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I’m still in travel mode for at least today and tomorrow---hopefully, the blizzard will let us get home on time. I may be lucky enough to post more later today, but right now, I have no time. But I did work all the way until early evening on Christmas Eve! I taped this Bloggingheads with Moe Tkacik about rape and Wikileaks, as a response to her post here.
I was ready for a fight, but Moe’s stance on both Wikileaks and the rape case changed considerably after that post, which also strangely includes ruminations on “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”, as if you can really extrapolate much about Swedish culture from a single exploitation series that has a sort of feminist message buried in a bunch of unsettling rape imagery. But the chat was amicable, and we agreed on most things, and I think it was really interesting. If you go to the link, you’ll get it broken into smaller chunks if you just want samples.
Moe’s not talking about how Sweden is hysterical because they believe that you should have consent before you fuck someone, but guess who is! That’s right, Julian Assange, who is fully committed to the “bitches are crazy” defense, which doesn’t surprise me, as that’s the defense in 99% of rape cases where the defendant was actually dating the accuser.
“Sweden is the Saudi Arabia of feminism,” Julian Assange has said in a recent interview. “I fell into a hornets’ nest of revolutionary feminism.” And there’s something the Guardian left out of its report on the accusations against him.
The notion that full consent should be required for sex to happen is hardly my idea of “revolutionary feminism”, or a “hornet’s nest”. Indeed, what I call the concept is “how people with empathy and a spirit of camaraderie about sex conduct themselves.” Indeed, I was reading old Savage Love columns (no link, sorry---maybe I can find it later---but it was not through the internet) while waiting to get on the plane on Christmas, and Dan Savage, hardly a “revolutionary feminist”, suggested that slipping the condom off during sex without a woman’s consent is rape.
Also reported at the Jezebel link:
According to the paper — presumably drawing on unpublished portions of the police report — when she woke up to find him penetrating her, she asked him if he was “wearing anything.” He allegedly replied, “I am wearing you.”
The thing about law school professors is that I always have an inordinate amount of respect for them, their knowledge, and what they’ve accomplished...and then I remember that Ann Althouse is also a law professor, and I wonder if they’re all secretly morons who’ve just had the wisdom to refrain from blogging.
My suspicion is that it’s just her. Althouse:
Get ready to be prompted to sign a document that will sound helpful and reasonable. The advance directive. Don’t you want the autonomy and control that comes from deciding in advance that you don’t want people to try to save your life?
[...]
The question is what do patients want and how what they want will be determined. It seems to me that the effort is to get people to commit in advance to death-hastening choices, by getting everyone to sign these documents.
In case you weren’t aware, the “death panel” canard is back. The short version: a new regulation is going to be promulgated allowing doctors to be reimbursed through Medicare for consultations on end of life care, including those that produce advance directives. It used to be that “death panels” consisted of the idea that, at some point, someone possessing government-run insurance would be denied lifesaving care because it was cost-inefficient. Apparently, the fresh new death panel hotness is that if the government even contemplates that people will one day die, it has, in fact, killed them. For pleasure.
This is a sample advance directive. Notice that at each point, you can make a decision of whether you would or would not like care in a terminal condition or persistent vegetative state. It’s possible that the advance directive mandated by HHS is a notecard reading “SIGN X TO DIE OR ELSE YOU DIE”. If that’s the case, then I will rescind this post. As John Cole points out, however, even the people saying this is terrible actually agree that it’s a good idea.
The worry here isn’t merely that it’s a good idea that will be stymied by lying morons the state of Wisconsin insists on giving gainful employment. The worry is that attacks like this will prevent people - oddly enough, people in Althouse’s age group - from getting advance directives because they believe that they’ll be signing their Kenyan Muslim death warrant.
You have a choice. You can make conscious, forward-looking decisions about your end of life care (and revise those decisions as long as you are able to), or you can refuse to let Kathleen Sebelius’ mindwaves force you to donate your organs to Michelle Obama’s school lunch program. When you’re in a vegetative state slowly slipping away at a cost of $15,000 a day, your family will be happy that you refused to be taken in by socialism...at least, right before John Boehner takes to the House floor and pushes legislation to keep you “alive” for another five years.
There is a point at which this insanity is no longer an abstract joke, but instead a meaningful campaign that will result in deep pain and suffering. It’s no longer a matter of people who know better fighting against people who should know better. It’s a matter of a moral imperative conflicting with an empty political obsession with the inherent evil of anything the President touches.
I don’t like Christmas music. But I do like having days when you’re expected not to work, but instead to eat stuff and goof off! And Christmas totally counts. So, in honor of Christmas---and all the holidays---I thought I’d build today’s Friday Genius Ten off Blur’s “Bank Holiday”, a legitimately fucking awesome song. Leave your picks in comments, or talk about whatever you like. Merry Christmas!
Original song: “Bank Holiday” by Blur
1) “Mis-shapes” by Pulp
2) “Animal Nitrate” by Suede
3) “Bye Bye Bad Man” by The Stone Roses
4) “Road To Ruin” by The Libertines
5) “Loose Fit” by the Happy Mondays
6) “Caroline, Yes” by the Kaiser Chiefs
7) “I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish” by The Smiths
8) “Beat Surrender” by The Jam
9) “Forgotten Works” by The Klaxons
10) “Don’t Let Him Waste Your Time” by Jarvis Cocker
So, Jezebel posted a gift guide called ”Gifts Women Really Want”. Being of the female persuasion, I clicked this link, and while the audience includes platonic gift buyers, I really do fear there may be some gentleman readers who think some of these gifts are appropriate not just for giving your sister or giving your platonic female friend, but also giving to that nice lady who lets you put your naked body near and even inside her, calls you by an affectionate nickname, and is statistically likely to be doing up to twice as much housework as you. True, Jezebel is a lady blog, but men read it, as do ladies who sleep with ladies. And some of these gifts are not appropriate for your girlfriend/wife. Girl-space-friend, okay. But if naked fun is in the works, these gifts shouldn’t be.
There’s a common perception that giving a gift card is an inherently lazy; unless the card is to a specialty retailer much beloved by the recipient, it’s a pretty generic present. That said, I highly doubt that there’s ever been a Target gift card that wasn’t eventually put to good use. And there’s something about Sephora that causes blackouts—you wander in to kill some time and suddenly, 90 minutes later, you’re blinking back to consciousness and wondering what the hell you’ve been doing the entire time. You might never buy $25 foundation on your own dime, but if someone else is giving you your pick of the store…
This reminds me of one of my so far favorite posts on Man Boobz about an anti-feminist/anti-woman forum post:
but what exactly can I get my GF for Christmas for about $30 that would not inflate her ego too much? Is there a book? A CD? Anything?
You have your answer, abusive asshole! A Target gift card for $30 should do it. I don’t want to be all down on the gift card. I think that everyone is secretly grateful in most situations where one is given. Giving someone a gift card could, under one circumstance, be romantic, and that’s if it’s a store she really likes and you enjoy shopping together and you go with her to be that second opinion that is so useful in shopping. But not Target, seriously. I’d probably be careful around Sephora, too. I disbelieve that you could spend 90 minutes in there, unless the gift card was for like $1,000 or something. It would just be eaten up way too fast. I went into a Sephora in Manhattan once, and I did find myself blacking out, but that’s because of my inability to justify those kind of prices for stuff that’s basically the same as you can get at Duane Reade for a fraction of the cost.
It’s sort of hard to come down from there, but many of the rest have red flags planted in front of them if your lady friend has any inkling of feminist stirring in her. Proceed with caution if thinking of buying a woman a full set of kitchen utensils or a set of make-up brushes. If this is something she’s expressed a desire for to you directly, then it might go over really well. I was thrilled to get a copy of How to Cook Everything Vegetarian last year, but I had specifically mentioned repeatedly how much I wanted that book. But just springing accouterments of feminine service on someone as a spontaneous gift is likely to send the signal, “Work harder, woman. You displease my high standards of femininity.”
The fleece-lined tights just seem like a good idea overall, though.
Feminist ladies are hard to shop for, I’m sure. People in general are, but so much of the holiday gift-buying pressure around women is around buying them things that make them more efficient worker bees at the endless feminine tasks of beauty maintenance and housework. And that can be insulting to women who tend to believe they have more on offer than just their bodies and their domestic skills. My feeling on this is that clothes are a better bet, if you honestly feel you have a good gauge of someone’s taste, which can be hard.
I have a few feminism-related ideas for gifts for a feminist in your life, though.
The Brooklyn Museum is having a show of feminist-minded pop art, and of course, there’s a shop to go with it. It’s got stuff that scratches both the feminist urge but also the urge to be hip and funny. A cheeky feminist flask is the best idea ever. The perfect treat for anyone who busted her ass on #mooreandme.
Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution. This is a great book for either a music fan with an established or emerging interest in women in music, but it’s also a great gift for feminists who are interested in the highs and lows of feminist organizing in all its forms. Riot Grrrl is primarily remembered for the music, but at the time it was just as much about the writing and organizing within the punk community to make it and the larger world a better place for women.
But if your feminist gift receiver is into music made by women, there are a bunch of great albums out lately by The Ladeez Who Kick Ass. As mentioned last night, Janelle Monae had the album of the year with The ArchAndroid. It technically came out last year, but I’m deeply in love with the Vivian Girls Everything Goes Wrong, which is for the rock fan in your life who doesn’t like a certain trend in indie rock now that Jen Sorensen nailed perfectly.
This album actually rocks, as does the Dum Dum Girls I Will Be. For those more laid-back listening sessions that still shouldn’t involve giving up any semblance of verve, Best Coast kicked major ass this year with Crazy for You, which has a cat on the front, for that added spark in the feminist music lover’s life. For people who miss Sleater Kinney---and really, you should---there were two albums out by alums this year. Janet Weiss has been drumming for Quasi for a long time now, and their most recent album American Gong is truly awesome. Corin Tucker has The Corin Tucker Band now, with their album 1,000 Years. Sadly, we’ll have to wait until next year for Rye Rye’s album.
And to be clear, I’m not bashing Jezebel generally. I realize they had to do a “women only” guide, but the thing about women is they are people. So the gift guides they wrote for general people tend to read way better. Like this one.
Posting is going to be kind of light. I’m feeling the need for some mental health kicking around Brooklyn kind of time.
I have chores I should be tending to, but I need to get this off my chest.
It’s the end of the year. Many critics are putting out top 10 or 50 or 100 lists for the year. And at the top of many of these lists, including Rolling Stone and Pitchfork, is Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. And this is indeed a great album. I’m not taking a piss on it. I’m not one of those skeptics that are emerging after the initial rush of praise. I don’t really care that it’s a weird album, due to the fact that he warns you on the album cover with that title. I love it. I’d put it at #2 or #3, around there.
But c’mon. The album of the year is Janelle Monae’s The ArchAndroid. Pitchfork didn’t even put it in their top 10, instead ranking ahead of it scary voice harp lady Joanna Newsome* and Vampire Weekend, a band that should take their Paul Simon records and go to a desert island and leave the rest of us alone.
How did this travesty happen? Why has Kanye’s admittedly great album distracted the critics from the actual best album of the year? There are many reasons. Okay, three.
1) Short attention spans. Kanye West’s album came out really close to deadline, so it was still chewing on their brains when they got to list-making, instead of settling comfortably into their music rotations. So they thought of it first.
And that’s the album’s core appeal: voyeurism. In the wake of his mother’s death, West has had numerous public breakdowns. Events and emotions which would (and perhaps should) have remained private instead played themselves on a 24-hour cycle of a stage and West wasn’t ever comfortable playing the part. It’s almost as if he’s comfortable with the idea of playing a part until the moment the spotlight falls on him, at which point no amount of borrowed gamesmanship can make up for the fact that he is a wound as yet unready for the stage. And it’s this quality that pervades the album—the fear of failure performed as songs that consistently undermine their narrator’s persona.
3) Sexism. I said it. Not that it’s impossible for women to get the top slots in these kinds of contests, but Monae has a man-unfriendly persona based around dressing either in men’s clothes or as a robot, that just makes it more of an uphill climb for her. Plus, she put show tune-influenced songs on the album.
But not all is lost. I don’t agree with the guys on Sound Opinions all the time, but they knocked it out of the park this year by both putting The ArchAndroid as their #1 album of the year.
*I don’t want to be a hater, but I remember the fairy/Celtic music craze of the 90s, and my feeling then, as now, was that it appealed mainly to dorks. Dorks that would probably be happier if they let go and listen to country western, which at least has a spark of life to it, but it might interfere with their self-image as somehow better than that. My opinion hasn’t changed, and Pitchfork can’t make me.
The Twitter hashtag #mooreandme decidedly and quickly changed tone last night after Michael Moore’s appearance on “Rachel Maddow”. Now it’s becoming an education and reconciliation kind of place, though troll smacking is still going on and Keith Olbermann can’t help but poking his head in. (I can relate.) I think we have all let go of any hope that Naomi Wolf will continue to be anything but a grade A asshole over this; I think she is still unaware how many people who, probably because they don’t know how far she drifted off the farm years ago, she has run off from liking her forever. Now it’s time to regroup and reassess. With links and comments.
To start with, I want to push my own stuff. I have an article up at Slate about the reasons that feminists were/are so angry, and why the information in the Swedish police documents that were leaked demonstrates that the accusations are credible. I use the example of a rape that happened to me 13 years ago to explain exactly why claims about the accusers behavior during and after the alleged rapes do not discredit the allegations. If Texas can think it’s rape, so can Naomi Wolf.
Michael Moore acknowledged Sady Doyle and the fact that she’s the one who made him come around on this issue. I like him a whole lot better now, especially after he made the auditorium sing a song from “The Sound of Music” during commercial break last night, which was close to an unforgiveable offense. But I forgive him, because he actually thanked Sady, instead of just busting out some begrudging apology.
I really enjoyed this post breaking down the way that Twitter functioned as a protest tool in all of this. It has a million great points, but I was especially intrigued by these thoughts, banking off a screenshot of one of Olbermann’s stranger gambits.
Which brings me to the second advantage Twitter affords women: comparative invisibility. In the example above, Keith Olbermann demonstrates a kneejerk (and often quite effective) response to a female opponent—scour her image for something to criticize. Olbermann did his best, but he didn’t have much to work with. Twitter actually offers precious little fodder to those who, if provided with a physical image, would immediately criticize their weight, size, demeanor, etc.
The blogger also notes that women’s voices are hard to use against them. But this made me think in larger terms about how the one quirk of Twitter that’s been much-noted but little understood is how it’s more popular with people from traditionally disenfranchised groups---women and racial minorities---than with white dudes, who usually dominate the ranks of these sorts of things. And I wonder if these quirks of Twitter that make this shift towards dialogue and links and away from image empower people who otherwise find themselves subconsciously censoring themselves precisely because they know they’re judged more on the basis of identity? Maybe. Certainly in politics, you see a lot of people mastering the form of Twitter that perhaps don’t feel as empowered in other spaces. I’m open to theories, though!
This is the part of Michael Moore’s interview on “Rachel Maddow” last night that was lighting up Twitter, because this is the clip where he changed his tune about the accusations against Julian Assange, admitting they were credible and saying that the women who accused him should be heard in court. I was fortunate enough to be in the audience for this, but on this entire issue I have more to say later. Right now, I want to talk about something else that Moore and Maddow discussed, in the second part of the interview. But I will bring it back to the rape case.
Maddow made an interesting argument, which is that a problem with Wikileaks is that incorrect propaganda can be leaked along with factually true information, which is incidentally exactly what happened to Michael Moore. A cable was released claiming that “Sicko” had been banned in Cuba, which was published to great sniggering all over the place. And was also total bullshit. (And also incoherent bullshit, but it seems like it was mostly because it was internal propaganda for the Bush administration. No joke.) Moore countered by pointing out that the record was corrected in this case, and in fact, the Wikileaks cables are improving journalism because every cable the news medias wish to cover they have actually follow up with investigations. In other words, the cables are the starting point. I think there’s this belief out there that Assange and the Wikileaks crew are all about information as some kind of solution in and of itself (or that they support a secret-free society, when they’ve actually redacted information in the cables and worked with seasoned professionals in journalism to decide what to release). But the idea of Wikileaks is to put the government on notice, which is working very well.
What Moore is saying is also very interesting, which is that once information is out there---such as the fact that this cable was sent---we can actually deal with it. So, yes, a lie got out about his movie and Cuba. But then the lie was corrected, and what we learned from the whole shebang is that the Bush administration had a lot of internal propaganda going on. This is an important thing to know, and will influence our understanding of history from here on out. (It shores up the sense that conservatives lie to themselves in order to gin up enthusiasm for lying to others.) Of course, that doesn’t deal with the problem of deliberately leaked propaganda, but still, he had a point.
And what better proves it than the Guardian publishing the leaked documents from the Swedish police regarding the Assange rape case? It’s ironic that Assange is so angry about this, because I can’t think of a better example of how effective the principles of free information are. Before the documents were published, there was a dearth of information, and when there is a dearth of real information, people start to fill in the holes with their own prejudices so they can make judgments. People who wished to believe that they were supporting a noble man in every way with Assange were eager to grab on to any scrap of information that shored up their hopeful arguments that the accusers were the strawfeminists of right wing imagination, women who cry rape if a man looks at them funny.
But when the actual depositions got out, that changed everything. Now people had something to work with. Granted, some of them are so dedicated to the “hysterical bitches” narrative that they read it into the information at hand. But others, including Keith Olbermann and Michael Moore, seem to have revised their opinions dramatically on the case, because being exposed to the information made them realize their knee jerk reaction that the allegations couldn’t be credible was simply wrong. The people arguing that we shouldn’t attack the accusers without evidence ironically got a better foothold when we got some information, because at least we had something to point to when making our case. It narrows down the field of possibilities. Before the release, those defending these rape accusers and rape accusers in general from scurrilous accusations had many tangents to go with---you don’t have any idea what they said, it doesn’t seem likely that the only issue was a broken condom, there’s a possibility of hysteria but experience suggests to me most women aren’t just childish hysterics. Now it’s narrowed down to pointing to the details in the deposition and saying, “Look, X, Y, and Z are definitely wrong and should be punished if the prosecution can prove the case.” Meanwhile, if experience on #mooreandme is any indication, the rape apologists are still working with bad information that was imagined into existence when there wasn’t real information to work with.
Point for getting it all out on the table. Ironically, then, point for Wikileaks and the arguments for them. But like Moore said in the interview, this isn’t about Assange or one man, but about Wikileaks as a group, and the argument for free information in general.
Dahlia Lithwick reports quite amusingly on the Republican War on Vegetables, something I’ve blogged about frequently on this site. To my great delight, she reaffirms one of the aspects of vegetable-bashing-as-culture-war that seems obvious to me, but always causes a knee jerk pooh pooh reaction from people who tend to disbelieve feminists first and then accept evidence later. And that it’s that vegetable-bashing as a culture war tactic is rooted in misogyny.
To be sure, a goodly amount of the conservative complaints about healthy food are thinly veiled slurs on women in general and Michelle Obama in particular. Last week, Sarah Palin lectured Laura Ingraham on the first lady’s socialist plot to promote healthy eating: “Take her anti-obesity thing that she is on. She is on this kick, right. What she is telling us is she cannot trust parents to make decisions for their own children, for their own families in what we should eat.” And when Rush Limbaugh goes after Michelle Obama for the same reasons, he doesn’t even bother to hide the fact that he hates her for being a woman (note his classy references to her wardrobe and to “Michelle My Butt") as much as for her love of vegetables ("Gotta eat healthy stuff, gotta eat the garbage that she grows in the garden, nothing but fruits and vegetables").
Come to think of it, the very word “nanny state"—so frequently linked to GOP anti-vegetablist rhetoric—suggests that, much like George H.W. Bush, what most Republicans are really trying to work through with all this veggie fear-mongering, is their issues with their mothers.
She’s being tongue-in-cheek on the mothers thing, but mostly this is just the god’s honest truth. Republicans get a lot of mileage out of provoking the childishness in their base by casting liberals as controlling mothers who don’t let you jump on the furniture or stuff yourself with candy until you puke. It’s absolutely fascinating the way a lot of culture war politics are constructed around this model where conservatives see themselves as children who have to be prodded into doing things adults do just as a matter of course because it’s the right thing to do---everything from paying your taxes to eating green stuff---but then think they’re wearing big boy pants because they can actually make real trouble for their imaginary mommies. It’s very strange.
It’s also a big, hoary load of shit in many cases. Sarah Palin is on a rampage to shore up the idea that Real Americans eat nothing but crap, and proceed to show liberals whose boss by sitting on their asses, angled correctly so that the fat can line their arteries most effectively. But as KJ at XX Factor notes, Palin regards her own body as a temple that she actually takes real care of, particularly by being an ever-so-un-American exercise nut. I’ll note that George Bush was also a pretty healthy fellow. Just as the only thing I find relatable about Donald Rumsfeld is he has a standing desk like mine, the only thing that I find relatable about Bush and Palin is they get notoriously grumpy if deprived of exercise. Apparently, Palin thinks that the little people can do all that sticking it to the liberals by treating your own health like crap stuff for her, while she’s out jogging and imagining her next tweet about how oppressive it is that they put the vegetables at the front of the supermarket.
One of the most fascinating phenomenon aspects of collective psychology to me is collective willful ignorance. I wrote about this some in terms of Wikileaks and how it disturbs collective unknowing, and I think Ricky Gervais touched on it when talking about atheism as a matter of letting yourself know what you already know. I get why people don’t want to know certain things they do know, and why they suppress that knowledge, but that we can do it---and that we can it collectively---is truly fascinating. And that people who speak the truth everyone is ignoring can disturb the ecosystem of collective denial is also fascinating to me, probably in no small part because the vast majority of hostility I’ve experienced from others has directly stemmed from their being upset with me for saying out loud what we’re supposed to collectively ignore.
One of the most routine kinds of collective denial is historical denial. It’s the result of cognitive dissonance caused when your belief that your people are generally good people is disturbed by historical evidence that your people in the past did great evils. The urge is to minimize the evil. The most extreme of this is denialism, which crops up when people not only wish to minimize the great evil, but also generally agree with the principles that caused it and want to make the historical facts that disturb their sense that they’re right about what usually amounts to bigotry. So they deny the Holocaust because they don’t want to confront what their own anti-Semiticism led to in the past. Or, in the case of the trolls on #mooreandme, they deny that rape is a real problem and always has been, because they don’t want to confront their own resentments of women’s right to control their own bodies, or really struggle with the fact that most of their people (in this case, men) have, throughout most of history, treated women like they were subhuman. And then you have neo-Confederates, who are basically like Holocaust denialists, but for slavery.
Denialists often can’t completely deny a historical reality, so they just go to great lengths to minimize it. Holocaust denialists rarely say there was no Holocaust, at least if they’re speaking to a Western audience. They just claim that the numbers of people killed were negligible, and then go on to argue, either directly or through implication, that the Jews made it all up so that they could have cover to do [fill in one of the millenia-old anti-Semitic theories about a Jewish conspiracy to run the world]. Neo-Confederate arguments are basically identical. The argument is that the South seceded for reasons other than slavery, and while they admitted that slavery was legal (since that’s basically undeniable), they minimize how many people owned slaves, how much of the Southern economy was based on slavery, and how miserable slavery was. They argue that the South seceded because of taxes (ignoring that the tax arguments were about slavery), or that it was to prove a point about federalism (ignoring the fact that the South’s biggest beef with the Union was that the federal government wasn’t using its power enough, to return escaped slaves to the masters). The conclusion reached by denialists is that blacks and liberals exaggerate slavery in order to steal money from white people and give it to black people. If you ever hear someone screeching about “reparations”, for instance, they are 99.9% likely to be a slavery denialist. The “Never Forget” movement grew in the wake of WWII in response to this common problem of human nature, and it was effective. Holocaust denialism has been marginalized. Sadly, slavery denialism is mainstream in the United States, precisely because the winners of the Civil War were more interested in making nice than holding people who committed treason in defense of slavery accountable. This week, there were actual celebrations of the anniversary of secession, and the only reason that happens is that slavery denialism has given them cover to fantasize openly about being able to own slaves. Slavery denialism is so mainstream that its myths have been absorbed by people that reject its conclusions. Even on this blog, I’ve seen well-meaning people who’ve absorbed slavery denialism myths suggest that the reasons for secession were more complex than they were, for instance.
Which is why I was thrilled to see that the South Carolina newspaper The State published an article denouncing slavery denialism, and arguing that, contrary to widespread myth, the South seceded for one reason: slavery. Their proof of this is from original documents from the era, namely the secession declaration from South Carolina, the first state to commit treason. (Via.)
What we found most striking in rereading the Declaration was the complete absence of any other causes. After laying out the argument that the states retained a right to secede if the Union did not fulfill its constitutional and contractual obligations, the document cited the one failing of the United States: its refusal to enforce the constitutional provision requiring states to return escaped slaves to their owners. “This stipulation was so material to the compact,” the document declares, “that without it that compact would not have been made.”
Emphasis mine, because I know this myth that the South had reasons other than slavery is so widespread pushback in comments is inevitable (and distressing, since it serves racist ends). One of the common distraction arguments is to say the South seceded over the right to secede, which is like divorcing someone to prove that it’s legal. It’s not entirely untrue to say that by the time of secession, most Southerners had decided they felt very strongly about “states rights”, but the only reason they developed this belief was it rationalized slavery. By the same measure, the only reason “states rights” is an issue now is it rationalizes racist, sexist, and homophobic laws. Then, as now, “states rights” believers support broad federal powers when those powers serve their ends, such as support for Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 then, and support now for federal laws restricting gay rights or women’s rights. Indeed, the idea that secession was obviously a right wasn’t a given in the South until it was convenient to say so, and even then, the Confederacy didn’t allow secession itself. All claims that the South seceded for reasons other than slavery fall apart even under cursory examination.
So that’s straight up denialism. But I’m also interested in the other end of the willful ignorance spectrum, which is a squishier liberal “they weren’t that bad, were they?” kind of thinking. This applies only rarely to trying to minimize the ugliness of slavery and secession, because that’s so far in the past that I think it’s easier for people to think that we’ve left it behind us. And believing we’ve left it behind us is the main desire that drives this softer kind of denial, instead of the strong denialism, which is driven by wishing to justify affection for the old, bigoted ways. It’s when it comes to more recent history that you see more liberal-minded people give into the desire to minimize.
I jokingly call it the “all segregationists evaporated in 1964” belief. For at least my entire lifetime, it’s been basically considered improper and impolite to suggest that anyone living today was a segregation supporter, even though that’s physically impossible. (When I was born, the Civil Rights Act was only 13 years old, to put this into perspective.) They didn’t all die when segregation was banned. They kept on---many of them, like Jerry Falwell, fighting for it until the bitter end. But saying out loud that Falwell was a segregationist became impolite, even though it was true, and when he died only a couple of people in lefty magazines were courageous enough to note that Falwell built his career opposing civil rights, and only switched to anti-feminism when racism stopped being the source of the biggest checks. Conservatives love to take advantage of this collective willful ignorance, because it gives some of their more odious figures free license to say straight up racist things without paying any real penalty for it. On the contrary. They can expect people to leap up to minimize what they said.
In interviews Barbour doesn’t have much to say about growing up in the midst of the civil rights revolution. “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” he said. “I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in ‘62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white.”
Did you go? I asked.
“Sure, I was there with some of my friends.”
I asked him why he went out.
“We wanted to hear him speak.”
I asked what King had said that day.
“I don’t really remember. The truth is, we couldn’t hear very well. We were sort of out there on the periphery. We just sat on our cars, watching the girls, talking, doing what boys do. We paid more attention to the girls than to King.”
O rilly?
So, we’re expected to believe that a 15-year-old Haley Barbour and his group of I-guarantee-all-white friends went to a King speech, hung out in the periphery showing off for the girls and mostly ignoring the speech.....and that he and his buddies were just curious what King had to say? This curious young man then went on a mere six years later to work on the Nixon campaign of 1968, known for its innovative use of the Southern strategy. He is now a defender of a white supremacist group whose sole mission was to use economic and social intimidation to maintain segregation.
And we’re supposed to believe he and the other strapping young white men who accompanied him to stand on the edges of a civil rights rally were just curious what the speaker had to say?
Interesting. I have other theories about their motivations, but I’m also interested in what commenters have to say.
This rant by John McCain about the DADT repeal is something else:
Direct quote:
And you know, we’ll repeal it. And all over America, they’ll be gold stars put up in windows in the rural towns and communities all over America that don’t partake in the elite schools that bar military recruiters from campus, that don’t partake in the salons of Georgetown and the other liberal bastions here and around the country.
Seventy-seven percent of Americans support gays serving openly in the military. Thus, we are forced to assume that McCain thinks 77% of Americans follow the path from an Ivy League school into a Georgetown cocktail party. Which really calls into question this term “elite”. If three quarters of Americans are going to Harvard, is that really an “elite” education?
He also claims that the people that will be celebrating this didn’t serve in the military or even know someone who did/does. Which is funny, because that creates an interesting paradox. If the only people who support repeal have no experience with the military, then why is there a law banning openly gay service members? By definition, those people are interested in repeal, but in McCain’s formula, they don’t even exist. Why ban something that doesn’t happen? Granted, he used the term “most”, but seriously, he’s trying to create a dichotomy between Real Americans With Patriotic Family Values Who Only Have Missionary Heterosex In The Dark Before Praying and Perverted Liberals Who Eat Bon Bons And Screw Each Other In The Ass For Fun On Big Piles Of Money. And I’m going to say there’s a lot more overlap there than you’d think.
But what’s really fascinating about this rant is how it’s total capitulation to the principle that anything that pisses off liberals is good. Indeed, I’m thinking about 99% of what being a conservative is about right now is a combination of insecure masculinity issues and punishing liberals for thinking they’re so smart. So much so that huge chunks of this country basically waste time and money or hurt themselves doing things that liberals don’t actually care about in order to piss us off (voting for Bristol Palin on “Dancing With The Stars” comes to mind, as does slurping down tons of fatty food that will eventually kill you to prove a point to people who actually wouldn’t know the difference if you switched to whole grains). If you take this garbled rant from McCain and rebuild what he’s trying to say, it seems that his point is that gay service members should be deprived of their rights, because it will piss off liberals. And pissing off liberals is important, because they drink better cocktails than you do, and they all went to Harvard, and so a little being pissed off evens the score somehow.
For the record, I don’t think I even met anyone who went to Harvard until I was like at least 25. I have still never been to a Georgetown cocktail party, though I have been to many tailgate parties. I also sign off on what Scott said here:
What a bullet this country dodged in 2008. Frankly, I’m not sure he was even the best candidate on his party’s ticket at this point…
I was going to be lazy and not post anything today, but I was so moved by Sady’s post about the way she’s been stressing herself out with the #mooreandme campaign, that I had to say something in support. This isn’t, for me, about Michael Moore posting Julian Assange’s bail. Or coming down affirmatively on the subject of Assange’s guilt. I’ve maintained, in the face of great pressure to be stupid about this, that we can be intelligent people who can handle the thought that Interpol being ridiculous doesn’t mean that the accusers are lying. (I’ve also often pointed that O.J. was framed, and he was guilty. You can plant evidence on a guilty man, and often the police do because they get upset that someone guilty might go free.) We can do it! We can believe that Assange is being targeted for something other than the actual rape charges, and that it’s still wrong to engage in standard issue rape apologist crap aimed at the accusers. And that, by the way, is the main problem with Michael Moore---not that he posted bail. (Which is good, imo, because Assange was being badly treated in captivity, if for no other reason.) He went full blown rape apologist, including dismissing the charges with “the condom broke”, which is not the charge and, contrary to what right wing British tabloids say, it’s not a crime to have a truly accidental contraception mishap in Sweden.
Anyway, obviously what’s happening with #mooreandme now is that it’s being flooded with rape apologists---some only whipping it out for this occasion, but many who just automatically support accused rapists and denounce rape victims. And I have no doubt that Michael Moore, along with Keith Olbermann, are waiting this out, letting the overt woman-haters and rape-supporters wear down the feminists keeping #mooreandme alive. So there’s another black mark against Olbermann and Moore---they’re playing the patriarchal game of letting the overt misogynists do their work for them, so they can feel good about themselves while benefiting from sexism. Ironically, this is basically the way rape works in the real world. Few misogynist men are rapists, but those who aren’t rely on rapists as a threat to keep women in line, such as when RS McCain made it clear that he supports rapists as a vigilante force punishing women who are sexually liberated with men that aren’t RS McCain.
This situation has other parallels that Sady talks about eloquently and angrily:
That’s why Ben Roethlisberger walks free today. His accuser eventually refused to go forward, and her lawyer’s letter said that it wasn’t because the accuser hadn’t been raped, she still maintained that had actually happened to her and he had done it, it was because pursuing the case, no matter whether she got a conviction or not, would be so dangerous and so traumatic for her that it just wouldn’t be worth it.
Read the whole thing, but she makes a good case the shutting women up about the injustice of rape apologism is paralleled to the shutting of women up about actually being raped. It’s all about using sexist stereotypes and lies against women to wear them down until they’re forced to decide between justice and self-preservation.
Ironically, this is how the powers that be are trying to shut Wikileaks down---by making people involved choose between self-preservation and justice.
The people who try to force this choice often justify it to themselves by suggesting those clamoring for justice need to just get over it, as if the reason people clamor for justice is simple revenge or about creating karmic balance. In reality, it’s much more pragmatic than that. I had a relatively easy go of it when it came to pressing charges against the guy who assaulted me---I had supportive family and a supportive boyfriend, the police and prosecutors believed me, there was an eyewitness---and even then, pressing charges was at least half the reason the whole situation was so traumatic. In the best of circumstances, a rape victim will be accused of lying and will lose friends, because people find it unpleasant to be around someone who is trying to rectify an injustice instead of just letting it go. In worse circumstances, the victim will have no allies and be completely alone. So why do people push forward? Vengeful harpies, or is there a rational reason?
Since I start with the assumption that women are people, I’m going to go ahead and suggest that the vicious stereotype that women are vengeful harpies should be set aside, and that there is an entirely rational reason to seek legal recourse against a rapist. (Though I will point out that few would be upset with a man pressing charges against a friend who robbed his house because it’s so unpleasantly revenge-oriented.) It’s so he doesn’t rape again. For me, the only thing that pushed me into picking up the phone and calling the cops was being reminded that rapists who aren’t stopped will rape again. Because rapists rape because they enjoy the act of rape. What made me pick up and keep going when I was feeling beat down was thinking about the next woman who was rape-available that crossed his path, and how she might not be as privileged as I was in terms of having support and safety.
Rape apologists may not be rapists (though I have to point out that statistically, many pretty have to be), but they nonetheless are why rape happens. By making the price of speaking out too high for the majority of victims, they make sure that no one holds rapists accountable. Which is basically blanket permission to rape. Which is why rape is so damn common. Sady isn’t doing this because she’s got some overwrought sense of vengeance. It’s because as long as every rape victim who speaks out knows she will meet a sea of rape apologists that will grind her down, then many won’t. And if they don’t speak out, there are no consequences for raping. And so the rapists who go unresisted will just rape more. And while not resisting rape apologists doesn’t mean it’s your fault if they keep making the world safe for rapists, it doesn’t feel that way. Just as I knew that if I kept silent about my own sexual assault, and then the guy who assaulted me went on to rape someone else, I would feel that this was, on some level, my fault. And I couldn’t live with that. So, at the end of the day, it’s self-preservation vs. another kind of self-preservation. And with Sady, I think Michael Moore might have found someone who has quite a bit of the latter in her.
In all the excitement over the Senate going into turbo mode and the Wikileaks situation, this story may have passed many of you by---Billboard released stats on the year’s top 100. The statistical information is rich and interesting, including the fact that Lukasz Gottwald had a hand in nearly 10% of the songs on the top 100. But one fact struck me as the sort of thing that is just waiting for someone to get all Kids These Days about: a full quarter of the songs in the top 100 were about partying. Twenty-six of the 100 mention club dancing, and 21 mentioned drinking. It’s an interesting trend, and again, if you wanted to, you could rail against Kids These Days for being a bunch of drunk layabouts. Or, if you wanted, you could do a more sophisticated version, as I considered doing, that investigated if this trend was a result of some marketing push or a reaction to the economy.
Then I thought that before I made any judgments on Kids These Days, it might be wise to tend to my own house first. So, in the interest of fairness, I decided to do a little quick analysis of what at least one Kid In My Day---that would be me---listens to, and if you can really draw any conclusions about my character from the lyrical content of music I like. I decided to run two tests, looking at iTunes for most played songs and random songs I’ve given 5 stars to. And because this is generational warfare I’m analyzing, I determined that any song eligible had to be from between 1984 (when I was given my first record player and started to make my own musical choices) and last week. I can’t borrow Kids In Those Days’ music to make any points about myself, after all. And because I literally have no idea how most of the songs on the top 100 go, I thought I would refrain from identifying the songs here. I’m just going to describe what the songs are about. (If you can guess, bonus points.) After this, I feel I’ll be in a better place to determine if I can judge Kids These Days for their songs about partying.
I encourage you to play along at home!
From The Most Played List
1) This is an indie rock song about how superstitious behaviors to bring good luck in to your own life don’t work. I had to look the lyrics up, because it’s from a Swedish band, I do believe, and the singer’s accent is thick. I had no idea what she was saying.
2) This is a rap song from my late adolescence about partying.
3) This is an R&B song bragging about one’s sexual magnetism.
4) This is a rock song about how massive a bummer it is when the woman you’re dating never wants to fuck, like ever.
5) This is a rock song covered by a dance pop musician, and it appears to be about the importance of persistence when it comes to getting the fuck out of this stupid town.
6) This is a punk song about an all-consuming infatuation.
7) This is a punk song about how going out to shows can really suck because the band plays late, drunk dudes can be real assholes, and singer is a bit introverted anyway.
8) This is a dance song about falling out of love with someone because they’ve started to get on your nerves.
9) This is a bombastic rock song where the singer establishes how he’d prefer to be addressed.
10) This is a tender indie rock song about how being a musician can make you feel dehumanized and put on display.
I hate to say the opera’s over, because the U.S. Senate can literally fuck anything up, but it seems now almost certain that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell will be toast by Christmas. The standing Republican filibuster on it was finally taken back, and now they can have an up or down vote on the bill.
There is very little good news lately, and most of it is due to the Senate becoming this hellish place where government goes to die. It’s nice to see one decent thing happen despite all this.
But don’t worry, people who hate the hope that America could ever actually become a better place. I’m about 99% certain that any attempt at rules changes at the start of the next session that would make it harder to impossible for Republicans to kill basically any and all legislation of any importance will fail pretty quickly.
Today, though, I want to offer my congratulations to everyone who has worked tirelessly for the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and for the chance of GLBT service members to serve with the pride they deserve.
This week, I thought I’d kick off the Friday Genius Ten with a band that’s given me a lot of practice in the art of walking (admiring someone’s professional work) and chewing gum (grasping that they are a total misogynist and I would not like to be their friend). I was thinking of picking their song “Turd on the Run” for the humor value, but realized then half my day would be eaten up by the tone deaf and the humorless getting pissy with me. So, instead I’ll pick a song that demonstrates the art of thinking a song is awesome while being appalled at some of its lyrics.
Open thread. Leave your own song selections or comment about whatever you like.
Original song: “Miss You” by the Rolling Stones
1) “Walk on the Wild Side” by Lou Reed
2) “I’m Not Down” by The Clash
3) “A Quick One, While He’s Away” by The Who
4) “Victoria” by The Kinks
5) “Gimme Danger” by The Stooges
6) “Ooh La La” by The Faces
7) “Gloria” by Patti Smith
8) “Thirteen” by Big Star
9) “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” by The Ramones
10) “Run Run Run” by The Velvet Underground
Remember, kids, Johnny Ramone was a Republican. But he was also a pop music genius and apparently a very nice guy. You can walk and chew gum at the same time. Cat picture below the fold, with videos.
I have chores I should be tending to, but I need to get this off my chest.
The Twitter hashtag 
One of the most fascinating phenomenon aspects of collective psychology to me is collective willful ignorance. I wrote about this some in terms of Wikileaks and how it disturbs collective unknowing, and I think 
So 
In all the excitement over the Senate going into turbo mode and the Wikileaks situation, this story may have passed many of you by---