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Behind The Meat Curtains

Blogs, Food, Sexuality, Wingnuts, Women
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Wingnut blogger and favourite target of those Sadly Nosian scamps, Ace O’ Spades, is the cause of much current hilarity at liberal US blogs for his take on a lame satrical newpaper article on how to tell if your husband is secretly gay.

Considering this is a man who describes the female pudenda as having been designed by HR Geiger using play-doh and bacon, he’s got off fairly lightly.

Ace’s form of anatomical ignorance is admittedly creative, but bacon? Really? Everybody knows that the female genitals resemble nothing so much as a corned beef explosion. His description doiesn’t even have the sheer poetic chops of ‘meat pocket’. Now this might lead one to think that Ace might not be entirely familiar with female bodily geography and might even find it somewhat scary… That’s fine, but he insists HE IS NOT TEH GAY.

But of course not. Just because of a total fear of scary vaginas with teeth? Why ever would one think that he might be TEH GAY?

Indeed, far from being so, the undoubtedly studly Mr Ace has all sorts of problems with those pesky, pesky chicks, as he makes sure to tell us:

… are you one of those One Week Wonder sort of chicks who will lure me in with lots of sex when we start dating and then lose virtually all initiative and enthusiasm by day eight?

Hmm. You know that just might have something to do with his misperception of the human vulva as a bacon and playdoh sandwich with teeth. I’ve not yet known a woman who actually wants her pussy covered in HP sauce, made into a child’s clay teapot or given a dental checkup. Though there’s still time..

And his girlfriends only lost interest by day eight? And the rest. Try day one, hour one – minute one, even. That I can believe.

The protestations of complete and utter non-gayness, on the other hand, I find slightly less plausible, given that he can’t even tell his corned beef curtains from his pork sword.

[Meat curtains and other meaty items here.]

The Case For Shunning

Blogs, Manufacturing consent, Media, Sensible Liberals
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Image from Flickr

A principled disagreement has arisen at Sadly, No over the hiring of Matt Yglesias by the Atlantic magazine, a subject which, although riveting to a minority, is barely a blip on the radar in the larger scheme of things. In the course of the back and forth, though, HTML Mencken nails the much wider and more important point:

[…]

You know who doesn’t deserve being paid for their opinion? Just out of principle? Anyone anywhere who was for the Iraq War for whatever amount of time. Period. I mean, that’s a fucking minimum. And Matt Yglesias doesn’t meet it.

And why Matt Yglesias got that one wrong — again, a very very fucking hard thing to get wrong — isn’t because he’s precisely not a polymath — though real polymaths who ought to be paid for their opinion, people like John Emerson or even Brad DeLong, got Iraq right. It’s because his first instinct is accomodation with the Right; it’s because his political judgement was forged post-Clinton, thus he was completely naive to the facts of innate wingnut depravity. I suspect he thought of the Kosovo operation as the rule rather than an exception; for such bovine people, the sicky-sweet neocon catchphrase “I believe America is a force for good in the world” functioned as a cattlecall. Of course some of us could recognize imperialism’s euphemisms when we heard them; for those who couldn’t, well … it doesn’t really make any difference whether it was from ignorance or stupidity. Fuck ‘em. They need to spend a long time in the journalistic wilderness before they again deserve serious attention.

Iraq is too important to forgive and forget the stupid fucking idiots who got it wrong (and often, not only got it wrong, but concentrated on attacking those who got it right). It’s the touchstone of a pundit’s political judgement.

[…]

Abso-fucking-lutely.

I’d add a corollary to that: it’s also a touchstone of a pundit’s personal moral judgement if she or he chooses to hang out and socialise with people who enabled and supported the Iraq invasion and occupation.

At the moment in Washington there’s more social stigma attached to having a child at the wrong preschool than there is to enabling mass murder, world disaster and institutional thievery on the grandest-ever scale.

Blogging Without A Home

Activism, Blogs, Life under Capitalism, Poverty
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Don’t feel so smug, you with your mortgage 4 or 5 times your annual income: the way the housing economy’s going it could happen to you, too.

Blogger ddjango:

I am homeless. This is the second time in a year that I’ve been so. It ain’t easy.

Just about a year ago, I was laid off from a job I had held for four years. It was a pretty good job, doing research, geographic information systems, and data analysis for an institute at a local university. The layoff was unexpected. I drew unemployment for awhile, had an apartment.

Not long after the layoff, however, I went into a deep clinical depression, was hospitalized for awhile and have needed to spend a time recovering. Financially, however, I was a mess, lost my apartment, and spent several weeks in a local homeless shelter. Boy, did I learn a lot.

I got back on my feet, started looking for a job, got an apartment. I was doing all right, then got hit with another bout of depression and had to be hospitalized again.

Hospital bills, other unforeseen expenses, etc. I lost my apartment again about two months ago. So I’m homeless again, living in a shelter program.

I’m pretty lucky. (What?!! . . . “lucky”?!)

Yeah, lucky. Because the county I live in has a shelter which also provides a lot of services: substance abuse/alcoholism counseling, 12 step meetings, mental health care, including a psychiatrist, a case manager, job-hunting assistance, money management counseling, transitional housing, and connections to other services, like medical care. For free. It’s not a great place, of course: dormitory living with people in a very wide range of situations, like real street bums, active alcoholics, junkies, crackheads, mentally ill folks, folks in crisis like me, folks who lost their jobs and can’t find new ones, folks who lost relationships and/or got divorced and really screwed because of it, disabled veterans, released prisoners, and just damn unlucky, confused, and lonely folks.

But the place is fairly safe and the staff work hard. It got really fucking cold last week and the shelter crammed in as many folks as would fit. Food, clothing, shelter in a life-threatening situation.

This isn’t true in a lot of areas in this country. But you probably know that. I read an article yesterday about a homeless man who was beaten to death by a gang of suburban kids. This has happened often in the past few years. It seems it’s a brutal sport.

Yeah. Just ask Rachel Moran and her bar buddies.

On a personal note, we’re doing a fundraiser here at P!to keep me alive (and in cigarettes and bus fare) as I look for a job. My finances are trashed and I can use whatever help I can get. Please. Just donate what you can, if you can – I’ll be more grateful than you can imagine.

Thank you.

Be at peace.

Despite my qualifications and experience I’ve been homeless with my children, this in a country with a welfare state, and if it hadn’t been for the help of good friends, socialist friends, I don’t know what I would’ve done. So many people have been or are homeless or underhoused, sleeping on friends sofas or their car or a series of cheap and nasty B&B’s, and it’s not from laziness, or fecklessness, its from what seems an unstoppable and insupportable series of shitty, shitty co-incidences and bureaucratixc indifference and incompetence.

It really could happen to anyone.

If you want to chip in and help ddjango click here. He also has a list of organisations helping the homeless, all of which could use support.

Kos Does A Blog-Ratner

Blogs, Feminism, Sensible Liberals, Women
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Lamer than lame Jack McLame, the winner of this year’s Mr Lame competition – Markos Multisas of Daily Kos replies to the critics of his recent post telling women bloggers that death threats are just bad internet manners so get over it, girlies:

Blogging and threats
by kos
Sun Apr 15, 2007 at 09:49:00 AM PDT

I don’t disagree with anything Lindsey wrote. I disagreed with using a bloggers threats as an excuse to foist upon us all a “Blogger Code of Conduct”.

That’s what I was saying. 1) There are assholes that will 2) email stupid shit to any public figure (which includes bloggers, but 3) that won’t be stopped by any blogger code of conduct.

You see, stupid asshole psycho threatening emailers don’t care about codes of conduct. That’s all.

Shorter Kos: “Shut up you buncha nagging wusses, you’re harshing my king of the internet mellow. I Am Kos! Look on my works ye lesser bloggers, and despair! That is all.”

I’m not one for codes of conduct either, so I’m not at all loth to say that Kos is in danger in disappearing up the fundament of his own self-importance.

Kos is where he is now because of luck, mostly. Whilst not denying his undoubted talent and application, nevertheless he just happened to catch the zeitgeist at the right moment. And if it hadn’t been for the ongoing support of the progressive blogosphere – including feminist bloggers and diarists – Daily Kos would never have taken off at all and he’d be just like the rest of us, slogging away in well-deserved obscurity.

Kos seems to have forgotten one of the cardinal rules of marketing (one that Gerald Ratner learned to his cost) – never take the piss out of your customers. They can turn on you.

It’s LART* Time Again

Blogs, Domestic Violence, Feminism, Internet, Women
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Chris Clarke at Pandagon gives those men who’re pontificating on ‘wussy’ women who can’t take online harassment (see Wampum’s roundup for backstory) a great big whack with the clue bat :

How not to be an asshole: a guide for men
Published by Chris Clarke April 13th, 2007 in Gender Issues, Assholes.

[…]

I’m a big fan of dispassionate, rational, fact-based discussion of the issues myself, and it is in that spirit that I offer, to my brethren who’ve taken it upon themselves to be a shining light of dispassion on this topic, these fraternal words of guidance:

Shut the fuck up.

Here are a few of the actual facts that prompt the above sage counsel:

— You are not saying anything the women you’re talking to haven’t heard a thousand times before. You are not saying anything the women you’re talking to haven’t told themselves a thousand times before. If you would actually stop your reflexive know-it-all yammering and pay attention to what women actually SAY about the offenses they suffer on the sexual harassment – rape continuum, you will note that almost to a woman they second-guess their own gut feelings about the putative offender far beyond the point where almost any man would.

— You are wrong. If you doubt that the nature of abuse and harassment women suffer, online or off, differs from that men experience, then you don’t know what you’re talking about. Oddly, the Internets offer a way for you to verify this fact for yourself. About a dozen years ago, at the urging of a feminist online acquaintance, I logged on to AOL using an obviously female but non-provocative handle. (”AliciaMN.”) Within five minutes of logging on I had sexually abusive IMs popping up from men I didn’t know. Didn’t matter which room I was in: general chat, politics, classical music. I kept up the experiment for I think four days, a couple hours a day, sometimes chatting with people about non-sexual topics, sometimes just lurking. Two of the men who IMed AliciaMN with blatantly and obnoxiously sexual messages — “Hey, I’m up in Alaska! How ’bout you thaw my dick out with your throat?” being an example I recall — responded to my NON-response by telling “Alicia” she deserved to get raped.

This is neither new nor surprising information to any woman here. I mention it because 1) maybe if a man says it it’ll be taken seriously and 2) it implies a suggestion that disbelievers find a venue equivalent to AOL in its heyday and repeat my experiment, in the spirit of dispassionate empiricism.

— If no woman in your life has ever talked to you about how she lives her life with an undercurrent of fear of men, consider the possibility that it may be because she sees you as one of those men she cannot really trust.

— Finally, let’s assume just for the sake of argument that you’re right. You aren’t. But just as a gedankenexperiment, let’s pretend you are, and that the women who are talking about the massive deadweight silence from men about the harassment they experience, and who are getting all upset and speaking in terms of “war zones” and “hate crimes” and such are just being emotional, hysterical even, and — like the people who forward that bogus email about the guy with the ropes and duct tape in hs trunk in the mall parking lot — just need to be set straight with a calm, measured dose of logic and fact-checking.

In most situations, that’s a fine impulse. There really is no reason to get upset about LSD in blue star tattoos, and Bill Gates really isn’t paying people who forward a chain email.

But this situation is qualitatively different. When the topic at hand is men not taking an issue seriously, suggesting that the issue might not really be all that serious is not being dispassionate. It is, in fact, taking a side. And the people on the side you’re taking, incidentally, include the gropers, the rapists, the sexual-favor-demanding bosses.

In short, if you’re interested in quibbling with the data or suggesting alternate interpretations of what Kos really meant when he called Kathy Sierra a lying “crying blogger,” and your goal is not to be a flaming asshole, shut the fuck up.

And when you shut the fuck up, two magical things happen:

1) You’re no longer actively contributing to the very problem you’re discussing;
2) It’s easier to listen to what the women are actually saying.

Well, quite.

I have to wonder though – would I have featured this post with such alacrity had it been written by a woman? I’d like to think so, but let’s face it, we’re all products of our own conditioning and I, like every poor bugger else, was raised in a patriarchy so quite possibly I wouldn’t have. Which is sad.

*Google is your friend.