Feminism

Could He BE Any More Up Himself?

bigotry, Blogs, Culture, Feminism
Published on

I worked on a Tesco’s checkout when I was a law student, to make money for my children’s Christmas presents and to pay off pressing bills, so this condescending blogpost really got my goat.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Blogging Comes of Age …

There is a golden thermometer that I and others use for technology known generally as the Tesco Checkout Girl Test (TCGT). This is the test of what happens when someone, with often limited ability, has to use technology in order to carry out their job tasks, such as credit card checkers, changing till rolls, rebooting an electric till etc. It comes as a shock to me then to have been standing in a queue in my local Tesco tonight and hear two checkout girls discussing the optimal ways to ensure comment moderation in their blogs and discussing the merits of Blogger versus MySpace, Facebook or TagWorld. In fact when it came to my turn to be served I went and stood in another queue and left them to it so I could listen some more.

I don’t know when Julian was at university but grants no longer exist. The person serving you in Asda or KFC may well be putting themselves through a course in nursing or astrophysics.

He should be a little more careful – for all he knows the heart surgeon doing his triple bypass in 15 year’s time could be the same girl he’s taking the piss out of on his blog this week.

Aside from that, who the hell is he to assume that even fulltime non-student supermarket staff have no intelligence or aptitude for technology?

But ah, yes, I forgot. They’re checkout girls. Naturally their grouindstate is brainless and they have no life other than when they’re pushing his lasagna-for-one over the scanner.

Julian, you may be a fellow Pratchett and Guido Fawkes fan and Blears-hater, but you’re still a condescending sexist prick.

M’ M’ M’ My Sharia

Feminism, Wingnuts
Published on

Don’t play away in flyover country: you might find yourself in more trouble than just facing an angry partner.

Adultery could mean life, Michigan court finds

By Brian Dickerson

Detroit Free Press

(MCT)

DETROIT – In a ruling sure to make philandering spouses squirm, Michigan’s second-highest court says that anyone involved in an extramarital fling can be prosecuted for first-degree criminal sexual conduct, a felony punishable by up to life in prison.

“We cannot help but question whether the Legislature actually intended the result we reach here today,” Judge William Murphy wrote in November for a unanimous Court of Appeals panel, “but we are curtailed by the language of the statute from reaching any other conclusion.”

“Technically,” he added, “any time a person engages in sexual penetration in an adulterous relationship, he or she is guilty of CSC I,” the most serious sexual assault charge in Michigan’s criminal code.

No one expects prosecutors to declare open season on cheating spouses. The ruling is especially awkward for Attorney General Mike Cox, whose office triggered it by successfully appealing a lower court’s decision to drop CSC charges against a Charlevoix defendant. In November 2005, Cox confessed to an adulterous relationship.

Murphy’s opinion received little notice when it was handed down. But it has since elicited reactions ranging from disbelief to mischievous giggling in Michigan’s gossipy legal community.

The ruling grows out of a case in which a Charlevoix man accused of trading Oxycontin pills for the sexual favors of a cocktail waitress was charged under an obscure provision of Michigan’s criminal law. The provision decrees that a person is guilty of first-degree criminal sexual conduct whenever “sexual penetration occurs under circumstances involving the commission of any other felony.”

No more blowjobs in moving cars then.

It’s not even safe to open an Exploder window now either without facing jailtime, so to make assurance doubly sure, you might also want to run ad-aware or similar before using a computer in front of a minor. It’s that or face a potential 40 years in jail.

Via Majikthise:

Teacher faces 40 years for exposing kids to porn, blames adware

A 40-year-old substitute teacher is facing up to 40 years in prison for exposing children to internet pornography.

Julie Amero was convicted on Friday of four counts of risk of injury to a minor.

According to BoingBoing, the teacher blames an an adware infestation. Somehow, the PC may have become infected with pornographic adware, causing inappropriate content to blossom uncontrollably onto her screen.

The police maintained the Amero navigated to pornographic websites during classroom time, but expert witnesses for the defense testified that she could have spawned these windows by navigating to an innocent hairdressing site.

[…]

It’s still OK to stream live-action porn into hotel bedrooms though, so, no worries, eh?

Tory Boy, US Edition

Feminism, US politics, Wingnuts
Published on

Note to the Virgin Ben – oh, just go get laid already.

It doesn’t have to cost much, and no actual icky human contact need be involved if you do it right. Or just say hello to Mrs Palm and her five lovely daughters while looking at pictures of Lucianne Goldberg.

Or something.

Whatever, it’s clear that all that unexpressed sperm (or curdled pre-fetal-American soup, depending on how you look at it) is going straight to your brain.

Virgin Ben is Ben Shapiro the 20 year old Harvard law student and precocious wingnut author (which reminds me, wouldn’t the latter preclude the former? Dishonesty isn’t a quality one actually looks for in a lawyer, no matter how prevalent it might be in the profession), proving with very little effort required that years of home-schooling and enforced celibacy addle the brain.

Let’s face it, that theory is just about as valid as his. Shapiro says that Nancy Pelosi uses her womb for political advantage. How, exactly? Does she pop it out and wave it like flag when it’s time to vote? Does she sign motions in menstrual bood? What? Young Ben doesn’t seem able to say exactly.

Via Punkass marc:

It must be difficult to be a famous woman. If you don’t have children, you’re an old maid with shriveled ovaries who has forsaken your godly purpose. If you have children and don’t talk about them, you’re a cold parent who puts her career ahead of her offspring. If you’re like Nancy Pelosi, i.e. you have children and talk about them openly, you’re holding your previously occupied uterus above the heads of jealous menfolk as a sign of your superiority.

Yes, with the ascendance of Speaker Pelosi, uterine envy is at an all-time high. Take a recent editorial by Family Security Matters‘ Ben Shapiro, a Harvard Law School student who’s clearly worked overtime to overcome the many inherent disadvantages associated with having a dick.

[…]

While we’ll soon see how his obsession with Nancy Pelosi’s body is concentrated primarily in the pelvis, Shapiro gives us a head’s up that he’s thinking an awful lot about her breasts, too:


Nancy Pelosi, however, could breastfeed on the speaker’s podium and receive the plaudits of the mainstream media.

Yikes. Either Shapiro’s repressed maternal fetish has him uttering the creepiest of creepy phrases in print, or he’s incapable of imagining a woman performing anything but childcare duties (and whatever he may or may not have observed in his forays into internet porn).

The creepiness continues:


No woman in the history of politics has used her womb like Nancy Pelosi.

Sadly, far too many men have used their jackassery like Ben Shapiro.

[…]

To which I might add, no-one has used the genetic accident of having a penis to such pointless effect as Ben Shapiro.

Read more: US politics, Women, Feminism, Wingnuts, Shapiro, Pelosi

The Gaping Wound

Feminism, Race, UK elections, Women
Published on

Zimbabwe is Britain’s dirty not-so-secret; its people’s current terrible plight is the end result of our imperial endeavours in East Africa. British rule consisted essentially of our exporting the then Rhodesia‘s wealth back home to Blighty via a colonial administration that worked hand-in-hand with the nation’s white landowners (though nation is a misnomer, since we drew the border. Ditto the rules on land ownership.).

Cutting a very long story short, British colonial rule culminated in the eventual election of President Robert Mugabe, probably the only time the man has actually had a shred of political legitimacy. Mugabe is now well on the way to making himself President for Life, the better to finish the job of utterly destroying his fellow citizens.

How bad is it in Zimbabwe now? Could it get any worse, after the mad schemes of Mugabe, the torture and the murder and the AIDS and the home bulldozings and a life expectancy of 34?

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings found out how bad it is for women when her eye was caught by an article on sanitary towels:

“SHE has been arrested 22 times, tortured so badly that her front teeth were knocked into her nose and had an AK-47 thrust up her vagina until she bled. Thabitha Khumalo’s crime: to campaign against a critical shortage of tampons and sanitary towels in Zimbabwe, one of the least talked about and most severe side-effects for women of the country’s economic crisis. (…)

So desperate is the situation that women are being forced to use rolled-up pieces of newspaper. Zimbabwe already has the world’s lowest life expectancy for women ‘ 34 ‘ and Khumalo believes these unhygienic practices could make it drop to as low as 20 because infections will make them more vulnerable to HIV. ‘It’s a time bomb,’ she said. The shortage is forcing schoolgirls to stay at home when they start menstruating.

The Zimbabwean TUC has been trying to help by importing sanitary products to distribute free:

This, I suppose, is why the latest consignment has been seized by the police and the Central Intelligence Organization, rather than by the customs officials. Opinions about the Zimbabwean government’s motives vary: opposition to the ZCTU, general mean-spiritedness, what have you. For my part, I have never found it very worthwhile to ascribe any coherent motivation at all to the people who run Zimbabwe. Your mileage may vary.

It’s a shocking article, but if you’re male and see the words ‘sanitary towels’ and think it’ll be boring women’s stuff, don’t skip it (and the very illuminating comments) because it isn’t. This is about how, as Hilzoy puts it:

…there are so many different ways in which people who are desperately poor get screwed; ways I had never ever thought of.

Quite.

Read more: Women, Periods, Menstruation, Zimbabwe, Mugabe, Poverty, Unions