Women – Page 19 – Prog Gold

You Shall Know Them By The Company They Keep

Published on June 5, 2007

[UPDATE: Ann Winterton’s bill was defeated yesterday, but there’s two more coming right along behind. This is not over by a long chalk.]

The Catholic church in Britain, buoyed up by the rise of the religio-fascist Pope Ratzo, the presence of some prominent Catholics in the UK giovernment and the huge influx of Catholic migrants, is getting way too big for its boots: it’s threatening, the 70 Catholic MP’s who don’t toe the church’s anti-abortion line with excommunication (though they insist not, that’s effectively what it is) and worse, should they even so much as abstain from voting on new legislation tightening abortion rules. Catholic MPs include Ruth Kelly, the Communities and Local Government Secretary, and John Reid, the Home Secretary. The head of LifeLeague, James Dyson, said the pressure group would “out” Catholic MPs who took communion and abstained on abortion measures.Aiding them in this profoundly undemocratic exercise are some of the most rabid rightwing nutjobs British politics can produce.

The leader of Scotland’s Roman Catholics yesterday questioned whether politicians who backed abortion should remain full members of the church, and also compared Scotland’s abortion rate to “two Dunblane massacres a day”. In a sermon marking the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Abortion Act, Cardinal Keith O’Brien attacked both the practice of abortion and pro-choice members of the Scottish parliament.

[…]

“I think it’s far beyond time that the present Abortion Act of 40 years ago was re-examined,” he said. “We are killing, in our country, the equivalent of a classroom of kids every single day. Can you imagine that? Two Dunblane massacres a day in our country going on and on. And when’s it going to stop?”

The Dunblane reference was just gratuitously unpleasant and ill behoved a cleric – but it proves that this is about poitics and power, not conscience. That a priest would commit such an offence to common decency as to use a tragedy and parents’ grief to make a political point says he is a political, not a spiritual man. But then the anti-abortion movement has never been spiritual or about the sanctity of life but about the subjugation of women – and that goes double for the Catholic church.

British Catholics are in an invidious position. Allegiance to the Pope is required for Catholics as a matter of doctrine and this allegiance extends to the Vatican, it’s cardinals and all of their doctrinal instructions. Those instructions are infallible as they come from God directly, Catholics are told: the church’s position is that temporal powers are are strictly limited by God and God’s instructions trump the state’s. The Pope speaks directly to God, ergo the Pope’s instructions trump the state’s because abortion is considered a spiritual, not a temporal matter.

However, I suspect that should anyone else from any other religion give their primary allegiance to another city-state and its leader ahead of their own nation and compatriots they’d be called traitors, with prominent Catholics like Ruth Kelly in the forefront of the name-calling, especially so if they were Moslem.

The church can obsfuscate about liege lords and loyalty as much as they want, but their own statements of doctrine say it’s so.

This puts many British Catholics in a very delicate and ambiguous position: their loyalty has been constantly historically suspect and this has more than once resulted in bigotry and violence, so much so that the church has had to become an underground, secret, and dare we say it, even a terrorist organisation at times. This state of affairs has formed the basis of much of the long history of anti-Catholic bigotry in England but we had begun to get over it, at least until the ascendance of Ratso to the papal throne and the subsequent empowerment of the worst of the right wing of the church.

A Big Fat Profitable Meme

Published on May 31, 2007

It’s serendipitous that this admittedly ‘well duh’ set of research results should pop up this week while the issue of singers’ weight is a big online topic: :

Ubiquitous pop videos may harm girls’ self-image

Ian Sample, science correspondent
Thursday May 31, 2007
The Guardian

Music videos are driving a wave of dissatisfaction among adolescent girls by promoting ultra-thin role models as the epitome of beauty, psychologists warn today.

Watching pop videos featuring thin, scantily clad women for just 10 minutes was enough to drive down girls’ satisfaction with their body shape, according to a study which appears in the journal Body Image.

Researchers fear the damage inflicted on the self-image of girls as they prepare to leave schools and sixth form colleges is widespread, given the near ubiquity of music videos on television and on big screens in clothes shops, cafes and bars.

Viewing figures for MTV have swelled to 342m worldwide, according the channel, and a survey in 1998 found that 12- to 19-year-olds were the most frequent viewers, watching on average for 6.4 hours a week.

But Helga Dittmar, a psychologist at Sussex University and leader of the latest study, said adolescents were likely to spend far more time watching music videos than the survey suggested. “Public places such as stores, bars and clubs increasingly display music videos on large TV screens, making them an inescapable, almost omnipresent form of media,” she said.

More….

Indeed they are omnipresent, even here in Amsterdam, which does at least keep a lid on the more blatant forms of public advertising; though we are forrced to watch ads on the trams, they’re not really of the music video type; more for sore arse ointment or real- estate agents.

But there are few fashion chainstores you can go into without an in your face dose of Christina, Pussycat Dolls or some identikit skeleton with inflated boobs, fake cheekbones, extensions and a spray-on tan gyrating over some German techno-trance monotony and there’s about to be an explosion of it all over, now that the Netherlands premier department store De Bijenkorf is getting in on the act.

“Introducing in-store television is a move towards the store of the future. It can be compared to the Internet 15 years ago, when not many people were exploiting it for commercial use. One of the really attractive features is the ability to develop our own content and programming.

“This means that we can produce content that is very specific to our needs and can be immediately tailored to reflect exactly our central and local marketing priorities.

“In fact, the ability to tailor content to reflect in-store initiatives, trends and promotions is central to the screens’ success.”

If you’re a teenager and want to keep up with your peers you can’t avoid it. I thought it was bad when I was young but the pressure teenagers are under now is horrendous, schoolgirls saving up from Saturday jobs for liposuction and so on.

Despite stating the bleeding obvious it’s still quite a timely report, considering the current furore about the perfectly normal, if tall (but then anyone is tall to me, being barely over five foot in a land of dairy-fed giants) winner of the latest US Pop Idol.

Some publicity-hungry suburban country club nonentity and one-member manufactured ‘pressure group’ that Fox picked up somewhere called Meme Roth called her ‘obese’. Obese. Really. Give me a break and get back to your obsessive jazzercise and mainlining aragula salad and ogling poolboys, you silly, silly woman. And ‘Meme’? What were her parents thinking? Let’s face it, when your name constantly reiterates your existence -‘me,me,me,me,me..’ – you’re bound to turn out a solipsistic narcissist.

But enjoyable cattiness aside, Ms Roth’s just another tool being used to create a sensation and push up Fox’s profile.

It’s Fox pushing this meme and Meme too. Owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International, it’s a company that has much invested in media worldwide, not just the US. It promotes music videos, it makes money from them. Of course they want to influence them. To think otheriwse is to mistake the purpose of a corporation, which is to make money.

To us it’s about more than mere vanity and fashion; it’s about whether we can look in the mirror and loathe or accept ourselves for what we are.

To them it’s just about making a market. Handily it also gives a nice lot of traffic to other mass media outlets too, who profess outrage but who are still happily counting the hits. Their ad revenue goes up as well and everyone’s happy, excpet the girls and women who are left wondering why it is they don’t look ‘normal’.

Weight is a hot-button issue for almost all westernised women and there’s lots of ways to make money from that. Again we’ve fallen into the corporate trap and they’ve created a controversy to frame the discussion andmake money out of it. They got us going and coming. No wonder we hate ourselves.

De Haut En Bas

Published on May 30, 20072 Comments

Is it just me, or does this read as horribly condescending?

Kactus, one of my super-favorite babymama blog crushes who needs a wider audience, has chronicled her experiences using food stamps for the last five weeks (although I think I lost week 4): Week One, Week One Part II, Week One Part III, The Meat Deal Is A Big Deal, Week Three: The Month So Far, Week Five.

I do urge you to read the posts despite the twee intro: everyone should know exactly how it is many of us survive these days and not only that, learn how to do it themselves. The good times won’t last forever, and poverty isn’t a moral fault, it’s just shitty circumstances. This whole ‘you are poor you must have brought it on yourself’ schtick is a crock of shit designed to assuage others’ greed and guilt.

There but for sheer blind good fortune go you, no matter how much you might like to tell yourself it’s all your own talent, charm and all-round coolness. No-one is secure: even if you’re in an open-ended salaried job with benefits and no dependents, you’re still likely to be only a couple of month’s salary or a major illness away from penury. But with a job of the uncertain, badly paid type that are available these days and dependents, you’re fucked – unless you’re a very, very clever manager, which Kaktus obviously is, as well as being a talented writer. The fact that she finds time to write at all is a bloody miracle. What she’s doing is feminism in the raw and I know because I’ve done it too.

So to describe Superbabymama not as a fellow grown woman and a writer but as a “super-favorite babymama blog crush” – well, to me it gives off an air of magnolias; but then maybe I have a sensitive nose. But I still can’t help but be reminded of Reese Witherspoon in full on “aren’t I cute while being so sweet to the help’ mode.

But like I said, maybe it’s just me. I’m English and class skirmishes make my atennnae go up.

How Bushco Fixed the US Immigration Courts

Published on May 30, 2007

Political Corruption Barbie, Monica Goodling

It’s naive to think that political considerations have no informal influence in governmental hiring, particularly to sensitive posts like the administration of federal justice. But the lengths to which Bushco will go and the blatancy with wihich they blithely ignore due process to do it still beggar belief.

And is it just me or are these Bush Barbies all of a cookie-cutter type? Dana Perino and Mionica Goodling – clones of the ur-beneficiary of the looks=competence+decency myth, Ann Coulter? I think we should be told.

You know how it is, as does Bushco – people think better looking individuals are more competent and women are less corrupt, so to cover high crimes, appoint good-looking, photogenic women to commit them. Simple.

But the looks are just a sideshow – we should focus on what these willing tools do, not how they look. That’s playing their game.

From Legal Times, via TPM Muckraker:

Few people in El Paso know more about immigration law than Guadalupe Gonzalez, a lawyer who has prosecuted illegal immigration cases along the Texas border for nearly 25 years. In 2002, after seeing an advertisement, she applied — and was passed over — for an opening on the local bench of one of the nation’s 54 immigration courts. But when two more vacancies arose in 2004, nobody bothered to tell Gonzalez. In fact, the positions were never advertised.

Instead, the Justice Department’s leadership, which oversees the immigration courts, used a little-known power to appoint two lower-level attorneys — both of whom Gonzalez had supervised at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in El Paso — to the $115,000-a-year positions.

The authority used to bypass the competitive hiring process would be employed again and again during the last year of Attorney General John Ashcroft’s tenure and continue when Alberto Gonzales succeeded him in 2005. And according to the immigration court’s former administrator, it also allowed top political aides at Justice, including former Gonzales chief of staff D. Kyle Sampson and former White House liaison Monica Goodling, to fast-track candidates of their choosing — including a number of lawyers with no immigration law experience but strong ties to the Republican Party or President George W. Bush’s election campaigns.

[…]

Though allegations that Goodling had politicized the hiring of federal criminal prosecutors were known by the time she testified, her admission that she had taken political considerations into account in the hiring of immigration judges — who are considered civil-service employees — was not. Nor was it well-known that a discrimination suit filed by Guadalupe Gonzalez led to internal debate within the Justice Department over the appointment process and to a hiring freeze of immigration judges that began in December — a freeze that wasn’t lifted until last month. Justice’s immigration judge selection process is currently being probed by the department’s inspector general and its Office of Professional Responsibility for potential violations of federal civil service laws.

Gonzalez’s story illustrates the inconsistent methods used to fill immigration judge positions. As with the replacement of U.S. attorneys, political appointees at the Justice Department appear to have trod upon department norms — and may have even broken federal law — to reward their own people with plum assignments.

More…

Go read the whole thing: the Us attorney scandal and now the immigration courts are not siolated inciodents of polital corruption. Bush minions like Goodling and Paulose and their buddy in Rove’s office Kyle Sampson are like termites – you don’t know they’re there until it’s too late and the damage is done. You might spot one or two but you won’t know the extent of the infestation until the whole edifice collapses into a pile of dust.

Oh, Snap!

Published on May 23, 2007

Sometimes the jokes just write themselves

Adjacent Raw Story headlines:

Female sharks ‘can fertilize selves’

Mary Cheney gives birth to baby boy

It’s no weirder than all the speculation (oh, all right then, it’s me speculating, but if I just sneakily use the wingnut blogger construction ‘some say’, my ass is covered) that the Cheney sprog’s a clone of his own grandad, like in The Boys From Brazil; he’s just the first in a strain of uber-Cheneys being bred to take over the world and he’ll be called Damien and have a big pet dog and a very loyal nanny.

Maybe a shark would be better.