Abortion & Congress

Skimming a progressive group blog, I read a post titled: "Why Democrats Need to Stop Relying on the Judiciary: Abortion and the Supreme Court."

I didn't read it, but I presume it suggests taking the fight to the legislature.


I'm against that for the 110th & 111th congresses.


It's hard for me to say it, because abortion decisionmaking was one of the first "this is an area appropriate for a 'small government' policy" beliefs I settled into as a kid/teen.

It's also hard to say it because we're talking about lives here. People will end up wheelchair-bound in nursing homes instead of at home raising their other kids because they were forced to have a C-section late-term abortion (very dangerous) instead of a dialate & extract abortion (not nearly as dangerous).

What's more, it's "those people"--the ones I barely know--the ones outside my class--who won't be able to fly to Timbuktu, Canada and get the procedure done. It's rather unconscionable for me to say, "Let's not focus on those policies for now!" when my judgment might be clouded by ethnocentrism and blindness to other social groups.


Nevertheless, I see two scenarios, both addressing the issue of lives:

1. We spend a whole lot of legislative floor & committee time talking about sex legislation & get just rules passed.
   
   However, the rest of the time goes to "business as usual," which is all sorts of deals for huge businesses and unenvironmental / unjust trade.
   
   10 years later, everything is the same as it was in the 80's and early 90's, and people, not having really seen drastic results from a new world, hold their same views and bring the sex legislation debates right back where they are now.



2. We spend a whole lot of legislative floor & committee time talking about
   • getting rid of (or at least capping at low levels!) agribusiness subsidies,
   • passing laws that say Monsanto can't sue & destroy small organic farmers for accidentally growing genetically modified corn that they didn't want in the first place (it blew into their fields),
   • introducing major green taxes and social cost internalization incentives (maybe we'll finally get electric cars back from the big companies! Or, at the very least, we'll stop having year-round peaches everywhere in the country),
   • reducing the military budget, increasing police, nature maintenance staff & supplies, education, quality-instead-of-shitty psychiatric care, etc. budgets tenfold (or something...at least double!),
   • rolling back super-wealthy-person tax cuts,
   • taking David Smith's advice on affordable housing policy at a federal level,
   • increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit program,
   • and even considering new tax schemes (I haven't made up my mind on "Fair Taxes" yet)
   and get many or all of these just reforms passed.
   
   However, the rest of the time goes to "business as usual," which is all sorts of deals for huge businesses and unenvironmental / unjust trade.
   
   This time, though, the legislation we passed directly limits and goes against "business as usual" and cripples its ability to happen in the future. Plus, we'll be doing something unprecedented, so there won't be nearly as much prejudice against it among the common person, and it the changes will actually have a chance to do something. Imagine Pres. Johnson's "Great Society" reforms without the riots over them not really doing much1 (because this time, the reforms make more sense). This national legislative focus has a much better chance to turn people into progressives and make them demand a different kind of "usual" for "business as usual" than a sex-based national legislative focus.
   
   Heck, once that happens, they might even demand progressive sex legislation.
   
   But I'm utterly convinced that progressive sex legislation isn't going to change people's worlds enough to make them demand progressive economic legislation.

Footnotes:
1 I don't quite agree with that explanation of the riots, but I've heard it said a lot, so it seemed quoteable.

Carnival of Feminists

The 36th Carnival of Feminists is online at Fetch Me My Axe, the blog of a thoughtful, intelligent woman whose posts I always enjoy reading: Belledame222!

The 37th Carnival of Feminists will be here on May 2!

There is no theme yet, but check back for an announcement.




Please use the blog carnival submission form. However, if you're loathe to use it, I will also accept submissions at kitkatscritique _ at _ g m a i l _dot_ com

I look forward to meeting and reading you at blogs I know and blogs I don't.

Tweaking The "Coolest" Of Cultural Influences To Be Less Hurtful

This morning I had the opportunity to talk to a man who--bless his heart--repeatedly pushed the idea that powerful executives behind the hiring of misogynist rappers (whom misogynist non-rappers use as an excuse for putting their misogyny into identical words) are the people we need to focus on, rather than on those misogynist rappers (because that hasn't done all that much good).1

My new hero, Eric Deggans (the man on the radio show I called into) named names at the top of corporations, which I'll list here as soon as a copy of the broadcast goes online. I haven't heard Bill Cosby or Jesse Jackson name corporate names like that.

So, well, if they won't, and if the mass media won't (because, thanks to consolidation, they get their paychecks from the same bosses), let's get a grassroots effort to boot out the hurtful-mouthed musicians in favor of more airplay & album production for non-hurtful-mouthed musicians.

Readers of blogs and traditional media succeeded at it when it came to giving the Imus show the boot (though they may have failed when it came to giving Bernard McGuirk's career the boot)--do feminists and feminist allies have the will to get such an effort going against the advertisers for corporations that hire hurtful-mouthed musicians of popular genres?

(By the way, one advantage to media consolidation is that we can focus on many musical genres and many insulted non-dominant social groups at once--note that I've shifted from "misogynist rappers"2 to "hurtful-mouthed [popular] musicians"3

Oh, and if this does get momentum in the feminist community, and thus the "hurtful" thing most frequently being targeted in the letter-writing & boycotting campaign is misogyny, we do need to make sure that when we target it in non-white music, we let non-white people decide what is hurtful & what isn't.

For example, It wouldn't be fair to get black rappers who say hurtful things about white women kicked off the air because we don't want that kind of hurtful stuff said about women (a non-dominant group) in our culture's most popular/influential music. After all, they might've been saying it because white women are white (a dominant group), and who are white people to decide whether or not the insult was justified?

In the case of fighting misogyny by black rappers, it'd be important to make sure that black women feel hurt by that rapper before taking any action against his bosses and his bosses' advertisers.

I'll wait patiently to see if I can get this into a carnival--hopefully then discussion of the idea will find some momentum. Feel free to comment whenever you find this.5


Footnotes:
1 After all, advertisers don't pay the musicians directly--they pay the corporations, and then the corporations decide who get contracts & who don't. So Bill Cosby, Jesse Jackson...nice try, but not doing as much as you could.

2 Because that's what Don Imus started with, and therefore the musical genre and the insulted non-dominant social group everyone's talking about

3 That is, insulting their own races & other races, etc. as well as women

4 After all, some rappers who get a lot of airplay & albums have been criticized for hurting a lot more groups than women.

And I don't want to imply to music executives that there's something innate about rap & hip hop that cause it to include hurtful stuff. Heaven forbid they use that as an excuse to ditch all non-white music--particularly the harshly critical stuff that nevertheless isn't hurtful to non-dominant social groups!

I do, however, think that "popular" is an important criterion for genres to target because high perceived "coolness" allows such music to influence the slang of and provide "excused" vocabulary for non-[genre]-performing parts of the population.

5 Whoops! Looks like Pam Spaulding beat me to the call, and I'm guilty of some "Somebody oughtta-ing" when, as Hugo Schwyzer puts it, "plenty of things are already being done."

Still, there's a lot of momentum among people of many classes & races right now--people ready to write more letters after feeling a "win" with MSNBC's advertisers--can we somehow tie what people are already doing to widespread letter-writing & boycotting strategies?

News Update (Good News!)

1. A few weeks ago, I wrote how troublesome it was that boys had been raped in prisons and officials got to keep their jobs despite not doing anything about it even though lower departments had worked their asses off to get evidence together. Well, at least one of those officials has resigned and the investigation is now underway.

2. A man who pushes women he chooses as targets for the night to drink, drink, hey, have another drink! and then invites these women who can no longer think, "Hey, maybe a publicly filmed movie isn't likely to be filmed in the crew trailer--I don't think I'll take him up on that," to the crew trailer on the premise that they'll be in the movie and rapes them once they're there is in jail. Not for what he's done to these women, unfortunately, but they stopped Al Capone by getting him on tax fraud.

Liberal Dood

Psssst--U.S. femisphere--the founder of Daily Kos is taking paternity leave for his newborn & toddler.

I know he gets a lot of flack for running a site that underrepresents issues that, if not ignored anymore, could improve life a lot for women in this country, but I thought it's worth complimenting him for setting an example to other men with this act.

Abstinence-Only Education Funding For People Who're Already Abstinent Till Marriage?!

This is terrible!

The biggest chunk of our third-world AIDS prevention money (about 1/3, it seems) goes to abstinence education programs.

Okay, kinda sorta debatably a good thing or a bad thing when it comes to domestic AIDS prevention money.


But in the third world, at least as far as one gender is concerned, 80% of the new AIDS cases already are practicing abstinence till marriage and remaining monogamous within that marriage!

For many women, marriage is a risk factor for AIDS because of their husbands' dangerous behavior. Worldwide, 80 percent of women newly infected with HIV are practicing monogamy within a marriage or a long-term relationship. This shatters the myth that marriage is a natural refuge from AIDS. And it shows that, more than two decades into the epidemic, our fight against AIDS has failed to address the unique circumstances of women—especially women in the developing world.

So here's how the biggest chunk of our AIDS prevention funding is being spent:

"Lady, would you like to not get AIDS?"

"Yes, please!"

"Okay. Don't have sex till you're married, and when you're married, have sex only with your husband."

"But I already do that. And 16 out of my 20 friends who got AIDS last year were doing that, too."

"Impossible. Anyway, do you want to avoid getting AIDS or not?"

"Yes!"

"Then don't have sex till you're married, and when you're married, have sex only with your husband."

"But what about my high chances of that not working? What else can I do?"

"Nothing. Or, well, I'm not allowed to tell you about anything else."

"Are you kidding?"

"Nope."

I think it's very important to write all our Congressmen, perhaps including this little dialogue I just made up just to make sure they can't miss our point and think we're advocating a change because of ideology rather than logic, and ask them to change the allocation of international AIDS funds back to something more condom-oriented and drastically less abstinence-and-monogamy-oriented.

I'm pretty guilty of some harm where the game is closer to zero-sum

*sigh*

Amanda Marcotte's post about the "laziness gets overlooked and you get praised for the few non-lazy things you do" short-term benefits of being a sexist (as a reminder that Mr. Shakes of Shakesville should have said that applying feminist ideas benefits men in the long-term after making some pretty "bleh!" short-term sacrifices) reminds me of myself.

When minor grumbling over the male incontributions [to wedding set-up] threatened, we women were reminded that we "didn’t want" men to help decorate, the implied fucking-it-up-to-get-out-of-work barely implied at all.

That quote about messing things up to gain a reputation that gets you out of doing them reminds me of all the work I've put the poor hard workers in my family through.

I have got to get better about this. I have got to stop being so lazy around people who will ignore my laziness and just praise me for other things.

Surely there's something better on the other side if I do, right? Something like this?

I tried to imagine what it must feel like to be a man in these circumstances and to have women fawning over you for the simple task of not being a giant asshole, and I imagine it’s extremely gratifying. I find it’s hard to really imagine what it’s like to have that much ego-pumping, and on a regular basis, too. Which isn’t to say that all men have it—the feminist men in my life don’t and a lot of men I know besides get embarrassed at being fawned over. But they give up the fawning in order to behave with more justice in their lives. Also, in a very pragmatic way, they work more. Grooms I know here at home that have big weddings don’t have the pleasure of doing absolutely nothing but showing up and expecting to be congratulated for it. They have to work on it, and that takes time and effort, and is another price they pay.

...

[there're] enormous benefits ... My boyfriend knows, for instance, that he’s never going to show up one day and find that I’ve left suddenly, unable to take being treated like a servant anymore. ... a real opportunity for genuine intimacy with a [person] that’s only available to [pairs] where both people are equal.

The last post shares my small reform successes with the rest of the world, hoping they'll be motivational. This post shares my small reform failures with the rest of the world. :-(

Click here for the geeky afterthought.

I think there is an outside privilege system that supports my lazy will, even though it doesn't cause it:

I think there's a certain upper-middle and upper-class and suburban-affluent tendency to ignore kids' laziness as long as they're doing other praiseworthy things like making good grades or keeping a great behavior record in school.

Zero-Sum Games

I took the title from Zuzu at Feministe because I liked it.

Mr. Shakes of Shakesville wrote:

Instead of feeling threatened by or put upon by [various civil rights] movements, instead of feeling they somehow denigrate straight, white men’s lives or their ability to be who they are, men would apply these ideas in an effort to improve their own lives, along with everyone else’s. What we need to do is confer all the rights and privileges that these men have traditionally enjoyed upon everyone else, and then, once we’ve done that, we can start thinking about what new rights, obligations, responsibilities we can confer on everyone, in order to make our society a more egalitarian and fair place to live.

I'm not a man, but I am white and upper-middle-class, and I really like this quote because it makes me feel like I'm on the right path. I got an inkling of what I needed to do when I read Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting In The Cafeteria? and came up with particular implementation ideas through Ishmael, The End Of Poverty, the March 2004 issue of National Geographic, Code Of the Street, and many more sources.

Essentially, I understood particular combatable manifestations of privilege I have that have insulated me from feeling many of the negative effects of being a woman in my culture.

• I'm very white and of at least average conventional attractiveness, so I can pull off an "I'm a nice person!" face at college interviews, disciplinary sessions with teachers, job interviews, etc. very easily.


• I grew up in such a safe environment that pulling an "I'm a nice person!" face was always more likely to benefit me than to make me a target of violence. I got more practice at incorporating it into my subconscious, unaware facial expressions than did people my age in the ghetto.


• My parents made enough money at one job apiece to come home and spend time teaching me to read, do math, solve puzzles, and study for tests from a young age and throughout my childhood and teenage years.


• My conventionally successful parents (and grandparents on one side) passed on their interests in academics over makeup and geeky conversation over making out

Now, after hearing about the rights movements of people who aren't my color or social class or economic class, I better understand what I need to give up to, as Mr. Shakes put it, "confer all the rights and privileges that these [people] have traditionally enjoyed upon everyone else, and then, once we’ve done that, we can start thinking about what new rights, obligations, responsibilities we can confer on everyone."

It's important for me to:


• understand that food is going to take up 3-5x more of my budget (and perhaps my family budget someday) than it did in the family I grew up in. Internalizing previously external costs is the right thing to do.
  That way, someone else's costs to eat can come down to where mine are and we'll live fairly.


• give up huge amounts of free time and conveniences I used to have. After all, I'll have to save money to pay for that fairer food, and one of the more effecient ways to do that (because it also reduces another cost I currently shove onto other people--pollution) is to bike. But biking chips into free time.


• make a tough decision about whether to grab back my privileges--like free time bought by externalizing costs--if/when I have kids and want to be able to educate them as well as I was educated


• buy clothes used so they don't get dumped from Goodwill into Tanzanian markets and ruin 10,000 people's jobs at textile factories


• buy anything with metal in it used--especially if it probably comes from China--because new metal mining imposes huge costs on other people's quality of life


• use a good bit of free time that I would've used to learn to dance or used to earn a few more bucks writing reform-supporting letters to policymakers instead


• make sure, every time I get promoted or complimented at work, that there isn't someone lower-class or a minority or fiftysomething who deserved it more. Speak up if there was.
  (OUCH! Could lose me money that seems pretty darned essential at the time!)


• do much, much more--I could go on and on.

This isn't easy. I guess I want to say to men reading Mr. Shakes & Zuzu that I know how hard it is to adjust to new patterns--this winter I fell back into driving as soon as the weather got cold, even though the roads were clear. And I'm trying to make new habits as a childless youngster with a sturdy economic support system!



So I get it if one day you criticize a buddy for talking about his girlfriend as if he considers her inherently inferior to him and the next day you accept a promotion you suspect your female teammate deserved more.

No, it wasn't right to do that. It's never right to do wrong.

But it is human.

And I can tell you from experience that failures don't have to throw you back into old habits forever.

I can tell you from experience that continuing to hear & read why other people (in the case Shakes & Zuzu are advocating, women) need you to keep doing what you tried your best to do will keep you going if you let it.

(I suppose you could decide to make it get you mad at those other people for being so "needy" instead, but why? What moral good does it do? And, as Mr. Shakes points out, what practical good does it do?)

The internecine warfare that occurs between women and men, people of color and white people, straights and gays, as they all squabble like schoolchildren in an attempt to gain or deny rights, is exactly what those in power want. They promote it, they foment it, they do everything they can to aggravate it, because they know that if we were all ever to get our fucking shit together, and demand that the society we all live in and contribute to should be fair and decent to everyone, then the egregious wealth and power that they enjoy would finally meet its end.

I read theory about what I'm doing wrong in my treatment of other classes and what I could to do counteract the tide of wrongs against them to keep me going. Shakes & Zuzu suggest you read feminist theory, and I suggest that the reason you should is to keep you going.

Click to read one more fabulous quote that just didn't fit in anywhere else

Zuzu wrote:

Another example of [the attitude Mr. Shakes is encouraging men to abandon towards feminism and its tenets] is class anxiety, and the idea that if you get an education, you should be making more money than people who don’t have a degree.

...

A lot of people on New York One, a local cable news channel, demonstrated in man-on-the-street interviews that their resentment about how much the members of the TWU got in comparison with themselves was directed at the blue-collar transit workers, and not at, say, their own white-collar employers [who were the ones in charge of their salaries]. This is the kind of thing that keeps people from collective action, and keeps the people in power pulling the strings.

(all boldface & brackets mine)

Two terrible stories

Ohhhhh, these stories are heartbreaking.

1. A U.S. attorney
   • didn't prosecute men who sexually abused teenagers under their guard and who
   • let his employees say on behalf of his department that the department wasn't prosecuting because the teenagers didn't speak out against the very people guarding them at the time and therefore it couldn't have been sexual abuse & because the teenagers didn't get hurt enough for it to have possibly been sexual abuse
   and nevertheless wasn't fired by people higher up in our federal government.
   
   (The TX Atty. Gen. also refused to prosecute the case, as did the relevant department of the US Dept. of Justice. I don't know if their justifications for not prosecuting were quite as fire-worthy.)



2. Our federal government and various state governments haven't been prosecuting corrupt companies at the level we've come to expect them to. These two articles should've been about state or federal investigations and punitive actions years ago, not just coming out now.
   
   Based on my reading the past few months (and NPR reports on Sarbanes-Oxley repeal efforts), it seems the main reason for the rare and slow uncovering of these horrible business practices is that our federal government (and to a lesser extent certain state governments) has an overall policy of allowing more corruption than previously tolerated--in the belief that it'll be good for the economy overall.
   
   Anyway, that's the most forgiving way of looking at it. Of course, the least forgiving way of looking at it is to believe that the whole economic theory was a deliberate lie meant to convince people throughout the country and the federal government to give these policies a try, but that the developers and top-level proponents of the economic theory actually knew it would never help the United States population as a whole and that it would merely put wealth into the hands of their friends and the hands of people they could relate to by class & lifestyle. Tough call which it really is. Will I ever know?
   
   And, if it turns out that I'll never again be able to count on the government prosecuting this kind of corruption at the level it used to, what can I do to investigate on my own and make sure that my mom, who was going to start putting money into a long-term care policy, will actually be able to make claims on her policy when the time comes? Obviously, "Don't buy Conseco!" is one answer, but beyond that...what do we do?
   
   And after my mom comes me. How do I assure that if I need surgery, my health insurance provider won't suddenly say, "You lied by omitting the fact that you had a toothache in 1993! You had a previously existing condition you didn't tell us about! We're kicking you off and not covering your surgery!" like BCBS did to people in California?

Turned into a spy

Though they buried it on page A17 (perhaps appropriate, since it was an Op-Ed), the Washington Post did a great thing today by publishing an American citizen's account of being served a National Security Letter.

Three years ago, I received a national security letter (NSL) in my capacity as the president of a small Internet access and consulting business. The letter ordered me to provide sensitive information about one of my clients. There was no indication that a judge had reviewed or approved the letter, and it turned out that none had. The letter came with a gag provision that prohibited me from telling anyone, including my client, that the FBI was seeking this information. Based on the context of the demand -- a context that the FBI still won't let me discuss publicly -- I suspected that the FBI was abusing its power and that the letter sought information to which the FBI was not entitled.

Rather than turn over the information, I contacted lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union, and in April 2004 I filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the NSL power. I never released the information the FBI sought, and last November the FBI decided that it no longer needs the information anyway. But the FBI still hasn't abandoned the gag order that prevents me from disclosing my experience and concerns with the law or the national security letter that was served on my company. In fact, the government will return to court in the next few weeks to defend the gag orders that are imposed on recipients of these letters.

Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case -- including the mere fact that I received an NSL -- from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie.

I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government and being made to mislead those who are close to me, especially because I have doubts about the legitimacy of the underlying investigation.

Dang. I'd resent being made to mislead my clients, people close to me, etc. as a secret informer, too. Wow.

Ask your local newspapers to feature Egypt's big news

Egypt's about to get a government like the worst of the sub-Saharan African dictatorships.

Contested Presidential elections will be virtually impossible, since candidates must come from a licensed party with so much representation in all elected bodies that in practice only the NDP will ever get over the bar.

The opposition, from the MB to Kefaya, has been placed in an impossible position. Participating in the referendum will legitimize the results, particularly since nobody doubts for an instant that the regime will falsify the results if they go badly. The most extreme option, a collective resignation from Parliament, seems to have been taken off the table: even the MB seems to feel that this would be going too far, and that this would only please the government which would be able to replace the troublesome MB deputies with more accomodating deputies. That leaves only boycott, which will not in the end have much impact - as above, even if only 10% turn out and vote, the regime will happily claim 70%.

At the end of the day, there's only one opinion which Mubarak and the NDP really care about: the United States. The Constitutional crisis has not been front page news here, and even where it has been covered, the criticism has been tepid.

Call your local public radio station. Call national public radio stations. Write 60 Minutes. Call your local newspapers either asking their foreign bureau to work on it, since you want to read about it, or asking them to buy an AP or Reuters story on it. Heck, write Jon Stewart and see if he'll skewer Mubarak--maybe he can put a Scottish beret on a picture of him. Just drop a line saying you're curious about the situation and want to hear more.

Can't hurt. Takes 10 minutes. Might help.

Prisoners vs. Gays

Wow! Talk about accurate sizing up of people's probability of harming other people:

Given the number of criminals they're letting into the services these days just to fill recruiting quotas, I'm betting the average troop is a lot more concerned about sharing a foxhole with someone still suffering from a prison sex jones than being in close proximity to your average straight shooting queer.

Garrison Keillor vs. Dan Savage

I never listened to Prairie Home companion in all these years, even since I heard last year that it's going off the air within a year or so.

Until a couple of weeks ago. I've caught bits of it twice now, and I have to say that those descriptions of the cold were hilarious!

I sure wouldn't have had quite as good a weekend without them.

But not everyone who makes my world a better place sometimes makes it a better place all the time.

What a crock of baloney, Garrison Keillor. Even if you were trying to be tongue-in-cheek, did you have to do it so badly that it sounds like you're dead serious?
(And, though Dan Savage has apparently contributed to making my home state area a worse place by generalizing like a good classist that we don't need to bother to care about the cultural education levels of people in red states, these [ironically...culturally educational!] arguments make him someone who, today, is making my world a better place.)

Language & Words Anger

Arrrrgh. I hate stupid people.

I hate it when people misuse English and build entire points out of their misused words--
--points where the causation the speaker describes is logically impossible if the word is heard accurately.

Commenter on Fox News said:
...black folks...[doing] stuff like that's out of control...and it's...because--not all, not all, not all--but most of them lack moral characters. Look what they did in three days: they turned the dome into a ghetto.

I wanted to punch my monitor, because I was thinking, "You moron! Do you know what 'ghetto' means? It means, 'overcrowded place that people aren't allowed to live outside of.' Look it up in an encyclopedia: check out the very first ghetto (in Rome). Moron!"

I mean, for Pete's sake. "Ghetto" doesn't mean "violent hell."

Of course, overcrowding and not being allowed to live elsewhere usually cause violent hells, which is why ghettos are often violent hells.

However, it's not like black people had to come in with preexisting violence to turn the place into a violent hell--and it's certainly not like doing so would turn a place into a "ghetto." After all, again, a place can be a violent hell without being an overcrowded place you don't get to live outside of--that is, without being a "ghetto." No causation there.

Three days to earn the title "ghetto?"

More like the moment it got...hmmm...lemme think...oh! overcrowded!
(with any color of people)

How to escape that dumbass fashion advertisement scenario

Sometimes I really wish there were one central IMPACT-style self defense PHPBB forum where graduates and potential students all got together & gabbed.

There's a dumbass fashion ad that finally got pulled because, surprise, surprise, people were horrified that it looked like a gang rape!

Now that it's existed and we can't undo its existence, it sure would be fun to discuss with other Multiple Unarmed Assailants Class graduates how to get out of the scenario depicted in that ad (1 man to the side of her closed legs, pinning both arms (using one hand to pin each of her wrists to each side of her head); 4 accomplices not yet touching her (but 2 look like they might jump in any moment); and the woman, wearing high heels, seems to be in mid-motion--her butt is off the ground, so she's either not landed on the ground completely or has lifted it, perhaps as part of various motions to see if she can break free). Perhaps links to the discussion and musings of, "Do you really think it might work?" would catch on in Livejournals, the blogosphere, and even discussions over coffee!

We, bloggers and residents of the world, can never criticize or critique the ad enough to nullify its negative effect on people's minds. Doing that takes a positive new creation, too.

What a great way to help turn around the ill effects of that ad. Get viral tip-sharing going among women.

Eating local, part 2: helpful winter words

I have no idea if these will be what grows in your part of the country, but bookmark this post and keep checking back. As I find helpful words to punch into Google Images as you look for meal inspiration for January/February/March produce available in a part of North America where all the easy and common food stops growing, I'll update it:

Foods

• Spanish radish:


• Jerusalem artichoke:
       topinambour / topinambours


• Ginger:
       gingembre


• Celery root:


• Beet:
       betterave / betteraves


• Nut:
       noix


• Cream:
       crème / creme
       ("Cream" might be a type of soup, which almost makes it belong in the 2nd category, or it might be an ingredient in a particularly appetizing dish. Give the search a try even if you don't ever use heavy cream--you might see the dish and realize you can make the same thing with milk or melted cheese.)

References to preparation

• Gratin:
       gratin


• Cold dish; salad:
       salade
       (Warning: "salade" also means lettuce, which you won't find at this time of year, so do pair it with the type of food you're looking for or be prepared to see a lot of mouth-watering recipes you can't make!)

If you find a recipe that online translators and friends just can't help you figure out, leave me a comment and I'll be glad to help.

Eating local

If you're in the north midwestern United States or in Canada (I presume) and you're struggling to eat locally this time of year, it's helpful to know some French.

I don't know what to do with "Spanish radishes" that feel nothing like radishes and "Jerusalem artichokes" that look more like ginger than artichokes. But that's what the Minnesota co-ops are offering from local farms!

I'd all but given up on eating fresh food like a good seasonal shopper any time before late April--last night I hunkered down with greens out of a can, spaghetti out of a box, and tofu out of a box all mixed together. If I can't do local food that has to be prepared before tasting good, well, at least I can do long-shelf-life ingredients that have to be prepared before tasting good. After all, an addiction to 5-minute prep time kept me from preparing as much local food last summer as I would've liked.


But, looking up "jerusalem artichoke" after reading an article that indicated celery root, another one of those co-op mystery items, could be used as a main ingredient (puréed), I stumbled upon a picture labeled "topinambours."


That changed everything! The word in French isn't of the form, "place that isn't here" + "vegetable we do eat here," so the chances of Frenchies considering this vegetable something as normal as we consider cauliflower seemed high!

(I'm also convinced that we're more intrigued by the flavor of lime than they are because we have a distinct word for it--they call it a "green lemon," and I swear they flavor things with an attitude of, "lemon or lime...doesn't matter" more than we do.)

Sure enough, a Google Images search on "topinambours" turned up Jerusalem artichokes cooked in cream, Jerusalem artichokes shredded up & made into cake, Jerusalem artichokes cooked and cooled and covered in mustard dressing as a form of salad...

Just look at those lovely pictures. They're so messy...so obviously homemade with ease!



I mean, there's just something about "[rare vegetable name] salad" that makes people around me think of using [rare vegetable name] as a garnish on a salad of lettuce rather than using it as the only ingredient of substance. Much as we think of "tomato salad" or "carrot salad" as cold dishes consisting of tomatoes or carrots, the French think of "topinambour salad" as a cold dish consisting of Jerusalem artichokes.



I've experienced this, "Wow, it's nice to know the word for the food [or way of preparing food] in two languages" phenomenon before. I'm sure it holds true throughout more languages, but unfortunately, I don't know any besides French. How much more simple could the "weird local vegetables" seem to me if I knew the words for them in Wolof or Tibetan?

We hate Iran's gov't, Love 1/2 of Lebanon's gov't, Hate 1/2 of Lebanon's gov't, and Love terroristic U.S. enemies who hate our hated 1/2 of Leb's govt

Get this. I heard it on the radio last night.

• The majority coalition currently governing Lebanon is pretty much fine with whatever foreign policy the United States decides to pursue.
  They are led by Sunni Muslims.


• The biggest party in a minority coalition, which wants the majority coalition to share more decision-making power with the minority coalition (for example, the way our congressional committees have to be at least partly filled with members of the minority party/ies).
  This largest party is Hezbollah.
  Yes, it's both a paramilitary organization and a political party at once.
  Anyway, Hezbollah is very much against 85+% of the foreign policy that the United States wants to pursue (or that the United States tells other people in Europe & the Middle East to pursue and impose upon Lebanon). Heck, they take the propaganda so far that some people just say that Hezbollah "hates America." Whether or not that's a fair assessment (do they hate "America" or just our foreign policy ever since the European powers left the region?) I can't say.
  Hezbollah is led by Shiite Muslims.


• Also existing in Lebanon are militant / paramilitary groups that "hate America" (and they DO seem more likely to be thinking about more than just foreign policy's effects on Lebanon, since they don't think about politics and governance nearly as much as Hezbollah).
  They are made up of Sunnis.
  Even though they're very anti-American and anti-governments-who-support-America's-ideas and even though at least some members from each of these 3 paramilitary Sunni groups has buddies from back in the day in Afghanistan or some other connection to Al-Quaeda, we and the Lebanese governing majority have decided that, hey, they'll fight Shi'ite-led Hezbollah without turning on us or the Lebanese once they're done, right?
  Because they're Sunnis, and so is the Lebanese government's majority coalition leadership!

As my roommate said when I told her about this, "I think we've tried that in other places already. And had it not work."


*sigh*

(By the way, such groups, up to a couple of years ago, used to be given a swift kick in the pants out of Lebanon. Now, at our encouragement, the Lebanese government has been letting them stay & even work on their training. That's right...we're encouraging the Lebanese government to let them stay while we're chastising the Pakistani government for letting practically identical groups stay. But, hey, the Pakistani militants who are Sunni aren't helping the Pakistani Sunni government kill someone else we don't like, so it's okay to stick to the old sensible line about, "Get rid of your terrorists!" when talking to Pakistan.)

Read the rest of this entry




The bigger narrative I heard that story within is the idea that if we get all the Sunni-led countries in the Middle East to do 2 things, Hezbollah and Iran will both lose out.

• Why do we want Hezbollah to lose out? Because, at the mildest, we think they'll change Lebanese foreign policy if they come to power.
• Why do we want Iran to lose out? Because Dick Cheney thinks that if Iran develops a bomb (despite the fact that all their mullahs who ACTUALLY control President Ahmadinejad have issued religious edicts that they absolutely oppose letting the government use a nuclear bomb on anyone) it'll give it to a Shi'ite led paramilitary group.
  (And this is the "at the worst" scenario that "we" think Hezbollah could do--Cheney thinks that Hezbollah has enough people within the United States to get an Iranian-donated bomb from Iran to Palo Alto or Washington & set it off.)

So, if Cheney's right about Iran, Hezbollah, & nukes, well, okay, he's saved us all. But if he's wrong about any piece of that puzzle (such as Iran actually wanting to nuke anyone or such as Iran just handing a bomb over to people they're not 100% allies with), we don't actually need to DO anything against Iran OR Hezbollah to make it not come true. It simply won't come true on its own.

Anyway, based on those assumptions about what would--oh no!--happen if Hezbollah and/or Iran weren't completely shut down, our government has decided to talk all the Middle East's Sunni-led countries to do things that keep Iran & Hezbollah from effectively doing ANYTHING (not just military & paramilitary activity--more like keep them from ruling at all, which, of course, would be bad, because it'd also cut off water supplies, police forces, museum staff, etc. just like it did in Iraq).

However, those countries aren't just going to send in their troops the way old-fashioned allies did. They say, "Okay. We'll send money to paramilitary groups who also happen to be Sunni, just like us. They'll try to kill lots of Hezbollah politicians and civil servants in Lebanon. Others will try to kill lots of Iraqi politicians and civil servants who happen to be getting money from the Iranian government in Iraq."

D'oh!

Guess who those groups Egypt, Jordan, & Saudi Arabia are pitching in funds to on our behalf? Groups with ties to a group that attacked us 5 years ago! Again, what are we going to do when these trained (Sunni) people have new weapons, lots of money left over, and are simply done fighting Shi'ite Iraqis in Iraq or Shi'ite Lebanese in Lebanon? What are we going to do when it's more advantageous for them to use their weapons on Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, or the United States?

Are we going to switch teams again and hope we can make it work? (Apparently the whole reason we've been supporting a Shi'ite-led, Iran-friendly government in Iraq for the last few years is that the White House didn't believe our intelligence community when they said, "Ummmm...if you think Iran's on the Axis of Evil, you might not want to kick all the Ba'athists out of the government. You're going to get a pro-Iranian government if you let the Shi'ites take over completely." The White House apparently thought, "Naaaah! Iraqi Shi'ites hate Iranian Shi'ites! They'd never work with them after that big war between their countries!" Can you BELIEVE we threw out a Sunni dictator partly on the premise that he wasn't even representative of his country's populace, only to re-support Sunni paramilitary groups in Iraq? What are we going to let them do? Install a Sunni dictator? D'oh!)




I don't even have any idea what to write to Congresspeople about this one. I don't think debates in Congress get as detailed as this situation is. I guess the best we can do is keep hoping they say, "You're not allowed to bomb Iran!" or something.

I can't imagine a bunch of them saying, all together, "You're not allowed to bomb Iran, you have to stop sending money to Lebanon's Sunni terrorists and telling other governments to send money to Lebanon's Sunni terrorists, and you have to tell Egypt, Jordan, & Saudi Arabia to stop sending money to Iraq's Sunni terrorists. (And, of course, while you're at it, for the love of all that is holy TALK to Iran and tell them to stop sending money to Iraq's Shi'ite terrorists if that's what you want them to do!)" Congress just doesn't get as complex as that. What a shame.




What do you think?

Fire glued to body parts

After reading Female Chauvinist Pigs and the Packaging Girlhood blog, I do think that burlesque is overrated on the "empowering" scale. I have this sense of, "Can't people just admire these same talents to the same extent when done by these women with their clothes on? No? Well, that's a damned shame."

And after starting to read blogs, I've been horrified to discover that reasons to be uncomfortable with stripping as a major way women can earn money go far beyond that concern above. (Oh, and in breaking news, there's this terrible story, too!)



But apparently, there're also 62-year-olds who've perfected their art and learned to so finely control the motion of their breasts that they can spin tassels that're on fire.

WOW!
I almost want to buy a ticket to Las Vegas (nat'l. burlesque competition) just to go see her.

(That and cheer loudly for the women in our local burlesque troop who're competing and who told me the story.)

Public Housing

David Smith does it again: today he's crowded my browser's Bookmarks list with another "keeper" of a post.

Similar to this post (whose key words are "eyes on the street" and "defensible space"), today's entry uses economics and other disciplines to discuss bad things happening in geographical concentrations of people.

not

"You must make X% of my income to have your dick sucked"

On "Feminist Allies," Jeff cited an article he found cited on "Feminist Critics." In that article, an interviewee complained that she was very unhappy when she had to be in charge of people at work and in the household.

(Interestingly, neither site diverged onto the discussion of whether or not men "could" handle being "in charge" both at work and in the household back when that was entirely expected of them. Do Jeff or HughRistick or the interviewee in that quoted article feel that men are naturally able to juggle this, or do they feel that the years we spent making them do both were as terrible of conditions for men as women like the author of this article now think are so terrible for women?)

She implied that

1. men who don't have some sort of status outside of the household won't act like they're in charge in the household and that
2. to keep a heterosexual relationship happy, she and other women need to live out the [at least partly] submissive aspect of a traditional woman's role in the household.

Though she implied she was fine with being in charge at work and making a significant salary, she also seemed to be saying that it's very difficult to maintain happiness with a man who isn't even close to her outside-the-household status, not because of financial stresses, but simply because of the way his outside-the-household status impairs his ability to adopt a role inside the household that would please her.

Interesting.

However, I feel like she generalized her experience too far and incorrectly applied her theory about "what's wrong in my relationship with a man of this sort" to her sex life when she wrote, "I’m not going to pay the bills—I feel like his mother—and then come home and suck his dick."
Click the link to read this post in full

She generalized it too far because switching to crude language implies that you're one of the masses--that surely everyone shares your experience, right?

And why don't I think the masses feel that her theory of outside-and-inside-the-household-roles sums up the problems with their oral sex lives? Because I think that, given how it's assumed most people in 2007 feel about the merits of sex for mutual fun vs. sex for one powerful person's fun, the "normal" status of a member of "the masses" (true or not--maybe I should say the normative status, but that's why I put "normal" in quotes) is someone who has sex "because it feels good" and considers BDSM "kinky" or "weird."



This woman should think about whether she as an individual even wants to have sex orally if the only way it’s appealing to her is to think of it as a favor to a more powerful person.

I’m not saying she shouldn’t do it at all--maybe she’ll come to the conclusion that she as an individual needs a couple of power-and-submission-based sexual activities to keep her happy in a sexual relationship.** But if that’s the case, she should explain that so there’s some context. Otherwise, readers assume that she fits into that "normal" category of people--people who don’t need such things to keep them happy in a sexual relationship, and those readers read her as speaking for such people.



The thing is, if you read it as though she were speaking for such people, she makes them sound pretty fucked up. If she represents them, then even people who don’t get any sexual pleasure out of power-and-submission acts in bed somehow "need" to perform acts of submission in bed to be...happy, I guess.

Weird.

**(However, if she doesn’t, AND if she also finds no purely sexual appeal in feeling her partner get sexually stimulated on account of what she’s doing with her mouth, THEN I’d recommend that she abstain from sucking dick altogether.)

Couscous

I'd like to extend a heartfelt thank-you to the people, past and present, of North Africa for inventing and preserving couscous.

I just had a bite or two at lunch in the cafeteria today. Marvelous!

I experienced a little bit of heaven.

IMPACT Defense Against Multiple Assailants class

     Fighting multiple unarmed assailants bore some similarities to fighting single unarmed assailants. Firstly, the premise of the attack was sexual assault or some other act that implied the assailants wanted you alive and aware of what they were doing until they felt that they had managed to perform this act. Therefore, assailants were more likely to grab and restrain us than to throw a deadly punch.

     As in Single Unarmed Assailants class, the presumption was that they were out to

1. convince us to stop hitting them but not "fight" the way men fight each other and
2. do sexual things we didn’t want them to do (or, as I said, something like that).

     This class is not adequate preparation for fighting multiple henchmen in a Jet Li movie whose only goal is to kill you as fast as possible.


     Another similarity to the single assailant class was the idea that men who attack women (or anyone they perceive as belonging to a “weaker” social category, like children or the elderly) are easily frightened by the yells and blows of an opponent who is fighting a "real" fight. The evidence (crime reports, interviews, etc.) shows that this is even truer of assailants who feel the need to have a whole group to be sufficiently intimidating to a woman.

     It is also truer with multiple assailants because the reasons for the attack are often focused on feeling masculine in the eyes of other group members rather than in the eyes of the woman. This can make a lot of members of the group lose commitment and run away or give up as soon as they see their only judges failing the intimidate-and-abuse mission.

---

     The neatest trick we learned was lining up assailants. Though they roam and threaten like a wolf pack, they don’t move like a wolf pack. Trained combat teams have better things to do: they have Jet Lis and Uma Thurmans to fight. Thirteen-year-olds are not combat teams who know how to move in relation to one another. They probably formed their group 30 minutes ago!

     So if they try to come at you from 2 or 3 different directions, you back up and move left or right until becomes . However, it doesn’t take long for the ones in back to figure out that their path is blocked, so you must hit or kick the front one as soon as you get that line and then keep moving to make a new line out of the assailants (preferably including the one you just mobilized, because he/she might be mobile sooner than you think).

     If one does manage to run around you (instead of you keeping him in front of you by backing up as fast as he’s approaching your flank side), you might indeed get grabbed from behind. We learned several handy techniques for that! We learned:

• how to clock someone behind us in the head
• how to hurt him in the groin despite having our backs to him
• how to take out someone in front of us if that person seems too close to first hurt the rear person and take the time to turn around and strike a better blow, and
• most importantly, no matter how many or few assailants we’ve struck, to see exit opportunities from the sandwich and take them right away.

How’d we learn? Practice makes better!
(One of our instructors refuses to say, "Practice makes perfect.")

---

     We also learned how to hurt them and thus escape if they’re pinning our arms and legs to the ground. Again, as with single unarmed assailants, it’s important not to think, "He’s holding me and there’s a hand coming to grope me!" and to think, "He’s at my feet, restraining them from moving in 2 directions, but not a third. I will move them in this third direction and use them to hurt him. If he leans in to try to grope me, all the easier, but I’ll figure it out no matter what he does."
     (Strong abs make this easier, by the way! Balance and gravity make it possible even without them, though.)

     Same goes for people holding your arms. Don’t worry about what they or their buddies are doing to your breasts and crotch. Focus on the ones pinning down your weapons (limbs) and only once they’re too immobilized/stunned to grab back your weapons is it helpful to worry about [using those weapons and] getting rid of or escaping out from under people with their hands on your privates.

---

     Since an attacked person can keep the fight much more manageable by staying mobile, we learned new kicks and hits that weren’t taught in the Single Unarmed Assailants class. There we almost tried to lie down on the ground as fast as possible. Here we had to learn to stay confident and strong while standing.

     We also learned to "shuffle" because walking, running, or traveling sideways by stepping with criss-crossing feet (I’m so bad about doing that!) is more likely to make us trip. It’s not all-important, but it helps.

---

     The strike-once-and-only-once-and-move tactic doesn’t last forever. Once every assailant has had a few blows they generally pause longer to recover. If you have put two on the ground ahead of you and a third is staggering away from you on your left from a blow to the head, when you draw the fourth out to your right and hit him/her, when he/she bends over or goes down, you might see that no one else is on his/her feet yet. If you see that, it is safe to throw one, two, or more kicks against the same assailant and knock him/her unconscious (ball-clutching or head-clutching assailants can recover and run quickly enough to catch you half a mile down the road. Unconscious ones give you time to get to a safe place and report the attack to the police).

---

     Towards the end of the fight, you use both the one-hit-and-move strategy and the hit-until-knockout strategy as appropriate until all assailants have been knocked out ("ASSESS!") or truly run away ("LOOK!").

     Use verbal assertion to dissuade any menacing onlookers from jumping in to start a new fight. Fight if attacked. Look, assess, and repeat if there are more menacing onlookers.

     Leave the scene, watching where you’re going. They’re all unconscious or gone--you checked earlier. Don’t get hit by a bus or trip in a gutter by looking over your shoulder while you walk or jog.



That’s what we learned in class!

Absence over

Long absence. Grandma died; had to leave town. Blogged on paper.
Tough choice--put it on my book blog or here? It's inspired by a book...cross-post because this one has readership and I haven't yet opened the book blog up to the public? :-\

National Sanctity of Human Life Day

You know why I think things like the Prevention First Act are so important? Because things like that act display the beautiful, best humanity of truly "pro-life" people, whether or not they believe that abortion is among acceptable answers to the life-damaging problems that unwanted pregnancies bring.

I salute all of you, this day after yesterday.

Yesterday was both the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, cause for celebration among those who believe that abortion is among acceptable answers and "National Sanctity of Human Life Day," allegedly a day of celebration among those who believe that it isn't.

However, as "Plutonium Page" pointed out, the day, if taken at its title's face value, should not have a darned thing to do with whether or not abortion is an acceptable answer to life-damaging problems caused by unwanted pregnancies. If the title lived up to its words, the day should be dedicated to decreasing suffering in the most effective ways possible (that is, usually as close to the beginning of the problem as possible).

Plutonium Page posted the following gut-wrenching photo commentary illustrating that point:

(Click here to expand this post and read)

Today is a very special day for Mister Bush. He has declared January 21, 2007 "National Sanctity of Human Life Day". Check it out, right there on the White House website, a nice, pretty little message.

I filled in the blanks.

America was founded on the principle that we are all endowed by our Creator with the right to life and that every individual has dignity and worth.

(AP photo)

National Sanctity of Human Life Day helps foster a culture of life and reinforces our commitment to building a compassionate society that respects the value of every human being.

(AP photo)

Among the most basic duties of Government is to defend the unalienable right to life, and my Administration is committed to protecting our society's most vulnerable members.

(AP photo)

National Sanctity of Human Life Day serves as a reminder that we must value human life in all forms, not just those considered healthy, wanted, or convenient.

(AP/Nabil)
Click here for more photos. (WARNING: graphic content).

I call upon all Americans to recognize this day with appropriate ceremonies and to underscore our commitment to respecting and protecting the life and dignity of every human being.

(AP photo)

• Caring for the Wounded in Iraq - A Photo Essay - warning, extremely graphic content.
• Coalition casualties in Iraq

Oh, and Mister Bush? I'll leave you with the words of John Prine:

But your flag decal won't get you
Into Heaven any more.
They're already overcrowded
From your dirty little war.
Now Jesus don't like killin'
No matter what the reason's for,
And your flag decal won't get you
Into Heaven any more.

I, like Plutonium Page, want to take the focus off of whether or not abortion is an acceptable answer to pregnancy-related suffering in life. I want every day to focus on the more effective ways of reducing suffering in human life--ways like

• the Prevention First Act
• a strong Federal Emergency Management Agency
• a contribution of 0.5-0.7% of our GDP to countries in "extreme poverty" whose governments are doing very well given their financial situations, and
• talks with other countries even though we're not allied with them.

Why I don't want Sen. Hillary Clinton to be president

Here is a quote that describes the types of reservations I have about Sen. Clinton.

Yes, yes, I found it on Daily Kos...I swear I only started reading it because this primary race has me curious to see what the biggest leftytalk site is saying about the candidates, not because I usually agree with the people on there...

Anyway, this particular text did resonate with me:

"too many people think that underneath, she is a would-be aristocrat who would sell out America to the forces of free trade globalization in the same way that her husband did, only with a sterner look. Besides her money, her sex and Bill, Hillary's best asset is probably that she comes across as the most legitimate 'keep-the-oil-flowing' candidate, the one best able to play the Davos game. There is still a powerful lurking fear even among the Left, namely that the oil will indeed stop, so we really need to trust the old guard no matter what. This secret fear is probably what is propping up the Right from total collapse right now."

I have no idea who or what Davos is, and for me not all bad things in the state of worldwide economics have to do with oil per se, but I hope this quote communicates the gist of why, if Clinton is the democratic nominee, I would quite possibly vote third-party.

I've spent the last 3 years learning about nuances of the status quo / "old guard" of economic and social policy, and I've seen so many great ideas proposed by economists and other theorists just...flounder...when they reach people like Sen. Clinton who don't seem to give them the attention they have the power to give them.

I'm tired of that.

Now that I have a better idea of what new paradigms I do like the idea of (such as legislation that moves us closer to getting externalities factored into sellers' costs instead of social costs), I won't settle for someone who is as much of the old guard as Sen. Clinton is.

Race vs. Skin Tone (do you really know what someone looks like if you can only identify race?)

I happened to see an old article from a Twin Cities-area campus newspaper and found it interesting.

Apparently, though no one is complaining about specific descriptors of HOW peach or HOW brown a person's skin color is in crime reports, two students represented complaints about not-actually-physically-descriptive terms like "black" or "African American" being on the little security alert flyers that the college puts up around campus.

West, by the way, spent his major and earned a Rhodes scholarship studying what psychologists and other scholars have figured out about the way people perceive race. Just a little tidbit from other issues of that paper.

Until I read the article, I hadn't thought much about the idea that there were both nonoffensive and offensive ways to report skin color in crime reports, and that there are pretty good English words for showing that they're differentiated based on helpfulness (or unhelpfulness).

Check out how the two students put it at the end of this quote:

[Security chief] Gorman said it is difficult to decide whether to use race when it is the only descriptor that a victim remembers, because he wants to provide as much information in security alerts as possible. He said that victims tend to give very vague descriptions when recounting an incident.

“We’re going to use skin tone colors and other descriptors that could be helpful but sometimes [race is] all people remember,” Gorman said.

West and Littell argue that if a person only remembers the race of the person and cannot remember any other physical characteristics that gave them the impression that they belong to a certain race, then they do not actually know what the person looks like.

Male circumcision helps them avoid getting HIV

Or so says an article I found while trying to get the text of the Prevention First Act.

Weird.

The idea of encouraging lots and lots of people to alter their bodies to avoid one problem when we don't fully know what problems it might increase their chances of squicks me out.

Then again, that's common medical practice. In fact, it's common "naughty bits" medical practice. Women have been advised to do it for years.

Lots and lots of female people have been encouraged to alter their bodies to avoid pregnancy when we didn't fully know what problems it might increase their chances of...and even now that we know, it's still common medical practice to keep encouraging them to do it anyway.

Lots of feminists claim that the traditional reluctance to encourage lots and lots of men to do things with their genitals, hormones, etc. to avoid problems (such as unwanted pregnancy of a partner) is outrageous sexism.


So should we just be glad that at least some human beings are getting treated right by "common medical practice" and keep fighting to get "common medical practice" to stop being so nasty and deadly with the advice it gives to women?

Or is there some inherent value to encouraging these kinds of risky behaviors, as supporters of hormonal birth control have argued for years, that we should be glad that male human beings are finally getting to be the subject of?

Prevention First Act (S.21)

Yippee! Congresspeople want to put through a law increasing funding for birth control and other things that good studies show actually reduce abortions.

Is your senator a sponsor? Ask her/him to be one! If you're behind this even partly for religious reasons, I suggest mentioning that in your letter.

(Click here to see my letters)

Dear Sen. Klobuchar:

Firstly, congratulations on your win! I campaigned and voted for you--in fact, I knew who you were since you first started sending e-mails to the Kerry volunteer mailing list, and I've looked forward to your tenure, believing that you would make a fantastic senator for the Minnesotan people--extremely responsive to constituent concerns.

I am writing to ask you to sponsor the Prevention First Act. Thomas.Loc.Gov does not have the full text of the bill online yet, so unfortunately, I have not been able to see what I think of it, but the outline on Planned Parenthood and the Daily Kos have made me feel that even if it isn't a perfect leap forward, it does not seem to contain any passages that are steps backwards in the fight to help underprivileged
women suffer less, the fight to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies each year, and the fight to improve the quality of life for every citizen of this great country regardless of material privilege (these, by the way, are fights that MY Christian faith leads me to believe are moral and good).

Thank you, and I look forward to seeing the great steps you can help our
country take these next six years!

Dear Sen. Coleman:

Please cosponsor the Prevention First Act (S.21?)

You have won a lot of support from me by sending an individual reply to every one of my concerns, Sen. Coleman. When I voted in 2002, I hadn't thought we had ideologically opposed opinions on social issues, but because of you and your staff's attention, I have come to find how much we have in common! (Every time I think of writing you, I delight in finding out that we, as Twin Cities area residents who have experienced what an unusually beautiful place this is, with safe biking and park views within a mile or two of everybody, no matter how poor, valued the environmental protection and health benefits of biking equally. I wrote to ask you to vote for a bike commuter bill, and you had already beaten me to the punch by cosponsoring it!) I have come to feel that you are a good senator for the Minnesotan people--extremely responsive to constituent concerns.

I am writing to ask you to sponsor the Prevention First Act. Thomas.Loc.Gov does not have the full text of the bill online yet, so unfortunately, I have not been able to see what I think of it, but the outline I saw on Planned Parenthood and the Daily Kos have made me feel that even if I will eventually read it and find it isn't a perfect leap forward, it does not seem to contain any passages that are steps backwards in the fight to help underprivileged women suffer less, the fight to reduce the number of abortions each year, and the fight to improve the quality of life for every citizen of this great country regardless of material privilege (these, by the way, are fights that MY Christian faith leads me to believe are moral and good).

Thank you, and I look forward to seeing the great steps you can help our country take these next two (or more?) years!

Dear Sen. Dodd:

Please cosponsor the Prevention First Act (S.21?)

I am not a Connecticut resident (though I did donate to the Connecticut senate race last year!) but you are no mere senator, thanks to your membership on the HELP committee, so I hope you will have the time to read my request.

I am writing to ask you to sponsor the Prevention First Act. Thomas.Loc.Gov does not have the full text of the bill online yet, so unfortunately, I have not been able to see what I think of it, but the outline I saw on sites supporting it have made me feel that even if I will eventually read it and find it isn't a perfect leap forward, it does not seem to contain any passages that are steps backwards in the fight to help underprivileged women suffer less, the fight to reduce the number of abortions each year, and the fight to improve the quality of life for every citizen of this great country regardless of material privilege (these, by the way, are fights that MY Christian faith leads me to believe are moral and good).

Thank you, and I look forward to seeing the great steps you can help our country take these next four (or more?) years.

Dear Sen. Enzi:

Please cosponsor the Prevention First Act (S.21?)

I am not a Wyoming resident, but you are no mere senator, thanks to your membership on the HELP committee. You represent a constituency larger than state borders, so I hope you will have the time to read my request.

I am writing to ask you to sponsor the Prevention First Act. Thomas.Loc.Gov does not have the full text of the bill online yet, so unfortunately, I have not been able to see what I think of it, but the outline I saw on sites supporting it have made me feel that even if I will eventually read it and find it isn't a perfect leap forward, it does not seem to contain any passages that are steps backwards in the fight to help underprivileged women suffer less, the fight to reduce the number of abortions each year, and the fight to improve the quality of life for every citizen of this great country regardless of material privilege (these, by the way, are fights that MY Christian faith leads me to believe are moral and good).

Thank you, and I look forward to seeing the great steps you can help our country take these next two (or more?) years.

Happy MLK, Jr. Day!

Minnesota Public Radio rebroadcast a fascinating race-related interview in honor of Dr. King today.

Dr. John McWhorter discussed his opinions on how to answer the question, "What can we do to help poor black people not be so poor?" which he tried to put into a book.

He mentioned two ways that people generally respond to the question, said both weren't going to change a darned thing, and wanted to advocate a third:


1. Poor people who happen to be black have no reasonable reason to not want to work and need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps--that is--they need to just start wanting to work.


2. Poor black people are poor because the factory jobs all moved out to the suburbs (and now to China). What employers remain in the areas where they live won't hire them or won't give them the same amount of flexibility & trust that they'd give to white employees. We have to fix A) these employers' attitudes and/or B) the overall economic structure of the United States before we'll ever be able to help poor black people stop being so poor.
   (Dr. McWhorter feels like this idea came about largely because for the first time in history, during the Civil Rights Movement, black people did get external circumstances making life better.
   He feels, however, that this triumph of convincing external agents to help black people have fewer obstacles to success made people forget how to A) live one's daily life and B) work to help more poor black people succeed under the assumption that external circumstances aren't going to get any better.


3. A disproportionate number of poor black people indeed don't want to work, but their reasons for feeling that way aren't unreasonable. Whatever the reasons were that older generations of young black people stopped wanting to work (Greatest Generation social policy, jobs moving away from the city, discrimination by employers, etc.), young black people today don't think about their predecessors' motivators & demotivators consciously. They just grow up observing it and imitating it, like all humans do. Dr. McWhorter's example of this was a child born to Chinese parents in Brooklyn. That kid's going to grow up speaking English because he/she observed it and that's what humans do.
   
   Dr. McWhorter, therefore, posits that while it's not anybody's fault for being too "lazy" to work, it is possible to retrain people and make them feel differently than their early conditioning caused them to feel.

I wish I had a copy of his book to skim, because I'm putting together his "third view" based solely on what he said in refutation of views 1 & 2 and on one single example he gave of work that people who hold the third view should passionately support ("youth opportunity organizations," if I remember correctly.)


Considering the guy only came up with one example and spent most of his time explaining why he didn't think views 1 or 2 were going to do any good, I don't have much hope that he elaborates View 3 much better in his book. Oh, you silly academics who deconstruct other ideas and forget to clearly construct your own.

I'll find his book later and add to this list based on his words if he does flesh out View 3 examples better, but for now, I'd like to ask you in the blogosphere:

• What people, organizations, etc. (besides youth opportunity organizations) do you think address problems facing blacks from a "View 3" point of view?


• If you agree with Dr. McWhorter that this is the way of approaching problems that's gonna get them solved better than any other, what are your favorite (most effective, best run, etc.) groups, individuals, & projects from the list that could be generated by my last question?
  (I'm always looking for time & money donation ideas.)


• I'm a very privileged and inexperienced young white person from the suburbs. If you agree that organizations, groups, and projects working from this view of problems facing people of color are the most likely to make change, how should I interact with them?
  • Do I, with my background, have any characteristics worth imitating that poor people of color would have a hard time finding examples of in other people?
  • Or should I keep my irrelevant self out of the Boys & Girls Club and just donate my relevant money & goodwill-towards-the-orgranization-when-speaking-with-others-like-me (which are things my background arguably does give me)?
    I mean, it's not like I'm an entrepreneur or a doctor who can mentor an aspiring entrepreneur or doctor. I'm just a specialtyless office assistant myself.
    
    (Anyway, enough about me and my "What should I do?" questions. I'm primarily interested in generating discussion on Dr. McWhorter's ideas.)

Another lovely race-related item I found today is this quote:

A White Guy Honors MLK.

Good Will Hinton grew up in suburban Atlanta. Court-mandated busing, whatever else you may say about it, checkerboarded his friendships and integrated his heart, to the point that when he got to the University of Alabama at Auburn,

it just felt strange hanging out with mostly white people. So I ended up joining the gospel choir and becoming the only white member there. I'm not sure if that was part of MLK's dream for Alabama but I'd like to think that it was.

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, everyone.

Why Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, but not Iran, Syria?

I posted variations on this text at a few sites, and I've gotten some great responses, but so far the best has come from Haroon Moghul (dangit, why'd he delete his old blog's archives? Now how am I going to share his incredible Dubai article with people?).

The original text:

I don't get it. This morning on NPR, I heard Condoleeza Rice say something to the effect that we wouldn't be talking to Iran & Syria, asking them to stop funding Iraqi insurgents and seeing what they want in return for that.

Interestingly enough, we're not announcing that we're going to ask Saudi Arabia, etc. them what they want to get them to stop funding insurgent groups--we're going to ask them what they want to get them to do...well...just what I'm not sure...something to stop Iran & Syria from funding Iraqi insurgent groups.

But, hey, if that makes sense, and Iran's side & Saudi Arabia's side are doing the same thing, why not talk to Iran and ask them to stop Saudi Arabia from funding Iraqi insurgent groups? :-)

The point is...why are we on the Saudi-etcetera side only?

Iran has oil, too, so that can't be it. They're both states with a lot of "morality laws" and "morality police" to enforce them. They're both oppressive dictatorships who keep people who want more relevant Islamic principles as well as more liberal principles to rank higher in politics down & unheard. (The "morality laws" are the way the states pretend to be including Islamic principles in politics. They lock up the people who say, "But those aren't the aspects we considered important!" up & throw away the key.)

They just ain't so different. So what's the deal? Why are we treating them as if they were two totally different types of political system with two totally different types of interaction with religion?



What is our advantage in trying to get one side to put the other side's efforts down instead of trying to get both sides to scale their own efforts down?

I'm not asking this as, "Bush sucks!" kind of criticism.

I'm asking this to wonks who might be more perceptive or intuitive than I am.


I want to know of our proposed approach: what's in it for us, according to the approach's proponents?


Only once I know that would I consider starting to critique or criticize the policy.

Haroon replied, in a comment called, "A Few Good Reasons Why:"

When Iran overthrew its Shah in 1979, Americans learned that no native population can be so pliant as to be used, abused and manipulated solely for good as we perceive it to be. This shock, to the system, birthed our role in mutating the monster that was becoming Saddam. This realization has frightened Americans as it has all imperialists in the past: A native population, with a representative government and an ideology of resistance, cannot be crushed. The days of old-style wipe-out-the-native-resistance is gone; weaponry, media and resources are too diffuse for that brief moment in European genocide ahem expansion and Renaissance to come again.

But who then can America's ally be? Israel, of course, can never reject America -- not without ceasing to be the Israel it has, for decades, been; so long as Israelis believe they are like a colony in an alien world, they will never reject American support. (Or, if they do, it will be because they will find a bigger, better sugar daddy - just as Weizmann went from the Ottomans to the British and then the Israelis went to the Americans.) Saudi Arabia is a useful ally in this regard to, for several reasons

Firstly, it is not and never has been a real country; its population is unlikely to revolt against American interference because it has no national idea around which to rally -- and movements that have no national idea, and national base, nearly always (if not every single time) fail and fail miserably. We live in a world of nations. This is why Saudi "resistance" either goes the road of severely parochial tribalism (the reality of Saudi society, the means by which Saudis practice divide) or a malignant, internationalized Wahhabism, a la Osama Bin Laden... the means by which the Saudi royals practice conquer...

Secondly, Saudi Arabia's royal family knows that when the going gets tough, they'll go out Saddam style, albeit properly enough, with a lot more embarrassed knees-knocking. (Saddam, a brutal tyrant? Yes. A coward? No.) Saudi Arabia has no legitimate government -- it is the result of breeding aided and abetted by rentier stipends. When the going gets tough, nobody's going to care about the Saudis. Nobody. Even their support, the Wahhabi establishment, probably does du'a after every salat for a suitably sickening mass decapitation.

Not to mention oil. Oil, oil, oil.

Saudi isn't Iraq, or Egypt, or Iran, or Turkey. It isn't a country. It's a fiction that continues to be imagined by way of oil revenue, and a convenient one for US interests. Israel is too small, too controversial and, increasingly, too militarily weak to hold together the Middle East the way America wants it to be held together. America needs a new ally. But who can America rely on? Has to be a big country, of course, with money and resources. (Qatar is not Krazy Glue, in other words, and Dubai never will be.) But America learned in 1979 it can't trust a secular despot ruling over a proud, nationalistic, generally strongly-Shi'i people. We learned in 2003 that we can't even trust a well-secularized population, namely Turkey, because as a democracy, the Turks will look out for number one.

Saudi Arabia's number one is its ruling family. Saudi Arabia is America's hostage. A rich one, too. Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, they can never be as humiliated, as pathetic, as hypocritical, as militarily lame -- for all the Wahhabi bravado, their record is pretty pathetic -- as Saudi Arabia is and has been for several decades now.

Don't make friends with someone who can give you a bloody nose. This has nothing to do with human rights, with ideology, with some kind of attachment. It's power politics, plain and simple, and the Saudi royals keep digging themselves in deeper and deeper (into American pockets and defense networks.) They're useful precisely because, in the absence of their oil money, they would be useless. They know this, and know that nobody else can use them in quite the same way.

Boy, is that man good at analyzing current events through the lens of how colonialism affects decision-making today without being the annoying kind of "Colonialism is the only factor in everything!" academic that's easy to shoot down. :-)

But what a depressing outlook. Is nothing suggested in this book a realistic proposal?

Or are the suggestions about asking non-allied countries single short-/medium-term requests (modeled off of contributing diplomats' perceived "success stories" from the past) only realistic and possible for the United States when all the other states involved in a situation are of relatively equal "nationness?"


Click here for more answers I've received to my first question and my replies to those answers.
I'd love to see how you feel they compare to Haroon's response--better?
Worse?
Saying the same thing?

Can you come up with anything that could be done to prove them all wrong and get us to make requests of all sides in this situation?

[insert this text later]

Koufax Awards

Lots of people have written about the Koufax awards, but Sage's post acknowledging that she nominated people was the straw that broke the camel's back. I, too, will go public and suck up to my blogrolled favorites draw attention to my nominations.

1. Batch 1
2. Batch 2
3. Batch 3

Speaking of Sage, I sure do love her blog. All my favorite friends in real life speak & write English language usage rants just like this:

In other news: I was reading an article on Britney Spears in the grocery store line today, and she was described as having "functional highlights" in her hair. I'm no English major or nothin', but isn't that an oxymoron of sorts? How do they function? Do they cook her breakfast or whisper sweet nothings to her or advise her on fashion choices each week?

:-)

Iraq deescalation

If you're too lazy to write a letter to your congresspeople, but you wish they'd use funding or whatever other tools they come up with to block the "surge" of troops, you could always sign this. Looks like the people behind it have connections & money to get an ad into a paper that circulates with congresspeople pretty quickly. Or something.



Update: Just saw this. Yuck.

"You probably saw this at the beginning of the week, but just in case you didn't:

Commanders seek more forces in Afghanistan
Taliban prepare offensive against US, NATO troops

[...] President Bush is expected to announce this week the dispatch of thousands of additional troops to Iraq as a stopgap measure. Such an order, Pentagon officials say, would strain the Army and Marine Corps as they man both wars.
A US Army battalion fighting in a critical area of eastern Afghanistan is due to be withdrawn within weeks to deploy to Iraq.
Army Brigadier General Anthony J. Tata and other US commanders say that will happen as the Taliban is expected to unleash a campaign to cut the vital road between Kabul and Kandahar.

"Mind you, this is from this week, in 2007, not from 2003 or 2004. Right now, troops are being drawn from the actual 'war on terror' in Afghanistan to instead go fight in Iraq. Again."

I hadn't been up on the news enough to know that there was some particular big battle we pulled out from in 2003 or 2004. Yuck. Stay there, defend the road, people. Yeesh.