…from Lindy West at Jezebel. There are a lot of dudes I know who ought to read this.
Month: March 2013
It’s Getting Better
This would be awesome, if it does happen. I have to believe there are enough people who’d support this dude that the inevitable atavistic knuckle-draggers would be drowned out.
Also, is it weird and selfish that I hope the player’s a Giant? Because I think that would be awesome!
Also: The obvious comparison is Rob Halford of Judas Priest.
This is Why I Hate
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-united-states-isnt-broke-its-just.html
Incomes for the bottom 90 percent of Americans only grew by $59 on average between 1966 and 2011 (when you adjust those incomes for inflation), according to an analysis by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston for Tax Analysts. During the same period, the average income for the top 10 percent of Americans rose by $116,071, Johnston found.
To put that into perspective: if you say the $59 boost is equivalent to one inch, then the incomes of the top 10 percent of Americans rose by 168 feet, Johnston explained to Alternet last week.
Welp, this economic system seems to be working perfectly. I look forward to more privileged white people explaining why this is a desirable outcome for everyone.
Fucking swine. Sharpen your pitchforks.
This Law Brought to You By…
Man, I support this wholeheartedly. There’s no way it would happen but by by-goddamn-well ought to. Fuck these swine.
Go sign it! Make your friends and family sign it!
Money Where Your Mouth Is
I thought this was an excellent continuation of last week’s theme. Shannon Salisbury is an educator from Canada who’s creating downloadable resources for teachers and parents to help teach consent culture. I’m sending some money, and you should too. This is awesome!
Discovered via MGK.
Duality
So I’ve had hess two songs bouncing back and forth in my head since…oh, Tuesday morning or so. I’ve been a fan of both bands for like, 20 years, so it’s not like it’s anything new.
Sports “Heroism”
http://jezebel.com/5991504/we-need-to-outgrow-our-sports-legends
Doug Barry writes a great piece about our culture’s worship of sports heroes using the real-life inspiration for The Natural as his starting point. He doesn’t make the obvious next step of connecting that hero worship to the kinds of attitudes that enable a thing like Steubenville, though. And he’s so close! I kept waiting for that leap, but he never took it.
The way we whitewash the actions of these dues is both surprising and saddening. Athletes aren’t, and shouldn’t be, heroes. They’re good at playing a game and that’s fun to watch. It’s fun to root for your team. But let’s not hold up skill at a particular task as a referendum on a person’s character.
Steubenville
Henry Rollins has some musings about the Steubenville verdict.
It’s a lot of musing and thinking-out-loud, and Rollins hits on a lot of interesting points while he works through his reactions to the case. There’s no one real answer to a lot of the questions he finds himself asking because, as he puts it, there’s failure on so many levels here it’s hard to know where to start. From my own perspective as an educator, though, I think there’s one really, really important lesson we can impart to kids at just about all levels, and it’s this:
YES MEANS YES.
I know, I know; no points for originality. Fuck originality. I was talking to some dude about the verdict yesterday and the kid started going on about how you can just never be sure when someone’s consenting when they’re intoxicated. I thought he was going to take it somewhere profound, but instead he wound up shrugging it all off by suggesting that, well, you just never know, so sometimes people are gonna get raped. He phrased it a little differently–“You just never know.” “It’s hard.” Dude, it ain’t that fuckin’ hard. Did she say yes? Awesome! Go for it! Did she say no? Hands the fuck off. Did she say maybe? Well, that’s not yes, no hands the fuck off. Did she hint yes? Be sure, and make sure it’s an unequivocal yes, or you’re an unequivocal shitbag.
If kids can internalize that, you’d reduce the chances of dudes making the terrible decision to rape another human being, and you’d reduce the shitshow of people making excusing for rapists.
“It was a curious period.”
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/03/abigail-fisher-university-texas/63247/
What you have here is some ginned-up bullshit between (white) wiseguys aiming to preserve segregation because, you know, it’s unfair that non-white people should ever have to be considered alongside whites.
Angry white people are the reason this little girl had to be escorted to school by the Feds. White people angry that they had to share. But I’m sure our contemporary assholes think it was either all an exaggeration or since we have a black president racism is gone away forever and shutupdon’ttalkaboutitlalalalalacan’thearyou. They might be able to keep a straight face about it, but without laws like these the country will drift even further back on all the important measurables of racial justice in this country–we’ll just follow the slower, poisonous Northern model instead of the atavistic Southern strain we’ve done such a good job of stigmatizing.
But really, this is the part that made my simmering pot of anger boil over. Get a load of thisfuckingguy, the smarmy-ass fuck.
But when asked why the drafters [of the 14th Amendment] created programs targeted to black Americans if they did not intend the Constitution to allow the government to use race to help minority groups, [senior constitutional studies fellow at the Cato Institute Ilya]Shapiro said, “It was a curious period.”
“It was a curious period.”
Thanks for giving the game away, fuckhead. If you find yourself on the same side of the argument as thisfuckignguy, well, you deserve more scorn than even I can humanly heap upon you. But I will by-god-dammit fucking try.