In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Month: August 2005

Spare Me

One more thing to add to the disturbing product poll.

The Egg Babies are individually hand sculpted in polymer clay. The babies range in size from 2 to 5 inches. The eggshell underscores the fragility of the life of a baby in the womb.

Fetuses aren’t made in the womb, they come from eggs. So fragile, we are ordained by God to protect them!

via Green Fairy

Tucker Carlson: Supporter of State-Sponsored Terrorism

This is Fernando Pereira, a freelance photographer working with Greenpeace. He was killed in the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior by the French government in 1985:

Days earlier, the crew of the Rainbow Warrior had rescued and relocated the people of Rongelap. The United States government had just detonated the largest nuclear bomb since Hiroshima, and radiation poisoning impacted 95 percent of the villagers.

After a successful evacuation, the ship docked in Auckland, New Zealand to prepare for the second part of its mission: to challenge the French government’s nuclear testing plans on the island of Moruroa.

The Rainbow Warrior never completed that mission. On the night of July 10, the crew awoke just before midnight to an explosion. Before they had time to grasp the situation, a second explosion rocked the boat and the ship immediately began to sink. Following orders to “abandon ship” all but one of the crew made it to safety. Trapped below deck and knocked unconscious by the second blast, Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira drowned.

By dawn, the magnitude of the situation came to light, and an investigation began leading directly to the French government.

Tucker Carlson, in remembrance, calls this deliberate act of sabatoge “vandalism.”

Tucker Carlson says on the air, twice, that he thinks it’s a good thing the French government blew up the Greenpeace ship and killed some of its crew, unprovoked. He then goes on to call this “vandalism” rather than “terrorism.” Greenpeace is, understandably, not pleased.

Get the rest of the story, including the Carlson transcripts, at AMERICAblog. The Greenpeace account of the events may be found here.

via Thomas

UPDATE: More on the story at Majikthise.

Feminist, Photoshopping

The internet connection is back up, which would be obvious if you have a Flickr account that you check on a regular basis. A quirk in my ISP’s system left me without internet access for most of the day, but soon after we got home from Indy I was raring to go. Tonight, I uploaded something like forty pictures from old blog posts and other things that escaped me by hiding deep in the crevices of my hard drive.

Monday morning, I took a picture of myself shortly before I went to get rid of the skunk stripe on my hair. Afterward I contemplated putting it up on Flickr with a new shot of the lighter hair and opened up Photoshop to edit the photo.

What am I doing? I asked myself. With all of the writing Jill and I have done on beauty culture, here I was editing my photos before I released them to the world. I show the world my real face every day. Why was I so uptight about showing my face to my digital contacts?

I embarked on a project. Tonight I photoshopped the picture I took on Monday morning in two ways, one a more “natural” edit and another with a severe edit, then I uploaded all the original pictures of myself I could find with their edited counterparts. Though my photo editing skills are spare, the things I did to change my pictures are amazing considering my politics. And telling.

These pictures, and my crude attempts at preserving vanity, go as far back as 2001. This confession was inspired in part by Dooce.

And the SCOTUS Ad War Begins

NARAL Pro-Choice America is running a blistering ad campaign against Bush’s Supreme Court nominee Judge Roberts. It can be viewed through this page, which also includes the details that couldn’t be shoved into a 30 second spot.

It appears that the tables have turned somewhat in the propaganda battles, because the response from the PFA Voter Fund is likely to be seen as little more than whining by Roberts’ supporters.

I’m no lawyer and especially no fan of Power Line, but I find Hindrocket’s response to NARAL somewhat telling:

Roberts didn’t “support violent fringe groups” or a “convicted clinic bomber.” He supported the federal government’s position on a specific question of law–correctly, as the Court found. NARAL’s reference to a “convicted clinic bomber” is especially outrageous. The Bray case had nothing to do with a bombing by Eric Rudolph or anyone else, and Rudolph attacked the Birmingham clinic–the bombing that is referred to in the NARAL ad–eight years after Roberts wrote the brief on the Section 1985(3) issues.

For NARAL to suggest that John Roberts has ever done anything to support violence against abortion clinics (or anything else) is so far outside the bounds of civilized debate that one can hope that, even in today’s far-gone Democratic Party, sane voices will be raised to denounce NARAL’s advertising campaign.

Hinderaker’s assessment is a fleshing out of the PFA Voter Fund’s defense: Liberals have lied, have distorted the truth, and, above all, have gone too far. Considering the way most Kerry supporters responded to criticisms of their candidate’s military record, it looks like Roberts may just get Swifted.

Update: Prof. B has posted NARAL’s refutation of the Factcheck.org ad analysis. She ends the post by writing, “What’s really bothersome about all of this is that now we’re wasting so much effort talking about the *ad* and none talking about Roberts’s candidacy. I, for one, vow to get back to the actual issue at hand from here on out.”

Agreed. But that doesn’t mean I don’t find the application of Swifty-style tactics by a progressive group to be quite fascinating.

More Technical Difficulties

It looks like both of us are having connectivity issues. While I don’t have the cell phone/land line debacle to deal with, my internet connection has been mysteriously revoked. While I’d love to figure out the problem, my ISP customer service line has an estimated waiting time of two hours, and we are about to embark on a day trip to Indy for Ethan’s pre-kindergarten shopping spree. The little one needs him some shoes and school clothes.

Honestly, I’d rather take the day trip than screw with this connection business right now. My curious and lovable mother is taking us down there for a needed end-of-summer mini-vacation. Free lunch included.

Ryan, Feministe guest blogger and member of The Liberal Avenger, has volunteered to do some posting for us while we get things figured out. Give him some love and keep your fingers crossed for Jill and me.

Technical Difficulties

I have been absent from the blog, and will probably continue to be, because of several technical issues at my house (I’m in Seattle for the next two weeks before going back to New York). The story is at least kind of entertaining: My sister switched cell phone providers from Verizon to T-Mobile. My mom went online to fill out some paperwork for her, and when it asked for her phone number, she entered our house number. So when my sister’s new cell came in the mail, our house line stopped working, and her new phone would ring whenever anyone tried to call the house. Because our house phone is now a cell phone, our internet connection went haywire, and our internet doesn’t work. To top it off, my cell phone isn’t working for some inexplicable reason. All I know is that it won’t make calls, and there’s a graphic of a sad face on it (which pretty well reflects how I feel about the whole situation). I spent all day yesterday trying to call T-Mobile on my mom’s cell, but she has Verizon and gets terrible service at our house (which is one of the reasons that my sister was trying to switch providers in the first place), so I kept getting cut off. I finally just drove to the T-Mobile store, and they’re sending me a new phone, but that will take 5-7 business days.

So I have no internet, no land line, and no cell phone.

Basically, I am cut off from the world, and it’s a really weird feeling. And when I went to use the internet at the library yesterday, a mean lady yelled at me because I was talking on my cell phone (in my defense, I was using the internet to apply for law school loans, and I was on the phone with the loan people trying to figure out which loan to apply for, so it’s not like I was having a gossip session or something). She also had a bad habit of reading to herself out loud as she used the computer — and judging from her one-way conversation, I’m pretty sure that she was emailing her internet man-friend and I was distracting her. She was quite agitated, sweating profusely, and glaring at me. So now I’m scared to use the library computers, because I get the feeling that she’s a regular there.

So, that’s where I’ve been. The phone people tell us that they won’t have our internet or house phone fixed until August 22nd, so posting will be limited until then.

More Adventures in Gardening

While making tomato sauce for a lovely baked pasta dish,

The Making of Tomato Sauce

we found this. Note Ethan’s lip curled in disgust.

The SNAIL!

It’s a good thing we found it before chopping the tomato. Mr. Snail was shortly thereafter deposited on a squash leaf, but not before we squealed with delight at its feelers and slimy trail.

Again, I find my willingness to document these discoveries very telling of the entertainment in this town. Snails, it is.