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

Open Thread with My Kittens

Firstly, my apologies for neglecting to post a seasonal greetings Open Thread a few weeks ago. Belated wishes for a Happy New Year! Secondly, I hope you will forgive me via the adorableness of these three kittens we adopted a a couple of months ago. Please natter/chatter/vent/rant on anything* you like over this weekend and throughout the week.

So, what have you been up to? What would you rather be up to? What’s been awesome/awful?
Reading? Watching? Making? Meeting?
What has [insert awesome inspiration/fave fansquee/guilty pleasure/dastardly ne’er-do-well/threat to all civilised life on the planet du jour] been up to?


* Netiquette footnotes:
* There is no off-topic on the Weekly Open Thread, but consider whether your comment would be on-topic on any recent thread and thus better belongs there.
* If your comment touches on topics known to generally result in thread-jacking, you will be expected to take the discussion to #spillover instead of overshadowing the social/circuit-breaking aspects of this thread.


21 thoughts on Open Thread with My Kittens

  1. A long whiles back there was a discussion about the parochialism (or harsher words, such as racism) of people calling the United States of America by shortened versions such as the United States, or America. I was hoping someone could help point me to that discussion and other links to support using USA instead of US in writing that I copyedit. It’s not my call to make; it’s the author’s final call, so I would be grateful for any ammunition, as I have been losing the argument based on my own efforts. Thanks in advance!

    1. I’ve heard that for ‘America,’ which makes sense (there are two American continents, after all) but I can’t imagine an argument for not using the United States. There are certainly other countries with states, but there are also united countries with monarchies, and we seem to be ok with the UK.

      1. People in the United States of Mexico became testy when one of our politicians gave a speech there, and said United States of America when he meant to say United States of Mexico. United States is ambiguous, since there are two of them, side by side, both in North America!

    2. Do you remember if this was a post or a comment thread?

      PS, grown-ass woman, never used the word parochialism, am now going to use it daily. Thanks!

        1. No, that post doesn’t ring a bell. The post or thread of comments dealing with U.S. vs. U.S.A. was not as angry in tone, if I remember correctly. BTW, I’m trying to persuade, not alienate, someone who is not from the USA in the first place.

          Separate question—What happened to the site? I get an advertisement, and am told to wait 10 seconds, and if I click on Go To Site, or if I wait, I get a blank page more often than what I was looking for. This happened just now, for the first time ever.

          1. Wordwizard wrote: Separate question—What happened to the site?

            Hm, nothing that has been deliberately planned to do that! I think the BlogHer advert code might be mucking things up, so I’ll block that and see if it goes away.

  2. I’m writing a trio of one-act plays intended to be performed together. I finished the first back in October and the second last week.

    It just hit me that in the first piece, one of the characters is stripped of his agency as a leadup to the emotional climax. It’s justified by the circumstances–the character is the soul of a dead man and the other two characters are an angel and a demon in a play skewering the idea of predestination–but at the same time, I’m not sure I’ve managed to show just how much of a personal tragedy it is for that one character.

    Neither the angel nor the demon have much in the way of agency, either, and that’s spelled out quite clearly. Still.

  3. Saba Ahmed, head of the Republican Muslim coalition, seems to hate women and gay people more than she likes Muslims. This is the only explanation I can find for her public and persistent support for Republicans and Donald Trump in particular.

    1. Thank you – I had to revert to the boring default theme last year because WordPress changed a bunch of things that broke our old theme, and I wanted to wait until all that had settled down before I chose a new one. I hope this works fine for everybody accessibility-wise, can folks please let me know if you have any issues?

      1. The desktop version has default mobile detection, which means I can’t use it to see the recent comments sidebar when I’m on mobile.

        1. I see on my phone that the sidebars only appear on the Home page, and only at the very bottom so you have to scroll all the way down to see them. Yeah, not thrilled with that, but it will take me until next week to have a window to actually play around and get that fixed.

  4. TW: misogynoir, anti-blackness, rape, murder, KKK

    everyone should watch this video: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=944732968908780&id=100001162587079

    as she emphasizes towards the end of the video: while all of this happened openly in public, the police who were witnessing the events unfold did absolutely nothing to help her. the cops enabled the situation to continue to escalate. this demonstrates an unspoken, or at least quietly spoken of, affinity between white supremacists and chicago cops – and already at least a few cops across the country were exposed as secret KKK members themselves in 2015.

    if it weren’t for the random person who called an uber taxi to help her escape, she most likely wouldn’t be alive to tell her story.

  5. You know what pisses me off? Clinton is a woman who managed to become a real viable presidential candidate by participating in the political structures of this country as they existed. She did all the dirty dealing and moral sacrifice that we KNOW is necessary to succeed in American politics. You KNOW that a woman needs to work harder to succeed in that boys club. You KNOW she needed to play the game to get anywhere near to where she is now.

    And now Bernie Sanders, from racist whitebread Vermont, who has been able to flip the bird at whomever he wants because crotchety old white men get %1000 more credit and respect from EVERYONE than crotchety old white women, has the gall to call her out for her political participation.

    What kind of first woman president do you possible think we could have?! In what fantasy world can you imagine a woman reaching Clinton’s political achievements by telling powerful people to screw off the way Sanders does whenever he gets the chance?

    It’s sexism plain and simple, and Sanders is a huge part of it. I AM a stubborn separatist white man who tells people to screw off all the time, just like Sanders, but I recognize that I GET TO DO THAT because of WHITE MALE PRIVILEGE. He just seems to think he just happens to have stronger moral convictions, not that success and respect were handed to him a lot more easily because of his dick.

    This is PART of systemic oppression. Marginalized people are forced to uphold the dirtiest parts of a system and then castigated for their participation, while privileged people have more options to maintain the luxury of strong morals and ethics without sacrificing ambition.

    ARGH!

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