I’m catching up on a week’s worth of news and blog-reading, which is bringing me to a lot of great articles that I just don’t have the time to individually post on. And it’s actually rather frustrating because I have a whole lot to say about each and every one of these, but finals are in a week and I’m just starting to study today (yeah, color me fucked), so I’m trying to devote my brain power to corporate law in Germany (just typing it makes me twitchy and unhappy) instead of blogging. So while my posting is limited, check these out. They’re all really, really good:
–Europe is a pretty nice place to live. It’s slightly less nice if the dollar is your currency.
–What Digby said. Short version: Kids were seriously injured in a bad car accident — the boy was in a coma and the girl was seriously brain damaged. The kids weren’t insured, and the S-CHIP program — you know, the one Bush just vetoed an expansion of — provided for their medical care. The boy, who is now 12, gave the Saturday Democratic address supporting the S-CHIP program. And various conservative scumbags like Michelle Malkin and writers at the National Review decided to go on the attack — they painted the family as rich and entitled (not true) and Malkin went so far as to show up at their home and business and talk to their neighbors. That’s borderline stalking and I have a feeling that if someone showed up in Malkin’s neighborhood and at her workplace and started asking questions about her, she’d flip shit. Anyway, read Digby’s whole post — what it comes down to is that Republican shills are now attacking a 12-year-old boy and his handicapped sister. It does not get lower than that. (And I’m hoping to write a fuller post on this one later).
-So we said that we don’t torture people. Well… we kinda do.
–The modeling industry is even more fucked up than you thought – not only are models starved (and their agencies are finally admitting it), but they’re also being screwed when it comes to their paychecks.
-There’s an ongoing cry of “What happened to the Grand Old Party?,” as if today’s Republicans — who are incredibly fiscally irresponsible, generally incompetent, morally bankrupt, deeply racist, and frightening authoritarian — are different from generations past. Paul Krugman sets the record straight in a must-read column. What has Krugman been putting in his water? Because I’m usually pretty lukewarm about him, but he’s been on a roll lately, and his columns over the past month are some of the best I’ve ever read.
–Warner Brothers isn’t planning on having any more female leads in its movies. And this is exactly why we have the “assholes” tag.
–Why is the T in LGBT? It’s certainly a question worth asking, and another link that I will hopefully find the time to expand into a full post. Thanks to Yuri for the link.
–A Chesapeake Bay marina and bar fired a female employee for not complying with its dress code — the employee had undergone treatment for breast cancer and requested to wear something other than the required tankini top.
-Members of the Polish Women’s Party posed nude to promote themselves in the upcoming Parliamentary elections. My take: Cool that they have a women’s party. Not cool that they have to get naked to get noticed.
–Another wingnut is running for Congress. Tim Fasano, who is also an occasional porn-maker, is at the very least honest. He says: “I really believe the answer to this war is to kill all Muslims on Earth and destroy any written or computer record of this horrible religion.” Points for not mincing words, I guess.
–The Global Gag Rule is gagging women’s health. The Gag Rule happens to be one of my pet issues within the reproductive justice movement. I’ve written quite a bit about it here (a search should bring up some of the older posts), but Amie’s article is one of the best I’ve read. It’s an issue that certainly deserves more attention.
–If Christina Hoff Sommers really thinks that women are intellectually inferior to men, then I suggest she stop writing books and giving lectures and start washing some dude’s feet or something. As for the “women in science are not held back by bias” argument, I would suggest that women in every discipline are held back by our many unconscious biases. Women’s voices aren’t considered as “authoritative” as men’s. Women simply aren’t taken as seriously, whether we’re speaking or writing (there’s a reason that a lot of women use gender-neutral handles online, and it ain’t just to avoid harassment). And good old science backs up the contention that many of us unthinkingly situate men as intellectually superior:
Dr. Urry cited a 1983 study in which 360 people – half men, half women – rated papers [about politics, education and the psychology of women] on a five-point scale. On average, the men rated them a full point higher when the author was “John T. McKay” than when the author was “Joan T. McKay.” There was a similar, but smaller disparity in the scores the women gave.
…
A recent experiment showed that when Princeton students were asked to evaluate two highly qualified candidates for an engineering job – one with more education, the other with more work experience – they picked the more educated candidate 75 percent of the time. But when the candidates were designated as male or female, and the educated candidate bore a female name, suddenly she was preferred only 48 percent of the time.
But yes, I’m sure it’s just the tiny lady-brains.
–Elderly gay people are being treated poorly in care facilities.
–We are not a Christian nation. And it’s actually pretty un-Christian and un-American to argue otherwise.
–Democrats are weenies. They should not be extending wiretap powers, but it looks like they’re set to. I watched “The Lives of Others” last night (which is excellent, by the way), and it details the frightening forms of observation and interrogation used by the Stasi (the East German secret police). In the beginning it shows an interrogator forcing a prisoner to remain awake for a very long time — there isn’t much question that this is torture, and in the next scene a Stasi-in-training even refers to it as “inhuman.” It made me feel sick to my stomach realizing that in my country, sleep deprivation isn’t considered torture — and compared to the other things we do to prisoners in our secret prisons around the world, it’s on the gentler end. The rest of the movie is about a Stasi officer wiretapping the home of an East German playwrite and monitoring his conversations for anything possibly disloyal to the Socialist state. The parallels to the United States were really, really sickening. And it’s pretty depressing that Democrats are falling in line with these violations of civil liberties and basic privacy rights.
And since we forgot to do shameless self-promotion Sunday this week, feel free to promote yourself in the comments.