But it describes me perfectly!

I have to agree, personality tests are nothing more than a mildly entertaining way to waste time. Though I don't think we're so apt to accept the descriptions the tests give of us because we're vain or optimistic; rather, they're simply so generic and loaded with subjective standards that they're accurate for pretty much everyone.

You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself as an independent thinker; and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic.

The shorter version: You are human, with all the idealism, self-criticism, and desire to be both authentic and socially involved that implies.

Duty to whom?

I recently engaged some Christians in discussion, arguing that the value of human life is to be found in more than serving others and, instead, that every person's worth is in our free will and the ability to set great tasks for ourselves, whether personal or social or spiritual. Unfortunately, they did not seem to understand this as anything more than selfishness, taking refuge in uninterpreted biblical quotation rather than engage the ideas I tried to present.

Via Echidne, here's a short speech Bill Moyers gave, accepting Harvard Medical's Global Environment Citizen award last December. Moyers, himself an ordained minister (Methodist, I believe, but don't quote me), challenges the anti-environmentalism of Rapture-fixated Christianity, and the silent complicity of the media in this anti-environmentalism:

The news can be the truth that sets us free—not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk [of his grandchildren]. What we need to match the science of human health is what the ancient Israelites called 'hocma' —the science of the heart.....the capacity to see....to feel....and then to act...as if the future depended on you. Believe me, it does. [his elipses]

Moyers is faithful to his God, but he is also faithful to himself, his family, his community, and his world. He finds value in all of it, not because he believes God has created it and it can glorify God, but because all of it is valuable in itself.

Similarly, Immanuel Kant understands what it means to glorify God and do His will not as slavishly following orders from above, but as holding all rational beings in equal respect (ourselves *and* others; what else could 'love your neighbor as yourself' mean?), and pursuing the moral duties we discover through reason (which Kant finds to be stated most eloquently in the Gospels). Soren Kierkegaard, the other Christian philosophy I brought up, argues that Christian devotion to God involves transcending morality, but this level of devotion to the transcendent involves, paradoxically, a deliberate, continuous choice in which the individual becomes completely isolated: Kierkegaard's Christian, striving to follow God's will, can still only find her worth only in herself.

Why would God give us free will, only to have us abandon that will in blind deference to Him? That's not love; that's empty, mindless devotion. I cannot accept the idea of a loving God who values me *only* because I stroke his ego with Hallelujiahs.

Thank You, Josh Marshall

One of the things I love most about blogging is when you run across someone that seems to feel exactly how you feel and has either already put it into better words than you ever could or has found a source that does it for us both.

Perhaps it is time for the Democrats simply to embrace their destiny as the party of grown-ups. No members of congress threatening judges. No gonzo federal legislation cooked up in the middle of the night to game a family struggle in Florida. Borrowing money and saving money are not the same thing. A reasonable respect for the rules under which the country has long been governed. Congressional staffers will neither steal work material from members of the opposition party nor stand on principle when caught. Bribes tendered on the floor of Congress will be frowned upon ...

I Never Thought I'd See The Day

I mean, I love politics and all the tactical manuvering that goes into it, but I had always hoped that underneath it all there were some basic rules of fair play. Turns out I'm wrong. Tom Delay (on the fast track to political oblivion and acting like it) and some of his fellow wingnuts are actually openly dismissing the separation of powers.

The organizers of the conference and Congressional staff members who spoke there called for several specific steps: impeaching judges deemed to have ignored the will of Congress or to have followed foreign laws; passing bills to remove court jurisdiction from certain social issues or the place of God in public life; changing Senate rules that allow the Democratic minority to filibuster Mr. Bush's appeals court nominees; and using Congress's authority over court budgets to punish judges whom it considers to have overstepped their authority.

Wow. Just wow. First, as even William Rehnquist says in a quote ealier in the article, "a judge's judicial acts may not serve as a basis for impeachment." It's simply not something Congress can do. The Founders made the judiciary independent specifically because they might be improperly influenced by the political branches of government. This same argument applies to budgetary issues. Article III of the Constitution specifically fixes the pay of federal judges so that their salary isn't a Sword of Damocles hanging above their head whenever they make a decision. Congress can play politics with the budgets of all kinds of areas of government, the military for instance, but separation of powers demands that the judiciary be left alone. And again, I can't stress this enough, the decision a judge makes in a case is *not* sufficient for impeachment. The Constitution states that judges "shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour" which basically means that unless the judge does something pretty seriously illegal they can't be removed. "Good Behavior" does not mean, "Decides cases in step with the ideology of the majority" and there are a million reasons why the judiciary is independent and apolitical.

Secondly, looking to modern standards throughout the world is never the only basis for a decision, but when it is used it is entirely proper to look to prevailing ideas throughout the world for help in fleshing out an argument. Again, it's not the only basis for an opinion, but when you're saying that it's cruel and unusual punishment to execute kids, it can be useful to notice that before we recently stopped we were among Somolia, and Iran as one of the extremely few countries to continue to do so.

As pertains to the filibuster, it's been a political tactic for 200 years in this country and it's only now, when the Republicans have both houses of Congress and the White House and aren't able to get literally *everything* they want that people are seriously calling for an end to it. It is important to remind ourselves that we live in a republic, not a democracy. We are not ruled by the majority, but rather we try to honor the wishes of the majority while protecting the minority. People complain about how slow things happen in Congress, but there's a perfectly good reason for it; we don't want one party or group to take over the government and then radically change the system overnight. We're a huge country and we need to make sure that when big changes are made it's something that is not only wanted by a majority but is something that also jibes with some basic concepts inherited from our history as well as is something that will hopefully last beyond one election cycle. And this isn't even to mention that Republicans had absolutely no compunction about using the filibuster and other tactics to stop appointments when they were out of power.

In an interview, Jeff Lungren, a spokesman for Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Republican of Wisconsin and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said the panel was likely in some way to take up the issue of how the federal judges handled Ms. Schiavo's case.

But Mr. Lungren said Mr. DeLay had not requested a hearing and the committee had not decided on a course of action. "There does seem to be this misunderstanding out there that our system was created with a completely independent judiciary," he said.

It's nice of Jeff to cover for Tom DeLay on this, though it's pretty apparant from the full article that DeLay is right in step with this type of action. This quote just proves exactly what I'm talking about. Congress overstepped it's powers by getting involved in the Schiavo case and the Judiciary let them know about it. Instead of meekly crawling back to their own sphere of power, Republicans in Congress are trying to siphon off judges' ability to make decisions independent of the will of the political majority. Why they would choose this issue, which poll after poll shows something like 70% of Americans want Congress uninvolved in, is beyond me. Then again, DeLay is a dying lion and they always go down fighting a hopeless fight.

Thanks to Kos for the link.

Fruit & Vegetable Monster?

So Scott Kurtz seems pissed about Sesame Street introducing a healthy aspect to the show, specifically through our beloved Cookie Monster. To me the bottom line is that things change. Sometimes things we grew up with don't work for the modern era and you've got to make appropriate changes.

The gist is that Sesame Street looked at the alarming rates of childhood obesity and decided that having a character that mindlessly shoves his face with cookies couldn’t be helping. This isn’t to say that they’re getting rid of Cookie Monster or turning him into some whole-grain-only vegan. What they are introducing is the concepts of “anytime food” and “sometimes food.” Though I cringe to quote Bill Frist, he put it pretty well, “Even Cookie Monster is learning to control his cookie cravings. His sage advice opened our eyes to the simple joys of a tasty cookie and now reminds us that moderation is the key to healthy living."

To sum it up :

“The furry one also plans to try different kinds of cookies (read: healthier cookies) rather than his just staple, chocolate chip.

But will he still scarf his food? Yes, plus the occasional object, Truglio said.

But isn't that unhealthy? Her reply: He's still Cookie Monster.”

He's the Cookie Monster for the 21st Century Scott, what's wrong with that?


Update: Kurtz has a new strip up dealing with this "problem". As is common on the internet, Kurtz seems to think that the only issue of importance is parenting. What he fails to realize is that parents can do the best job in the world and kids will still be influenced by outside factors including their teachers, friends, and yes entertainment. Parents should absolutely be involved in teaching their kids good habbits, but that doesn't mean that educational programs shouldn't think twice about telling kids to scarf down plateful after plateful of sweets. Responsibility isn't just for parents.

And really does Kurtz honestly want us to believe there should be no difference between characters on an educational program on PBS and the corporate cartoon mascots of sugar cereals?

Roll Out

It's been talked about for years and it looks like it's finally happening. I can only hope they take us back to the 80s era and not this Pokemon inspired crap that they've been making lately.

More On The Real Party Of Death

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) thinks that it's understandable, given those crazy liberal judges and all the crazy liberal things they do, that there has been a spate of violent outbreaks in some courtrooms. Giving excuses and justifications for this kind of domestic terror is bad enough when it's from a lunatic like Michael Savage, but coming out of the mouth of a U.S. Senator on the Senate floor it is just disgusting.

Thanks Kos and Drew.

Bush Sucks, And We All Know It

If the mandate ever existed, it is most certainly over. This shouldn't be surprising given the way the Bush Administration is distancing themselves from some of the issues they had been sinking their teeth into (see Terri Schiavo and private accounts). Though we're still a little early in 2005, it's not too early for us to be thinking about mid-term elections and numbers like this are always promising.

We Only Write About David Brooks On This Blog

Really though, can you blame us when he writes such purile crap all the time? Big Dave's newest column boldly takes on the belief that it wasn't because the Republicans spent decades putting together a coordinated message machine that they are now enjoying success, it is because they have intra-party arguments all the time that has led to political domination.

The theory is that liberals must create their own version of the conservative pyramid.

Brooks admits that conservatives have created an efficient machine for creating and disseminating the party message, and that liberals are leagues behind in this regard, but dismisses the importance of this without so much as a single argument. I may not be a fancy pants conservative philosopher, but when faced with a really compelling argument about why liberals have been getting kicked around, especially in the media, I would think I'd at least get a sentence about why that's not true. But then again, Brooks has spent a lot of time thinking about philosophy, so deigning to address such sophomoric concerns might be beneath him.

Conservatives have thrived because they are split into feuding factions that squabble incessantly. As these factions have multiplied, more people have come to call themselves conservatives because they've found one faction to agree with.

This reasoning seems a bit circular to me. Conservativism has grown because it represents a wide variety of wildly differing political beliefs and people with wildly different political beliefs end up starting to call themselves conservative because the party is so diverse. Look, taking political power will always involve coalition making. The truth is that personal politics will always be a continuum and not a series of discrete political ideological sets. Parties draw in special interest groups to the fold which themselves have segregated the personal political continuum into discrete groups and this is largely accomplished through framing the Party's message.

The major conservative magazines - The Weekly Standard, National Review, Reason, The American Conservative, The National Interest, Commentary - agree on almost nothing.

The same could be said of many liberal publications from various points on the left side of the continuum. I'm sure that these conservative publications do have a lot of differing ideas about how things should be, but they also probably have a lot more in common with each other than they do with a lot of liberal publications. Rush may not agree with someone at the Cato Institute on a lot of stuff, but they're far more to agree with each other than they would with Al Franken.

This feuding has meant that the meaning of conservatism is always shifting. Once, Republicans were isolationists. Now most Republicans, according to a New York Times poll, believe the U.S. should try to change dictatorships into democracies when it can. Meanwhile, 78 percent of Democrats believe the U.S. should not try to democratize authoritarian regimes.

Well, that's a fine statistic Mr. Brooks! And what a startling revelation that, gasp, the party line changes over time! I wonder why he didn't choose to talk about how the party used to be pro-segregation, but that now they just support policies which effectively, if not officially, segregate the population. And can anybody seriously look at the reletively recent dominance of the DNC Democrats within the party and still insinuate that the party is without change and introspection. Not that I think this change has been a good one for the party, but to insinuate that the right is this big tent party that has led to dynamism while the left is completely homogenous and therefore ideologically stagnant is either purposfully blind or dishonest.

Conservatives fell into the habit of being acutely conscious of their intellectual forebears and had big debates about public philosophy. That turned out to be important: nobody joins a movement because of admiration for its entitlement reform plan. People join up because they think that movement's views about human nature and society are true.

Liberals have not had a comparable public philosophy debate. A year ago I called the head of a prominent liberal think tank to ask him who his favorite philosopher was. If I'd asked about health care, he could have given me four hours of brilliant conversation, but on this subject he stumbled and said he'd call me back. He never did.

Brooks once again makes assertions that he either doesn't support at all or simply uses crappy anecdotal evidence. A) If philosophy and knowledge of intellectual forebears is so important, where is that in the Republican platform. When I see Republicans on the Sunday shows, they're not talking about Thomas Aquinas, they're talking about their reform plan. If all this philosophizing is done behind the scenes, then, isn't this an issue of message? That is, isn't what he's saying the Republicans did that the Democrats haven't done is to craft a cohesive message platform; a single marketable ideology that they can apply to nearly any political scenario. While I think philosophy is great (and I'd happily say that my favorite philosophers are Hume, Kant, Marx, and Mill), I'm not sure there's quite the functional difference that Brooks would like us to believe. Let's say we took two groups, one from the right and the other from the left and put them in separate rooms. The Republicans, ever the scholars, talk about their favorite philosophers for a few hours and hammer out a cohesive message platform based on the writings of those philosophers. The Democrats, on the other hand, spend their time building their message based on principles of social fairness and equity but with no reference to specific intellectual forebears. When we put them on Hardball is there really going to be a difference? Are the Republicans going to support their arguments with quotes from "A Philosophical Inquiry Into The Origin Of Our Ideas Of The Sublime And Beautiful" or are going to be talking policy? In terms of gaining political successes, which we should keep in mind is the basis for this article, is the philosophy that Brooks thinks is so important really getting to the people that the right is courting or is it the cohesive policy platform?

And I'm sure you all thought it too, but what kind of garbage argument is, "I called up this one liberal that I know and he never called me back with his favorite philosopher!"?

In addition, liberal theorists are more influenced by post-modernism, multiculturalism, relativism, value pluralism and all the other influences that dissuade one from relying heavily on dead white guys.

This is my favorite part of the article. Want to know why? Brooks here *admits* that in the conservative view the only philosophers worth studying are dead, white, and male. Yeah, that's a big tent party you got there Dave-o.

If I were a liberal, which I used to be, I wouldn't want message discipline. I'd take this opportunity to have a big debate about the things Thomas Paine, Herbert Croly, Isaiah Berlin, R. H. Tawney and John Dewey were writing about. I'd argue about human nature and the American character.

Firstly, let's all agree that just because Brooks may have changed his mind about some areas of politics it doesn't mean his current ideas are any more valuable. In fact, as we can see, I think his horrible inability to see an issue *explains* why he might have changed his mind, especially to the party that values good tag lines over good arguments. Secondly, sure, I'd love to debate philosophy with my liberal friends. In fact, we do, all the time. Politics, however, must always be grounded in the policies that you are advocating. Government is about people and making their lives better with your policies, not ethereal ideas concocted by some "dead white guys". What Brooks seems to be saying is that Democrats should just give the reigns over to the Republicans for a while so we can go back to our cave and talk a bunch, but you don't win by retreating. Republicans didn't start beating Clinton around by talking a good philosophical game; they got their hands dirty making policy. I may not agree with their policies, but they were talking about concrete concepts, not the music of the spheres.

And all we have to do is look to the beginning of this article to prove Brooks wrong. Republicans have message disipline, Democrats don't. While this philosophical debate may also be beneficial, writing off something the opposition has that we don't is just plain stupid. Even if we decide we need both I don't see any arguments why we can't *do* both.

In disunity there is strength.

It's interesting that Brooks managed to avoid saying the word "diversity" here, choosing "disunity" instead. Firstly, it means he doesn't have to implicate evolution, which is good because, you know, having disunity on an issue is good, but not THAT much disunity. I just know that if he didn't actually type it out, diversity was the word that popped in his head first, which just goes to prove my point; by changing what has to be the most obvious word in order to better conform to the party line Brooks is feeding the unity of the party message. This type message workis exactly what Republicans have gotten so good at and why they are so good at politics.

And next time a part of the party that is cutting funding for kids to get through college tries to tell me I need to get more philosophical I think I might throw up.

The Real Death Party

The Pope is very near death it seems, but Fox would have *loved* it if his death could have coincided with when they started reading their eulogy and casting him as a great conservative leader. When you think about it this was a really fortuitous event for Democrats because we got to see the Republican machine jump the gun and give away their biggest memes for the post-Pope coverage including this crap about the "culture of life" crap. Hopefully the Dems are organizing right now to counter exactly that message rather than trying to be above the politics like they usually do and which usually gets them spanked on the TV shows and in the polls.

As a member of the "Culture of Death" however, I should say that the Pope represents 15 points on my Death Pool. Mmmmmm, savory death....

Thanks to Pandagon for that linkeroo.

Update: The Pope has now *actually* passed away.

Phunny Stuph

I've been pretty inconsistent with posting the Photoshop Phriday's lately, but this one warrants a post. It's not laugh out loud funny, most of the time, but I got a lot of enjoyment out of 'em.

Abortion prevention and Democrats

I found this post, about tolerance for abortion among Catholics, quite heartening. Until this, at least

The Prevention First Initiative coupled with a position on prohibiting late term abortions except when required by the health of the mother neutralizes GOP attack lines .... [my emphasis]

Bullshit. Better sex ed and easier access to contraception for teenagers? Great. Working harder to prevent rape? Fantastic. Acting as though anyone knows better than a pregnant woman whether to continue her pregnancy or not? Completely unacceptable.

The Democratic party needs to stay the hell away from any restrictions on abortion rights if they don't want to marginalize feminists.

Halo New

This is mostly a test post to prove to Dan that Blogger actually works, but as long as I'm typing I might as well tell y'all that Bungie is releasing a Halo 2 map pack for $20 in stores and $16 if you download it through Live. The bonus to buying the actual retail disc is that you get a physical copy of the maps as well as getting some bonus movies and stuff to make it a little more interesting.

Petition!

Go sign

We have very disturbing news to report - some Democratic leaders are actively recruiting anti-abortion candidates and forcing out pro-choice Democrats!

Feminists and progressives must speak out to stop the Democratic Party from becoming "Republican-lite" on women's issues and undermining its own women candidates.

Barbara Hafer is a strong advocate for reproductive rights and was the frontrunner to take on extremist Republican incumbent Rick Santorum in the 2006 Pennsylvania Senate. She has just been forced out of the race by Democratic leaders and consultants in favor of an anti-abortion candidate they recruited.

Who did top Democrats pick to run against Santorum, one of the leading anti-abortion, anti-women's rights and anti-gay senators?

Top Democrats recruited Robert P. Casey Jr., a staunch abortion opponent in the mold of his father, the late Pennsylvania Governor Bob Casey Sr. You may recognize his name from the 1992 Supreme Court case of Casey v. Planned Parenthood, in which the senior Casey defended Pennsylvania's Abortion Control Act, which was so extreme that the Supreme Court struck it down.

Unless, of course, you don't care *glares*

Terri Schiavo Commentary

Long time, no post, I'm back.

Seeing as how we are now entering the tenth day without the feeding tube, it's probably safe to say that Terri Schiavo will probably pass in the next day or so, and according to MSNBC the parent's have finally resigned themselves to the situation.

I, like most of America it seems, have been following this case. At least it's made us all more aware of the importance of having a living will. What bothers me most is the sensationalism that the right has used to portray this as a "Democrats support Death" rally. Of course, none of us really thought they wouldn't at least try, but when Rush Limbaugh keeps asking his listeners why the liberals want to kill Terri Schiavo, it just makes me shake me head at the idiocy.

Some pearls from the MSNBC article above, apparently the Schindlers claim that Terri tried to speak to them yesterday, to vocalize that she knew she was dying and that she didn't want to die. Call me crazy, but that sounds a little over the top when she hasn't uttered a single coherent word since her brain died 15 years ago.

Awwww!

Cute little snake!

Depression

An interesting essay, via BitchPhD, on depression -- the post-partum sort in particular, but there are still some good points on depression and mental illness in general.

All of our feelings are biological. To attempt to invalidate some of them as 'less real' or somehow less important because they're hormonal or biochemical or whatever--that would invalidate all of them. The deepest, most profound feeling you have is biological. Hormonal. Biochemical. To say, 'When my boyfriend gives me flowers that makes me feel happy, that's good. But when I don't have the money to pay the utilities and they get shut off again and I feel sad and hopeless and like my life will never change, that's bad, and not only that, but it's actually a biochemical imbalance in my brain that needs to be corrected by drugs,' just doesn't make any sense.

Individual people have to find ways to cope with their individual situations, and often a medication is the best answer. But it is **not** the **societally** best answer **when there are clear social and economic reasons for this mental illness.** Yes, absolutely, if you're a woman and you're depressed and you can't cope, meds can be very helpful. But when that's society's only answer, I have a big problem with it. We don't need drugs as a long-term solution. We need social change.

What do you do

to help a friend get over a bout of depression, when you agree all the things she's depressed over are horrifying tragedies, worth being depressed over?

Brooks is a tool, part seven billion and five

In direct contrast to the political opportunism they have demonstrated on this exact issue in the past, David Brooks claims social conservatives think

The value of a life doesn't depend upon what a person can physically do, experience or achieve. The life of a comatose person or a fetus has the same dignity and worth as the life of a fully functioning adult.

Social conservatives go on to say that if we make distinctions about the value of different lives, if we downgrade those who are physically alive but mentally incapacitated, if we say that some people can be more easily moved toward death than others, then the strong will prey upon the helpless, and the dignity of all our lives will be diminished.

Meanwhile,

The core belief that social liberals bring to cases like Ms. Schiavo's is that the quality of life is a fundamental human value. They don't emphasize the bright line between life and death; they describe a continuum between a fully lived life and a life that, by the sort of incapacity Terri Schiavo has suffered, is mere existence....

The central weakness of the liberal case is that it is morally thin. Once you say that it is up to individuals or families to draw their own lines separating life from existence, and reasonable people will differ, then you are taking a fundamental issue out of the realm of morality and into the realm of relativism and mere taste.

You see, if we think it's right that individuals should decide for themselves whether to remain on life support, we simply no longer understand the meaning of the words 'right' and 'wrong'. Because, I guess, David Brooks has decided such things are clearly wrong.

Of course, all of this crap only indirectly applies to the Schiavo case because the bill passed by social conservatives in Congress simply said that the Federal court system should decide whether Ms. Schiavo had expressed a desire to be taken off life support in situations such as this. It didn't try to outlaw removing life support from patients in this particular or more general cases; it simply claimed a new area of Federal jurisdiction, and hence debate over the bill should have boiled down to precisely the procedural issues Bobo mocks non-social conservatives for bringing up. The fact that social conservatives didn't debate this on procedural grounds shows how much this bill was intended to stir up the anti-abortion vote (and if you don't see the connection you haven't been reading enough Pandagon lately).

I Got The Whole Word/ On My Computer

I'm not sure if I already blogged about this when it first came out but I don't even care because it's the coolest thing ever. Nasa has developed a program that puts together satilite images from several different satilites orbiting the globe into a cohesive map of the globe. You can start completely zoomed out and then take yourself further in to anywhere you want. So far I've looked at downtown Tokyo and Mt. Fuji, Disney Land and World, downtown Philly, and found my house in New Jersey and my parent's house (I could even see the pool and some trees) in Washington. Yeah, it's a little creepy, but really damn cool.

What makes it less creepy is that given the size of the globe the pictures are mostly not new. The ones of Philly are at least several years old because certain things (like stadiums) are missing.

Nice To Know

Ezra's pointing us to this article in the Washington Post which shows that Osama Bin Laden was in fact in Tora Bora for a while. Remember when General Tommy Franks made that big deal about how Kerry didn't know what he was talking about and that we didn't really know where Osama was? We Kerry was right and either Tommy Franks was lying/told to lie, or our generals are horribly out of the loop.

Oscar Romero

Not that long ago, there were prominent religious figures who were known for other than trying to deny women reproductive autonomy:

While it is clear that our Church has been the victim of persecution during the last three years, it is even more important to observe the reason for the persecution . . . The persecution comes about because of the Church's defense of the poor, for assuming the destiny of the poor.

Abortion: Net Zero Effect?

Jesse makes an argument I gave a while ago (go find the link yourself, I'm on break and lazy)

If pregnancy is truly this life-altering process, why do anti-choice advocates simply treat it as if it's a factory line? (Because they don't give a damn about the woman or the fact that children exist after the umbilical cord is cut, but bear with me.) If children are little more than plugins to industrial womb variables - this woman shall bear us nine, with optimal utilization - and the argument against abortion is that it doesn't provide enough foot soldiers, a simple X and Y argument, it cheapens the lives of everyone, it cheapens the decision to abort a fetus. It's a slap in the face to anyone who believes that an individual can accomplish or achieve, to anyone who truly thinks that each life has value. If you're a mass, a lump in a clump of lumps waiting to be shaped by forces beyond anyone's control - what's the difference between abortion and pregnancy? It's a tick in an attendance book, and if you don't show up, you just get someone else to make another tick somewhere else.

By reducing a pregnant woman to an incubator, a broad range of anti-choice arguments undermine the significance of pregnancy, childbirth, and parenthood.

Oscar Romero

Not that long ago, there were prominent religious figures who were known for other than trying to deny women reproductive autonomy:

While it is clear that our Church has been the victim of persecution during the last three years, it is even more important to observe the reason for the persecution . . . The persecution comes about because of the Church's defense of the poor, for assuming the destiny of the poor.

Xbox In Short Supply, But Not For Next Gen

VE's got word that given the rush on Xboxes lately stores are starting to run out. Supposedly MS is on top of this enviable problem and will rectify it soon.

In similar news a source at a major publisher is saying that the next iteration of the Xbox will launch with a million units in Europe. At first this may not sound enormous, but I believe at last count there were something in the neighborhood of 15 million Xboxes sold thus far so if they sold 2 million units worldwide in the first month or so after launch they'd be in a pretty good position to do a lot better than this generation; and be in a really good position for Sony's launch of the PS3.

Office (Air) Space

I know a few people interested in all thing Bri-ish, so here's a review of the American remake of the BBC's cult favorite, The Office. Seems like they think it's about par for the course for American remakes of BBC hits, funnier than most shows conceived here but not as good as the original.

Culture of Death, Culture of Life

Echidne and Amanda are pissed.

Unlearning From The Past

Thomas Freedman seems to think there's something wrong with the fact that 26 prisoners of war taken by US troops since 2002 in Iraq and Afghanistan have been killed while in custody in what appears to have been acts of torture. Crazy liberals!

PS3 Revealed? Or Someone Photoshopped Their Digital Camera?

Given that this isn't official, take the following picture of the PS3 with a grain of salt. Every generation fans Photoshop what they would like the next machine to look like, but then again, every generation an image or two of the machine gets leaked. So here they are.

What? No Celts?!

I could *NEVER* do anything productive in the Age of Empires games. I'd try a million different strategies, but my guys just got slaughtered every time. Be that as it may, I have always loved the series, and check the fuck out of these hot pics for Age of Empires 3.

We are the champions of the world!

It turns we're the first hit when you do a Google search for Staff of Ra.

New Social Security Trustees Report

Ezra does all the hard work, so go read his stuff. The short story is that the report lowered the trouble time for Social Security by a year which gives the bad guys something to crow about, but it's not much. So really, not that big a deal since it's really Medicare that we should be worried about.

Supremes?

The 11th Circuit agrees, Terri Schiavo's parents have no case. The Supreme Court is the last option, and I'm really curious if they'll even want to touch this one. On the other hand, I'd really like to see what they have to say about the constitutionality of Congress' actions in this case.

You can find the actual opinon through Kos above, or here too.

THWIPP! Round 3

Thomas Hayden Church, of Wings and more recently Sideways fame, has been announced as the new villain for Spiderman 3, though his character is still shrouded in secrecy. The movie is set to release in May of 2007 (closer than you might think at first).

Now that all the press release stuff is out of the way it's time to get my geek on. Who's he going to play you ask? Here are some options, ranked by likelihood:

10. Hydroman. Ok, do we really need to talk about this one much? He's kinda like Sandman, but less cool and made of water. Add in that he'd be a fortune in special effects, even for a movie like Spiderman 3, all for a pay off of one shitty ass character.

9. Manwolf. This one is a little more than what you might think. He's John Jameson, the son of J. Jonah Jameson, Peter's Spiderman-hating boss at the Daily Planet. Basically he picks up a magic rock on a moon landing and gets turned into werewolf. Sure, sounds pretty lame, and in fact that's the death knell for this one. In actuallity they introduced the character in Spidey 2, there's some connection to Mary Jane, and the interplay between J. Jonah, Peter, and John could be interesting. Still, Spidey v. Wolfman isn't exactly going to play well with a non-comicbook audience and as a character he's not that easy to control, which I'll explain later.

8. Hammerhead/Tombstone. These guys are exactly the bonehead thugs you think they are. The problems are many and varied with these guys. First, Thomas Hayden Church doesn't have the body for thugs like these guys. Second, they're just not interesting characters. I mean, Hammerhead bashes things with his head, and they both typically work for the mob. Not what we're looking for exactly, move along people!

7. Jackel. He's actually a really cool character. Sort of a super scientist with a penchant for manipulation and long term plans. But therein is the problem; he's a little too big of a character for the third movie in a trilogy. There's no way they could really do any kind of justice to the character and the character isn't really the type we're looking for here. Plus, he looks too much like The Green Goblin.

6. The Lizard. The first and biggest problem; they already have a Dr. Conners (who turns into the Lizard) in the last movie. Granted, it wasn't a big part, and they could probably just recast the part and nobody would notice/care, but it's an obstacle. Plus, Lizard is a ton of special effects and almost no acting for Church. This wouldn't be the first minor cameo by a star, but there's just not much for Church to do, he doesn't seem like a scientist to me, and Lizard, again, isn't what we need for the third movie.

5. Kraven the Hunter. Church could probably pull this guy off, but he's not without problems. I think Kraven's a bit too aristocratic for what I'm imagining is going on and isn't likely to "work well with others". And actually, unlike so many of the others on this list, Kraven doesn't really lend himself to *enough* special effects. He doesn't fly, he doesn't shoot lazers. All he's got is slightly higher than normal human abilities and a knife.

4. Venom. The old alien symbiote meets rival news man. There have been a few hints dropped in the last two films about a possible Eddie Brock/Venom apparance, and the fanboys crap their pants every time the topic comes up. He'd also be perfect for both the movie and Church. I think they could pretty easily simplify his background enough to fit him into feature film. Unfortunately, I don't think they've set enough up for a Venom appearance in this one. A few more hints dropped and it might have happened, but I think you'd need major introductions in the other two films that just isn't there.

3. Mysterio. Also a good one for Church, though he might not play as well with audiences. Mysterio's a special effects/hallucinogenics expert that succeeds through confusion and obfuscation. He works well and plays well with others, which is what I need for what I'm thinking. The special effects stuff could make for some good scenes. The only real problem is that he's not too cool, as compared to, say, something like Venom. In fact, some people might say he's a little, um, gay, but I think with a really good costume redesign it could be possible.

2. Sandman. We started with Hydroman and threw him out because he's both a rip off of Sandman and because he's lame. Well, Sandman's not. He's a thug type of character so he can work with other characters, but interesting instead of just plain stupid. Plus, it'd be fucking cool special effects wise.

1. Electro/Shocker. Why're they number 1? More importantly, why are they sharing the top spot? Well, they're sharing because they might as well be the same character, powers wise which is important for a special effects movie. These guys can take just enough of the plot to make them interesting without making the audience feel like there's something the movie's not telling them/pissing off the fans. They're both powerful enough to give Spidey a run for his money on their own and can work in teams to really make life hell for our neighborhood wall crawler. Both wear costumes, so it's something Church can do without getting lost in constant special effects, and both of them are of roughly normal build. Also, in teams these guys are dumb enough that they can be bullied by a strong, intelligent leader. Also, my bet is on Electro because Shocker sounds lamer from a marketing perspective.

The reason I've been harping on this "working with other characters" bit is that I think it's pretty obvious at the end of Spidey 2 that Harry Osborne is going to take up the mantle his father left behind. Sure, Sam Raimi has said in interviews that he doesn't feel tied to making Harry become his father, but from a story arc perspective of the trilogy, it just makes more sense for Harry to see his father's failure as the Green Goblin and take up the glider with a much better plan; use a recently arrived somewhat minor villain to either team up with or manipulate into fighting Spiderman. Either in a one-two attack or a full on simultaneous assault the two of them will try to pound on Spiderman until one of them can kill him. Who knows, maybe Harry will realize his mistake just in time and go good at the end. It'd certainly be true to the comic character.

Who knows, maybe I'm totally off base, but I think given the options this seems most likely.

Judicial Activism

After the Republicans moved the Terri Schiavo case to federal court, where had no place to begin with, the federal judge denied Schiavo's parents' request to reinsert the feeding tube. As Drew points out in his updates, the judge didn't even address the Constitutionality of the issue because on its face the parents' case was without foundation.

Here's the case made simple. Ideally, if a person has a living will and it says that they don't want to be kept alive like this you just consult the will and pull the damn plug. Schaivo didn't have a living will. In that case the spouse can say that it was the express wish of the patient to die. Now, as we see here other parties, like parents, can try to intervene and show that it was not the wish of the patient to die by showing evidence to the contrary. In this case *several* courts have found that Terri Schaivo's parent's have no proof. I can understand why they wouldn't want their daughter to die, but they simply have no case for showing that this isn't what she wanted.

Brooks Gone Wild

Everyone's posting about David Brook's new piece, so I might as well too. It's not quite as broadly condemning of Republicans as some of the sites made me believe, but it *is* rather impressive that he made it an entire column without some attempt at faux balance by bringing up some slight the Dems have done.

Bush Goes Into Matrix To Save Terri Shiavo

Bush has, for the very first time ever in his presidency, come back early from a vacation in Crawford, to address the Terri Shiavo case. I'd hate to think that this was a baldly political reach around to the fundies, but then I remember all the rest of the shit that has happened in the last four years that didn't warrant coming back to work early. And yet, people think Bush is all about values. The only answer is that he can remake the Matrix as he sees fit and will some day soon lead us to the real world.

In the mean time, life in the Congo still sucks more than anything should suck and we're spending national attention and over $80,000 a year to keep a woman alive that stopped living life when "Particle Man" by They Might Be Giants was brand new and Apartheid was still in effect. Here are some other things that happened in 1990 other than Terri Shiavo dying.

Thanks to Ezra for the tip.

Edit: Drew from Terminus found some hot pics of Terri's brain. I don't think any of us need an MD to seek how fucked up that is.

Re-Edit: Look at the pics linked above, then read this quote from Tom DeLay: ""She talks and she laughs and she expresses likes and discomforts," he said Sunday evening. "It won't take a miracle to help Terri Schiavo. It will only take the medical care and therapy that patients require." Tom DeLay is a fucking liar, yet it doesn't seem like anyone has seriously called him on it, at least, not yet.

Omega Edit: Ok, here's a conservative voice for our debate, though it focus' on Terri's husband. Of course, James Taranto is completely wrong and is either being purposefully deceptive or is so simply foolish that it'd be amusing if the issue weren't so infuriating. Several courts have found that Terri Schiavo expressed a wish to die if she were in this type of situation. To me, that's all I need to know.

X-Man United

Matt Vaughn, who produced "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Gun Barells" and "Snatch", has been locked in to direct the third X-Men movie. Also, Hugh Jackman, getting his Hollywood money people are still hiring him, is the first principle cast member to sign on with the rest of the cast in negotiations. For those that don't remember, Halle Barry, cresting on her career, announced after the last movie that she would not return as Storm for the third movie. Given the state of her career lately though I wouldn't be too surprised if they hooked her in for another go.

Womens: They is so confusing!

To the surprise of no-one who paid attention in high school genetics, scientists have determined that the miniscule Y chromosome found only in males is much less active than the X chromosome -- which occurs twice in females and once in males. What is the inane, Feminine Mystique-esque, conclusion Maureen Dowd comes to?

As the Times science reporter Nicholas Wade, who is writing a book about human evolution and genetics, explained it to me: "Women are mosaics, one could even say chimeras, in the sense that they are made up of two different kinds of cell. Whereas men are pure and uncomplicated, being made of just a single kind of cell throughout."

This means men's generalizations about women are correct, too. Women are inscrutable, changeable, crafty, idiosyncratic, a different species.

Does Maureen Dowd have no experience interacting with actual women and men, people who exist outside of romantic comedies and sitcoms? Christ.

Badger, badger, badger, badger

Mushroom, mushroom!

Think of a headline

A discussion of abortion over at the panda which has left. Amanda's point is extremely well-taken:

I've said it before, but it bears repeating--that the pro-lifers define "conception" as what makes a baby is a rhetorical device to reinstate the belief that a baby is made by a man and merely borne by a woman. There are many steps in the process of turning raw material into a baby, but only one is bandied around by pro-lifers as the point that something turns from raw material into a baby, and amazingly enough that step is the only one that involves a man. Anything pre-conception (or, with the morning after pill, pre-implantation) that prevents bearing a child isn't baby-killing, but anything after a man has planted his seed, if you will, is the moral equivalent of murder. Ejaculation has become the end-all and be-all to pro-lifers of what makes something a baby.

Prior to Roe v. Wade and the formation of the radical anti-choice movement, most women and midwives regarded quickening -- the time when the woman starts to feel the foetus moving inside her -- as the start of new life and when this thing forming inside her really becomes a baby. But religious figures, doctors, and other assholes who had a problem with women having a say in their reproduction pushed the view common among anti-choicers today that life begins at the instant sperm and egg combine.

Sortastic Pics

Here are some pics from Will Wright's Spore.

Edit: If you read the article on Spore you might have been wondering what this "Demo Scene" he talked about is. It's a group of programmers that make computer demos with music and stuff happening but with a very strict size requirement, usually 64k which is about the size of a biggish Word document. The way they do this is with all kinds of math stuff I don't understand, but it's pretty cool. Here's a site that has some demos you can check out.

An Emergent Spore

Will Wright has, as ever, come up with another of his wacky ass ideas and it looks....fucking.....cool.

Tuesday afternoon blogging digest extravaganza!

Pandagon
Bitch. Ph.D
and Pandagon again.

He Was Just Helping The Sheep Over The Fence

Billy "Wicked" Wilson, creater of Voodoo Extreme and Gaming Groove game news web sites, has passed at 33.

Voodoo Extreme was the web site that made the internet useful to me. It was the first site that made me log on every day because there was actually new stuff happening every day. Magazines suddenly seemed horribly late with everything they reported and VE was able to open up the video game world in a way that no place I had ever seen before.

Man, it's weird how someone that you don't even really know dying can still unsettle you.

R.I.P. Billy, hope wherever you are you don't have to ice up the tp.

Freedom Force: The Review!

So I just finished Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich (FF2), the sequel to Freedom Force (FF), released in 2002 (possibly 2001, but I picked it up the Summer of 2002). I enjoyed Freedom Force immensely, and I've gone back and played through the single-player game several times. Both games have a similar format: In each mission, you control a squad of up to four superheroes from a third-person overhead view. As the story progresses, characters earn experience and 'character points', which allow them to purchase more spectacular powers. The game includes a 'hero builder', which allows you to create your own heroes, who can then be 'recruited' into the single-player game; with some 3D modelling experience and practice with the hero builder, a user can create just about any hero they might come up with.

The differences between the two games is largely cosmetic: FF2 uses a new graphics engine which allows for more spectacular special effects than in FF, though these aren't anything that will blow your mind. Controls are almost identical, so if you've played FF recently you'll just notice a few small streamlining touches here and there. FF2 includes several new characters, my favourite being Tombstone (whose Possession power makes the game ridiculously easy sometimes), and all of the characters from the old game show up at one point or another.

The weaknesses of FF2 are largely the same as the weaknesses of FF, and the primary one is the fact that I got this game on Friday night and finished it Sunday night -- with Saturday and Sunday largely taken up by homework. All together, I'd say less than 20 hours to play the entire single-player game, even shorter than I remember FF being. The writing can also get more than a little cheesy at times, and there are some out-and-out plot holes.

If you, like me, are addicted to superhero games, then I recommend FF2, though not everyone will want to spend $40 on a game they can finish this quickly.

Propagantastic!

By now, I assume you've heard about the pundits paid to shill Bush administration policies. You might also remember hearing about a pro-Medicare Drug Bill 'video release' which ran on local news stations across the country but was produced by the administration. As it turns out, like it so often has lately, things are much, much more appalling: the administration has spent hundreds of billions of dollars over the past four years (twice as much so far as was spent under the Clinton administration) to produce hundreds of similar segments, most of which have been shown on local news stations throughout the country, and often modified so that the token indications that these are government productions are removed or replaced.

Eastern and Western Washington

Some state senators in that state we all know and love have floated a proposal to split Washington in two along the Cascades. We get these sorts of proposals every ten or fifteen years in California, too: people from rural parts of Northern California (everything north of Bakersfield/San Luis Obispo, including San Francisco, Sacramento, and Lake Tahoe) object to all the water that gets sent down to LA and propose cutting them off. Nothing ever happens, of course, because something like 40% of the state lives in the Santa Barbara-LA-San Diego corridor, and another 40% in the Bay Area (who, on the whole, don't care what happens to the lakes up in the mountains other than Tahoe).

Gender politics in the US of A

Have I mentioned how much I'm enjoying the guest bloggers over at the panda which has left?

The problem with comments like this [that the greatest gift a husband can give his wife is the freedom to choose whether or not to work] is that men in this country are already oppressed by the American Dream, the male version, at least. As far as I know, there's no female-centered version of the American Dream. In the American Dream, our hero Ward Cleaver is a Real Man because he has a job that pays for him to have a big house, a family and a most importantly, a wife who is financially dependent on him and under his direct control. This is how masculinity is defined for so many, many men in our country. The problem is that fulfilling that dream of having a woman sequestered away at home tending to you and your children is that it's out of the financial reach of the majority of men.

Of course, what this means is that we have a population of men in this country that both believe that in order to be Real Men they have to have a wife that is both at home and subservient, but out of financial necessity, they have wives who work. And it's hard to get subservience out of someone when you can't tell them, 'Well, who makes the money around here?' There's a lot of resentment there.

In step the Republicans, who can't give these guys what they really want--jobs that pay enough to have a family with one income--but they can give them an endless list of people to scapegoat: welfare moms, illegal immigrants, disobedient women getting abortions, gays who want marriage when you can't even have the Leave It to Beaver one you wanted for yourself, and so on and so forth. Plus, the President is all too willing to be a walking phallic symbol for all sorts of masculine fantasies of power to be projected on. Maybe you can't be Ward Cleaver, conservative men of America, but at least you can pretend you're Dirty Harry.

I wonder if Jesse consciously turned his blog over to a handful of women during women's history month?

Some good advice

from some wingnut writing for Focus on the Family's magazine for teenage girls. The topic, as the topic of most such magazines, is boys, and the three 'essential' differences between boys and girls.
1. Guys are visual -- because girls just don't ogle.
2. Guys are physical -- which is a euphemism for fucking-oriented; and again, unlike girls, who are much less fucking-oriented.
3. Guys are the sexual aggressor in the male/female relationship.

That’s not really a news flash for you, is it? The fact is, guys are not only visually stimulated and physical, but they really are the sexual aggressor in any relationship. And you know why? God made them that way. That’s right. God wired guys to be sexually aggressive, just as He made you to be the caring, nurturing one in the relationship.

You know what pisses me off about abstinence-only sex ed? It's not really the fact that it doesn't work; that just makes it bad policy. What bugs me so much is how much patriarchal crap like this the wingnut abstinence cheerleaders just throw into the stuff they write. Come on, people: couldn't you just admit that most everyone (not just men) wants to fool around with the person they're dating and ogle attractive people, and most everyone (not just women) wants a deep emotional connection and worries about getting 'too involved too fast' (whatever that might mean in each particular case)? Then your textbooks wouldn't be offensive and wrong, just ineffective.

Bonus: Even more patriarchal crap from the same magazine. This piece reveals the 'eight secrets' about guys:

2. Keep a Little Mystery ...
Guys by nature are "conquerors" (just look at their interest in football, video games, rock climbing, etc.). What can guys conquer or pursue if girls reveal everything about themselves? I'm referring to how you relate to guys, but it can also apply to how you dress....
It is possible to be too open and too buddy-buddy with guys. There seems to be a fine line between treating them as brothers in the Lord and crossing over into too familiar territory. When a guy knows everything about you, it leaves nothing for him to conquer....
In our discussion, the girls drilled me about how to actually maintain some mystery. I responded by giving them questions to ask themselves.
• Who initiates most of the conversations I have with a guy?
• Who (other than adults) initiates our activities, the girls or the guys?
• Who's making the phone calls?
• Does he ask questions, or do I volunteer information?
Remember, if you're too available, you've removed the challenge.

Remember, if you're not letting the boys decide what you're going to do, they'll dump your feminist butts.

3. Don't Mock
Guys of any age don't like being playfully mocked by a group of girls, even if the mocking comes in the form of a compliment: "nice eyes/hair/muscles/etc."...
5. Free or Flee
Guys don't like feeling manipulated, controlled or emotionally cornered by girls. Being conquerors, they naturally withdraw from those situations. My sons know they're not yet ready for relationship commitments, and the more they feel pressured by girls to make them, the more they pull away....
6. Guys vs. Girls
Guys don't like competitive "guy vs. girl" contests. It puts them in a lose-lose situation. On one hand, when guys win a contest, they're put in a male chauvinist category. If they lose, it's humiliating and creates an invisible barrier between them and the girls.
Competition locks girls into a no-win situation as well. If the girls win the contest, it forfeits the openness the guys may have felt with them. If they lose, girls usually feel some degree of humiliation, resentment or bitterness.

Got to stroke those oh-so-fragile male egos. Remember: you're here to make the boys feel good about themselves, and if you show them up they'll dump your feminist butt. Boys only like girls who stroke!

7. Guys Are "Allergic" To Silliness
Guys enjoy seeing girls have fun, but they don't like being around girls' silliness.... Rest assured, guys definitely have their own form of silliness. Do they ever! But it needs to stay among the males. Keep your silliness among yourselves as well. Guys admire girls who conduct themselves with poise in public.
8. Guys Do Notice Homemaking Skills
Believe it or not, in these days of liberation, guys still notice a girl's homemaking skills. In fact, the older my sons and their friends become, the more alert they are to the presence or lack of those skills in their female friends. Can she cook? Administrate? Is she kind to children? How does she handle her money? Does she care about learning?

So, to put it all together: if you and your boyfriend are hanging out with your friends (who, naturally, are all girls) and their boyfriends (who, naturally, are his friends), let them decide what movie to watch or game to play. Then, while they're having their fun, you girls can go in the kitchen and bake them some pies!

Christ.

funny stuff

Pandagon: This makes me feel like a clown--laughing on the outside, but crying on the inside

my finger's hurting, so that's all you get for now

More PP

Panda which has left:

The woman who makes plans is pretty much always a negative stereotype in our culture. Sylvia Ann Hewlett got on all the talk shows by writing a book scolding women not to plan to have their children later in life when it was easier for them for fear that they may not be able to have them, and a great time was had by all on the shows pitying women who got their comeuppance for thinking they could exert control over their own destinies only to be left childless. Even in situations where women are doing their best to fulfill social expectations, taking control is viewed negatively. For example, we adore ourselves a blushing bride, but a woman who manages her own wedding planning is going to be labeled a Bridezilla before all is said and done.

Plans indicate control and plans also indicate desire. You make a plan because you have things you want and you need to figure out the best way to get them. Every time a woman swallows her birth control pill, there's a world of desires behind that decision and the pill is one of the tools she's using to achieve those desires--a job, an education, marriage to the man she really wants not just to the first that got her pregnant, no marriage at all, a smaller family, more income to spend on hobbies, more time to herself, you name it. There's a lot of feminist ink spilled on the discussion of how female sexual desire is demonized in our culture, but even more than that, almost all female desires are suspect, except of course the desire to serve. (One reason that fields like math and science are still underpopulated with women is that intelligent women often turn their talents to fields where service is still emphasized, like medicine.)

And from the excellent post by a blogger I'm not familiar with that the guest-blogger links to:

How fucked up is it, that a woman's ability to choose whether or not to bear a life is so incredibly fucking scary that there's an entire formal and informal institution of fear and shame set up around her body to keep her from understanding it? How fucked up is it, that when I say that out loud, or here in a public forum, that people just dismiss it, pretend talking about women's uteruses is boring and unimportant and not worth thinking or talking about? How can they say that and then spend their time passing laws that directly affect me and my pesky uterus, and heckle me when I try and take control over my body's processes? How can they say that and then tell me that not only is my body not worth discussing (so long as I'm the one discussing it), but that having this body makes me bad at math, too emotional, weak and inferior and flippant and flighty?

Pandagon: Affirmative action for theologians?

Pandagon: Affirmative action for theologians?

my finger hurts, so you just get the link

The PP

Dr. B on the importance of PP:

This, of course, is the real point: abortion is only a small (but necessary) part of what women's health clinics provide. The attack on women's health clinics is, effectively, an attack on women's health; when and if anti-abortion crusaders shut down clinics, all they do is promote more, not fewer, unwanted pregnancies--by removing access to birth control, by removing respectful, affordable health care, by removing the education and support women need to learn how to take care of themselves, including planning pregnancies when and if they want them.

Bitch. Ph.D.: Spoiled students, part 3; or, what kind of student was I?

Dr. B writes about her childhood education, and then reflects:

This is one reason I want to get pseudonymous kid the hell away from whitebread smalltownia: his mom is a college professor, he's not going to have to worry about academics. What is going to be hard for him if we don't get out of here is to expand his brain beyond middle-class suburbanism. But the point isn't, 'god I hate the suburbs' (though I do): the point, educationally speaking, is that in some ways one of the things I took away from my elementary ed. was that, in the name of protecting their kids, middle-class parents seriously limit their childrens' education. The education I got was far superior to the education the honors kids--or the white flight kids whose parents moved to a different school district--received. What those kids learned, I got from books and at home. What I learned, they couldn't learn from books, or at home in their safe suburban families. Maybe some of them learned a bit of it later; I hope so. The problem, of course, is that when those kids don't learn those things, they grow up to weild power and miseducate their own children and continue to shit on the children of the underclasses. I don't want my kid to grow up to think like that, nor do I want him to grow up with the equally horrible (maybe in some ways even worse) sense of safe middle-class liberalism that the honors kids whose parents kept them in public school had, a liberalism that operates without a real understanding of the issues at hand and is still, underneath, scared and scornful of the people it tries to 'help' without in any way actually thinking about the power structure.

I have one small, impersonal comment on this, and then I'll go into a larger, more personal one.

The small comment is that the last sentence reminds me of Nietzsche's critique of a sort of patronizing liberalism and Christian charity. Nietzsche argued that these attitudes towards the 'lower' classes stemmed from a feeling he called ressentiment: anger, jealousy, and resentment.

The larger comment is that, particularly in Bush's America, the ideology of the suburbs is just as much condescending conservatism as condescending liberalism. This is actually the ideology I was surrounded by growing up in rural Northern California: throughout the community, almost nothing but contempt is shown for the small non-white population of the county, for gay people, for liberals and 'socialists', and for 'flatlanders', a term which describes the tourists who come up to the mountains from San Francisco and the Central Valley (and whose wallets bring in the cash which keeps the economy afloat there, I might add). The local paper, 'The oldest continuously published paper west of the Mississippi', publishes syndicated neo-con Charles Krauthammer's calls to invade Iran and Syria and letters to the editor which forecast the doom which will befall our bastion of decent living if, say, the 'communist-socialist plot' to put carpool lanes on a busy stretch of the major highway is implemented, or Wal*Mart isn't given the tax breaks and exemptions from road development requirements it 'needs'.

I think the only reason I didn't turn out a raging movement conservative Christian like so many of the people I went to high school with was my parents. While I'm far to the left of both of them today, they -- and especially my mom -- offered a moderate-liberal counterbalance to all the bigotry and lower-middle-class sneering that surrounded me. The church we attended until I was in junior high is by far the most liberal in the county.

If I had to choose between the condescending liberal East Bay suburb where my dad lives and the condescending conservative community where my mom lives and I grew up, I really don't know which way I would go. I don't think I could stand the people in either place.

No words

Just go. Now.

Why are you still here?

Ugh, part eleventy-thousand

Per guest-blogged Amanda over at the panda which has left, a Texas state rep. has proposed a bill which would allow pharmacists to refuse to provide birth control, including emergency contraception. I've heard about this before, but I've never encountered an argument so disigenuous, ignorant, or downright abhorrent as the one she quotes.

Arguing that a raped woman has been extremely traumatized, he concluded: "A woman has gone through a trauma; for these reasons her body may not be fertile."

I've known probably eight young women who were raped as teenagers, and most of them still have a week of nightmares every year, around the date they were attacked. Several of these young women didn't take emergency contraception because they were too scared to go to a doctor; the unsurprising end result is often a bright young women branded a slut by the community, kicked out of her parents' house, and being forced to drop out of high school instead of go to college so she can care for her child with some minor financial support from the asshole who thought he was entitled to put his penis wherever the fuck he felt like.

This is where my personal desire to castrate rapists with a golf club comes to the surface again.

But They're So Stupid!

The Supremes have made it illegal to kill kids. Drew sums it up pretty well.

Don't Panic

Here is another trailer for The Hichhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, and it is good.

Savings of DOOM!

Shorter David Brooks: oh noooooes! seperate cheking accounts will destroy teh marrieges!

What a fucking inane tool.

Spider-man's greatest bible stories!

Just go. Trust me.

The Christmas Season Starts Early This Year

If any of you are looking for an excellent gift for me, this tie will do.

Now On Ebay, The Stick From Sean Penn's Ass

Welcome to the Style section of Headpiece for the Staff of Ra, I'll be your Cruise Director, Ben.

So I got roped into watching the Academy Awards last night, and other than the fact that the thing's a god damn four hours, I thought it went pretty well. Chris Rock got a couple gasps from me for some particularly catty moments, which I suppose it good as opposed to being bored off my ass, which is sort of the standard. Sean Penn needs some serious hugs to call the fuck down. I thought they did a good job of spreading the awards around a bit rather than piling them all on one film as they usually do, but Hotel Rwanda seems to have been snubbed a bit.

And what the fuck was Laura Linny thinking with that hair?! Hellooooooo!

Breaking: Iraq has been completely pacified

Or not. Not at fucking all.

Overdue

Five years after it was clearly necessary, and five-and-a-half after it could've made a huge difference, Sens. Clinton and Boxer, along with a Rep. from Ohio, have proposed election reform. Based on the press release quoted at that link, the reform includes making election day a national holiday, voter-verified paper ballots for electronic voting machines (which will be considered their official ballot), and same-day voter registration.

And, of course, since accurate vote counts are a partisan issue, we should not be surprised when this goes down in flames.

Wal*Mart

Perhaps you wonder why I refuse to shop at Wal*Mart. Well, besides the fact that they're involved in a huge class-action lawsuit against all their female employees for systematic discrimination, here's some
info about labour conditions at Wal*Mart:
- Average pay of a sales clerk is $8.50 an hour. This works out to be $1,000 below the government's definition of the poverty level for a family of three if this is the only form of income.
- Wal*Mart employs so many people at these wages that other retailers are forced to cut paycheques to be competitive.
- Wal*Mart considers 'full-time' to be 34, not 40, hours a week. True, this means someone who works 36 hours a week is eligible to buy health insurance -- but it also means they're even less likely to be able to afford it.
- By one reckoning, the CEO of Wal*Mart receives 897 times the pay of the average sales clerk.

Rings of Rexnor!

Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich has gone gold. Due in stores 8 March. This makes me jump up and down in one place.

Though it makes me wonder how I'm going to keep up with my other superhero game ...

You Know What Would Make Hockey More Exciting? Games Played.

On the heels of a cancelled season the NHL is thinking of ways make the game more exciting for spectators when the players and owners can finally resolve their petty bickering. In a country whose "national pasttime" is as boring as freaking baseball I've never been able to understand why people can't get behind a game as fast paced as hockey. Sure, there's not a ton of scoring, but why is that the ultimate arbiter of excitment? Do basketball fans thrill over every lay in? Hell no! According to this article the average goals per game is down from 7 to 5, which really doesn't strike me as a huge change. My real problem is that it seems like this is being viewed as an either/or situation. I just wish someone could come up with a way to alter the rules that wouldn't favor either offensive or defensive play. My team, the Devils, are a great defensive team, or at least they have been in years past, and I'd hate to see that style of play disappear completely, even if it would be nice if other teams could go for a more open style of play.

T.G.I.PH.

Another end of the week, another Photoshop Phriday and all the wry wit you wait all week for.

Spoiler Alert!

Calling all nerds! Here are some pics from the next/last Star Wars movie. Yeah yeah yeah, I got excited for both of the previous two film and they turned out to be less than great, but *this* one looks BITCHIN'!

The Erotic Applications Are Endless

Hey, long time no see! Over at Evil Avatar I ran across a link to a video and an article about supposedly "total immersion" technology which allows 3D objects to interact with real life objects. One thing to keep in mind while you're watching the video is that these are *not* holograms and you can't see them just floating in the air, you have to see them on a moniter or something. In application however, you could perhaps have some sort of headgear or other peripheral that would make it seem as if the objects were in front of you. We'll see, at this point it seems like it's still very much in the lab.

A shoe post

Echidne:

The politically incorrect parts probably have to do with the fact that a woman in high heels is showing her availability for sex in two ways: first, her pelvis is tilted to receive rear-entry and second, she is clearly unable to run away. Or so I imagine. Though high heels are also excellent weapons of self-defense, especially if used against the eyes of the attacker. Just kidding, just kidding! Don't quote me on any of this and don't try any of this at home.

Whoops! Sorry, E, too late now.

Heels are also terrible for your feet, knees, legs, and back. One of my grandmothers worked as a cocktail waitress for many years, wearing high heels for 40 hours a week. She's had foot surgery at least half a dozen times, probably closer to a dozen times, and, while she can still walk and go up and down stairs, she's considered legally handicapped, with wheelchairs at the airport and a parking placard.

Oh, and another story, this one about one of my step-sisters. A couple years back, Rachel begged and begged for a particular pair of high heels for months. Finally her mom relented. Rach will wear them for 5-10 minutes at a time, then have to take them off or sit down because they're so uncomfortable.

"But they're fun!" "But they're cute!" "But they're sexy!" Uhhh, yeah, fine whatever.

Do I have an inner whore?

It's illegal to sell sex toys in Alabama. Today the SC said they won't consider the constitutionality of this law.

Bitch. Ph.D explains the narrative underlying why "siding with the sex toy merchants could open the door to the legalization of behavior such as prostitution":

Ah yes, we all know this story. A young girl, fresh and innocent, purchases her first vibrator. She becomes addicted to sexual pleasure, masturbating constantly, and neglecting her studies and her family duties. Her hair becomes greasy and unkempt, and her eyes unfocused, and she begins to steal money to purchase more vibes. Anything, anything! to feed her habit. Next thing you know, she's lost touch with all that is Good and Holy and is prostituting herself on the street, mere pennies for a blow job, anything to earn money towards a rabbit vibe. By the end of the novel, there she is, poor, ruined thing, standing on a street corner in the freezing rain, fingering herself right out there in public in front of god and everyone without even realizing what she's doing, all sense of shame lost in her addiction, muttering "suck your cock?" to every passing car.

Happens all the time. Only by outlawing sex toys can we protect women from their inner whores. Don't give me that "if you outlaw sex toys, only outlaws will own sex toys" crap, or the "they'll just masturbate with cucumbers or electric toothbrushes" argument. It's a slippery slope, and we must stop masturbation here and now or we'll descend into a nightmare world of humping and groaning and civilization, as we know it, will be doomed.

DOOOOOOOOOM!

Give me reasons

I agree with Jesse, although permit me to express my reaction to 'framing' in the terminology of a philosopher:

Framing is sophistry. Sophistry is the sort of thing ad executives, the worst sort of lawyers, and patronizing political hacks do: wrap up whatever they're hocking (usually crap) in a bright shiny bow so they can force it down your throat before you even think to ask whether it's what you really want. Okay, got my metaphor's a little mixed, but I think you get the idea.

The term 'sophistry' comes from the ancient Athenian school of rhetoric, the sophists. If you were a politician or other prominent Athenian, you would go to their school and they would teach you how to impress people with your fancy vocabulary and compelling and vacuous arguments. Think of a modern day forensics club. Or trashy law school. Or a marketing degree. The sophists were the rivals of the great Athenian philosophers, who prized not popularity or political success but truth and virtue.

The thing that pisses me off so much about the conservative movement in this country is not that I find their positions short-sighted and bigoted. If that were all, presumably we could come together in various fora, share our points of view and possibly even come up with new policies all could agree as beneficial. No, the thing that really pisses me off is that every single one of these people is engaged in pure sophistry to defend these crappy ideas and avoid engaging their ideological opponents in genuine debate.

Should the Democratic party follow suit and become such masters of framing that Karl Rove breaks down and cries at it all, that is the day it will truly have lost what little appeal it still has for me at this point. Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist, articulated a revolutionary strategy very much like framing. But Gramsci said this was not a matter of propaganda but of education, a means of breaking the workers out of their false capitalist consciousness. Communism itself was still a philosophical position to be defended and justified.

Contemporary progressivism, in order to truly be democratic, must walk a fine line between energetic advocacy and defense of its positions, and sinking into the sophistic slime the conservative movement wallows in.

Lean on me

Sometimes in our lives we all have pain
We all have sorrow
But if we are wise
We know that there's always tomorrow

Lean on me, when you're not strong
And I'll be your friend
I'll help you carry on
For it won't be long
'Til I'm gonna need
Somebody to lean on

Larry Summers: Womens are just dumberer!

Via Armando at Kos, I see that the Office of the President of Harvard University has released a transcript of his 'polemical' comments last month. (You should know by now that this is going to be long.) He talks about three reasons why women are underrepresented in academia and industry, particularly in science and engineering, in what he believes to be descending order of influence (that is, (2) plays a bigger role than (3), and (1) plays a bigger role than either of them):

1. Women are (for whatever reason) less likely than men to choose the demanding career of an academic or scientist.
   Comment: This factor cannot be isolated from the broader cultural standards Summers discusses in (3). Even among middle-class liberal folks striving for gender equity in their households, there is strong anecodtal and sociological evidence that women tend to spend much, much more of their time cleaning, cooking, and caring for children than their male partners do. This, in my opinion, clearly does not reflect some kind of innate mothering instinct, but instead the way men and boys are raised: wives end up cleaning, cooking and taking care of their children because husbands don't pull their own weight around the house. Meanwhile, there's the double standard that a dirty house with crappy food and neglected children reflects negatively on the wife, not the husband, independently of how much they work outside the home. Given this cultural situation, it's entirely rational for women to forgo a career that involves 40 years of 80-hour weeks.
   
   On the other hand, I believe we are rapidly approaching gender equity among physicians, and female lawyers also seem to be quite common, and these fields are just as demanding as academia. This doesn't negate my point in the last paragraph so much as indicate that the situation is much more complicated than Summers seems to think.
   


2. The innatist thesis:
   

   
   The second thing that I think one has to recognize is present is what I would call the combination of, and here, I'm focusing on something that would seek to answer the question of why is the pattern different in science and engineering, and why is the representation even lower and more problematic in science and engineering than it is in other fields. And here, you can get a fair distance, it seems to me, looking at a relatively simple hypothesis. It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability-there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means-which can be debated-there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined.
   
   [This is followed by a long and obscure statistical argument, which I've summarized in the header for this point. Then he gives some asinine anecodtal evidence about his daughters calling toy trucks 'daddy truck' and 'baby truck' and how people fell into traditional gender roles in experimental communes shortly in Israel. Then he explains why he thinks all the discredited research into evolutionary psychology has shown there are innate differences:] When there were no girls majoring in chemistry, when there were no girls majoring in biology, it was much easier to blame parental socialization. Then, as we are increasingly finding today, the problem is what's happening when people are twenty, or when people are twenty-five, in terms of their patterns, with which they drop out. Again, to the extent it can be addressed, it's a terrific thing to address.
   

   
   Comment: Again, there is no way to separate this factor from the simple cultural issues in (3). Indeed, the fact that women succeed as science and engineering majors in college, ie, do well with the math and science itself, and only fail to develop careers in their field after graduation, ie, once they have to deal with the scientific and engineering establishment, seems to me to clearly support the case that there is discrimination against women as professional scientists and engineers, and undermine the innatist argument.
   
   He finishes up this point with a pathetic qualifier, but the damage has already been done. I have to agree with Armando over at Kos, the guy is either an idiot or a misogynist or both.


3. Women are discriminated against both during the hiring process and in the workplace.
   Comment: So long as this is expanded to include other, more general cultural and sociological factors, I agree that this is a major problem to be addressed. However, as I've said above, I do not believe there is any justification for sharply separating this point from the other two: discrimination and double standards put differential pressures on men and women, allowing the former the luxury of dedicating themselves to their careers in ways the former cannot, which both (groundlessly) lead to beliefs in innate differences in ability.

It should be clear by now my fundamental critique of Summers' deeply ignorant and offensive argument: the three factors he identifies cannot be sharply delineated on an empirical level. Cultural factors are simply too pervasive to conclude that women and men have inherently different preferences and abilities. Which is what feminists have maintained for about sixty years now.

Edit: Fixed some odd spacing. There's a shorter summary of his inanity here, link via Atrios.

My paper is good because I spellchecked TWICE

Echidne has a few choice quotations from David Horowitz' Giant Index of The Evils of Liberal Professors.

"This complaint applies to the discriminating nature of grading of my English teacher…On the last one, I wrote about how family values in the books weve read aren't good. I know the paper was pretty much great because I spell checked it and proofred it twice. I got an D- just because the professor hates families and thinks its okay to be gay." [sic] - Ohio State, English, 2/9/05

"We were then required to watch an immoral Seinfeld episode dealing with masturbation, an exercise with little sociological value. She then gave a lecture on 'moral relativity,' which she defined very closely with 'cultural relativism.'" - St. Louis University, Sociology, 2/13/05

"Talked about flags as symbols of states and argued that new Iraqi flag was not a result of a transparent and fair process…Claimed AS FACT that other Arab societies had red, green and black in their flags…" - St. Michael's College, Human Geography, 4/30/04

Perusing the list Atrios generated, most of the complaints seem to be along the lines of 'the professor expressed an anti-Republican opinion in class!' or 'we did not read any books expressing a conservative point of view!'.

Here's the thing: we're working off the empirically justified assumption that most of the people around us are just as liberal as we are. Should we make jokes and bitch about how we don't like or understand Republican voters? Ehh, probably not. But we're people -- we slip up, and we're willing to apologize when we see we've genuinely hurt someone.

At the same time, it's our job to try to get you guys to learn the ideas of the field of our specialty. This is because we've studied it intensely for years or even decades; possibly even longer than you've been alive. We're simply more qualified to write the syllabus and lecture than you are. You've got to trust us when we tell you that Antonio Gramsci (communist) is more respected among political scientists than Ann Coulter, and his ideas and arguments are more worthwhile to examine than hers. But of course you write your own term paper: if you want to cite Ann Coulter, Ayn Rand, or David Horowitz (post-him being a communist, of course) in your paper, and your paper actually uses these writers to address the issues brought up in class in a relevant and coherent fashion, you will deserve and should receive a good grade.

On the other hand, if your paper on Margaret Sanger and her stance on abortion can be summarized as 'Abortion is murder! James Dobson and Ann Coulter both say so!' (only with 'murder' and 'is' misspelled), you will have earned your F by failing to address the assigned topic.