Hey, I’m back from wherever the hell it is that I’ve been the past few days. I’m not at liberty to discuss the details of my mission, but I can report that conditions are still not ripe for a cease-fire in the Middle East. The ripeness factor, it’s just not quite there yet. I think we’re waiting for a nice mellow thumping sound.
In the meantime, you know what happens when you get drunk off your ass and a cop pulls you over? You start saying a bunch of crazy shit that you don’t really believe and have never even thought of before. Really.
Freaky, huh? Actually the bombing seems to have mysteriously let up while Condi was in Lebanon, though heaven knows why. It’s not like the U.S. and Israel are in bed together on this thing:
Lebanese officials have pleaded with the United States to pressure Israel for an immediate cease-fire, but U.S. officials said conditions are not yet ripe for such a move, and they expect Israeli military operations to continue for another week or even longer.
Not yet ripe:
Still not ripe:
Posted by Violet under War on July 25, 2006, 2:06 pm EST
The Democrats are rolling out their big plan for re-taking control of Congress and the White House. This is what they’re going to focus on:
College — A $3,000 refundable tax credit for college tuition; federal grants to enable and require states to keep tuition low.
Retirement — Require employers to provide a plan to all workers; the plan must be portable from job to job.
Health care — Create an insurance pool for all small businesses; extend health care to all children.
Right. Because college tuition, retirement, and health care are all anybody talks about. Those are the big issues of the day, the white-hot controversies that have gripped the nation’s conscience. That’s exactly what’ll make people get out and vote Democratic: college tuition, retirement, and health care.
Okay, well, guess we’d better start planning on another 4 years of Republicans.
Posted by Violet under Politics on July 25, 2006, 2:21 am EST
U.S. Opposed to Cease-Fire With Hezbollah. I’d like to blog about this, but I’m afraid my blood pressure will cause my arteries to actually explode. The blood vessels will just burst and great fountains of blood will shoot out through my skin and spatter all over the wall, and then I’ll bleed to death. That’s what will happen. So I’m just going to limit myself to commenting on this remarkable statement by our ambassador to the U.N., Captain Kangaroo, on why a cease-fire isn’t feasible:
“I think it’s a very fundamental question how a terrorist group agrees to a cease-fire,” he said, referring to Hezbollah. “How do you hold a terrorist group accountable? Who runs the terrorist group? Who makes the commitments that the terrorist group will abide by a cease-fire? What does a terrorist group think a cease-fire is?”
These are all profound and worthy questions, and I for one am certainly glad the Captain is thinking about them. But if you remember, just a few days ago Hezbollah was described as part of the government of Lebanon and their attack on the Israeli soldiers an “act of war” by the state of Lebanon — thereby entitling Israel to open up the most gigantic can of whoop-ass it could find and bomb the ever-loving shit out of the entire fucking country. So it’s kinda funny that now, according to Captain Kangaroo, a cease-fire is impossible because Hezbollah is just a rogue terrorist group that isn’t accountable to anyone…including the state of Lebanon.
Well, see, just writing that made my veins start throbbing ominously, so I’d better quit now.
Posted by Violet under War on July 21, 2006, 1:42 am EST
I admire Trish Wilson’s fortitude. She’s been dealing with Fathers’ Rights Activists for years, exposing and refuting their lies, and I don’t know how she stands it. Every time I encounter the FRA slime machine I feel like I need a shower.
The latest news from Trish is actually very good: two influential legal publications have come out strongly against Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS), a non-existent psychiatric disorder that was invented by a crank and is popular with abusive fathers who are trying to game the system. According to the proponents of PAS theory, when a child alleges abuse by her father, it’s evidence not of abuse but of “brainwashing” by the vindictive mother who has taught the child to hate her father and invent crazy stories of being molested. The correct response, according to PAS people, is to award custody to the father. You can see why abusive pedophilic fathers would be very fond of this theory.
Dr. Richard Gardner, the psychiatrist who invented PAS, believed that pedophilia was natural and that the real trauma came from hysterical overreaction by a court system that just didn’t understand a father’s need to boink his child. Here are a few quotes from his various ravings:
Jon Stewart on net neutrality. Watch the whole thing: as funny as the first bit on Senator Stevens is, the final payoff absolutely kills. (Note: you may have to click the play button twice to get the thing to start.)
Actually “she” is now a “he”: Ben Barres, a neurobiologist who used to be Barbara Barres and underwent a sex-change operation nine years ago.
Barres has published a highly personal critique of the Larry Summers school of essentialism, which claims that differences between the careers of male and female scientists are due to innate differences between male and female brains. You know, just writing that sentence reminds me again how appalling it is that someone can get to be the president of Harvard and be so utterly misguided and ill-informed. It’s like standing up and claiming that the reason there were so few black mathematicians in antebellum Charleston was because black brains are organized differently from white brains.
But as Barres explains, men like Summers and his little friend Steven Pinker are so thoroughly blind to their own privilege that they simply can’t credit it. Since Barres has been on both sides of the fence — first as a female scientist, now as a male — he’s uniquely positioned to address the reality of gender bias:
After he underwent a sex change nine years ago at the age of 42, Barres recalled, another scientist who was unaware of it was heard to say, “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister’s.”
As an undergraduate at MIT, Barres once solved a difficult math problem that stumped many male classmates, only to be told by a professor: “Your boyfriend must have solved it for you.”
“By far,” Barres wrote, “the main difference I have noticed is that people who don’t know I am transgendered treat me with much more respect” than when he was a woman. “I can even complete a whole sentence without being interrupted by a man.”
Of course, women in the academy (and in the corporate world, for that matter) have been saying all this for some time. We know that gender bias is pervasive. Yet our observations are routinely dismissed by men (and some anti-feminist women) who claim that we are unable to accurately assess our environment. Which is rich, since it’s the reverse that is obviously true: men, particularly white men, are the ones who are blind to the social realities. They sail through life totally unaware of the enormous privilege they enjoy purely by virtue of being male. And then, having convinced themselves that they really did hit that triple, they stand up and tell women that the reason there aren’t more females in the sciences is not because of ten thousand years of patriarchy, not because the modern feminist revolution is barely 40 years old, not because of a massive and pervasive gender bias that privileges men — but because of innate differences between male and female brains.
You’d think people would be a little more careful slinging that “innate differences” stuff around, since that was the same error that earlier generations of scientists made in discussing race. And in fact that kind of thinking is disreputable now when applied to racial differences — witness the derision that greeted The Bell Curve. Yet when it comes to gender, the same old sloppy thinking still prevails. Larry Summers and Steven Pinker would probably reject being lumped in with the Charles Murrays of the world, but in fact they are making the same error: mistaking socially-mediated behavior patterns for evidence of innate qualities.
It’s rather astonishing, really, that they can do that, since in addition to the whole lessons-learned thing from racism, decades of research have demonstrated that: a) innate cognitive differences between males and females are elusive, while b) gender bias in terms of academic hiring and the granting of tenure is extremely strong. You would have to be blind to look at those two sets of data and conclude that the poorly attested cognitive factor is more important than the very robust evidence for social discrimination. Well, either blind or just a white male who doesn’t want to believe that being white and male has anything to do with your professional success.
Posted by Violet under Gender Issues on July 16, 2006, 8:42 pm EST
“Israel must respond with the necessary severity to this act of aggression… Israel will respond aggressively and harshly to those who carried out, and are responsible for, today’s action,” a cabinet statement said.
This was Thursday:
Lebanese police said 27 civilians, including 10 children, were also killed in a wave of Israeli attacks on the south on Thursday after the Hezbollah action that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert branded an “act of war”.
UPDATE: Here we go — more retribution on those “responsible”:
A baby was sliced into three and body parts hung from olive trees as the full force of Israeli military might hit rural southern Lebanon Thursday.
On a charred mattress rest the remains of a burned baby girl, her arm to one side. Her upper body is at one end of the bed and her lower body at the other.
Police said the 10-month-old and six other family members were killed when an Israeli missile hit their home in the usually quiet village of Baflay, near the coastal city of Tyre.
Serves that little baby right for kidnapping those Israeli soldiers. Hey, Israel’s got to defend itself.
Posted by Violet under War on July 13, 2006, 7:37 am EST
I’ve been a little surprised this week by the credulous reaction of the foreign press to Torture President’s alleged “policy reversal” on abiding by the Geneva Conventions. Headline after headline from around the world has announced that the Bush White House, in a “stunning U-turn,” will now extend Geneva protection to all the prisoners at Gitmo.
What are they smoking?
All the Bush administration has done is acknowledge that the Geneva Conventions apply — which is to say, they’ve acknowledged the existence of the Supreme Court ruling in Hamdan. And with practically the same breath they’ve asserted that they’ve always been in compliance with Geneva anyway:
The White House spokesman, Tony Snow, said today that the Pentagon memo was “not really a reversal of policy’’ because detainees were already being treated humanely. A top Pentagon lawyer also insisted, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, that the memo “doesn’t indicate a shift in policy.”
Snow’s remark was interpreted by most of the press as a risible face-saving gesture, but I think it was nothing of the kind. In fact, Snow was laying out precisely and accurately the administration’s position. Oh, Geneva applies to us after all? Well, fine, because we’re not doing anything wrong anyway. They’re simply going to deny that they’ve tortured and mistreated prisoners. And they’re going to keep right on doing it — the torture, the mistreatment, and the denial.
The White House is taking a similar approach to the Supreme Court’s finding in Hamdan that the BushCo kangaroo courts are, well, kangaroo courts:
While Bush verbally pledged to abide by the ruling, the administration’s plea to Congress suggests that it wants the legislature to rubber-stamp the policy the court found illegal.
“All Congress needs to do . . . is to ratify that process, and we can move on very, very quickly,” Daniel J. Dell’Orto, principal deputy general counsel for the Department of Defense, told the House Armed Services Committee.
Thus the deliberate GOP misreading of Hamdan that was taking shape within hours of the ruling is now being mouthed as the official White House line. Nothing wrong with the President’s kangaroo courts that a little Congressional rubber stamp won’t fix! And he’ll probably get it, too, since Congress is clearly full of gibbering sadists who love the idea of innocent brown people being abused and tortured and denied even the most minimal legal rights.
I’ve just checked the world news this morning and, interestingly enough, the world is actually coming to an end! It’s the kind of thing people talk about but no one ever really expects to happen. But I think today is the day. Planes are dropping out of the sky, Iraq is approaching meltdown, Israel looks about ready to detonate the Doomsday Machine, a pair of twins have taken over Poland, a 62-year-old woman just gave birth and a 79-year-old celibate man in a dress is telling Spain to embrace Traditional Family Values. I’m just gonna have to punt here and soak my brain in a nice warm seltzer bath for awhile. In the meantime, let’s have a guessing game! Can you identify the person in these sketches? Hint: like Jim Morrison, he’s hot, he’s sexy, and he’s dead. (After the flip, since these are nude renderings.)
Over at Alternet, Rob Boston has put together a list of The Top 10 Power Brokers of the Religious Right. It’s a very useful compendium, though if anything Boston has understated just how whacked these people really are.
Topping the list is meteorologist and former diamond miner Pat Robertson, who has made a name for himself in the fields of weather prediction and assassination incitement. The number two godbag is James Dobson, the well-known humorist whose Focus on the Family magazines for boys and girls have outpaced The Onion to become the most popular joke sites on the internets.
Then there’s the Alliance Defense Fund, headed by Alan “SpongeBob SquarePants is Gay” Sears; the ADF backs people like the Rev. Rob Schenk, who ensured the Alito confirmation by smearing magic olive oil on the chairs in the Senate hearing room. Jerry Falwell’s on the list, an outstanding Baptist thinker to whom the nation owes a debt of enduring gratitude for his clear-minded revelation that feminism was responsible for 9-11. And of course there’s Timothy LaHaye and his wife, ofTimothy, who founded the Concerned Women for America (which has recently opened a branch in Tehran, I understand). LaHaye is rumored to be on the short list for the Nobel Prize in Literature for his monumental Left Behind series of apocalyptic novels. A great man.
Some of the people on the list are new to me: Louis P. Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition has escaped my notice so far, which is surprising given that Sheldon has clearly drawn a bead on the self-same Marxist/ Leftist/Maoist coterie of homicidal maniacs to whom I owe allegiance: “A dangerous Marxist/Leftist/Homosexual/Islamic coalition has formed – and we’d better be willing to fight it with everything in our power. These people are playing for keeps. Their hero, Mao Tse Tung, is estimated to have murdered upwards of 60 million people during his reign of terror in China. Do we think we can escape such persecution if we refuse to fight for what is right?” Damn. I’d better alert the comrades that our cover’s been blown. Also that we need to invite more Homosexuals and Islamics to the meetings.
If you’ve followed the various links in this post — or if you’ve been reading me for awhile — you’ve gathered by now that my hatred of godbags burns with the heat of a thousand suns. Well, no: not hatred, really; if they would just keep to themselves I wouldn’t care if they worshipped Samsonite luggage. It’s their annoying habit of trying to impose their primitive misogynistic crap on the rest of us that I object to in the most strenuous terms. The “rest of us” also including the hapless daughters born into that godawful godbaggery and warped for life because of it. Purity Balls, anyone?
Posted by Violet under Godbags on July 9, 2006, 10:31 pm EST
“I think it’s a very fundamental question how a terrorist group agrees to a cease-fire,” he said, referring to Hezbollah. “How do you hold a terrorist group accountable? Who runs the terrorist group? Who makes the commitments that the terrorist group will abide by a cease-fire? What does a terrorist group think a cease-fire is?”
