Once upon a time I worked in an office with cubes. Cubes, as you probably know, are made of five-foot-high upholstered partitions which do approximately zip to block sound transmission, so the lucky cube dweller gets to hear everything that’s going on in all the surrounding cubes.

In my case, it was my misfortune that the people on the other side of the cubewall were what I generally refer to as “twits.” Twits are people who don’t know what they’re talking about but insist on talking about it anyway, often with great heat. A memory that is burned into my mind is the evening in mid-June when the aforementioned twits were discussing day length. One person noted that it seemed to her the days were getting longer. Another person said that he thought the days were getting shorter. Someone else opined that in fact the day length was not changing, it was just an illusion caused by the fact that the sunsets were occurring later and later. A fourth person mentioned the word “solstice,” which she had heard on the radio, and wondered aloud if this had anything to with the sunset thing. One of the other people explained authoritatively that no, the solstice occurred in the fall and marked the point when daylight savings time ended. The conversation grew heated. Positions became entrenched. Sharp words were exchanged. In an alternative timeline, I committed suicide on my side of the cubewall because I couldn’t fucking take it anymore. In this timeline, alas, I endured and am here to tell the tale.

It often seems to me that about 99% of blogular discourse is like that trans-cubewall solstice discussion: people arguing vehemently over things they don’t understand. Which is fine, really, but I’d rather they didn’t do it within earshot of me. The suicide thing and all.

Unfortunately, that kind of twittery occasionally infects the blogs I read, which annoys the living shit out of me. (It also shows up here on my own blog at times, and I will gladly pay a princely sum — I’m talking 10, 20 bucks — to the first person who can build me a twit filter.) What’s even worse is when the twittery is compounded by the vicious cliquishness — part Heathers, part People’s Front of Judea* — that leads some people in the leftist-feminist blog world to believe that their energy is best spent on attacking other people in the leftist-feminist blog world.

(Heathers) + (People’s Front of Judea) x (solstice dispute) = Blog War

So imagine my angst when I emerged today from my extended Sickmas hiatus, all ready to catch up on the news and blog talk, to discover that lo and fucking behold, yet another one of these trainwrecks** was in progress.

Happy Fucking New Year.

*From Life of Brian:

REG: The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People’s Front.
PEOPLE’S FRONT OF JUDEA: Yeah…
JUDITH: Splitters.
PEOPLE’S FRONT OF JUDEA: Splitters…
FRANCIS: And the Judean Popular People’s Front.
PEOPLE’S FRONT OF JUDEA: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Splitters. Splitters…
LORETTA: And the People’s Front of Judea.
PEOPLE’S FRONT OF JUDEA: Yeah. Splitters. Splitters…
REG: What?
LORETTA: The People’s Front of Judea. Splitters.
REG: We’re the People’s Front of Judea!
LORETTA: Oh. I thought we were the Popular Front.
REG: People’s Front! C-huh.
FRANCIS: Whatever happened to the Popular Front, Reg?
REG: He’s over there.
PEOPLE’S FRONT OF JUDEA: Splitter!

Later, during the commando raid:

BRIAN: Brothers! Brothers! We should be struggling together!
FRANCIS: We are! Ohh.
BRIAN: We mustn’t fight each other! Surely we should be united against the common enemy!
EVERYONE: The Judean People’s Front?!
BRIAN: No, no! The Romans!

**Which is not to say that everyone on the train is a twit, a Heather, or a member of the People’s Front of Judea. Many smart people of good faith get involved in these discussions because they want to inject a little sense into the sea of nonsense, and that is a fine thing. But the sea, it’s still made of nonsense.

Posted by Violet under Reclusive Leftist, Recommended on December 31, 2006, 9:56 pm EST

19 Comments »

I’m a day late to the blegging blog swarm for the folks who run the Koufaxes (seeing as how I’m reclusive and all*), but now that I’ve emerged from my cocoon I’m ready to throw my whole-hearted support into the effort. I can also throw a box of kleenex and some Tylenol in there too, if anybody’s interested.

Here’s the deal: the folks at Wampum, who run the Koufaxes every year on their own dime (and they don’t have a lot of dimes), are in dire need of a couple of new hard drives for their servers. As Mr. Hotty McNature Pants says:

More than any other single online event, the Koufax Awards builds a remarkable unity and camaraderie across the left-progressive-feminist blog world. MB and Eric and Dwight have enough things to sink their cash into, and there isn’t as much positivity on our side as there ought to be. They do important work for very little recognition. Let’s help them out.

So please, toss a few bucks in Wampum’s Amazon tip jar. You can also do the PayPal thingy from a link on the Wampum home page.

*Update for my loyal readers: Christmas has not yet come to the Socks household. My family seems to be experiencing its own tiny little Spanish Flu epidemic; on Christmas Eve two of us were too sick to even contemplate having a celebration the following day, and on the 25th my sister-in-law couldn’t get out of bed. We’re all starting to feel better though and will probably have our celebration in a day or two. For now our Christmas is in a sort of suspended animation: presents around the tree, the stockings hung by the chimney with care, yadeyadeyade, all waiting until we can stop blowing our noses and throwing up.

Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on December 26, 2006, 1:52 pm EST

6 Comments »

My parents’ cat surveys the scene from underneath the Christmas tree.

I’ve been wanting to post on the Ipswich murders and prostitution in Britain, but two things keep getting in my way: 1) Christmas preparations, and 2) the cold that I keep getting re-infected with in some kind of recursive feedback loop from hell. So my withering blast on prostitution will have to wait until next week.

In the meantime, let’s talk about my cold Christmas! And by Christmas I of course mean the entire solstician shebang: Yule, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, winter break from school, the holiday grind at work because everybody but you is on vacation, etc. Me, I’m sewing Christmas stockings this year for my dog and my parents’ cat and blowing my nose a lot. What about you?

Posted by Violet under Holidays on December 21, 2006, 3:32 am EST

21 Comments »

I’ve been tagged! Nobody’s ever tagged me with a meme before. I’m giddy with excitement.

Thanks to BCB* Mandos, it is incumbent upon me to do the following:

Find the nearest book.
Turn to page 123.
Go to the fifth sentence on the page.
Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog.
Name the book and the author, and tag three more folks.

Upon first reading these instructions I was a tad flummoxed: my computer is in my study and I am surrounded with books. There’s an entire wall of books to my right, piles of current reading behind me, more piles of current reading on the stool, atlases at my feet — you get the picture. Was I going to have to pull out a fricking tape measure to determine which book was physically closest to some part of my body? Then I realized that the nearest book was barely three inches from my right hand: Balkan Ghosts, by Robert Kaplan. I’d forgotten it was even there since the poor thing was completely covered with about three years’ worth of birthday cards, deposit slips, free shipping offers from Bluestone Perennials that expired two years ago, and various other detritus, the whole edifice serving as a handy platform for my glasses.

Anyway, here’s the excerpt:

Petru Bejan was an editor of Timpul (The Times), a weekly newspaper born a few weeks after the December 1989 revolution and published by students at Jassy’s Cuza University. Timpul’s masthead bore the religious pronouncement Adeverat a inviat (”Truly He has risen”). The issue Bejan gave me to inspect contained several articles about the addition of Bessarabia to Romania in 1918 and about the “cultural genocide” perpetrated by the Russians in Bessarabia since World War II.

That’s from the chapter on Moldavia (the part inside Romania, not the independent Republic of Moldova).

I’m tagging three bloggers I don’t think have been memed yet: Richard, Victoria, and FlawedPlan. Feel the love.

*Blog Cognitive Benchmark.

Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on December 16, 2006, 4:59 am EST

21 Comments »

The mayonnaise thread over at Twisty’s morphed into a discussion of why women in a patriarchy justify their own oppression. A commenter named JR mentioned Social Justification Theory, which other people in the thread at first thought was the same as Stockholm Syndrome. Here’s my comment, which I’m dragging over here in order to continue the conversation:

System Justification Theory is not quite the same as Stockholm Syndrome. The latter is basically “please the captor to ensure survival,” as Twisty summarizes. Social Justification Theory is not really about bonding with the powerful oppressor, but about accepting the intrinsic moral validity of the situation.

But SJT didn’t need to be invented; many feminists (including me!) independently recognized quite a while ago that this sort of psychological justification explains how women accept their status under patriarchy. Look: if patriarchy is all you see and there’s no way out and everybody in the world (including the people you love) thinks you’re an inferior piece of shit whose destiny is to serve men, then believing in your own worth would provoke an unendurable storm of cognitive dissonance. It would just hurt too fucking much. So, unless you’re Mary Wollstonecraft or something, it’s much more comfortable to simply believe that everyone is right — you ARE an inferior piece of shit — and no injustice is being done. God’s in His heaven and all is right with the world.

SJT and Stockholm Syndrome are not mutually exclusive, of course. But for some women in some situations, Stockholm Syndrome really doesn’t explain their complicity in their fate; there is no bonding with the oppressor, no escape from suffering, no silver lining (even an imaginary one). There’s just shit. Yet they justify this situation to themselves as “natural,” inevitable, part of God’s plan. An analog is the psychology of some low-caste Hindus and Untouchables, who endure their situation by believing that it is karmically just.

An interesting point is that it is often the most disadvantaged people in a social system who have the most psychological investment in justifying it. This justification is deeply precious to them, the only thing that makes a grotesque situation endurable. This is part of the explanation for the paradox that some women are even more reluctant to embrace feminism than some men. Psychologically women under patriarchy have a great deal to lose by acknowledging the injustice of the system. Men potentially have something to lose as well, but their psychology is different. High-status men in an entrenched patriarchy (historically the class which has occasionally produced pro-feminist men) enjoy a sense of abundant, unquestioned privilege which they may not be consciously aware of, but which influences their behavior. Obviously many of them sense the vulnerability of their superior position and defend it against any challenge, but others — a few — are like rich kids born into wealth who don’t know the value of the dollar. These are the ones who say, Sure, why not give the little ladies the right to vote? No skin off my nose! It’s easy to feel generous and benevolent when you’ve got millions in the bank. Needless to say, this money-grows-on-trees mentality can rapidly give way to a scarcity model once the threat to male privilege becomes real.

Another point to be made is that in order for the closed loop of social justification to be broken, there has to be an alternative on the horizon. In my comment at Twisty’s I alluded to the hopeless outlook for a young woman in an entrenched patriarchy: if that’s all you see and all you know and all there’s ever been, then there’s no way out. Psychological complicity is almost guaranteed unless you’re an exceptionally strong-minded individual. There have doubtless been feminists in every single human generation since the dawn of patriarchy, but unless feminist awareness reaches some kind of critical mass, it’s destined to flicker out. The feminist alternative has to be real enough and credible enough for the great mass of women to take the enormous psychological risk of believing in it. Hence the importance of consciousness-raising, of feminist role models, of criticism of patriarchy, and of a feminist vision for the future. And then the revolution doesn’t happen overnight, obviously; forty years after the start of the modern feminist movement in America, there are still plenty of women who find it easier to drink the patriarchy kool-aid than to believe in their own worth (though at our current juncture I think Stockholm Syndrome is probably more important than Social Justification Theory in explaining the mentality of the most vehemently anti-feminist women in America.)

Posted by Violet under Feminist Theory, Recommended on December 12, 2006, 7:12 pm EST

40 Comments »

I’m here but both too busy and too icky-feeling (some sinus evil) to actually pull together a post. Fortunately, Twisty has three new ones up since I last checked, and she writes better than I do anyway:

Why patriarchy is like mayonnaise; how the latest Krazy Kristian Kult is interpreting the New Testament to mean that men should leave the toilet seat up; and, best of all, great news on the cancer check-up!

Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on December 11, 2006, 9:10 am EST

10 Comments »

Here’s something to think about while you’re doing your Christmas shopping for cheap crap from China made by slaves:

According to the latest report, the richest 10% of adults in the world own 85% of the world’s assets. The richest 1% own almost half. Down at the bottom end of the pyramid there’s a neat reversal of that latter figure: the poorest 50% of the world’s adults own barely 1% of global wealth.

If we could just get rid of the slave problem and the debt issue and the whole Global Capitalist Evil Empire thing, then I’d say we ought to keep sending our dollars to China in exchange for cheap crap. Great way to re-distribute wealth.

Meanwhile, here in Walmart Nation (which has one of the most inequitable wealth distributions on record), the government has found a novel solution to the domestic hunger problem: renaming it. Writhe Safely reports:

The USDA has solved disguised the crisis of American hunger by re-naming it “very low food security.” Every year the government issues a report showing access to food, using the word “hunger” to describe the state of Americans who don’t know where their next meal is coming from. No more. The lead author of the report says “hungry” is “not a scientifically accurate term for the specific phenomenon being measured.”

“Mom! What time’s dinner? I have very low food security!”

Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on December 6, 2006, 12:48 am EST

30 Comments »

I admit I have occasionally wondered how people can not know that Landover Baptist Church is a parody. It seems pretty obvious to me. But then I read things like this, and I’m reminded that the gap between reality and satire is sometimes vanishingly small.

Pastor Benny Hinn wants to buy a new Gulfstream — excuse me, ministry tool — and he’s hitting up his deluded followers for the cash:

I have enclosed a beautiful photo-filled brochure [photo above — V.S.] to explain more about this incredible ministry tool that will increase the scope of our abilities to preach the Gospel around the globe. Now we must pay the remainder of the down payment, and I am asking the Lord Jesus to speak to 6,000 of my precious partners to sow a seed of $1,000 in the next ninety days. And I am praying, even as I write this letter, that you will be one of them!

I know that as you obey the Lord, He will open heaven wide and cause a mighty harvest of blessings to descend upon your life and all that you do!

This next step is absolutely vital to everything we are called to do, and it is the only way I can continue to do all God is directing me to do during these prophetic days. There is simply no other possible way for me to keep up with my schedule.

Purchasing this incredible ministry tool is monumental and historic. We have never bought any plane with this much range or capability that will crisscross the globe repeatedly so I can present the Gospel in person to unprecedented millions of precious souls who will accept and come to know our wonderful Jesus as their eternal Savior.

…Your seed of $1,000 or more toward Dove One will reap a harvest for years. The G4SP is built to fly for decades. Imagine the harvest during all those years, and you will be a vital part of that long-term harvest!

Major credit cards accepted.

A few salient notes:

• The Benny Hinn ministry takes in a hundred million dollars a year.
• Hinn’s personal salary is somewhere between half a million and a million dollars annually.
• Hinn’s “parsonage” is a $10 million seaside mansion.
• Hinn has a private jet (which Dove One will replace) that he uses on “healing missions” to places like Hawaii and Cancun, where he stays in hotel suites that cost thousands of dollars a night.

In the comments over at Pandagon people are talking about a South Park episode where Pat Robertson asks his viewers for donations to buy a laser for the 700 Club spaceship so they can bring the Word of God to the Marklar (?):

Everyone, the Word of God is going around the world and all your help is appreciated. What we need now is an argon crystal laser. You see, an argon crystal laser can pierce thick space hulls in a way that other lasers just can’t. Send your money now. I thank you.

I’ve never seen South Park, but I think Benny Hinn has.

Posted by Violet under Godbags on December 5, 2006, 12:13 am EST

67 Comments »

Today’s pearl from the Google news feed:
Kids see too many anti-impotence ads: doctors. Now why in the hell isn’t this illustrated with a picture of a limp dick?

UPDATE 12/5/06: The omission has been rectified. See comment #7 below.

Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on December 4, 2006, 10:49 pm EST

19 Comments »

I didn’t either.

While perusing the headlines reporting that RU-486 might prevent breast cancer (which leads me to imagine a future where yearly abortions are encouraged along with Pap smears and mammograms), I was amused to note that the French news site Actualites-News-Environnement found it necessary to illustrate the story with a photograph of a topless woman. Actually not the whole woman; just her breasts, looking quite healthy and perky. It would seem that French readers are hazy on the concept and need to be reminded of which bodily organs are threatened by breast cancer. Oui! Je me rappelle maintenant! Les lolos!

Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on December 3, 2006, 11:04 pm EST

18 Comments »

I haven’t commented on the John le Carré novel come-to-life over in the U.K. because, while I’m as fascinated as anybody, I have essentially bupkis to add to the conversation.

However, one of my readers does have something to add. You all know Paul Tergeist as an annoying troll who is exactly like Stephen Colbert except not funny. There are other sides to Paul, though, and one of them is his apparent expertise in radioactive poisoning. He posted this comment over in another thread, but I think it deserves its own post. Besides, this gives me an excuse to talk about Litvinenko despite not having the first idea myself about what happened.

Here’s Paul’s comment:

Sorry folks, I was wrong. I expected Polonium 206 because that is what I would have used if I were stupid enough to play Russian roulette with the devil. By the time radiation poisoning is suspected the evidence, with a 9 day half-life, is almost gone, but killing with it is problematic at best.

But if one cannot get directly at one’s intended victim the next best, and the most widely available isotope is PO210 and it, also, has very few known scientific uses, although there ARE some, and very valid ones.

I personally prefer tritium gas for things I use around the house. It is easy to obtain, as is radium. But Polonium is different in that only about 100 grams are manufactured in the world every year and 210 is a rapidly decaying isotope. The reason it is used is that it generates heat, and a lot of it.

I am rather surprised that the Russian Government would have used PO210 for an assassination. In fact, I don’t believe it. A 138 day half-life is simply not acceptable. The victim will die and the evidence will still be intact and traceable. If one doesn’t care about leaving evidence, there are many better methods of assassination available that I am personally aware of and many better, cheaper, and more widely available methods for irradiation if death by irradiation is the aim. For instance, every smoke detector in your home has at least ten times the ‘exempt’ amount you can buy online without a license, and one could easily get enough cheap or surplus smoke detectors to kill someone….if they didn’t kill themselves first.

So my initial investigation would be to find out where the polonium came from (simple enough to do because of trace impurities). I will guess Russia as a starting point, but I do not cleave to that hypothesis.

Then I would find out how Litvinenko got dosed with it. A beginning hypothesis is that he was trading in illegal quantities of radioactive material and somehow ingested or inhaled a tiny bit from an improperly sealed container. It is possible that he was murdered, but the killer would have had to be very careful not to kill himself in the process. PO is not absorbed through the skin, but you probably cannot pour it into a drink at a table without getting a good airborne dose yourself.

Furthermore, I absolutely cannot believe that Litvinenko, because he dealt in radioactive material, did not have the most current radio-detection equipment available in his home and even on his person, but he didn’t. So something may have happened to make him take the smuggled product into his own custody and he inadvertently dosed himself.

We are not talking about a lot. The current standard of measure is sieverts (Sv). I am from the old school and use Roentgens (rem) of which one is equivalent to 100 Sv.

Without getting complicated, the equivalent dose to a tissue is found by multiplying the absorbed dose, in grays, by a dimensionless “quality factor” Q, dependent upon radiation type, and by another dimensionless factor N, dependent on all other pertinent factors. N depends upon the part of the body irradiated, the time and volume over which the dose was spread, even the species of the subject. Together, Q and N constitute the radiation weighting factor, rW. For an organism composed of multiple tissue types a weighted sum or integral is often used. In terms of SI base units:

1 Sv = 1 J/kg = 1 m2·s–2

Although the sievert has the same dimensions as the gray (i.e. joules per kilogram), it measures a different thing. To avoid any risk of confusion between the absorbed dose and the equivalent dose, one must use the corresponding special units, namely the gray instead of the joule per kilogram for absorbed dose and the sievert instead of the joule per kilogram for the dose equivalent. For a given amount of radiation (measured in the absorbed dose called grays), the biological effect (measured in sieverts) can vary considerably as a result of the radiation weighting factor rW.

A typical dosage from the natural background is on the equivalent of 2.4 mSv/year. The LD50 is about 2Sv.

How much PO210 are we talking about? Barely enough to see. I shall begin by presuming the Russian Security services innocent, because I do not believe them completely inept.

Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on December 1, 2006, 3:08 pm EST

39 Comments »