(Hat tip: Shakesville)
This fascinates me. Like giant close-up pictures of bugs fascinate me.
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008It was so bad, I was almost hoping she’d suddenly start speaking in tongues. Anything to break up the cringefest. And yes, that would have been less embarrassing.
Friday, September 12th, 2008You know, people in other countries watch this shit and so do total misogynists. Then again, why worry about what people in other countries think about America’s choices for Supreme Leadership of our country? After eight years of Dubya, how could their opinion of our intelligence fall any further? And misogynists are quite capable of sneering at and grossly insulting the intelligence of women in general regardless of whether or not we shove corroborating evidence for their usually groundless beliefs on national TV. There, now I feel better. “Better” in the sense that I’ve convinced myself that there’s no real reason to feel “worse.” Well, not quite. There’s always that one little future terror…in the immortal words of Melissa McEwan of Shakesville: “Please, dear Cheesus, don’t let this person anywhere near Teh Button.”
I don’t need to strain myself for opinion bytes on Sarah Palin’s interview performance in the first of a series of three with ABC’s Charles Gibson; the rest of the media world has already done a thorough job for me. To wit:
Palin called the Russian incursion into Georgia last month “unprovoked,” a view at odds with that of U.S. officials who have reviewed events leading up to the military action.
Asked whether the United States would have to go to war with Russia if it invaded Georgia, and the tiny country was part of NATO, Palin said: “Perhaps so.”
Gov. Sarah Palin linked the war in Iraq with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, telling an Iraq-bound brigade of soldiers that included her son that they would “defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans.” The idea that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaeda plan the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a view once promoted by Bush administration officials, has since been rejected even by the president himself.
(Okay, that one wasn’t from the interview. Just more salt rubbed into the wound while I was torturing myself reading the media coverage.)
In an on-location-in-Alaska interview that consumed 11 or 12 minutes of the Thursday edition of World News Tonight and continues later tonight on Nightline and again tomorrow on World News Tonight and 20/20, Palin recited her answers as if reading from a Teleprompter inside her head. The extensive coaching she has received could not save her from embarrassment in this exchange.
Gibson: Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?
Palin: In what respect, Charlie?
Gibson: What do you interpret it to be?
Palin: His worldview?
Gibson: No, the Bush Doctrine, enunciated in September 2002, before the Iraq War.
Palin attempts to fake it for 25 seconds with a swirl of generalities before Gibson, showing all the gentleness of a remedial social studies teacher, interjects.
Gibson: The Bush Doctrine as I understand it is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense. That we have the right of a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?
Of course Palin agrees with the Bush Doctrine, but she can’t come out and say so, having just admitted that she doesn’t know it by name.
I haven’t decided if I’m going to inflict parts 2 and 3 on myself yet. While I’m deciding, here’s a nice video of Assembly-of-Goddites speaking in tongues.
What the hell is wrong with people?
Friday, August 15th, 2008I recently found myself in need of a mattress. After a severely disappointing experience with 1-800-Mattress and several sleepless nights on my loveseat (or sex-couch, as a filthy-minded foreign friend prefers to think of it) I turned to the internets and asked, where oh where can I get a mattress today?
Google not only provides the answers, but also the user reviews to tell me what I’m getting. I was shocked to learn that Value City Furniture, the very people I purchased my sex-couch from, had put me in danger!
No self-defense allowed – Nickname unavailable – Jun 30, 2008
VCF is one of those places that doesn’t allow law-abiding citizens to have the means to protect themselves if they enter their store. They require … More »
VCF is one of those places that doesn’t allow law-abiding citizens to have the means to protect themselves if they enter their store. They require everyone to make themselves helpless, even if they have a state issued handgun carry license. Haven’t we seen enough mall, church, and school shootings to know that criminals and deranged individuals don’t respect signs that restrict only law-abiding individuals? « Hide
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Clearly, I had no choice but to buy from the Original Mattress Factory. Thank you, Anonymous Paranoid Guy!
McCain: Obama is the Antichrist
Monday, August 4th, 2008Not satisfied with claiming that Obama is communist, Muslim, gay (or at least meterosexual), and has black children, the McCain campaign is now claiming that he’s the fucking Antichrist.
I don’t even know where to begin. For one thing, it’s a completely incoherent ad, though it gets points for invoking Charlton Heston. But beyond that, its dog whistles are so shrill that only a premillennial dispensationalist or someone with a perverse fascination with premillennial dispensationalism would get what the hell they’re on about.
An ad like this in Canada would probably result in speculation that the candidate was senile. Just saying.
Hat tip: rojonoir.
The anti-gun gun-nut
Monday, July 28th, 2008
Not bad for a gun-hater.
So. A homophobic terrorist shoots up a Unitarian Universalist church, which is pretty much the mass murdering equivalent of kicking puppies. The usual suspects on both sides come out of the woodwork to claim that more guns or fewer guns, respectively, would have prevented this tragedy from occurring.
On the NRA side, SaysUncle is on the case!
The Mrs. often asks why I carry to church. It’s because shootings keep happening at churches.
Kynn points out that politicizing tragedy and victim-blaming is kind of a shitty thing to do. Posters from SaysUncle immediately jump all over her blog. She bans them. Her blog, her prerogative, and she wasn’t looking for a debate.
SaysUncle & Co. get butthurt about it and bring up Kynn’s appearance and gender presentation, as if either are relevant.
I can’t resist an opportunity to troll, so I went over there and attempted to reason with them. After all, I’m not anti-gun; I just think that guns wouldn’t have prevented the tragedy. But they flip out, arguing that of course, they totally could have taken down the shooter without hurting anyone else.
There are a lot of arguments that one can make here, but my final one, as I was starting to get caught up in their spam filters, was that yes, certainly, I respect their right to own guns. Among the many problems with their victim-blaming line, however, is the idea that the only way to prevent gun violence is by carrying concealed firearms. To which I asked: what about kids who are too young to shoot, people with physical or mental disabilities that prevent them from safely operating guns, and especially in this case, what about pacifists who don’t want to carry guns? Should they, like the original poster, carry guns to church? And if they don’t, do they deserve to get shot?
The, er, ludicrous response:
Each and every single person on Earth has the implicit right to kneel, bend their head and take a bullet in the back of the head. Each person has the right to lie supine with knees spread. Each and every person has the right to stand in abject terror with hands raised and the sure and certain knowledge that personal death is very near.
Where do these people live—Baghdad? I have a hard time imagining that violence is so rampant in the U.S. that one’s only option if one wants to be safe is to pack heat. Earlier, we were arguing about whether it’s responsible to have guns around children—I firmly believe that it is not. Their argument hinged on the infrequency of accidental child deaths caused by guns.
But random shootings, well-publicized as they are, are also quite rare. You’re more likely to die in a car accident. So I wonder at the psychology of people convinced that they need to be armed when they attend children’s plays at churches—you know, just in case. I suspect there’s some other motive at work, such as complete and utter paranoia or, possibly, tiny penises.
These guys don’t believe me that I’m not part of some sinister left-wing conspiracy to take their guns away (I’m really not, and I’m not sure why they’re so scared when the far-right has been in power in their country, content to erode all of their civil liberties besides the right to bear arms). But to be honest, it’s really hard to take the pro-gun argument seriously when the people making these arguments are so batshit that the solution to any problem becomes a testosterone-laced violent fantasy.
Anyway, apparently they’re looking for Rational DebateTM, which I guess is an invitation to wander over there and disagree with them. Just a warning: If you disagree too effectively, they start to froth at the mouth and suddenly every comment you make mysteriously gets caught in their spam filter.
The worst person on the planet
Sunday, July 20th, 2008We have a contender.
Meet Dmitri. He’s a pick-up artist, which in itself gives him about 50 million douchebag points. He met a woman named Olga, who talked to him for a few minutes, gave him her card, and said, “Call me.”
So he did. She wasn’t home, and he left the second-douchiest phone message in history. Olga seems to be a sensible woman who, in realizing her mistake, did the sensible thing and just didn’t call him back. So a few days later, he fired back with the douchiest phone message in history.
Have a listen. He’s from Toronto, and the comments from the good folks at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore in that article are just wonderful.
Hat tip: Rantipole6
“Ilk!”
Thursday, July 10th, 2008
I’ve always yearned to be “ilk!”
Of course, I may be flattering myself. When the Lady Lydia referred to persons of “Kyso’s ilk,” she may not have been referring to me because she didn’t specify what Kysoean attributes a person must have to be considered one of “Kyso’s ilk.”
(I’m sorry for the incessant quotation marks, but since the Lyds used ‘em, I feel I must faithfully reproduce them. It would be wrong to assume that she simply isn’t aware of the proper usage of quotation marks. Wrong, I tell you.)
Who is this “Lady Lydia” broad, you may ask? (Well, you might already know. That was what I was wondering when I was nipping merrily through the site today and noticed somebody was leaving comments on a post that was two years old. I mean, it takes some dedication to read through two years of blog archives!)
Well, as it turns out, the simpler explanation is usually the correct one…nope, the Lyds didn’t actually just happen across the awesomeness that is PunkAssBlog and was so enchanted by the content therein that she spent the past week reading post after post in reverse chronological order til she accidentally encountered one that was actually about her. No, she was LOOKING for it! (Excuse me, them. There are two of them.) But still, two years later..? I smelled a Mystery! Happily, she very thoughtfully embedded her url in her username, so my investigation got off to a swimming start.
As it turns out, the Lyds is deeply into women doing nothing but homemaking. She tacitly admits that homemaking with all the modern conveniences out there is a grotesque bore, so she is also deeply into all the crap women used to have to do by hand, from scratch, in order to homemake. I can sorta understand this as a consuming hobby. It doesn’t move me personally, but then, neither does skydiving and I know at least two people who are totally into that. Diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks. The only really bizarre aspect of her hobbyist obsession is that she appears to believe that all women should also devote themselves to her particular hobby, full-time, at the expense of a paying job. (And as a corollary, I guess she thinks men should be really excited to get to work full-time to completely financially support not only any woman who wants to entirely devote herself to this hobby, but all the hobby materials as well, plus a house with land suitable for planting to go with it.)
I’ve known lots of people with hobbies, some of ‘em dead crazy about ‘em. But I haven’t ever met anyone who thought that they should get to quit their job and somebody else should support them so they could pursue it full-time–and then wanted the entire world to follow suit. That’s just…wow. Words escape me.
I flicked through the sidebar as the Lyds recommended (some gorgeous examples of who she admires sufficiently to link to will be provided at the end of this post) and then scanned down her main page. And woot! I FOUND it! the answer to the Mystery of What She Was Doing Commenting On a Two-Year-Old Post by Kyso: an article entitled Silly Women, which she opens by saying that someone alerted her to a blog where she’s the main topic.
(Two two-year-old posts about her means she’s our blog’s main topic?)
Anyway, she spends the entire article attempting to simultaneously appear to turn the other cheek in a humble and ladylike fashion as laid out in the Bible when someone in particular has infuriated her, while squeezing out insults aimed at pointedly nameless silly women so that she doesn’t actually have to eat her own bile in silence in a humble and ladylike fashion as laid out in the Bible. This is otherwise known as passive aggression, and is a tactic not infrequently resorted to by women who find (or put) themselves in the Lyd’s domestic situation. Sad but true.
Now that we’ve pretty much explored her one dimension, let’s briefly turn to some quotes from the collection of links on her page that she labels ESPECIALLY FOR FEMINISTS for some fun quotes that support her oft-stated and obviously very important-to-her goal of KEEPING BLOGS LOVELY!
Oh, the tranquil beauty of these sites soothes my troubled soul!
When The Only Moral Abortion Is My Abortion
Saturday, June 28th, 2008In honor of congressional candidate Mike Erickson, I thought I’d recycle this oldie-but-goodie–always worth a read!
When the Anti-Choice Choose
By Joyce Arthur
My three favorites:
“I’ve had several cases over the years in which the anti-abortion patient had rationalized in one way or another that her case was the only exception, but the one that really made an impression was the college senior who was the president of her campus Right-to-Life organization, meaning that she had worked very hard in that organization for several years. As I was completing her procedure, I asked what she planned to do about her high office in the RTL organization. Her response was a wide-eyed, ‘You’re not going to tell them, are you!?’ When assured that I was not, she breathed a sigh of relief, explaining how important that position was to her and how she wouldn’t want this to interfere with it.” (Physician, Texas)
“In 1990, in the Boston area, Operation Rescue and other groups were regularly blockading the clinics, and many of us went every Saturday morning for months to help women and staff get in. As a result, we knew many of the ‘antis’ by face. One morning, a woman who had been a regular ‘sidewalk counselor’ went into the clinic with a young woman who looked like she was 16-17, and obviously her daughter. When the mother came out about an hour later, I had to go up and ask her if her daughter’s situation had caused her to change her mind. ‘I don’t expect you to understand my daughter’s situation!’ she angrily replied. The following Saturday, she was back, pleading with women entering the clinic not to ‘murder their babies.’” (Clinic escort, Massachusetts)
“My first encounter with this phenomenon came when I was doing a 2-week follow-up at a family planning clinic. The woman’s anti-choice values spoke indirectly through her expression and body language. She told me that she had been offended by the other women in the abortion clinic waiting room because they were using abortion as a form of birth control, but her condom had broken so she had no choice! I had real difficulty not pointing out that she did have a choice, and she had made it! Just like the other women in the waiting room.” (Physician, Ontario)
You can read the entire article here.
Let’s Talk About Feminist Mothers
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008The first I actually heard about Rebecca Walker’s “Mommie Dearest”-style expose of the horrors of growing up as well-known feminist author Alice Walker’s daughter was on Michelle Malkin’s website–yeah, I admit, I periodically nip over there, mostly because she’s just so controversial that I just KNOW she must have SOMETHING to say that’ll really wow me…in an interesting and thought-provoking way, not like the time she talked about how she went and stalked that family whose kids were on some kind of government medical assistance, that did wow me, I admit, but not in the way I was LOOKING to get wowed…
It was a fairly short byte on her site–I read it, thought “Sad,” and didn’t give it much more thought til the issue started popping up on the feminist-oriented blogs I like to frequent. The latest entry into the fray I read was Feministing’s Courtney on Alternet: “Alice and Rebecca Walker Clash: Do Feminist Mothers Have to Choose Between Dreams and Diapers?” which included a link to Rebecca Walker’s original article. My own thoughts about my mother, a self-identified feminist, and her raising of me are complex enough that while I suspected in advance that I wouldn’t quite fall entirely in line with Rebecca Walker’s take on feminism specifically, I thought it’d be interesting and thought-provoking (I do spend a lot of time searching for those sensations, I admit) to see what another woman who perceived herself as having a somewhat poor experience being raised by a woman who strongly identified as a “feminist” had to say.
Not much, as it turns out. And she’s a bit old to be rebelling against Mommy’s beliefs because she’s pissed at her, so it isn’t really even excusable on those grounds.
I don’t want to turn this into a woe-is-me! rant about my childhood and adolescence. Really, all I want to say are two things–
1. Being neglected by your mother and then being cut off from her affections because you violated her ideological beliefs has nothing to do with the particular ideological beliefs you violated and everything to do with your relationship with your mother.
2. The fact that you personally are having fertility problems and love to be a stay-at-home mom has absolutely nothing to do with the philosophical validity or lack thereof of the idea that our society should not discriminate against members of it based upon their gender.
Honestly, I had a very similar experience with my mother when my first child was born–she really didn’t care about him at all (the second one, either). However, feminism was not to blame. She was. Not to put too fine a point upon it, but by that time in her life my mother was one fucked-up individual. If she’d been Wiccan, or Mormon, or Fundamentalist Christian, or a satanist, or a Ku Klux Klanner or a member of an anarchistic militia or even a Conservative Republican, she’d have been equally fucked-up. Sad but true.
There are reasons she was all fucked up and some of them even had to do with the opppression of women in general. None of them had to do with feminism. My mother was a very bright woman; she did understand what feminism actually meant and clearly recognized the rightness of that belief system. She was simply incapable of practicing it, crippled as she was by a haze of poorly suppressed rage at the course of her life, probably untreated bipolar disorder and substance abuse problems likely resulting from the same. She tried to seize all the feminist “advantages” she perceived and yet simultaneously tried to bank on the so-called “privileged” status of women in a patriarchy–recognizing the flawed nature of this attempt, she tried it all the same. She even got away with it to some extent, in her youth because she was very beautiful and charismatic, in her older age because she was scary as shit.
I don’t know what Alice Walker is truly like, as a mother or in any other aspect of her intimate personality. I sincerely doubt she ever matched the depths my mother sometimes sunk to and her daughter does not appear to be claiming this, which is a good thing–I’d still love The Color Purple even if she had, but it’d take a little of the joy out of it all the same. I’m sorry that she and her daughter have reached this unpleasant impasse of publicly aired outrage and I hope for both their sakes they pull out of it.
But it doesn’t really have anything to do with feminism.
I Want Me Some “Marriage Strikers(tm)!”
Friday, June 6th, 2008Disclaimer: I am so not commenting on Glenn Sacks’ response to Antigone’s blog post. I have decided that to do so would be thievery, dammit, thievery! so I am simply going to confine myself to the basic concept discussed by both.
So, what the heck are Marriage Strikers(tm)! exactly?
American Literature 101, a personal tutorial for HotMama247
Sunday, May 25th, 2008Not every blog post has to be a work of fine art. And certainly, many of us bloggers write badly in many ways. I, for example, write long sentences and repeat words too many times. Also I love the comma. Love it, love it, love it. I have enough journalism classes behind me that I know what I’m doing wrong, but they’re so thoroughly behind me I no longer have to care. What I’m saying is, I try not to be the person who harps on other people for poor writing, since I have little room to talk, plus most of us make it up to our audience by being occasionally funny, insightful, or relevant.
However, if you’re going to be none of those things ever, and you’re going to claim to be a part of an educational clearinghouse – implying that you are kind of on top of your subject matter, an not, say, a month behind and tickled pink on the more obvious developments – could you at least do us the favor of not writing a melodramatic 14-year-old girl’s diary entry?
Young People of Today
Published by HotMama247 May 19th, 2008 in AbstinenceYoung people of today are overtired, anxiety-ridden, compulsively active, and constantly depressed with recurring fits of paranoia and becoming more promiscuous and irresponsible. The pro-aborts tell us this is normal.
I don’t expect Betty Smith, here, but your passage does bear striking resemblance to something she wrote:
“Intolerance,” she wrote, pressing down hard on the pencil, ‘is a think that causes war, pogroms, crucifixions, lynchings and makes people cruel to little children and to each other. It is responsible for most of the viciousness, violence, terror and heart and soul breaking of the world.”
She read the words over aloud. They sounded like words that came in a can; all the freshness was cooked out of them. She closed the book and put it away.
Ok, maybe you can’t sound like the author of one of the Great American Novels, however, you can avoid sounding like her thirteen-year-old protagonist, and should, considering that even unworldly, teenage Francie knew she was writing crap that day.
Francie, of course, wrote a true statement (“Intolerance is bad; it causes the following bad things”) and realized that the appropriate response to her self-righteous little screed was “Yeah, so what? Tell me something I don’t know.” Your situation is a little different. You take a statement that is arguably true in some communities (“Kids are over stressed”), apply it to all kids, and then somehow try to make the whole thing pro-choicer’s fault. I’m sure there’s a hope chest full of assumptions there, but you’ve lost me and you’ll have to fucking prove it. Once again, let’s do this in list form:
1. Link, for the love of Christ, link to something that supports your argument. Otherwise, you’re just rocking on your porch, muttering about kids these days and ordering them off your lawn.
2. “Pro-aborts”? Pardon, educational clearinghouse, your slip is showing.
3. At least link to the pro-aborts who are saying it is right and natural to make the children who slipped through their abortiony grasp into neurotic stressed-out slutbags with no sense of responsibility. Seriously, do these people exist anywhere but in your head?
4. Take a writing workshop at your local community college or adult education center. Please.
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