This made me laugh a large amount.
The Envy of Electric Boats
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Category Archives: Gender
What I’m Reading, September 22, 2014
The atheist libertarian lie: Ayn Rand, income inequality and the fantasy of the “free market”, CJ Werleman, Salon, September 14, 2014
Robert Reich says that one of the most deceptive ideas embraced by the Ayn Rand-inspired libertarian movement is that the free market is natural, and exists outside and beyond government. In other words, the “free market” is a constructed supernatural myth.
There is much to cover here, but a jumping-off point is the fact that corporations are a government construct, and that fact alone refutes any case for economic libertarianism. Corporations, which are designed to protect shareholders insofar as mitigating risk beyond the amount of their investment, are created and maintained only via government action. “Statutes, passed by the government, allow for the creation of corporations, and anyone wishing to form one must fill out the necessary government paperwork and utilize the apparatus of the state in numerous ways. Thus, the corporate entity is by definition a government-created obstruction to the free marketplace, so the entire concept should be appalling to libertarians,” says David Niose, an atheist and legal director of the American Humanist Association.
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Reich says rules that define the playing field of today’s capitalism don’t exist in nature; they are human creations. Governments don’t “intrude” on free markets; governments organize and maintain them. Markets aren’t “free” of rules; the rules define them. “In reality, the ‘free market’ is a bunch of rules about 1) what can be owned and traded (the genome? slaves? nuclear materials? babies? votes?); 2) on what terms (equal access to the Internet? the right to organize unions? corporate monopolies? the length of patent protections?); 3) under what conditions (poisonous drugs? unsafe foods? deceptive Ponzi schemes? uninsured derivatives? dangerous workplaces?); 4) what’s private and what’s public (police? roads? clean air and clean water? healthcare? good schools? parks and playgrounds?); 5) how to pay for what (taxes, user fees, individual pricing?). And so on.”
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That awkward pause that inevitably follows asking a libertarian how it is that unrestricted corporate power, particularly for Big Oil, helps solve our existential crisis, climate change, is always enjoyable. “Corporations will harm you, or even kill you, if it is profitable to do so and they can get away with it … recall the infamous case of the Ford Pinto, where in the 1970s the automaker did a cost-benefit analysis and decided not to remedy a defective gas tank design because doing so would be more expensive than simply allowing the inevitable deaths and injuries to occur and then paying the anticipated settlements,” warns Niose.
Spanking is a euphemism. For assault. Chocolate, Pomp, and Circumstance, Medium, September 17, 2014 Continue reading
What I’m Reading, September 17, 2014
The “death of adulthood” is really just capitalism at work, Andrew O’Hehir, Salon, September 12, 2014 (h/t Kjerstin Johnson)
It’s all very well to discuss feminism as a force of cultural liberation expressed by Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and Lena Dunham, but for millions of women in the Western world it has also been an economic imperative, one that set them free from some (but not all) traditional expectations and thrust them into a job marketplace where they are often underpaid relative to their male counterparts. This is too complicated an argument to develop here, but I suspect that the “death of adulthood” is so much more evident among men than women because women are still called upon to perform productive labor – the bearing and nurturing of children – that cannot be or generally is not performed by men. In that sense the death of adulthood is just another name for the fabled “crisis of masculinity” we’ve been hearing about for 30 years or longer, in which men often feel that their power has been undermined by ball-busting feminists when what’s really happening is that their economic role has changed and they don’t know what the hell to do about it.
Fox News Correspondent Tries to Slam Obama, Instead Proves Trickle-Down Economics is a Scam, Allen Clifton, Forward Progressives, August 16, 2014 Continue reading
What I’m Reading, September 4, 2014
Unreality TV: ‘Weekend Update’ and the landscape of fake news, Brian Phillips, Grantland, August 22, 2014
It would be a mistake, however, to write off “Update” as the less subversive precursor to a more radical age of news satire. In the early years in particular, it wasn’t that “Update” was soft; it was that the target was different. Saturday Night Live first aired a year after Nixon resigned, six months after the fall of Saigon. The old American public reality, I mean the Walter Cronkite, Fit to Print reality, was cracked down the middle but still more or less in place. TV channels were confined to a few stiff buttons on an oversize remote. Newspapers still published late editions. There was no Internet. The structure of American authority had been shown up as fatally flawed, but nothing emerged to replace it. The early “Weekend Update” sketches were less interested in using the power of the news to castigate corruption than in pointing out the fraudulence on which the power of the news was based. They showed Chevy Chase, a mock-up of the oracular newsman, murmuring dirty talk into a telephone, unaware that he was on the air.
Or they showed Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin, in a “Point/Counterpoint” debate, dropping the pretense of civility and saying what they really thought: “Jane, you ignorant slut.” “Dan, you pompous ass.”
Above all, they made the news, that somber institution, look innocuous and foolish, a province of irrelevant weirdos and harmless egomaniacs.
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Is it strange that, of all the current-events products currently on television, it’s often Fox News that feels most like a “Weekend Update” bit? Critics are constantly asking why there’s no conservative Daily Show, but there is; it just won’t admit it’s a joke. The structure of Fox News is so deeply and basically comic that it’s impossible not to read it into the tradition of news satire. All those weeping paranoiacs! The fist-shaking curmudgeons! The gun-toting robo-blondes! Like “Weekend Update,” Fox succeeded by taking the elements of a normal news broadcast and exaggerating them to ludicrous proportions. Only instead of Opera Man, it has Angry Immigration Crusader; instead of Mr. Subliminal, it has Jowly Operative Insinuating Things About Hillary Clinton’s Health; instead of Gay Hitler, it has Outmatched Token Liberal; instead of “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead,” it has Benghazi.
Be sure to read the full article. It has some brilliant Fox News screen captures.
Better Identification of Viking Corpses Reveals: Half of the Warriors Were Female, Stubby the Rocket, Tor.com, September 2, 2014 Continue reading
Don’t Dangle Raw Meat in Front of a Badger
(The following is adapted from a comment I made on Facebook, in response to the argument that the hacked nude photos debacle is analogous to leaving one’s wallet hanging out and having it stolen. It briefly involves badgers.)
![By Gary M. Stolz, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/640px-Badger_animal_meles_meles.jpg "By Gary M. Stolz, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons")
Ah yes, a version of the “don’t dangle raw meat in front of a badger” argument. How is putting something online different from leaving cash hanging out of your wallet? Taking the cash requires little to no skill, just a willingness to steal something from someone. Hacking someone’s phone or computer, or even a cloud account, requires much more concerted effort. (Yes, yes, I know it’s easy for some people, but no one is born with hacking skill—they still have to learn how to hack, then make the decision to do so.) Nothing was left “in plain view,” as your analogy would require.
(By the way, I’ve heard the “don’t leave cash hanging out of your wallet” argument applied many, many times to women who get sexually assaulted while wearing short skirts, just so you know the rhetorical company you are keeping.)
Since we are possibly talking about hacks that occurred in the “cloud,” a better analogy would be a locker, or even a safety deposit box. One of the top cloud-storage companies is even called “Dropbox.” We’re not talking about people who left nude pictures of themselves in plain view of the whole world. Several of them had already deleted them, and the rest stored them places that, we have been repeatedly assured, are secure. In fact, we’ve learned that a well-known flaw in iCloud security might have been involved (and by “well-known,” I mean well-known to computer security professionals, not celebrities who happen to own iPhones.) [Ed.: Apple is claiming that iCloud was not hacked, but that multiple individual celebrities’ accounts may have been hacked.] If you want to argue that what happened here is somehow to be expected, then you have no cause for complaint if someone cuts the lock off of your locker at the gym, steals your wallet and your phone, and gym management asks why on earth you would carry your wallet around with you outside of your home.
That only scratches the surface of why your analogy is flawed, but I’ll stop there to give you time to catch up.
(I could go on from there about how people ≠ badgers, but this is good for now.)
Photo credit: By Gary M. Stolz, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
If This Is What It Means to Be a Man…
…count me out, I guess.
Fox News hosts defended the practice of catcalling, insisting women should “let men be men” and downplaying the harmful impact widespread street harassment has on women.
On the August 28 edition of Fox News’ Outnumbered, hosts highlighted a New York Post opinion article that suggested women “deal with” “flattering” catcalls. Co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle defended street harassment saying, “let men be men,” and, “look, men are going to be that way. What can you do?”
I must just have a higher opinion of my gender than that.
I mean, I could talk about all the proven harm that can result from street harassment and all that, but what’s the point if we can’t even agree on whether men have the basic ability to control themselves in front of women? Guys, try having at least a tiny bit of pride, FFS.
About that Whole “Rape Prevention Nail Polish” Thing
These guys invented a nail polish that can supposedly detect date rape drugs. Some people were critical of it. I made a Storify about it.
Ironic Sexism
I guess it’s the new “ironic racism” or something:
Sofia Vergara has been nominated for an Emmy four times for her work on “Modern Family.” But to the TV academy, she’s a good-looking object to put on display.
Vergara introduced television academy CEO Bruce Rosenblum, who delivered a speech about the state of television, or something — it was frankly hard to pay attention, as Vergara had stepped onto a rotating pedestal so that the audience could view her from 360 degrees. The actress is game for anything and usually makes fun of herself first (as when she made a strange joke about her unfamiliarity with American TV customs, as “Modern Family” prepares for its sixth season). Maybe she shouldn’t!
Point/Counterpoint
I cam across this tweet from the comedian Jim Norton, which sets up an interesting point/counterpoint:
My article for http://t.co/h8xVC3TuVS http://t.co/7gfhdoNiEs and a rebuttal by @CharlotteAlter http://t.co/G2u8e8UaXa
— Jim Norton (@JimNorton) August 8, 2014
Norton’s piece has the eye-catching click-baity title “In Defense of Johns,” while Alter’s rebuttal is entitled “Dear Johns: Actually, You Should Be Ashamed to Buy Sex.”
I’m pretty much on record as supporting the decriminalization of sex work, for a variety of reasons*.
Part of Norton’s piece is a rather squicky pontification on men who frequent sex workers**, followed by an argument for decriminalization that I tend to find convincing: Continue reading
Virginity
Even some evangelical Christians (specifically, evangelical Christian women) are starting to think it’s overrated.
One could be tempted to hope this will mean the end to memes like this:
Two out of three people on the meme site seem to get it:
origami_isopod gets it:
My phone is an expensive and important material object and not a useless social construct put in place to shame and commodify women.
RompahRolleh gets it:
It means we’re finally on our way to shedding a social stigma used to shame people for sex and maintaining support for people who’ve lost important things like phones with their ability to communicate and hold contacts.
phattytenorio, not so much:
we live in a world where material things are much important than those once in a life time experience, we blind ourselves not knowing which has greater importance.