What I’m Reading, October 20, 2014

Posted on October 20, 2014 by wellsdc

Property Rights, Gin and Tacos, October 15, 2014

It’s equal parts intriguing and disturbing how often men treat women with respect – not invading their personal space or shouting things at them that they would prefer not to have shouted at them – not because they think women deserve to be treated with respect but because they are with a man. The inebriated young men didn’t refrain from making suggestive comments because they realized that it’s inappropriate; they refrained because I was next to her. Old creepers and “pickup artists” do not leave accompanied women alone at bars because they recognize that ignoring all the “please stop” signals is behavior that trends toward Rapey. They do it because the has a Sold tag on her and is already the property of some other man. And many men who would happily treat women with the utmost disrespect would recoil at the thought of disrespecting another man by hitting on his Property.

The right’s Lena Dunham delusion: Anger, misogyny and the dangers of business as usual, Katie McDonough, Salon, October 17, 2014 Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, October 14, 2014

Posted on October 14, 2014 by wellsdc

Denied. Charles Vestal, Medium, October 10, 2014

The law itself says 20 weeks “from fertilization” (vs. “gestational age”), and we’re actually only 18 weeks from fertilization–my amazing wife tracked her cycle to a T. The hospital acknowledges it isn’t against the letter of the law, but it is a grey area their policies won’t let them touch. Too risky, too hot button a topic.

We are denied the opportunity to even make a humane and doctor sanctioned medical decision by a bill that we never thought would affect us. I was there at the capitol, fighting for the rights of women. It never crossed my mind I would be fighting for my own.

No, We Don’t Want Your Apologies (AKA You are not a very good ally if…), Feminace, October 8, 2014 Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, October 13, 2014

Posted on October 13, 2014 by wellsdc

For Master Thieves, Legos Are the New Uncut Diamonds, Vocativ, Shane Dixon Kavanaugh, August 20, 2014

While Legos aren’t exactly uncut diamonds (they’re not nearly as portable), as far as untraceable commodities go, they’re almost as good. Thieves can sell unopened Lego sets, which are very difficult to track, almost immediately online for as much or more than the retail price. And if they sit on them for a while, it gets even better, because many of the bigger sets rapidly appreciate in value—at a rate much faster than inflation. In other words, they’re money in the bank.

Last week’s back-to-back busts underscore what appears to be a growing awareness among criminals of Legos’ street value. Over the last couple of years, professional thieves and opportunists around the world have turned the Danish building blocks into fat stacks of Benjamins. They’ve included Silicon Valley executives, criminal masterminds in Florida, Oklahoma conmen and even drug dealers in Amsterdam, who have started accepting Lego toys as payment.

Some go for the toy stores, others rob the delivery trucks. Earlier this year, a suspected band of crooks in Australia brandished angle grinders and crowbars to pilfer at least $30,000 in Legos from four different retailers. In England, bandits in Watford Gap and West Yorkshire pulled off Lego truck heists to the tune of $87,000 and $67,000.

The Kraken Is Such A Big Meanie, The Kraken, The Gloomy Historian, October 9, 2014 Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, October 10, 2014

Posted on October 10, 2014 by wellsdc

Men Have Depended on the Government for Centuries—So Why Shouldn’t Women Do the Same? Rebecca Traister, The New Republic, October 8, 2014 (h/t Echidne)

Where once American women were forced to depend on husbands for economic stability and social and sexual sanctification, they now rely, to some degree, on the American government to protect the rights and benefits that make independent citizenship possible.

But what too often goes unacknowledged is that women aren’t the only Americans who have relied on the government as a partner. Rather, it’s a model of support and dependence that has bolstered the fortunes of American men throughout the nation’s history.

It’s hard to remember that guys did not rise to the top of business and political worlds passively, by dint of their hard-wired inclinations and the gravitational pull of their penises alone. Men too, even the rich, white married ones who vote Republican as reliably as single women vote Democrat—in fact, especially those men—have benefitted terrifically from government policies and practices. Call it “The Wifey State,” and come to grips with the fact that white guys have been taking advantage of it since the founding.

Wal-Mart Advances ObamaCare, BooMan, Booman Tribune, October 9, 2014 Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, October 8, 2014

Posted on October 8, 2014 by wellsdc

Why Nobody Ever Asks If Irony Has Ruined Science Fiction, Charlie Jane Anders, io9, September 29, 2014

Every few years, there’s another essay insisting that irony is ruining culture. Hipsters and postmodernism have created an insincere world where nothing means anything. But you never hear anybody insisting that irony has ruined science fiction. That’s because irony is part of the creative life-force of the genre.

We tend to talk about irony in terms of a disconnect between a stated expectation and what actually happens — in other words, as a kind of failed futurism. But irony, more broadly, is about dislocation. And the description of types of irony in the introduction to the book Irony in Language and Thought (ed., Gibbs and Colston) seems like it could be a list of science-fictional story setups: “coincidences, deviations from predictions, counterfactuals, frame shifts, juxtapositions of bi-coherences, hypocrisy, etc.”

Anybody who writes about history, and then tries to imagine history continuing into the future in the same bewildering, illogical, bendy fashion is going to bake a certain amount of irony into the cake. That’s partly because storytelling is about humans, who use technology in ways that its creators never expected, and make choices that no rational observer would expect. The law of unintended consequences is fundamental to narrative irony.

The ironic twist is also part of the DNA of SF, from War of the Worlds onwards — H.G. Wells’ disease-ex-machina ending only really works as irony, rather than as straightforward narrative: they’re too big and powerful for us, but in the end they’re unexpectedly defeated by the tiniest of creatures.

Henrique Alvim Correa [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Photo credit: Henrique Alvim Correa [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

What I’m Reading, October 7, 2014

Posted on October 7, 2014 by wellsdc

My day at the gun nuts’ confab: Blunt talk, high drama and mass paranoia, Alexander Zaitchik, Salon, October 7, 2014

Earlier that morning, a speaker had flattered the [Gun Rights Policy Conference] crowd by calling them “the most sophisticated gun-rights gathering in the country.” This is probably true. It’s also telling. All of the room’s combined political experience, intelligence and savvy still does not add up to the ability to grasp how America’s largely unregulated gun trade has become a public health crisis, or why background checks and other common-sense measures poll so well. The gun-rights movement continues to see background checks through the same paranoid prism it sees everything else: the threat of door-to-door gun confiscation.

Why I will no longer speak on all-male panels, Scott Gilmore, MacLean’s, October 4, 2014 Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, October 6, 2014

Posted on October 6, 2014 by wellsdc

Battered, Bereaved, and Behind Bars, Alex Campbell, BuzzFeed News, October 2, 2014

Lindley’s case exposes what many battered women’s advocates say is a grotesque injustice. As is common in families terrorized by a violent man, there were two victims in the Lindley-Turner home: mother and child. Both Lindley and Titches had suffered beatings for months. But in all but a handful of states, laws allow for one of the victims — the battered mother — to be treated as a perpetrator, guilty not of committing abuse herself but of failing to protect her children from her violent partner.

***

No one knows how many women have suffered a fate like Lindley’s, but looking back over the past decade, BuzzFeed News identified 28 mothers in 11 states sentenced to at least 10 years in prison for failing to prevent their partners from harming their children. In every one of these cases, there was evidence the mother herself had been battered by the man.

***

These laws make parents responsible for what they did not do. Typically, people cannot be prosecuted for failing to thwart a murder; they had to have actually helped carry it out. But child abuse is an exception, and the logic behind these laws is simple: Parents and caregivers bear a solemn duty to protect their children.

Road Hazard: Recalled But Not Repaired, Rachel M. Cohen, The American Prospect, Fall 2014 Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, September 22, 2014

Posted on September 22, 2014 by wellsdc

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.

***

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.”

***

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 18, 2014

Posted on September 18, 2014 by wellsdc

There’s nothing “shocking” about growing up, Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon, September 11, 2014

Along with the gotcha! wardrobe malfunction, the “Can you even believe it that a human being is subject to the laws of time and physical progression?” story is a reliable page views grabber. Throw in wrinkles, weight or any possible cosmetic surgery and you’re particularly golden. Three years ago, the Internet blew a gasket when Sinead O’Connor, who was once 20 years old, appeared in public, in the words of an Inquisitr headline, “No Longer Bald or Skinny.” Fortunately, she had the decency to lose weight before the release of her new album earlier this year, prompting inevitable headlines about her “dramatic makeover.” And when the 81-year-old Kim Novak appeared at the Oscars this winter with an unusually taut, immobilized countenance, critics were swift to mock her “wax museum” appearance. These are your options, people. You can get older in whatever natural form that may take and be made fun of for it, or attempt to remain youthful and be made fun of for it. Basically, unless you master some vampire-like secret of remaining a fixed age and size for eternity, you’re screwed.

Colorblindness is the New Racism, Lauren Rankin, Policy Mic, July 22, 2013 Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, September 17, 2014

Posted on September 17, 2014 by wellsdc

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 →

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