Update: Lindy West takes her Twit and goes home

Well, nobody could see that coming. Before I had time to get up the preceding post discussing Lindy West’s arrogant histrionics^†, she took the drastic step of blocking me from her Twitter account.

My crime?

@thelindywest It’s @SethMacFarlane, FFS. Who expects PC or feminist humor? Don’t presume nobody notices. It’s just part of the expectation.

No, really:

Even better, Ms. West offered me an animated picture of someone named Alithea making a masturbatory gesture.

Briefly, then: You’re doing it wrong, ladies.

A Note to Lindy West: You’re Not Helping

Poor Lindy West.

No, no. It’s just that as much as I sympathize with feminist issues, her whine—along with the rest of society’s apparent shock and horror—about Seth MacFarlane’s performance as host of the Oscars just doesn’t sit right.

West’s rant at Jezebel, titled, “Sexism Fatigue: When Seth MacFarlane Is a Complete Ass and You Don’t Even Notice”, is the sort of thing that really doesn’t help anyone or anything:

A strange thing happened on Sunday night when I watched Seth MacFarlane joke that Zero Dark Thirty is a movie about how bitches be naggin’, and listened to him croon about how lovely Jodie Foster’s naked boobs looked mid-simulated-gang-rape. I felt…nothing. Just nothing. Nothing beyond exhaustion and an extreme desire for wine, anyway. I wasn’t happy about it, but compared to what I was expecting from MacFarlane, it was a yawn. Compared to the sheer volume of hate and misogyny I filter every day for my job, it was a sneeze.

So I wrote happy jokes about other stuff instead. I bowed out, essentially. And I was thrilled to read and disseminate smart takedowns of MacFarlane’s primetime misogyny on Monday morning, letting other people do the heavy lifting that I was too fatigued to engage with. Because this fatigue—it’s really something.

My struggle as a feminist and a critic isn’t to contain my outrage—it’s to remind myself to feel anything at all.

This fatigue is self-induced. There’s no other way to put it: You’re doing it to yourself, Lindy!

Brief remarks on human frailty

This is something you never want to read—

A Florida man is accused of child abuse for allegedly putting bleach in his baby’s bottle.

But he says he simply made a stupid but innocent decision based on some bad parenting advice ….

…. From the county jail, the first time father, said he thought he was helping his sick daughter – who’s suffered from breathing problems since birth.

“I was told by another friend of mine that giving baby a top of bleach, just the top of it would help her breathe a little better,” Carron said.

Instead, she threw up and her panicked parents called 911.

Carron and his family insist it wasn’t intentional.

“It wasn’t a smart thing to do but Carron doesn’t know, this is his first baby,” said Chianti Washington, Carron’s sister.

“It was a dumb decision on me. I heard someone else did it so I wanted to try to help her,” Carron said.

—but I did, so now I’m passing it along, because the only way to get rid of a mindworm is to communicate the parasite to someone else. Dilution is the only known cure. (And no, it isn’t tremendously effective.)

Allow me, please, the luxury of a rant:

Special K the Lede of the Day

File this one under, “Whoops!” or, “Er … How’d That Happen?”

The Kellogg Company is recalling 36,000 boxes of its Special K Red Berries cereal that could contain pieces of glass.

Spoiler alert: In Stephen King’s Cujo, the problem was red dye. In The Simpsons, well … yeah.

For the rights of organs everywhere ….

“When a physician removes a child from a woman, that is the largest organ in a body.”

—Mary Sue McClurkin

Can we skip the litany and just note that 2012 was a strikingly bad year for conservatives in the War of the Lady Parts? It’s a depressing review, to be certain. Unfortunately, 2013 is off to a bad start for the social conservatives, who are apparently quite happy to continue the trend of refusing to make any sense.

A big hint dropped last month when a two year-old court filing emerged in which a Catholic hospital turned the Church’s longstanding fetal personhood argument upside down, giving the impression that money is more important than life. The Church hierarchy has since reiterated its life-at-conception stance, and repudiated the filing, but the damage is done.

This month the personhood argument takes another hit from the anti-abortion crowd as the Alabama legislature works to pass a new TRAP^† law aimed at making pregnancy termination services more difficult to provide and receive. Arguing in support of HB 57, state Rep. Mary Sue McClurkin (R-Pelham) explained:

“When a physician removes a child from a woman, that is the largest organ in a body,” McClurkin said in an interview Thursday. “That’s a big thing. That’s a big surgery. You don’t have any other organs in your body that are bigger than that.”

You’ve Got To Be Kidding! (#2)

Let us simply go with the Associated Press:

An African-American nurse claims that a Michigan hospital agreed to a man’s request that no black nurses care for his newborn.

Tonya Battle tells the Detroit Free Press she “didn’t even know how to react” when she learned about the request from the father in October at Hurley Medical Center in Flint. The Flint Journal reports Ms. Battle sued last month in Genesee Circuit Court ….

…. Battle’s lawsuit claims a note was posted on an assignment clipboard reading, “No African American nurse to take care of baby.” She says that later was removed, but claims black nurses weren’t assigned to care for the baby for about a month because of their race ….

…. The Free Press said the lawsuit recounted how the neonatal intensive care nurse was at the infant’s bedside when a man came in and she requested to see the hospital-issued identification wrist band given to parents of patients. The man responded that ” … I need to see your supervisor.”

A supervising nurse spoke with the father who told him he didn’t want African-Americans to care for his child; the supervising nurse, reports the Free Press, also told Battle that he appeared to have a swastika tatoo on his arm.

“What flashed in my mind is ‘What’s next?’ A note on the water fountain that says ‘No blacks’? Or a note on the bathroom that says ‘No blacks’?” Battle told the Free Press.

Sometimes, there are no words that suffice, so the relevant critique comes from Rev. Charles E. Williams II, president of the Michigan chapter of the National Action Network: “There is growing concern around the country about how this could be in 2013.”

I don’t get it ….

Would someone please explain what I’m seeing here?

____________________

Marian Kamensky, February 18, 2013. Via Cagle Post

Some things bear repeating

Sometimes a notion bears repeating.

For instance, Steve Benen, last week:

We don’t have a spending problem. We don’t have a spending problem. We don’t have a spending problem. We don’t have a spending problem.

While Mr. Benen was responding to a quote from Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA)—”And, you know, we’ve got a spending problem. Everybody knows it.”—on Meet the Press, the sentiment that the United States suffers from a “spending problem” is not exclusive to the House Majority Leader. You can find it throughout the Republican Party, and nearly everywhere you turn Beltway media punditry. But one can just as easily argue that we have a revenue problem, as in, not enough revenue. After all, one of the questions that confounds my conservative neighbors is what they think would happen if we destroy education funding, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, regulations for labor, food, and drug safety, and other programs that arguably work to augment the quality of life in the United States.

Age, guile, and a bad economy

Michael Kindt gets the quote of the day:

I can’t drink like I used to. I actually NEED to sleep. When I was in my 20s, I’d get three hours and be good to go. Sure, I’d be grouchy, but I wouldn’t be physically compromised like now. I have gray in my beard. My manhood still functions, but sticking it everywhere now strikes me as a bad idea. And I have passed the point where bad movies aren’t amusing. They’re just bad movies and my time is more precious than irony.

I hate to admit it, but that really is a good summary of aging. And I’ve yet to achieve forty. But that is beside the point. Believe it or not, his larger point is about the economy.

Are you an advertisement?

I’m not sure how I feel about this.

First note: I don’t use Yahoo!, except on the occasion that some blog post leads me to Yahoo! News.

Second note: I do, obviously, use Facebook, but I’m not what you would call a fan of the site.

Either way, I’m uncertain about the idea of such targeted advertising. Indeed, when using the “Login with Facebook” feature at various websites, I take a moment to make certain I’m not littering my timeline with a bunch of automatic notifications. And because of the way Facebook likes to tell everyone what its users are doing, I generally don’t respond to invitations to play various games, or enter my birthday on a calendar, and so on.

To the other, it’s Facebook, so … yeah. I kind of knew what I was getting into when I signed up for an account.

But I would prefer my social networking to network according to my wishes. I do not accept the proposition that my friends, or the world in general, need to know everything I’m doing online.