Decades of Drudgery

#resist

The lede tells me that one of America’s most widely read right-wing journalists said something nasty about someone who went and said something spectacular in his own right, but I find myself wondering how anyone, even conservatives, still pay attention to the journalist who is essentially criticizing his commercial competition.

The most part of accepting that professional wrestling is not real combat comes down to just that, accepting the obvious. The hardest part about supermarket tabloid gossip was always the idea that anyone might believe it. Twenty-some years have Republicans denigrated themselves for a horde of alleged journalists whose apparent basis for competition has something to do with finding ways to pitch more extreme alternatives to a worryingly hungry audience.

What portion of what is happening, and how we got here, has to do with words like, “unwell”?

And to what degree does is it relevant, or is any notion of apropos merely a matter of aesthetic priorities, that over two decades after the widely-read conservative firebomb journalist accidentally helped a cartoonist win a Pulitzer …―

An established muckraker questions the psychiatric health of a competitor and market heir, and something goes here about the Pulitzer joke and nearly bringing down a presidency, and here we are all these years later and still drowning in rape culture because … I mean, say what we will about Republicans and conservatives and all that, but the rest of the nation has been finding ways to enable them. And yeah, yeah, yeah, I didn’t vote for them, either, but it is also true that we’re Americans, and we just don’t go lining them up in front of the ditch, so we should probably consider that somewhere in between we still simply haven’t done enough to forestall such spectacles as two excremental puckers fighting for headlines because that is the priority.

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Image note: Detail of Lucifer, by Franz von Stuck, 1890.

It Almost Seems Deliberate

MEMORANDUM

To: YouTube

re: Really? I thought this part was obvious

So … you know that little thing you have where we click for the option to say we don’t want you promoting this or that kind of video? Why does it not work? No, really, when I tell you to not show me this, don’t turn around and promote the same damn video again.

If It’s Tuesday I Must Be Whining

Microcosmic: As Rachel Maddow asks Michael Beschloss his opinion on campaign norms―e.g., releasing tax returns―it occurs to me that we are quite possibly witnessing a microiteration of a problematic thumbnail sketch: If achieved, then change standard.

As Maddow asked, what about the future? And that would approximately make sense: Hillary Clinton is about to be elected president of the United States of America. We’ve already decided that everything else in her career is just that much more volatile and alarming and inappropriate than any man who came before her, repeatedly suggesting with each iteration that we will, in fact, attempt to change the rules in order to forestall certain outcomes.

For instance, who remembers the One-Drop Rule? Was there nothing incongruous or untoward about the proposition that we finally laid the One-Drop Rule to rest when Barack Obama was elected? Okay, that’s not fair; we lynched the One-Drop Rule and then put the corpse in whiteface: If Barack Obama is one-drop white, we haven’t yet elected our first black president.

Remind me all you want that it didn’t work; I’ll just shrug and wonder why we bothered trying.

Still, though, if we call off the customary tax return release? It’s easy enough to expect the ritual to survive Donald Trump, but we’ve seen this happen before. No, really, did you know that politicians were never supposed to get paid for public speaking when they weren’t in office? Apparently this has always been the rule, and Hillary Clinton just wasn’t smart enough to know. And since her predecessors didn’t really use the private email systems that they actually did, Secretary Clinton should have known that behaving like her predecessors was forbidden; I mean, it’s not like we suddenly invented this standard that what she did was unacceptable out of thin air just because she’s Hillary freakin’ Clinton, right? It’s not like we didn’t care when it was anyone else and then just decide to care because some scandalmongering political opponents decided to pretend something entirely ahistorical and―you know, since it’s “Her”―well, yeah, why not, sounds great. Sorry, I guess that’s just a distraction, isn’t it? Because while we’re spinning pay for play fancies because transparency means we can, the only reason we don’t care about the idea of pay for play through Colin Powell’s foundation, while he was Secretary of State, is because he’s Colin Powell, not Hillary Clinton, so that sort of thing could never, ever happen.

Nor is it just about girls, though it’s true in this case it kind of is. But the underlying principle of schoolyard socialization dynamics includes a function whereby a bellwether among the despised might achieve a threshold of respectability, and the communal response is to alter the threshold in order to maintain exclusion. That is to say, some kids will simply never be allowed by their peers to be cool; it’s a general bully principle, because without it the list of people bullies are allowed to treat poorly pretty much crumbles to dust in the wind.

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Image note: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton works from a desk inside a C-17 military plane 18 October 2011. (Kevin Lamarque/Associated Press)

Maddow, Rachel. “Historic debate could reset campaign norms”. msnbc. 27 September 2016.

The Zuckerberg Atrocity

How about some crass humor?

For some, the costs are higher. In 2010, 12-year-old Amanda Todd bared her chest while chatting online with a person who’d assured her that he was a boy, but was in fact a grown man with a history of pedophilia. For the next two years, Amanda and her mother, Carol Todd, were unable to stop anonymous users from posting that image on sexually explicit pages. A Facebook page, labeled “Controversial Humor,” used Amanda’s name and image—and the names and images of other girls—without consent. In October 2012, Amanda committed suicide, posting a YouTube video that explained her harassment and her decision. In April 2014, Dutch officials announced that they had arrested a 35-year-old man suspected to have used the Internet to extort dozens of girls, including Amanda, in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The suspect now faces charges of child pornography, extortion, criminal harassment, and Internet luring.

† † †

Hildur Lilliendahl Viggósdóttir, decided to draw attention to similar problems by creating a page called “Men who hate women,” where she reposted examples of misogyny she found elsewhere on Facebook. Her page was suspended four times—not because of its offensive content, but because she was reposting images without written permission. Meanwhile, the original postings—graphically depicting rape and glorifying the physical abuse of women—remained on Facebook. As activists had been noting for years, pages like these were allowed by Facebook to remain under the category of “humor.” Other humorous pages live at the time had names like “I kill bitches like you,” “Domestic Violence: Don’t Make Me Tell You Twice,” “I Love the Rape Van,” and “Raping Babies Because You’re Fucking Fearless.”

Thus:

• zuck/zucked/zucking: Shorthand term describing online rape threats for the sake of humor; named after Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook.

• Raping Mark Zuckerberg page on Facebook: Why not see how long Facebook lets that one stand as a humor page? Doll up photos of Mark Zuckerberg and have at it.

• Taking the Piss: A bit of a twist on the classic English phrase; put photos of Mark Zuckerberg in urinals, snap the photo, post them to a Facebook “humor” page.

• Use your imagination: Really, I can’t keep thinking like this. It’s actually uncomfortable. (See below.)

One would think the problems are obvious. To wit, how do we define fair? Do we really think this sort of thing would stay confined to activism? Of course it wouldn’t. And while fair is fair insofar as Zuckerberg is apparently just fine with how things go at Facebook, so why not treat him the same way, isn’t that also kind of the point? It’s wrong to treat any person that way, regardless of how much the Facebook CEO might occasionally look like he’s hoping you don’t get squirt in his face, and please not in the hair. (Spit or swallow?) Poor Mark. But then, billions of dollars do a lot to relieve the stresses of having a conscience.

Then again, it would be a good thing to hear people on television starting to refer to how a person got “zucked”. Shame might be the only way to test whether or not Mark Zuckerberg has a conscience left.

And if you’re confused? Just read through Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly’s article for The Atlantic. There’s a reason Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg are atrocities against humanity.

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Buni, Catherine and Soraya Chemaly. “The Unsafety Net: How Social Media Turned Against Women”. The Atlantic. 9 October 2014.

Men Should Probably Ask the Men’s Rights Movement to Please Stop

“This is something I’ve always suspected about men’s rights activists, but it’s satisfying to see those suspicions turn out to be true.”

―Paul Constant

Sigh.

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/482908761338572800

Yes, really.

Keep reading:

The “vast majority” of college women lie about being raped. Men are violent because of their mothers. Feminists are plotting to dominate men.

One thing was ringingly clear among attendees at the first-annual International Conference on Men’s Issues in St. Clair Shores this weekend: Women are becoming an increasing threat and something must be done to stop them.

(Neavling)

Among the sights and sounds Steve Neavling witnessed were denunciations of rape accusations as “buyer’s remorse”, lamentations that, “There’s no stress defense for hitting your wife”, and even lowering the age of consent to thirteen so unwitting men don’t get into trouble for making a “mistake of age”. Janet Bloomfield explained to the conference attendees, “The point being that it can be incredibly difficult to know, just by looking at someone, how old they are”.

Meanwhile, male is the new black Negro, and I have no idea what to tell anyone about Lee DeVito’s astounding account of sexual harassment at ICMI.

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Constant, Paul. “There Are Fewer Men’s Rights Activists Than You Fear, but Those Few Activists Are Exactly as Terrible as You Think”. Slog. 2 July 2014.

Neavling, Steve. “8 ugly observations about conference on men’s rights in metro Detroit “. Motor City Muckraker. 29 June 2014.

DeVito, Lee. “I was molested at the Men’s Rights Conference”. Metro Times. 27 June 2014.

Quote of the Year: Phyllis Schlafly on Sex Discrimination

“The best way to improve economic prospects for women is to improve job prospects for the men in their lives, even if that means increasing the so-called pay gap.“

—Phyllis Schlafly

So, right. It’s over. This is our quote of the year. I mean, come on, really: Yes, she said that.

Well, wrote it, specifically.

On Faith

Faith:

Two weeks ahead of the Super Bowl, half of American sports fans say they believe God or a supernatural force is at play in the games they watch, according to a new survey.

That percentage includes Americans who pray for God to help their team (26 percent), think their team has been cursed (25 percent) or more generally believe God is involved in determining who wins on the court or in the field (19 percent). Overall, half of Americans fall into one of these groups, according to the survey Public Religion Research Institute released Tuesday.

“As Americans tune in to the Super Bowl this year, fully half of fans — as many as 70 million Americans — believe there may be a twelfth man on the field influencing the outcome,” Public Religion Research Institute CEO Robert Jones said in a statement. “Significant numbers of American sports fans believe in invoking assistance from God on behalf of their favorite team, or believe the divine may be playing out its own purpose in the game.”

Football fans were the most likely to pray for their own teams to win, with 33 percent saying they ask God to intervene in games, compared to 21 percent of fans of other sports. They were also more likely to think their teams were cursed (31 percent compared to 18 percent) and to take part in rituals before or during games (25 percent to compared to 18 percent).

(Kaleem)

It is time to actually stop and think about this, for minute. No, no, don’t pray about it. Think.

On Advocacy and Avoidance: Fetus Stuffing Edition

“What if the umbilical cord was reattached and the baby stuffed back into the womb, would it cease to be a person?”

—Attributed as “Anonymous”

There is a backstory here.

Who Would Jesus Screw?

So here’s one of those … er … hypotheticals—you know, a what-if proposition that never really happens, right?—to consider: Imagine a pregnant, single woman working at a Christian college being called into the administration offices to be fired for engaging in premarital sex. Now, the first thing to mind is, well, it’s a private school, and a Christian one at that, so we can expect the institution to have some conduct standards others might find a bit odd.

But that’s where the story takes a strange turn:

Teri James, 29, told the news outlet that she did sign a two-page contract with San Diego Christian College that included a provision agreeing not to engage in “sexually immoral behavior including premarital sex.”

“I needed a job in this economy and so I never thought that anything would happen,” James explained to “Today.”

But James said she was humiliated after being pulled into her supervisor’s office last fall, where she was asked if she was pregnant and then was let go. After James lost her job, she claims the school offered a position to her now-husband, even though they were aware he’d had sex before getting married, too.

(Boldface accent added)

In fairness to SDCC, we should note that the school has not yet acknowledged that they offered the female fornicator’s job to a male fornicator, so Christians concerend about the delicate suggestions of hypocrisy in the name of faith can relax and just remind themselves that it’s a woman, and therefore a slut, and thus is only making it all up.

The rest of us will simply watch, with equal measures of amusement and disgust, as the school tries to talk its way out of this one.

In the end, it’s a matter of appearances. That is, one can see the evidence of Ms. James’ fornication; there is no hiding it. But her boyfriend, now husband? Well, he doesn’t carry pregnancies, so there is no visible evidence, so they can all just pretend he’s a virtuous man.

Or something. I mean, if you’re thinking, There must be more to this, well, there probably is. But nothing says those other aspects are obliged to make any sense.

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.