Matt’s post on the wacky world of anti-feminist blogging is good. Not surprisingly, the comments section basically turns into an illustration of the post’s title. Didja know that feminists are all ugly bitter bitches? Enlightening stuff! But I think my favorite comment has to be this:

The reason that I think Amanda Marcotte is unattractive probably has less to do with any objective feature of her looks and more to do with her as yet unrepentant blasphemies towards the Blessed Mother of God. I’m sorry, but I don’t find blasphemy at all attractive.

Blaspheming the Blessed Mother of God always kills my boner, too. (No wonder I’m still single!)

Also check out Matt’s favorite runner-up for the Golden Wingnut Award — the man who wrote a post titled “Anglo Women are an endangered species.” It only goes downhill from there. A taste:

Female persons have noticed that men greet each other by shaking hands, so now all female persons want to shake hands, too. Equality at last! I’ve got some bad news for them: men don’t shake the hands of female persons the way they shake each other’s hands. Men use a very strong grip; it’s a way of communicating health, strength, vitality and to some extent virility. A man with a very weak grip is suspect. In the old days, a weak grip implied that he was gay. Now it just means he’s a wimp. Regardless, a man with a weak grip will not get the respect he’d get if his grip was strong. Thus has it always been, though it’s not often talked about.

If I used that same grip on a woman’s hand that I use on a man, she’d probably scream from the pain, for I am quite capable of crushing her hand, and that’s the degree of strength I routinely use when I shake the hand of another man.

Truly incredible.

Clearly a Godless liberal.

While conservatives are declaring war on the Muslim world, liberals are apparently launching an assault on the holidays.* This time it’s Thanksgiving. Michelle Malkin is in a tizzy because the Seattle School District sent out a letter to its staff letting them know that Thanksgiving may be a difficult time of year for Native students, who for some crazy reason don’t just associate Thanksgiving with turkey and pumpkin pie. Now, the school district didn’t tell teachers not to discuss Thanksgiving; it didn’t even give them rules or guidelines for what to say. It just asked them to recognize that this may come up — in other words, district leaders did their jobs by preparing teachers and staff for potential issues.

But that doesn’t fly with Michelle. Here’s how she thinks Thanksgiving should be taught:

Chuck Narcho, a member of the Maricopa and Tohono O’odham tribes who works as a substitute teacher in Los Angeles, said younger children should not be burdened with all the gory details of American history.

“If you are going to teach, you need to keep it positive,” he said. “They can learn about the truths when they grow up. Caring, sharing and giving — that is what was originally intended.”

I may be crazy, but last I checked, a whole lot of Seattle School District students are not “younger children.” Further, school is for teaching, not cultural indoctrination. We can pretend that settlers and Native populations got along just dandy, and we can also teach students that slavery was a real hoot for African Americans, that Japanese internment was kinda like camping, and European Jews didn’t mind being relocated to their own special neighborhoods — that doesn’t make it so.

Malkin and other conservatives routinely accuse “left-wing academics” of twisting the truth to suit their ideological aims. So here’s the introductory paragraph to the letter that the Seattle School District sent out to its staff; I’m sure you can just taste the liberal brain-washing:

We recognize the amount of work that educators and staff have to do in order to fulfill our mission to successfully educate all students. It’s never as simple as preparing and delivering a lesson. Students bring with them a host of complexities including cultural, linguistic and social economic diversity. In addition they can also bring challenges related to their social, emotional and physical well being. One of our departments’ goals is to support you by suggesting ways to assist you in removing barriers to learning by promoting respect and honoring the diversity of our students, staff and families.

Respecting and honoring diversity? Recognizing that people come from diverse backgrounds? Sounds like Communism to me.

Reading Malkin’s comment section is always a trip, because I’ve never seen so many people with such victim complexes all in one place. One dude bemoans his oppressed status and says, literally, “Is there a special interest minority group for white heterosexual males?” Others proudly declare that, in my house, we WILL celebrate Thanksgiving!

It would be sad if it weren’t so funny (or perhaps the other way around?). Soldier on, staunch defenders of Thanksgiving. Soldier on.

__________________________________
*Probably because we’re big pussies who don’t know how to fight with real guns keyboards in the face of deadly carpal tunnel syndrome.

To answer Patterico’s question:

Let’s assume the following hypothetical facts are true. U.S. officials have KSM in custody. They know he planned 9/11 and therefore have a solid basis to believe he has other deadly plots in the works. They try various noncoercive techniques to learn the details of those plots. Nothing works.

They then waterboard him for two and one half minutes.

During this session KSM feels panicky and unable to breathe. Even though he can breathe, he has the sensation that he is drowning. So he gives up information — reliable information — that stops a plot involving people flying planes into buildings.

My simple question is this: based on these hypothetical facts, was the waterboarding session worth it?

No.

But here’s the problem with hypotheticals like this: They’re totally and completely divorced from reality. The situation Patterico describes, wherein Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (”KSM”) was tortured actually happened; KSM did, in fact, confess to planning 9/11. Of course, he also confessed to planning such a ridiculous laundry list of attacks that it’s difficult to believe he had a hand in all of them (the guy claims he made plans to assassinate President Carter, President Clinton, and the Pope, among a wide variety of other crimes). Chances are, he did what most people do when they’re being tortured: He told his torturers whatever he thought they wanted to hear in order to make it stop. Which makes for really, really bad intelligence that potentially compromises American lives.

It also makes pro-torture conservatives look a little silly, and can really screw up actual attempts at prosecuting terrorists:

In March, Mariane Pearl, the widow of the murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, received a phone call from Alberto Gonzales, the Attorney General. At the time, Gonzales’s role in the controversial dismissal of eight United States Attorneys had just been exposed, and the story was becoming a scandal in Washington. Gonzales informed Pearl that the Justice Department was about to announce some good news: a terrorist in U.S. custody—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda leader who was the primary architect of the September 11th attacks—had confessed to killing her husband. (Pearl was abducted and beheaded five and a half years ago in Pakistan, by unidentified Islamic militants.) The Administration planned to release a transcript in which Mohammed boasted, “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head.”

Pearl was taken aback. In 2003, she had received a call from Condoleezza Rice, who was then President Bush’s national-security adviser, informing her of the same news. But Rice’s revelation had been secret. Gonzales’s announcement seemed like a publicity stunt. Pearl asked him if he had proof that Mohammed’s confession was truthful; Gonzales claimed to have corroborating evidence but wouldn’t share it. “It’s not enough for officials to call me and say they believe it,” Pearl said. “You need evidence.” (Gonzales did not respond to requests for comment.)

(more…)

Head over to UN Dispatch to read the heartbreaking, but important, post.

Jonah Goldberg pities the poor, over-taxed rich:

Indeed, to hear leading Democrats talk about the “richest 1%” — a diverse cohort of investors, managers, entrepreneurs and, to be sure, some fat-cat heirs — one gets the impression that wealthy Americans are a natural resource, to be pumped for as much cash as we need.

(more…)

Calling all small-waisted wide-hipped big-booty chicks: Ya’ll are smarter than the skinny bitches (and childbirth will definitely be less painful. Double score!):

Researchers studied 16,000 women and girls and found the more voluptuous performed better on cognitive tests - as did their children.

The bigger the difference between a woman’s waist and hips the better.

Other experts are skeptical because, well, it’s quite possibly a bullshit study:

“On the fatty deposits being related to intelligence front, it’s very hard to detangle that from other factors, such as social class, for instance, or diet,” said Martin Tovee of Newcastle University.

“And much as we logically like the idea that men are interested in the waist to hip ratio, it actually features relatively low down the list of feature males look for in a potential partner.”

And the “evidence” provided by the BBC reporter?

The findings appear to be borne out in the educational attainments of at least one of the UK’s most famous curvaceous women, Nigella Lawson, who graduated from Oxford.

Clearly, Natalie Portman cheated her way into Harvard.

Don’t you just love studies that pit women against each other in our eternal search for mates? Nothing warms my little feminist heart like an article that says something vaguely good about “curvy” women, but feels the need to bash thin women in the process.

Thanks to Fauzia for the link.

Pat Robertson, you so crazy:

Much has been said of my remarks at the 1992 Republican National Convention.

“The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

I’ll admit that things have changed and I might need to update my remarks to be up with the times, which is good because I forgot to mention a lot of other things feminism does to society. Feminism has led helpless children into the hands of the video games and the iPods. (An iPod by the way, as I understand it, is some type of pod that children enter to finish incubating because their unfit mother’s womb is dusty and useless like an old boot.)

(more…)

This made my day. Tory leader David Cameron is proposing broad educational and service-based responses to sexual assault:

He pledged longer-term funding for rape crisis centres, to change attitudes towards rape through sex education and announced a Tory review of sentencing.

The government says it has taken action to improve conviction rates.

In a speech at the Conservative Women’s Organisation conference, Mr Cameron said: “Studies have shown that as many as one in two young men believe there are some circumstances when it’s okay to force a woman to have sex.

“To my mind, this is an example of moral collapse.”

He called for “widespread cultural change” and warned that society has become increasingly “sexualised” over the past decade, during which time treating women as sex objects has become viewed as “cool”.

He also called for compulsory sex education in schools to drive home the message that sex without consent is a criminal offence.

The whole “sexualization causes rape” thing frustrates me, but otherwise he’s right on the money. I’m especially pleased to see that he’s promoting a comprehensive approach to lowering the sexual assault rate, which includes resources for survivors as well as education for men. Acquaintance rape can be a tricky issue, because “no means no” just doesn’t jibe with all of the other messages that men and women received. The sexual power game puts a lot of women on a tightrope between virgin and whore; there’s pressure to have sex, messages that nice girls say no at least once or twice, imaging of sex as domination, assumptions that women will be the “brakes,” shame in giving an enthusiastic “yes” under certain circumstances. Men see the same thing — and they internalize the idea that “no” might mean “yes,” that women get off on being “ravished” and want men to take complete sexual control, that if a woman is in your bed it means she’s consented to doing pretty much whatever you want, that women exist largely for male pleasure.

“Teaching men not to rape” sounds like a silly proposition if your understanding of rape is limited to stranger attacks; it’s not nearly so silly when you recognize that there are men out there who genuinely don’t get it, and are thoroughly socialized into believing that forcible sex is not only “not rape,” but is fully acceptable and even normal. Education, coupled with broader measures to empower women to feel like they have the right to say no (and the right to say yes without shame), can go a long way in turning that around.

Thanks to Cecily for sending this on.

Seems that “The Always Controversial Caleb Posner” has hisself a blog.

A glance at his blogroll tells me just about all I need to know about young Mr. Posner, as does his citation of Christina Hoff Summers as the kind of feminist he’s a-ok with.

Kid’s got a bright future sucking on the teat of the wingnut welfare machine, that’s for sure.

One immigration court says no.

When Alima Traore was a young girl in Mali, parts of her genitalia were cut off, which is the custom there.

“In my country, usually there is an old lady who does circumcision,” said Ms. Traore, who is 28, lives in Maryland and works as a cashier. “They have a small knife that they cut the intimate parts with. It is very atrocious.”

In September, the Board of Immigration Appeals rejected Ms. Traore’s plea for asylum and ordered her sent back to Mali. It ruled that she did not face persecution there, because the cutting, while “reprehensible,” could not be repeated. “The loss of a limb also gives rise to enduring harm,” the board said, but it would not be a good enough reason to grant asylum.

The board also said that Ms. Traore’s fear that any daughters she might have would be subjected to similar barbarity was of no moment. Nor did it matter that Ms. Traore’s father has said he will force her to marry a first cousin — his sister’s son.

The woman had parts of her genitals cut off, is being forced into marriage, fears her daughter will also be forced to undergo genital cutting, and will face serious consequences if she refuses forced marriage — but that isn’t enough to justify an asylum claim, because there isn’t a “risk of identical future persecution” (the full decision can be found here). I’m with Bonnie Goldstein:

In this latest case, however, the board stubbornly reasserted its earlier interpretation and rejected the higher court’s reasoning. It also took a hard line against Ms. Traore’s secondary plea that if returned to her village, she will be forced into marriage with her first cousin. “It is understandable that … an educated young woman would prefer to choose her own spouse rather than acquiesce to pressure from her family to marry someone she does not love and with whom she expects to be unhappy” (Page 5), the board concluded. But “we do not see how the reluctant acceptance of family tradition over personal preference can form the basis for a witholding of removal claim” (Pages 5 and 6). Nor could Ms. Traore prove, the board said, that her father, who stated in a letter that she must enter the arranged marriage “to uphold the reputation of our family” (Page 6), would take severe action if the wedding failed to occur. The board’s basis for believing this was that Ms. Traore’s father did not spell out what the anticipated punishment would be. Score another victory for traditional family values.

(more…)

Bint shares the bad news that all public housing units in New Orleans are set to be destroyed. If you’re in Louisiana or the surrounding areas, or if you want to make the journey to engage in some civil disobedience, contact [email protected] with your response to the pledge copied below:

A major human rights crisis exists in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. It is a crisis that denies the basic rights to life, equality under the law, and social equity to Black, Indigenous, migrant, and working class communities in the region. While this crisis was in existence long before Hurricane Katrina, the policies and actions of the US government and finance capital (i.e. banking, credit, insurance, and development industries) following the Hurricane have seriously exacerbated the crisis.

(more…)

On jailing women for abortion, Neil Steinberg draws an obvious (but important) conclusion:

[A] fellow columnist was addressing abortion, and he upbraided a presidential candidate who suggested that banning abortion would “criminalize young girls and perhaps their parents.”

“No anti-abortion legislation ever has proposed criminal penalties against women having abortions, much less their parents,” he wrote. “Jailing women is a spurious issue raised by abortion rights activists.”

And he hurries on. But I found myself lingering, wondering why, exactly, this is. Why would abortion rights activists raise the issue of jailing women?

The answer is obvious.

If abortion is to be a crime, as many would like, then somebody has to be punished for the crime. The assumption is that this would be the doctors, exclusively, while the women undergoing the abortions get off, I assume, with a stern lecture.

That is not, however, how it usually works in criminal law. In criminal law, if you are planning to rob a bank, and I drive you to the bank and wait while you are inside doing your business, then I am not an innocent party. I am a bank robber, just like you, and if you shoot a guard while inside, I’m a murderer, too.

So if abortion is murder — the reason we’re banning it, supposedly — then why would not the women who delivered their fetuses up to slaughter be equally guilty as the physician who actually does the deed? That’s how they do it in South America.

The answer, obviously, is because re-criminalizing abortion is a hard enough sell in this country — 34 years and counting, somebody’s dragging their feet — without raising the specter of teenage girls being packed off to jail.

Besides — and this is the strange sociological part — jailing the women would imply that they are complete adults responsible for their acts. And once you admit that, you’re halfway to granting them control of their own bodies, and thus not banning abortion in the first place.

It certainly is a conundrum.

I’m not sure how one gets to be too pregnant, but that should give you some idea as to how ridiculous parts of this article are.

It’s about the high teen birth rate in Texas (#1 in the nation, baby), and is unfortunately full of skewed statistics and flat-out untruths. Parts of it are actually not too bad, but overall it’s a frustrating read. The reporter points out that abstinence-only education doesn’t work, but still seems to accept that it’s a good idea — even when he quotes idiotic points like this one:

Conner is not convinced access to contraception in the schools is a good idea, either. “We don’t want to send a mixed message,”  she said. She noted that  a mixed message would be “don’t have sex, but if you do, use a condom.” 

Kind of like saying, “Don’t drink, but if you do, have a designated driver”?
(more…)

My favorite ladies & gents at NYU — Voices for Choice, NOW-NYU and Law Students for Reproductive Justice — are holding a rally in Washington Square Park today for affordable birth control. Contraception prices have skyrocketed on college campuses because of a Congressional oversight in the Deficit Reduction Act which now prevents college health centers and health care providers like Planned Parenthood from purchasing contraception at a discounted rate. As a result, birth control prices have been jacked up to two to three times their previous cost.

Come out and send a message to Congress that this is unacceptable, and that we demand restored access to contraception for students and low-income women. The details of the rally:

Monday, November 12th
4:45-6pm
Washington Square Park

They’ve also got a fine list of speakers, including Representative Joseph Crowley; Joan Malin, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood of NYC; NYC Council Speaker Christine Quinn; and the fabulous Meena Shah of NYU Voices for Choice.

It’s another event I wish I could make. Someone let me know how it goes!

I wish I could say I lived in a country that truly valued and supported its veterans; but apart from some lip service paid to the troops, that isn’t the case. Christy at FDL nails it; head over there and check out her post. And since one out of every four homeless people is a veteran, perhaps consider donating to your local homeless shelter today. It’ll be a lot more meaningful than just waiving a flag.

To those who have served, thank you.

From the Association of the Bar of the City of New York:

“As an expression of solidarity with our beleaguered colleagues at the Pakistani bar, the New York City Bar Association, the New York State Bar Association, and the New York County Lawyers’ Association, in conjunction with other organizations, invite you to attend a public rally in front of the New York County Courthouse, 60 Centre Street on Tuesday, November 13, from 1:00-1:30 p.m.

“The crude and brutal suspension of law and the legal system in Pakistan, and the repression of judges and lawyers there, require that we take a moment from our own busy schedules and demonstrate our concern.

“Because the images from Pakistan show the violent repression of Pakistani lawyers wearing their customary dark suit and white shirt, we request that you appear on Tuesday in similar attire, though this is not required. What is important is a strong show of support.

“We hope to see you there and encourage you to distribute this as widely as you can.”

I really wish I could be there. If you’re in NYC, show up and show solidarity.

I’ve been a horrible guest-blogger. I wrote myself into a frenzy for two or three straight days and then I came down with some kind of weird stomach virus + the flu. Which left me lying on my couch feverish and going in and out of cold sweats, with a pile of Kleenex next to me, my laptop which was FAR TOO BRIGHT to stare at, and lots of bad boxed orange juice. I had to take two days off work (uh…which ain’t so bad). And am now just beginning the work week, inundated with random tasks and far too many emails. Ugh. So. Apologies. Apologies. Apologies. I wish I could have written more, and should Jill get the bright idea to ever ask me to blog again, I would do so in a heartbeat. I swear I have intelligent things to say. So for now, farewell? Until we meet again.

There’s a first time for everything, right?

Apparently Conan O’Brien was being stalked by a Catholic priest, and the response from the Superficial dude is as follows:

That’s odd. The Catholic Church hardly ever threatens people. I mean, unless you read The Da Vinci Code, use birth control, are Kevin Smith, work at an abortion clinic, insult Mel Gibson, get a divorce, press charges for stuff that may have happened when you were an altar boy, pose provocatively in a confession booth, are Madonna, totally dig gay marriage or claim the Holocaust is real. But, yeah, other than that; very calm people.

Someone page Bill Donahue, stat.

A Canadian man is refusing to pay taxes because he’s against abortion. I’m sure he’s also taking a stand against the government by refusing to avail himself of the things his taxes actually help fund — like public roads, law enforcement, the fire department, and the Canadian health care system.

Now might also be a good time to remember Drs. Garson Romalis, Hugh Short of Ancaster, and Jack Fainman, all of whom were shot and wounded (but thankfully not killed) by anti-choice terrorists in Canada, within a few days of Nov. 11th, Canadian Remembrance Day.

If only we could do it again.

(And Echidne has thoughts).

Anti-choice nut John Dunkle has been ordered by a federal judge to remove threats about a women’s health clinic worker from his blog:

One posting, which featured the provider’s name, photo and address, stated that “while it does not sound good to say go shoot her between the eyes, it sounds even worse to say let her alone.”

Yes, that’s the face of the “pro-life” movement. I’m glad to see someone standing up to anti-choice terrorists.

About Ahmadinejad’s visit to NYC a month or so back, one conservative blogger takes the lefty blogosphere to task for ignoring it, writing:

In the meantime, such supposed bastions of homosexual rights as Pandagon, Shakespeare’s Sister, and Feministe are silent in opposing Columbia’s invitation to Ahmadinejad. While it seems they are all more than willing to accuse all conservatives with being (inherently) racists, none can be bothered to speak out against a tyrant, homophobe, misogynist, and killer. Why? It is simple; Iran is the enemy of their enemy, civilization.
Update The president of Columbia, Mr. Bollinger, did a fine job of naming Ahmadinejad for what he is. I assume that he planned to do so from the beginning and, thus, I believe my remarks here may not apply to Mr. Bollinger. However, the reaction of many on the left side of the blogosphere makes me convinced that they are, in general, true.

To which I say, first, who are the anti-science, anti-human-rights, hard-on-for-theocracy, pro-torture, anti-gay, taking-us-back-to-the-Inquisition folks in the United States right now? Not so much the lefty bloggers.

And second, before you accuse us of “silence,” it might do you some good to run the term “Ahmadinejad” through our search functions.

Sometimes I think that dipshit college freshmen PoliSci majors write newspaper columns simply to entertain the feminist blogosphere — and Caleb Posner is no exception. He is really, really angry that “radicals” have overtaken the feminist and the civil rights movements. Feminism, he said, went downhill after 1848, as soon as the little ladies started trying to take away his porn:

In 1848, when the first women’s rights conventions were taking place in America, there was real purpose to them. Women did not yet have the right to vote, nor was there true equality in the law. Early feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony fought for something noble and worthwhile. But the days of rational, purposeful feminism are long gone.

(more…)

German TV just isn’t doing it for me any more, there’s only so much Postwar I can read in a day, and I’ve exhausted this season of Grey’s. So I need a new show. I wanted The Wire, but they don’t have it on iTunes. Suggestions?

This is why I love Gawker.

The #1 reason I was hesitant to come to Germany was that I feared I’d be surrounded by the kind of insufferable NYU hipsters who constantly proclaimed their love for Berlin and all seemed to be moving there (or at least talking about moving there) after college. Thankfully, as a resident of Germany’s second-largest but perhaps most-overlooked city, hipster expats are few and far between and I never have to hear about how New York is so over.

Berlin is great — I really loved it when I visited, and I would live there in a second if someone gave me the chance. I’ll be going back there in two weeks. So I have no ill will towards Berlin. But goddamn I hate the Berlin fetish that seems to have afflicted so many young, already irritating New Yorkers.