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We are moving. Not the whole site - just the blog, to a place where the comment function works in a way to which people seem to be a bit more accustomed. Check it out! Annals of Homeland Security Now check this out. Guerrilla Marketing Check out this, this and this. Then shoot me. -rz 5/11/04 Andrew Sullivan seems to have come around to the view that men and women aren't so different after all (or, wait -- that can't be -- that'd be off message -- it's that women are more vicious than men! -- oh sorry, that's Ann Coulter). Seriously, though, maybe one hidden benefit of the prisoner abuse scandal might be that people start taking social construction seriously again. If you're curious what gender your writing is, try the Gender Genie. You have to submit at least 500 words of your writing to find out. I tried twice and was male both times. Even when writing about French feminism. ESPECIALLY when writing about French feminism. I mean seriously; what did you expect? 5/10/04 UPDATE: Nicole's PPF rant was written by a man too. So was Goatdog's review of Kill Bill. I tried this, and I have to say that I think the Gender Genie is full of shit. At first I thought that perhaps it was the profanity that got me that "male" score on the rant, but I tried three times with three different pieces of academic writing, and got male each time. Even my NOTES are male, for god's (or whoever's) sake! Moreover, I am profoundly troubled by the fact that "myself" and "me" count as feminine. Clearly this is total bullshit. IF, and I do mean IF, these particular words are gendered at all, they are gendered male. People, please. Iraqi prisoner Dhia al-Shweiri on what the American soldiers wanted to do to him, from Salon: "They wanted us to feel as though we were women, the way women feel and this is the worst insult, to feel like a woman," al-Shweiri said. Al-Shweiri's account could not be independently verified. I have a few questions. Do we think the writer, Scheherezade Faramarzi, intended this rather mischievous placement of the "independent verification" disclaimer? What do we think about al-Shweiri's analysis? Do we think this passage just plays into American stereotypes of Islamic misogyny? Do we think that most male American soldiers feel exactly the same way about what it would be like to feel like a woman? Is that why they did this? What about the female American soldiers who also took part?Perhaps PPF needs to be a department of this website. I think what Nicole is describing is actually illegal (threatening with a deadly weapon? reckless driving? etc.). I'd just like to add that a few days ago I witnessed a driver attempting to utterly BLOCK AN AMBULANCE (which was on the way to the hospital with its lights flashing) so as not to lose a parking space that was being vacated. This driver pulled up alongside the car in front of the space and began backing up directly in front of the ambulance. It wasn't like the ambulance could just go around: there was a bus in the opposing lane of the very narrow street. And it wasn't like the driver could have somehow failed to notice the ambulance, as he/she waited for the other car to vacate the spot and the ambulance approached behind him/her on a long straightaway. Does the fact that someone could DIE if they don't get to the hospital enter into this driver's calculation? (Probably just a ped, I hear him/her thinking.) On the other hand, it really irritates me when pedestrians barrel precipitously out into the street, especially where there's no crosswalk, without bothering to look even an eensy-weensy bit in my direction as I drive toward them. WARNING: Here follows a rant. It's not rebecca's fault. PPF RIGHT NOW DAMMIT! It's enough already. We pedestrians are sick and tired of being pushed around by cars and car-centered amenities. Pushed around LITERALLY yesterday at the drive up ATM. (Why not use the walk-up ATM you ask? Excellent question. Answer: there isn't one. But that's okay, because people in their cars are better than people on foot. BETTER.) So here's my question. Is it legal to use a car to threaten someone in order to get your way in a dispute? I don't know, and I don't know where to look. But I'm thinking it's not, by means of the following analogy. IF I were to carry a gun around, a gun for which I had all the permits I needed, and with which I never ACTUALLY SHOT anyone, but I got it out and used it to threaten someone so that I could get my way, or cut in front of that person in line, I would still be breaking the law, no? Is this not why armed robbery is a crime worse than unarmed robbery in our penal code? SO, if you use a car the same way, are you not actually breaking the law? Of course, all of this is made so much worse by the fact that cars are even easier to get than guns. Not that it's hard to get a gun in this country, but it's even easier to get the state's permission to drive. And, in Illiniois, even if you're such a complete and total moron that you can't manage the cursory testing, you can still BUY one by contributing to the reelection campaign of an alleged representative. All of which leads me back to my original point: PUT PEDESTRIANS FIRST NOW!!! PPF NOW, DAMMIT!!!!! The March on Washington was this past weekend. It was amazing. It would be nice to think that some version of a feminist movement might be rekindled by things like this. Best things about it: watching (and videotaping) Ann Richards rockin' out to the Pink Bloque's "Hey ya" dance (footage to be posted here soon). Camryn Mannheim, who was more articulate than any of the politicos. The Church Ladies singing about fundamentalists to the tune of "Little Boxes" (you know: "little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky"): "There's a white one, and a white one, and a white one, and a white one..." Speaking of fundamentalists there were a fair number of antis lining the streets with their gigantic pictures of bleeding fetuses and pictures of embryos with thought bubbles saying "Hi mommy. Today I started to look around." I want to say to these people, OK, so work with us to make a world in which abortion is unnecessary. No more rape. Free healthcare and readily available contraception to all. An end to poverty. An end to hunger. An end to the subjugation of women. Come back and talk to me about abortion when you've worked for all these things. Maybe adopted a kid or two, too. Depressing: none of the political blogs I read had much if anything to say about the march. And, yes, they're all written by men (though I have to say there WERE a lot of men at the march). Where are the fabulous feminist blogs? Tell us. Christina Aguilera is on cable radio right this second, in fact. She and Lil' Kim are talking about the sexual double standard: "The guy gets all the glory, the more he can score, while the girl can do the same and yet you call her a whore." The part where she tells the boys that they're probably so uptight because of the size of their members is still to come.... Complete text of this song, a high overhead poetic production but one we endorse nonetheless, can be found here Today (4/22) on The Daily Howler Bob Somerby referred to "pseudo-con commentators." We suggest the words "pseudo-con" and "pseudoconservative," like other neologisms of our acquaintance, be put into general circulation. We're sitting in a cafe working on the website and being forced to listen to Avril Lavigne. Need we say more? Though we had also listened to Christina Aguilera, whose music at least half of lopopac founding members like. That portion of the membership did feel that it sort of evened out. So much for liberal radio. On Fresh Air today (4/15/04), Terry Gross discussed with John Witte the pros and cons of allowing a man to marry his pussy. Wait -- we might have misheard -- OK -- we'll get the transcript once it's posted. Hey y'all! (Like anybody's reading this.) Check out Rep. Henry Waxman's fantastic database of Administration lies on Iraq! From "Sex and the Single Voter," today on Salon: Bushnell added
that the shark- (and leech-) infested waters of today's dating pool
have also left single girls distrustful of guys who appear on their
televisions, bearing promises of tax cuts and an end to terrorism. "A
lot of single women in their 20s and 30s will say they've been
disturbed by male dating behavior, and now they don't really trust
men," said Bushnell. And it's not just that our political options
remind us of dud paramours; it's that -- with the exception of the
mesmerizing Bill Clinton -- presidential candidates tend to have the
look and feel of our fathers. "They represent the rigid kind of male
authority that single women have basically been fighting against their
whole lives. And it's that male authority that has proven to be in
their experience intrinsically false and suspicious," Bushnell said. Nothing against our fathers, of course!"Make no mistake about it; if we'd had known that the enemy was going to fly airplanes into our buildings, we'd have done everything in our power to stop it." -- George W. Bush Seems like a bit of backpedaling to me -- what was it he used to say "make no mistake" about? Update (4/15): see also W's other site. Who gives whom money Stan the Man (April 1) Does anyone else think the character "Stan" in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the same guy as "Stan" in The Conversation...? "This is an ill context to be alive." (March 31) So said Dave Chappelle tonight, on The Majority Report with Janeane Garofalo, on the new Air America liberal radio network. Now that Bob Edwards has gotten the boot, I'm thinking about tuning my dial to 950 AM... On not voting for John Kerry (March 31) At the M20 antiwar march one of the speakers was screaming about how we're not going to let ourselves be hornswoggled into supporting a corporate candidate like John Kerry. Meanwhile, on the Dennis Kucinich email list, despite the fact that Kucinich has yet to endorse Kerry, a few vocal people are complaining that he will... (more here) sign the save bob edwards petition Market research (March 29) You can find out "who you are" according to your zip code at this site. A number of different market segmentation "products" are available, and you can see who you are according to all of them...(more here) Cats and birds (March 29) It's spring, and the cats, when not attempting to sabotage my typing efforts, are sitting in the window looking out at birds and making this funny choked chirping sound they make. Can anyone tell me what cats think they are doing when they make that sound? Are they trying to make a bird call to attract the birds? Are they really really excited but know they should try to be quiet since they'll scare the birds away if they make a noise? Is it a cry of hunger? Perhaps, as soccer devotees, they're taking a chapter out of that playbook and trying to BE the bird. Tell me. Update (4/19): They definitely only do it when the bird makes the sound first. apply for one-year residency at umong sippadhamma, home of "one-day eukabeuk" Books we bought that we didn't realize we already had Last Modified 8/15/04 6:28 PM | Hide Tools |