Best Anonymous Comment Ever

Followed a link from a friend on livejournal and read the comments, and for once it was worth it because I found this, from a point where the discussion was commenting on how 'food policing' was often 'woman policing':

If you read the Bible, it turns out that apparently all the sins of the world were caused by one woman making an inappropriate food choice.

Via Making Light

Close the Washington monument.

So tired of 'War on Terror' bullshit.

By the way, I'm a "domestic extremist"

Signal boosting this: apparently there are rumors that the TSA's sense of listening to people being upset about the new, ineffective, and invasive 'security' techniques is to put 'em on a ... you got it! ... list.

Maybe someday I'll have time and brains to post again, but 'til then, let this bit of fucking outrageousness tide ya over.

This gives me a little moment of optimism

So I have a tag on this blog, if you haven't noticed, of "sixteen tons". Which I use, of course, for ranting about American corporatism and the nature of employment and related subjects like "What do you mean you have a life and can't do overtime?", etc.



Sometimes I see little glimmerings of things that might make me hope that in some future time, I wouldn't need it.

(Class-limited, that is, but it's something for someone, and that's a little better than nothing for nobody.)



No comment beyond that, just a little quickie note.

Running through to drop a link

Ebert's blog: "How do they get to be that way?"

On the painting over the murals of students in that Arizona school.

Right-Wing Irony Oops

This in from The Moderate Voice:

Conservative thinktanker David Frum was fired soon after his criticism of Republican obstructionism over health care reform, with his boss claiming, well, y'know, times are hard.

Turns out a lot of these policy wonks have think tank jobs ... for the health coverage.

Nose to the Grindstone

A friend recently linked to this article, titled 'Why Self-Discipline is Overrated'. Which ... I recognise me in it, despite the fact that I have kind of terrible self-discipline.

Though I certainly internalised the notion that moral rectitude is in part measured by how good one is at knuckling down and doing What Must Be Done.

But one of the things that it reminds me of is the style of "schooling" intended to shape children into good, obedient workers, rather than critical thinkers, innovators, or even well-informed and knowledgeable citizens. Under some bits of the history of school development, none of those things are actual desired goals - which explains why the system stinks at producing them. No, the system is supposed to produce "self-discipline", pretty much.

But the stuff about going to college? Portrait of the blogger as a teenager. And a few other people I know, besides:

Dutiful students may be suffering from what the psychoanalyst Karen Horney famously called the “tyranny of the should” -- to the point that they no longer know what they really want, or who they really are. So it is for teenagers who have mortgaged their present lives to the future: noses to the grindstone, perseverant to a fault, stressed to the max. High school is just preparation for college, and college consists of collecting credentials for whatever comes next. Nothing has any value, or provides any gratification, in itself. These students may be skilled test-takers and grade grubbers and gratification delayers, but they remind us just how mixed the blessing of self-discipline can be.

I was a nerdy kid. I'm still an autodidact, pursuing levels of in-depth knowledge on subjects of interest to me - but of course those subjects fit remarkably poorly into any instructional pattern. I was bad at most of my homework, because - as the article notes - so much of it is utterly pointless, and that much was evident to me from the age of, y'know, seven or so.

But in college? I had no idea what I was doing. I had nebulous goals for the future, none of which were dependent on a degree, but getting a degree was What One Did and An Important Experience, so I tried it. (It didn't work out, but that's neither here nor there; I both know people who, like me, went from "stressed to the max" to "broken" and people who scraped through with a degree they found meaningless aiming them at a life that didn't feel like it went anywhere.) The whole value in college was the "discipline" of it, and the "won't it feel so good when you've accomplished". I had no space for finding the place to learn - and do - what I loved.

I didn't even figure out what I wanted to be doing for something like ten years after I dropped out. Because I didn't have the tools; I just had the discipline thing (and the knowledge that I kind of fail at it).

I think of this now, for two reasons - one, that I'm having a major shitfit about the conservative/discipline approach to living and the way it devalues more spontaneous and intuitive attitudes right now, entirely unrelatedly, and two, because I'm seriously considering how I might want to actually go back to school. And ... what I want is a particular Master's degree. And to get that, I ... need a BA. So I've been trying to find something that I can do, that fits in with my life, that is also work that I love, because if I have to hit this particular hoop, I want to do it for more than the discipline.



(In a fit of irony I'm trying to make sure I get at least a post a month up here despite being profoundly occupied with Little Foot. Discipline! Perseverance!)

Grab Bag

I don't have the time or the brain to write up anything particularly brilliant, so I'm just going to throw out miscellaneous notes in no particular order.

Giving birth has corrected my pregnancy-induced gender dysphoria, which is a tremendous relief. Even the fact that Little Foot is, thus far, exclusively breastfed off my personal boobs does not ping me as being Axiomatically Wrong the way late pregnancy did - I might even go so far to say it doesn't ping at all, but given how awful I was feeling towards the end there I don't know if I have valid space for comparison. I'm not back to previous levels of mostly-able-bodiedness by a long shot -- a four-block round trip walk in the heat (weather.com says 84F!/87 with heat index - that's 30 for you centigrade folks) completely flattened me earlier, my bad hip seizes up in horrifying ways every so often, and I still have stitches in my chassis -- but my body feels more or less like my body again, not this alien lumpy thing that I'm only existing in because I'm stuck there.

Labor and afterwards generalised childcare have convinced me that I need to buy a box of bendy straws to stash under my shrine to Neb.y Set (which is where I keep the rope and other such things stashed), for circumstances in which I might not be able to use my hands when drinking or am stuck in a position in which easy drinking is more complicated. Things one does not expect to learn from newborn care!

I love having the whole family in the same house, even if it's a little crowded and stressy-because-of-people-being-displaced. It's just ... yeah. A good thing. I know it's only temporary, while we're adjusting to Little Foot being no longer wodged into my innards and all, but it's a fantastic thing while it lasts, and I'm enjoying it greatly.

Little Foot herself is doing well. She's regained her birth weight, the pediatrician thinks she's doing great, she's sleeping well, eating well (ow), and generally being professionally adorable. The lion's parents are visiting us now, and they are appropriately smitten. All things are good. At least at the moment, 'cos she's asleep. ;)


A few links:

"How I Lost My Health Insurance at the Hairstylist's" is one of those punch-in-gut stories, and makes me even more enraged by the fact that the public debate has become "How do we get people health insurance" rather than "How do we get people health care". I wrote a ranty, impassioned letter to the White House about it. Gods know if it'll make any difference. But damnit.

"The Terrible Bargain We Have Regretfully Struck" is not an expression of my own experience, but it's an expression that needs to be heard. And, as pointed out over and over in the comments, it is an expression of my experience -- just in different adjective combinatorics. The rules are the same.

"An Open Letter to John C. Wright", meanwhile, is a lovely bit of response to a truly obnoxious homophobe. It is cheering, and also funny, and I think I need to buy one of this man's books because he deserves to have money aimed in his direction, so I have added that to my to-do list for books.

Intersecting Works of Fiction

I had commented to a friend of mine a while back that the Star Trek: Rebooted movie had reawakened my long-lapsed Trekkieness. (I went to Star Trek conventions when I was in high school, level of Trekkie. Wrote some fanfic, too, though mostly because the people I was hanging out with did. I didn't like the right characters, though, heh.)

She gave me this link yesterday, and that is fucking fantastic. One of those things that suddenly cleans up the goggles, as was said in the comments - talking about the importance of the romance subplot in Rebooted. And I'd been already outraged by the people who talked about Uhura as a token girlfriend, as if she hadn't been the linchpin of the entire possibility of resolving the movie plotline in a manner of appropriate heroism, as if she hadn't been clearly the pursuer and not the pursuee or woman-who-melts-suddenly-when-confronted-with-the-asshole-turned-hero. But that post reveals a big, big piece of something I missed, and I loves it forever for making me a little tiny bit wiser.


That being said, racist fail in another SF media project:

The Avatar live-action is an inexcusable debacle.

And here's a really sharp visual representation of why.

Seriously, when Heroes does a better job on race issues (Heroes of the "Have we gone an episode without killing off a woman or a POC?" fame, in which it rather takes after its pulp superhero comics origin perhaps a bit too well) than you, well, that's ... unspeakably ... I'm out of words here, someone hand me a cue card.

Especially when starting with a show that had a rich Asian cultural background, stuff like "We want you to dress in traditional cultural ethnic attire. If you're Korean, wear a kimono. If you're from Belgium, wear lederhosen" from the casting director? Casting calls for "Caucasian or other" on POC characters?


And, so Rebooted doesn't feel entirely left out of the scolding, an open letter to Winona Kirk on the subject of sexism in the Reboot portrayal.

Embracing the Shadow

This was not the post I was expecting to write next for the Pagan Values Month blogging thing, but the post I will be linking to is just too beautiful to let slip away.

Both of the religions that I follow have, in places, an aesthetic of duality. There are repeated myths of the siblings or pairs, exact opposites, exact equals; their conflicts, their parallelisms, the fundamental creative tension between the self and the shadow, however one defines the self, however one defines the shadow. The thing that comes closest to expressing this in common consciousness is the yin-yang symbol: the two shapes curling around each other, each having a spot of the other at its core, the essentiality of both of them.

What does it mean to be in a world in which one's opposite is one's beloved brother, in which love and conflict build the glorious?

Hold that thought.

I will now take a turn into the ridiculous and talk about this past season of American Idol. And in the end, when this thought embraces its shadow, it will achieve the sublime.

I'm not much of a reality TV person - I'm not much of a TV person at all, let alone specific manifestations thereof - but my family wound up watching much of the end of this season of American Idol. There is a whole cultural thing tangled up around this, but our household attachment to the drama orbited around the three figures who were the final three contestants left standing. We talked about musical skill, we talked about impressions, we talked about what we liked and did not like about the voices of the performers, and we talked about the nature of the contest, the way the judges attempted to skew results to get particular performers to pass to the next week or off the show.

And we were cheered every week one Kris Allen managed to beat expectations, beat the harsh criticisms of the judges, stay on the show despite having someone we felt had an inferior voice and a far inferior attitude consistently pimped as a superior singer. Adam Lambert's progress was almost a given, so his continued victories were simply a sign that the world was functioning as it ought, but Kris Allen's progress was another story, one with actual dramatic tension, pitting him primarily against Danny Gokey, the other 'Christian contestant' and obvious judge favorite.

And the narrative in some circles was not the music, it was the package the music came in. Here's the big story: the flamboyant, theatrical gothling who was, in a phrase I saw recently, born fabulous, but whose unmistakable vocal brilliance and skills overcame whatever reticence some might have about his outrageousness; the down-to-earth Christian performer with a traditional relationship background. But which one of the latter?

In the end, it was Kris Allen.

And now I direct you to An Unapproved Road and a post titled We Get To Carry Each Other, from which I will quote (found via The Moderate Voice):

I know next to nothing about Kris Allen’s non-musical life, except that he’s married, he calls himself Christian and he’s done missionary work across the world. I heard about the exchanges among the other contestants that made reference to what is supposedly “godly” and right in relationships, but Kris’s name wasn’t part of that. I don’t know what kind of Christianity he practises, or how he envisions his God. I do know this: he declares himself Christian to the television audience – i.e. to the world; and he freely, publicly, verbally, and especially non-verbally, loves Adam Lambert like a brother.

and

In an interview the day after the finale, Adam departed from the usual breezy soundbytes required of him to emphasize what he felt was most important about the competition -- that the friendship and respect between himself and Kris might be an example for others in transcending difference, for the reward of becoming enriched by it.

Now do you see why I started out talking theology and then started babbling about American Idol?

(Go read that post, by the way. I mean it. It's gorgeous. Read at least some of the comments, too. Like this one.)

Look at the glorious nature of the duality. Look at the one young man, pianist and guitarist and singer-songwriter sort of voice, skilled musician, dedicated Christian; look at the other young man, whose coming out as gay in Rolling Stone isn't so much a revelation as an incidental footnote that he throws out on his way to 'Let me talk about my music.' Look at some of the narratives about the heartland vs. the coasts, culture and counterculture, down home vs. the clubbing scene, modest and self-effacing vs. charisma that can smack ya like a club, all the ways these two young men were supposed to be at each other's throats. One could imagine introducing them, telling each, "This is your Shadow. This is the Other. This is Not Like You."

And we are so readily taught that when there is that division between the two, that they are enemies, that there is hostility: this is the story of heaven and hell. This is not that; that is not this; they are locked in an eternal combat, jaws locked on each other's throats. This is everywhere, in politics (an us-and-them display if ever there was one, these days), in social things, all over the place, this antagonism between Self and Shadow.

But Self and Shadow are reflections off the same divide; that which is other to me is my negative space, the shape of the world that embraces. It can conflict, yes, but it can also twine and reveal the most amazing things, things like the friendship of two young musicians who recognised across that line that their exact differences made them, in the end, exactly alike.

In the tension between Self and Shadow, the world sings.

When Monsters Call Out the Names of Men

I want to be more cheerful now damnit and get the post about being triggered all to hell off the top of the page, so I'm going to do something I've been chewing on for a while. I mentioned to Hope that I had been sort of semi-compiling a set of songs into a playlist of kink expression, and at this point I've put together enough to make a post with, I think. Though I haven't found anything to express my thoughts about bondage, I suspect that's a wee bit tricksy to make it into music readily.... (And the religious intersection is complicated.)

Links in song titles go to YouTube videos. Band-release videos when I can find 'em, stills or weird constructed videos when I can't. I know there are other ways of pointing at music online, but YouTube is the most consistently available I know of. Other links go to prior blog posts about some of those concepts, when I could be arsed digging them up.


"Tonight and the Rest of my Life", Nina Gordon. (Link appears to be a movie trailer, and a slightly different version than the one I have.) Refrain in particular is a lovely description of subspace for me, both in the dreaminess of the rendition and the words themselves.

"Deep as you Go", October Project. Descriptive of deep substate and the altered-consciousness craving that underlies a lot of my kink - as well as some of the risks involved.

"Faster than the Speed of Night", Bonnie Tyler. Can't go without at least acknowledging my switchy bits, and this is the best me-domminess song I've got. And wow, is that an 80s video. And terrible quality. Ah well, the sound is fine. Alas, that the song about what the pretty boy should be doing so lacks in actual pretty boys.

"The Music of the Night", Andrew Lloyd Weber (The Phantom of the Opera). I certainly cannot neglect my first Master.

"Sleepwalkers Dream", Delain. Spiritual content, some, and some more about the experience of the altered consciousness state. In a lot of ways, this one is probably one of the most evocative in the total shape of things for me -- "the truth lies out there".

"Eye of the Storm", the Crüxshadows. The best I've got at the moment for some of the straight-up religious stuff, both in my relationship to Neb.y and in my sacred Work as a submissive partner. If that sounds a bit uppity for the sub, well, that's not my problem. That's still my Work here.

"Nothing Else Matters", specifically the cover by Apocalyptica. Not explaining this one, just enjoy the sensual rendition of Metallica. Never seen a cellist headbang? That's fixable!



And to round us out a bit, a couple of things that didn't quite make it with relevant lyrics quotes:

"Beauty of the Beast", Nightwish

You told I had the eyes of the wolf
Search them and find the beauty of the beast

All of my songs can only be composed of the greatest of pains
Every single verse can only be born of the greatest of wishes

"Sweetness Follows", REM

It's these little things, they can pull you under.
Live your life filled with joy and thunder.

More Linkfarming on the Amazon Thing

The Guardian weighs in. The CBC too.

PNH comments at Making Light.

Commentary on the trolling claims from Bryant at Livejournal.

Creative and angry Amazon users start playing with tags on the current top hits for 'homosexuality'. Others are going through the database tagging disappeared books with 'amazonfail'.

Neil Gaiman's input.

Fandom personality Cleolinda comments. One of her commenters adds some bonus WTF.

A tech blog muses on the exploit, pointing out that it doesn't fit a standard definition of 'glitch' but rather a human-exploitable software file that was exploited by humans.

Why it won't get fixed instantly.

(This post may wind up being updated as more stuff crosses my field of vision. Or it may not.)

Rounds of adds:

On scaling and monopolies.

Broadly speaking, concerns about accessibility to books in the modern era.

The Wild Hunt notes effects on pagan books.

Erynn Laurie continues to express her poor opinion of Amazon, which I am linking because I am coming from a reasonably similar perspective.

Gawker suspects a hacker. Meanwhile, Deanna Zandt comments on how, even if it is a hacker, that doesn't get Amazon off the hook.

Metadata analysis at Dear Author. Definitely read this one!

Another overview post.

The disability community is also affected; given the desexualisation of the disabled, this also deserves a bit of shouting. I would note that I believe Serrano's Whipping Girl, a book about trans issues, was also delisted.

An anonymous Amazon employee claims to have found something. Also, Amazon spokespeople are embarassed.

The NY Times comments on the entire thing.

Heather Corinna is pissed off.

Amazon.Com Works On Improving Its Evil

Because screwing over small publishers using POD wasn't enough, it's now time to target sexuality, and mysteriously, queer sexuality appears to be harder hit than normative sexuality....

Mark Probst noticed and that seems to have sparked a chain of response and miscellaneous commentary about some things only containing Kindle links.

One notes that several books that were previously in the bestseller ranks were vanished by this action.

Affected books include not only things like Heather Has Two Mommies (adult content, you know) but Kate Bornstein's Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws. !!!!

!!!!

!!!!!!!!!

And some other books have been affected as well, apparently, some feminist books, sex and disability .... I can't get over the suicide prevention book, though.


Amazon claims that this is a glitch. As a result of this glitch, whatever may be the case, a search on Amazon for 'homosexuality' is producing results like this (I just checked that screenshot against reality, and it appears to still be the case). Various people are dubious, some with suggestions about what happened there.

This has apparently been going on at some level since February at least.



To be marginally fair, an alternate theory is that Amazon.com has been epically trolled. Though as several commenters point out, that's not necessarily as redeeming as one might hope.


A link collection for those who want to do further investigation.

Forever Proud and Free

AFL-CIO's Richard Trumka speaks on racism to the steelworker's union.

Because all men are brothers wherever men may be
One Union shall unite us forever proud and free
No tyrant shall defeat us, no nation strike us down
All men who toil shall greet us the whole wide world around.

My brothers are all others forever hand in hand
Where chimes the bell of freedom there is my native land
My brother's fears are my fears yellow white or brown
My brother's tears are my tears the whole wide world around.

- Peter, Paul, and Mary, "Because All Men Are Brothers"

Actual post later, just getting back into the swing of things.

Gaming Dog-Whistles

So one of McCain's bloggers called potential Obama voters the D&D set living in their mother's basements, which was, y'know, standard and laughable.

I didn't notice the dog-whistle. WordWeaverLynn at livejournal did, and decodes it for the rest of us.

(Corrected 'McCain' to 'minion'.)

Another INS Murder By Neglect

Hiu Lui Ng. Age 34. Cause of death: cancer, broken spine. Survived by: sister, wife, two sons. Coworker of a friend's husband.

I'm short on pithy commentary, here.

Hormonal Contraception Again

A leaked proposal to redefine hormonal contraception as abortion at the discretion of providers has been making waves.

I don't have the wherewithal to comment right now, so I'll just heads-up the story.

Conservative

One of my deep secrets: I think of myself as conservative.

The problem is, the stuff that gets marked as 'conservative' around here strikes me as anything but, which means I wind up sounding like a left-wing wacko even when my reasoning is fundamentally conservative.

Sometimes this is funny.

Sometimes it makes me awfully sad.

Today I read a post talking about what I mean when I want to call myself 'conservative'.

It's nice not being alone.

Same As It Ever Was

So, Renegade Evolution is a cranky, controversial-in-some-circles porn actress and stripper.

She has been butting heads for a long time with people who seem to want to characterise her as some sort of brainwashed minion who will only harm women everywhere by doing work that she enjoys a great deal. This tends to make her even more cranky.

One of the things that she's wished for for a long time is the opportunity to meet her detractors in an honest debate where they're actually forced to deal with sex workers in the flesh rather than as theoretical abstracts.

It appears that she had that opportunity at last.

Note, should you follow that link, in the comments a statement by one Anthony Kennerson, that begins:

Why do I get the feeling that Sam Berg will get seriously cold feet and attempt to pull out in the end, citing the usual stated policy against debating "pro-porn" activist lest they "legitimize abuse and murder"??

Which turns out to be sort of one of those prophetic things, now, doesn't it? Sam Berg is pulling a "I won't come to your panel if Ren is there", justifying it because Ren lost her temper pretty badly a while back.

The person who's trying to pull this together is trying to talk sense into the senseless.

Meanwhile, anyone who has any reasonable leverage with William and Mary College? Alumni, colleagues, people who can write a good letter? If you could lean on 'em a little, so that maybe one side of the debate won't be coerced into the silence of absence and talked about rather than talked with ....

Seven Potato, Or

So there was a reasonably sane and rational discussion of polygamy/polyamory issues at Scalzi's Whatever. (For the record, I am pretty much in agreement with Scalzi's layout of the issues involved.)

And then someone notes that the bloody FLDS raid is relevant to the general population. And the thread is mostly dead, so it's not really a hijack, and I'm too tired and cranky to start it up again, even if anyone were likely to be listening in the out of sight, out of mind attention span of the blogworld.

Just, the whole damn thing depresses me.

Let's see. In this corner we have a sect of crazy religious schismatics who have decided that patriarchal polygyny is required by their god, and perpetrate it by coercing underage girls into marriages and exiling young teen boys so that they have enough adolescent poontang for the elites (who didn't get kicked out), as well as bonus indoctrination, physical and sexual abuse, and all the stuff that comes of living in a crazed isolationist compound because if someone outside the group notices that they're pulling this shit the gummint will come down on them like a ton of bricks. We have extensive welfare fraud because the marriages have to be kept secret and thus the mothers claim absent father, too, in yet another one of those unintended-consequences fun times.

In this corner we have adults conducting relationships with other adults, under the same circumstances of misogyny and abuse as are present in the ordinary monogamous world (in other words, too damn much anyway, but not bloody mandatory).

Why the fuck am I supposed to be answerable for the behaviours of the fanatics, again? "Dance, monkey, dance; you're weird in a way that might be claimed relevant to this question so explain those people in a way that makes me believe you're not one of them!"

I'm burned out on this shit. I haven't done much poly-activism for years, and I'm burned out on this shit. I'd like to, y'know, point out things like not only is it not legal to marry more than one person, it's a felony to suggest that it might be a nice idea in Michigan, and that sort of thing, if I were doing activist shit, but whenever I poky my head out from under my rock, I keep running into "What about the FLDS?"

What about them? I think they're godawful perpetrators of a system that destroys lives. I think that the criminalisation of polygamy probably makes it worse, because they are driven more thoroughly to hide what they're doing and perpetrate their fraud and abuse in ways that encourage it to get worse and keep any sort of social oversight from being present -- but that falls in with my whole position on "consensual crime". I think Jeffs is a fuckwit and at best a repeated accessory to rape. I think their theology is wacked, that they have a right to believe wacked things, and that their established system of dealing with their batshittery abuses their young people horribly and unforgiveably in criminal ways most of which would still be criminal ways if their marriages were legal.

I think I'm tired of people who abuse children and adolescents being used to shut down or hijack discussions about what adults choose to do with each other.

(The relevance of this point to other discussions kicking around the blogworld is left as an exercise to the reader.)