Atomic Nerds

Dick Durbin says Jesse Jackson has a responsibility to update the public on his health

No he doesn’t.

Jonathan Krohn says being criticized by conservatives is bullying

If having your political opponents say mean things about you is just like being bullied in high school at 13 you should probably try to find a job other than “political pundit”.

Probe Eyes Paterno’s Preference For Handling Problems Internally

Most poorly thought out headline EVER.

More hospitalized in Spain’s running of the bulls

Panicked cattle in city streets are dangerous, film at eleven.

Is optimism really good for you?

Not if you’re feeling optimistic about jogging with angry livestock.

Russia mourns flood victims, local officials blamed

Thus proving globalization is truly a reality.

Oh Chuck Norris No.

Synopsis: Chuck Norris has managed to notice that James Turley, on the board of the Boy Scouts of America, has announced he will “work from within” to try and change the BSA’s no-gays policy. Chuck Norris has also managed to notice that the Obama administration has been moderately friendlier to gay people than those previous. He wants us to ask ourselves, at great and exhaustive length, if it is a coincidence that James Turley and the Obama administration both don’t hate homos. There are seventeen “is it a coincidences” in there in all, relating to the strange conspiracy that is their mutual lack of anti-gay sentiment and the fact that Turley is, apparently, a rich Democrat.

No, it’s not a coincidence, Chuck, it’s called having similar politics and it doesn’t require a motherfucking White House conspiracy, gifts, bribes, or favors. Contrary to whatever bubble of Barrens Chat you may currently dwell in, being against no-gays-allowed policies is a pretty common political stance now, among many people to the left of Rick Perry and even a few scattered folks on the right. If anything gay-rights advocates feel Obama has been REALLY squishy on that issue when he didn’t really need to be for his own political survival; the Obama white house isn’t exactly in the pocket of that particular lobby, and has plodded along just in the wake of the leading edge of public opinion like any well-trained weathervane. And the Boy Scouts, while they may ban atheists, agnostics, and gay folk, do not ban liberals or moderates.

My own general position is that the BSA should stop fucking around and choose whether it wants to stand on its principles as a private organization to ban whomever they choose (and maybe at the same time stop accepting multimillions of taxpayer dollars’ worth in federal and local public funding and favors- on principle), or act like the public organization they often function as and open their admissions to all boys in America. I’d like it a lot if that latter happened; my husband was a Scout and so was my brother, who made Eagle, and I genuinely believe they’re an overall force for good for boys in this country. But it’s not my organization, and I’m not on the board. Turley is.

And if you believe his position as such is so radical it requires back-scratching and favors under the table from the White House to explain, you truly have lost touch with America.

So it seems recently a Michigan representative got thrown off the floor for using language too salty for the sensibilities of the House.

The offending word was “vagina”. No, seriously. The one that gets, like, a couple of titters when it’s used in health class in front of schoolchildren. The actual anatomical term for that part of a woman’s reproductive anatomy that is surrounded by the vulva and terminates at the cervix, through which penises and semen enter and babies exit some time later. This is not a slangy nickname, let alone an offensive slangy nickname like “cunt” or “gash”, it’s the actual proper term for the body part.

The context for this entire episode was a speech given by Rep. Lisa Brown in opposition to a proposed bill that would, among other things, ban all abortions after 20 weeks. In the course of a longer speech pointing out among other things that anyone who would institute a flat ban on abortions after 20 weeks has not really thought through some of the medical realities of pregnancy, she concluded:

And finally, Mr. Speaker, I’m flattered that you’re all so interested in my vagina, but ‘no’ means ‘no.’

OK. Unquestionably a barb, a goad if you will, perhaps even an insult that might not have been appropriate*, but politics isn’t a tea ceremony. There are rough edges and thrown elbows and in days of yore the occasional savage beatdown. The roughness and occasional crudeness of politics was in fact advanced in days gone by as an argument for why women shouldn’t be allowed to participate, and not in the sense that they were going to frighten the men.

Lest you think I’m exaggerating and she was just thrown off for some sort of “no directly insulting the Speaker, also shut up my god you’re annoying” reason, here is a quote from one of the other representatives:

“‘What she said was offensive,” said Rep. Mike Callton, R-Nashville. ‘It was so offensive, I don’t even want to say it in front of women. I would not say that in mixed company.’

I see.

A glance at his campaign biography indicates that Mike Callton is married, to a woman, and has children, which means that unless a paternity test is failed somewhere down the road that Mike Callton must have interacted with a vagina at some point after his birth, in front of a woman no less. (This also brings to mind the horrifying question of what Mike thinks an appropriate term for the place he must have put his penis at least once is. My imagination is unhelpfully volunteering “vajajay.”)

His Wikipedia page reveals the rather more mind-bending factoid that Mike Callton has a biology degree, which I have difficulty imagining he obtained without ever learning what the proper anatomical term for the bit of a mammal that leads up to the uterus and opens to the world is.

There is, of course, always the depressing option that he thinks vaginas are inherently dirty things that must never be mentioned even in front of people who have to endure the burden of owning one, of course.

Either way, I feel fairly certain that if he, or any other member of the House, is unable to hear the word “vagina” or contemplate its existence without a fainting couch, they sure as fuck should not be allowed to write legislation affecting them.

*It wins over exactly no opponents but the stripe of pro-lifer who appears to be under the impression that women carry babies around in little suitcases under their dresses and not inside their bodies, which can get pretty full-contact gruesome even when nothing is technically all that wrong and the baby is fine, let alone when it is and it’s not, is pretty irritating.

ETA: Actually, two female representatives were barred from the floor, one of which wasn’t told why. Both women were trying to introduce an amendment to the legislation expanding the proposed new regulations on abortion to vasectomy. If trying to make a point through bill edits and amendments is somehow considered unnecessary roughness in legislature, it must be a very, very new development.

So tired. My sinuses objected most strenuously to the steep changes in altitude during allergy season, plus starting the new regime as soon as I started to feel better have wiped me out.

So instead go read Farmgirl on the subject of open vs. concealed carry, or rather opinionating on the matter. She said pretty much what I would have.

So President Obama has gone ahead and come out in support of same-sex marriage.

One would think I’d be pleased about this, since I’m also in favor, but I’m not especially. I AM pleased that it is possible to have a sitting President who is in favor, and view that as positive progress.

You could characterize my overall lack of other forms of pleasedness as personal distaste for Obama, which is probably not entirely untrue, but I note that a lot of same-sex marriage advocates have had pretty much exactly the same reaction as I have: that this is a nakedly opportunistic political calculation in an election year, and not a statement of intent or meaningful support.

Basically, it goes like this: liberals saw him as tepid in his support of gay rights, conservatives saw him as secretly supporting gay marriage no matter what he said, and moderates saw him as a waffler. He had nothing left politically to gain from maintaining a pretense of opposing it, and the political math was better to look like he was taking a firm position of some kind given that the people who’d be legitimately put off by it are mostly lost causes at this point, whereas younger voters who see gay rights as their generation’s civil rights struggle would be very much energized.

Having someone who is secretly in favor of your side of an issue is exactly like having someone who doesn’t support it. Having someone who is now in favor of your issue but supports the states deciding it (as he was careful to qualify) is having someone who supports the status quo. While it’s nice he’s not going to actively roll back progress made, it’s not exactly helpful either. Even to the extent that being publicly out in favor is nice for generating support/enthusiasm, it would have been a hell of a lot more useful BEFORE North Carolina decided to write a ban on even so much as the possibility of civil unions or domestic-partner benefits into its constitution.

Having someone powerful in your corner who’ll do exactly as much to help you as his aides calculate is politically beneficial is not that much of a warm fuzzy feeling.

So President Obama has gone ahead and come out in support of same-sex marriage.

One would think I’d be pleased about this, since I’m also in favor, but I’m not especially. I AM pleased that it is possible to have a sitting President who is in favor, and view that as positive progress.

You could characterize my overall lack of other forms of pleasedness as personal distaste for Obama, which is probably not entirely untrue, but I note that a lot of same-sex marriage advocates have had pretty much exactly the same reaction as I have: that this is a nakedly opportunistic political calculation in an election year, and not a statement of intent or meaningful support.

Basically, it goes like this: liberals saw him as tepid in his support of gay rights, conservatives saw him as secretly supporting gay marriage no matter what he said, and moderates saw him as a waffler. He had nothing left politically to gain from maintaining a pretense of opposing it, and the political math was better to look like he was taking a firm position of some kind given that the people who’d be legitimately put off by it are mostly lost causes at this point, whereas younger voters who see gay rights as their generation’s civil rights struggle would be very much energized.

Having someone who is secretly in favor of your side of an issue is exactly like having someone who doesn’t support it. Having someone who is now in favor of your issue but supports the states deciding it (as he was careful to qualify) is having someone who supports the status quo. While it’s nice he’s not going to actively roll back progress made, it’s not exactly helpful either. Even to the extent that being publicly out in favor is nice for generating support/enthusiasm, it would have been a hell of a lot more useful BEFORE North Carolina decided to write a ban on even so much as the possibility of civil unions or domestic-partner benefits into its constitution.

Having someone powerful in your corner who’ll do exactly as much to help you as his aides calculate is politically beneficial is not that much of a warm fuzzy feeling.

One of the better of several available screeds pointing out that the “People’s Rights” amendment would pretty much exist to give the government the ability to summarily muzzle, sue, or disband any entity larger and more profitable than a garden party that it disapproved of.

I feel others more qualified than I have done a perfectly fine job of presenting the idea that a)This is what it would effectively do, and b)This would be a very bad thing, bad far out of proportion to the ills it’s meant to address.

What I would like to note is on the subject of the entities this particular broad stroke is no doubt aimed at: lobbying groups, PACs, special interest groups, all conglomerations of persons whose business is to bother legislators and the public at large in the name of their particular goal: I am glad that they exist and I wish them continued existence.

There are a large number of issues, policies, and subjects in general that I care about, and I do not have anything like the time or energy to pay attention to all of them all at once. I don’t have the time or energy to pay attention and due diligence to any one them, in fact. I am downright pleased as punch that there exist groups whose paying jobs and reason for existence revolve around professionally caring about things that I do and exerting influence on people who have a direct relationship with these issues.

This system is not without its large and systemic flaws. Groups who represent the interest of majorities wield more force than those who represent minorities; they suffer profoundly from principal-agent problems; they sometimes “represent” me in ways I truly wish they would not; they pursue goals I consider irrelevant or actively counter-productive; they blow issues that are not of particularly critical relevance out of proportion in election cycles; they are a primary contributing agent to how legislation winds up bloated, byzantine, and full of irrelevancies.

There’s also the fact that people I consider my sworn ideological foes have access to exactly the same processes and have their own leviathan lobbying platforms, but I consider this acceptable. My only wish is that they be more self-evidently stupid or hateful more often, not that anyone have the power to make them go away.

But, without the professional issue-obsessers and interest-pushers, my- and every other individual with those various enumerated rights we’re supposedly being protected by such a bill- influence over the actual process of creating policy relevant to various issues we care about dwindles to effectively zero. There’s this blog, which doesn’t stay on a single topic for more than a day or two, and there’s the standard letter to the congresscritter, which the critters mostly don’t read, and that’s about it. The remaining source of influence dwindles to the government and whoever happens to be immediately buddies with the people in it, which takes the fundamental problem of said government having an extraordinarily narrow and blinkered perspective on the country and the world in general and makes their isolation total. (Remember, media corporations would get their rights stripped, too.)

It’s a terrible voice, but it beats the hell out of no voice.

Via commenter BH, an Atlantic article arguing that everyone has missed the point of Makode Linde’s “brilliant” golliwog cake.

The article does go into some detail missing from the original reporting on it, the important bits of which were a) The culture minister and her entourage had no clue what she’d be walking into other than that it was purportedly about female genital mutilation, and b) the minister had been under media fire previously for supposedly being pro-censorship of art, or at least heavily critical of “provocative” art. So yes, it was basically a setup meant to put a politician in a no-win scenario, which banked on her going along with it, which was a pretty good bet.

It also argues that it was actually a brilliant piece of art whose point was to demonstrate Sweden’s disconnect from the reality of Africa and Africans and illustrate the alienness of the experience of being black or African in Sweden. The article concludes:

There’s no doubt that Adelsohn-Liljeroth and the many Swedes involved in campaigning against FGM seem to be kind-hearted, noble-minded people who oppose racism and would like to help the victims of female genital mutilation. Linde, even if he has corralled them all into a disastrous photo op that could even cost Adelsohn-Liljeroth her job (it shouldn’t), probably doesn’t mean to embarrass them personally so much as draw attention to the subtle racial politics of Sweden’s popular conceptions of FGM and Africans generally. That’s not an easy thing to explain to people in words, but a screaming cake seems to have done it.

To which I would reply: no it didn’t. If it had, neither the Atlantic article nor the Africa Is A Country article explaining it would need to exist.

For one thing, that’s not what Linde said it was supposed to do at any point, and as the artist one presumes he would know. (His statements on the cake have been mostly semicoherent and range from LOL I TROLL U to “you’re just not sophisticated enough to understand”, and reinforce the “performance artist as unrepentant and undirected attention whore” impression.)

For another, if your art needs to come with a lengthy explanation of what exactly it’s supposed to express, it has essentially failed as art. Guernica doesn’t need to come with a “war is horrible” pamphlet in order to understand the painting, although if you’re unschooled in art history you’ll probably wonder what the point of having everyone’s features squashed on one half of their face is*. Even if you don’t know it was painted during the Spanish Civil War in the aftermath of a bombing, the idea that it’s about senseless suffering and chaos comes through just fine on its own. It’s not standard representational art, but it’s not enigmatic either.

Not all art is even meant to express something other than “pretty!”, or for that matter “ugly!”. It doesn’t necessarily need to. But when it IS meant to express a particular thing, it’s on the artist to make sure their point is even possible to take from the result, much as it’s on the writer to communicate their ideas efficiently and not on the reader to possess advanced detective skills to find it. Dumb audience members who aren’t going to get it and probably don’t want it exist, but when almost the entire world can’t find the expressed idea, that’s not on the audience as a failure, it’s on the artist.

It’s entirely possible that all that’s being expressed is that it’s possible to make really racist images and have people go along with them as long as you manipulate them in the correct ways, and then deduce that what makes this possible to accomplish is a meeting in Swedish culture of norms of avoiding conflict with the abstractedness of Africa and Africans to most Swedes. But I really do not think that makes the cake, or the artist, brilliant. Upsetting people by being blantly offensive not a high-order skill, and sadly neither is manipulating politicians who are feeling public opinion pressure.

At the end of the day it’s still just a really offensive cake.

*The point of cubism is to show all perspectives from one point of view. That’s pretty much the entirety of it.

So, I saw this link mentioning a racist cake, and went “It’s a cake, it cannot be THAT bad”, and then I clicked on the link, and I scrolled down to the picture, and I went “HOLY FUCK!”

Now, there’s a debate in the comments over whether the cake can really be racist, since the artist is black (that’s his head serving as the cake’s head). I feel ill equipped to decide the question, beyond noting

a)It’s in such incredibly bad taste that “is it racist” is kind of a semantic decision when it comes to accurately describing its overall wrongness

b)Given that all other examples of the artist’s artwork I can find are of various permutations of old, incredibly racist blackface parody, it’s safe to say he has Issues and a bunch of them are old National Geographics with naked Africans…

I want to know how many people looked at this idea before it was implemented, and thought it was a good idea to carry though. How many people had to sign off on “Yes, let’s have an appearance by the Minister of Culture in which she cuts into a cake that is a representation of every single hideous European stereotype of Africans ever, plus also it will be screaming and crying and begging for mercy. Let’s also make sure we get a nice photograph of her winning smile as she cuts into it and feeds a bit of itself back to it.”, and go “yes, this will be hip, edgy, artistic, and above all cultural“. Bonus points if someone caught the Hottentot Venus reference and thought THAT was a really good idea.

I’m sure at this point the Swedish Minister of Culture is muttering to herself something along the lines of “God damn, my country had an African colony for about fifteen minutes in the seventeenth century, why am *I* getting this shit”, but… given the sheer self-evidentness of the bad idea, I don’t have a ton of sympathy.

Trolling the interwebs for content, which is an activity much akin to stirring bogholes with a stick, I came across an article title that inspired a “You really have to ASK?!!” reaction in me: Rick Santorum: What Went Wrong?

No few of the respondents had about the same reaction I did, which was that the reason for Santorum’s dropping out of the race was self-evidently contained within his campaign and within Rick Santorum in general, but a lot more chalked it up to having less money than Romney, having somehow failed the timing on the early races, not getting enough media attention, incorrect humors, or whatever other reasons than that only a minority of even Republican voters found him palatable.

Santorum’s campaign in general, and most especially what I saw in his supporters, struck me as yet another case of election-year Just Exactly Like Me Syndrome. This malady can occur at all times of year, but never attains its full flowering at any other time than election year. The most susceptible victims are those who have been living under opposition party power for a few years.

The central disorder of JELMS, from which all symptoms flow, is the idea that the vast majority of Americans are just exactly like the afflicted voter or candidate, with all clear and inarguable deviations representing lunatic fringes or tiny minorities that the “real Americans” dislike and automatically dismiss as irrelevant. The problems, priorities, and perspective of the average American, who obviously represents a clear majority, are assumed to be functionally identical to the JELMS carrier, so that objections to positions or statements of the candidates in question must obviously be trivial because they don’t really impact the JELMS carrier. Since they are not his problems, they are not really problems, or aren’t important problems but rather trivial special-interest gadfly issues. If they are sufficiently oppositional objections, clearly the objector represents the JELMS carrier’s idea of everything that is wrong with America that real Americans are fighting tooth and nail against. In that case, they may not only be dismissed, but active vilification is encouraged. Sandra Fluke and Joe the Plumber should get together for a beer sometime.

Class issues are common plagues of the JELMS-afflicted, since essentially all political candidates and most of the people who make a living commenting on political issues or have the time to lustily follow them share a perspective that has certain luxuries attached to it. Whether it’s talking as though all Americans have the capability to welcome and support as many children as come along within a family (often while simultaneously demonizing the “culture of dependency” welfare brings), or attempting to empathize with difficulties obtaining enough arugula while simultaneously lecturing Americans for their eating choices (without realizing that “fattening” food is often interchangeable with cheap food), speculating about the racial overtones of pickup trucks, or attempting to draw derogatory comparisons between one candidate’s level of extreme wealth in comparison to one’s own, no matter which side of the aisle it comes from, the JELMS sufferer manages to reliably alienate while assuming that it won’t matter to the people he’s alienating because, as it is not a big deal to him, it obviously won’t be to them.

Other common symptoms of JELMS:

- When managing to alienate sections of a different group in numbers large enough to show up in the polls, the discussion within camp is framed as that group being stupid and easily manipulated by the opposition.

- When asked by a perceived in-group member why candidate is not concerned about (issue they believe to be important), the answer received boils down to, from the candidate’s perspective, the issue is not important and some other issue more important to them should be discussed instead.

- Candidate’s perseverating on issues supporters have vaguely realized aren’t highly important to a majority of voters is framed as “messaging trouble” rather than a major disconnect.

- Successes are credited to the “just exactly like me” assumption being fundamentally correct rather than compared against the weaknesses of the competition.

- The successes of the opposition in past years are credited to having deluded the real American majority as opposed to having offered (and even sometimes given) them something they wanted.

- Mockery of the NJLM outsiders fliply phrased in class, race, gender, and other “outsider” pejoratives, with no apparent consciousness of alienating people who might be something other than a tiny and deeply entrenched oppositional minority.

JELMS is bipartisan and equally likely to occur on both sides of the political divide, though its most serious carriers are usually found within the party out of power. This makes it all the more difficult to highlight the perils of the problem, since by the time the dust in an election settles multiple different carriers on both sides probably had the opportunity to do plenty of damage that will not be recognized as such.