Every time one rolls around, before it ramps up I think to myself “Surely, this time there will be at least one electable candidate who does not make me vomit with rage and/or/and terror and more rage. Humanity can’t be this fucked up.”
If you’ll excuse me, I’m going back to finding a way to make atmospheric nitrogen burn on its own.
Under the heading of “more people who apparently live in a separate reality than I do”…
Mulling over this post of Tam’s on people whose principles of freedom or noninterference suddenly vanish when it comes to the prospect of not having official state sponsorship in telling others what they may or may not do with themselves, and this post at Blunt Object on the point at which issues get more nakedly paternalistic and about a desire to enshrine contempt for others at the state level rather than a desire to help anyone or anything…
…Brought what had been a relatively modestly sized bee in my bonnet up to a much larger one, because it had come into focus. Specifically, a strain of comment I have been seeing in regards to the Obama administration’s decision to keep the Plan B emergency contraception pill from being available over the counter to anyone who cannot prove they are 17 or over. At one point it was even stated fully word-for-word:
“They want to sell birth control over the counter to teenage girls!”
Here is the moment where our respective realities diverge, because in the one I live in, birth control is sold at the pharmacy counter with no proof of age required, comes in a capitalistically diverse array of competing brands, varieties, and flavors, and is even advertised on television. They’re called condoms and anyone who can throw ‘em in the basket and pass the money over the counter can buy them, and while a few novel other uses for them have been innovated, birth control and safer sex is pretty much what they exist for. I could buy them when I was a teenage girl without an age check, background check, or parental notification required. This fact was relatively uncontroversial at the time and remains so now.
The decision by the administration was defended as concern for the health of young girls, but appears to be purely political given that the nation’s organization of professional medical fretters is baffled about it and the responsible agent of the administration has every bit as much medical expertise as Obama himself does. Since it appears to fly in the face of all actually medical and health-related advising the administration has gotten, we seem to be left with “we can’t sell birth control over the counter to teenage girls!”
Except for the part where we already do, which apparently a substantial portion of Americans have managed to forget.
Ah, but Plan B is special, because it’s only for women, and it’s only for after the deed has already been done because maybe she didn’t have a condom, or it broke, or he lied and said it was on when it wasn’t, or took it off midway, or hell, maybe she was raped. Or, as I’ve seen actually raised as an argument a number of times, maybe she’s a minor being sexually exploited by an adult man!!
….Which, a)A grown man can have sex with a young girl and avoid detection-via-pregnancy-or-pharmacist with a condom, B)What if she’s a minor having sex with another minor, which is vastly more likely, and C)If that’s the case, then how exactly does it make anything any better at all for her if she has no access to emergency contraception after unprotected sex with her predator? She gets pregnant, and HOORAY HE GETS CAUGHT because she had to have an abortion, or had to have the child? That sounds like the best outcome possible for everybody, especially the baby!
Or, let’s get real: Plan B is special because it’s only for women, and it’s apparently much more important that we be able to shame and deny access to girls who’ve already had unprotected sex than it is that we appear to “approve” of it by acknowledging that it is a thing that happens, even with girls under 18. Even though it’s a thing that happens rather an awful lot, to the point of being more normal than not.
You can have all the opinions about the desirability, morality, and supposed never happeningness* in a more enlightened age where we disapproved of everything harder that you want, but that doesn’t- or shouldn’t- impact what we enact as policy to support and improve public health. That’s the goal, not disapproving of people it makes you feel good to disapprove of, not structuring our health system so it appears to condone or frown on the “right” things.
What’s really at stake here isn’t some tepid argument on whether it’s okay for women or girls to have a sexuality, it’s the unwanted children that result from unwanted births. They’re not punishments or devices to teach someone or other to “have some responsibility”, they’re little people who have absolutely no control over their circumstances.
*Which is bullshit, but the higher number of teens who had sex and got pregnant in 1950, also got married. But that’s more okay because married is always good no matter how young, unprepared, or actively unsuitable for each other you are, especially if there’s a helpless dependent in the equation!
Easy. We’re above all that.
(click for big)
From the “Inbox that we check shamefully infrequently” files, a question about this study and how legit it is. Asked, answered.
The title of the article: “Researchers find poop-throwing by chimps is a sign of intelligence”. We can just dispense with that right there and wonder if the reporter felt any twinge of shame, or merely glee, at crafting that headline.
Content of study: Researchers did brain scans of chimps that threw stuff a lot versus those that did so less often, also tracking how often they actually hit what they were aiming at, and found that chimps that did more throwing showed more development in an area of the cortex had more development in the areas associated with motor functions, and also with Broca’s area, which is associated with speech in humans. The researchers in question go on to speculate that throwing stuff has more to do with communication than anything else, and that getting really good at throwing stuff might have supported our progression to speech as hominids.
Credibility of study: Middling to low. The journal it’s published in is not all that high-profile in primate circles, and doesn’t seem to be getting much buzz or traction in primate circles.
My major reaction to this thing is that it’s kind of an odd approach and an odd reaction to take from that data. It’s been known for a long time that motor functions and language functions are very tied up, neurologically speaking, and that the circuitry we have for observing actions and learning from observation seem to be tied up with motor functions; if you’ve ever heard of mirror neurons, they’re neurons that fire both when we perform an action, and when we see someone else perform that same action, as though we’d done it ourselves. These neurons were first discovered in monkeys, seem to also exist in humans, and occur for us in Broca’s area and in other primates in the area where Broca’s would be if their brains were but bigger and more developed. Broca’s area is where language seems to live.
We know that motor functions, our ability to imagine doing things, our ability to articulate doing things, and our ability to imagine another’s perspective are all tied up in Broca’s and in these motor neurons, but we don’t really know a whole lot more than that barring various tentative stabs. One general idea that has at least some traction is that speech and language in general are an exaptation- a repurposing by evolution of a structure meant to do one thing, into another thing- of very fine motor control, since the hardware required to make our hands and limbs do very precise things seems to be the same hardware that lets our lips, tongues, and vocal chords do other very precise things for the purpose of communication.
In light of this, taking from this data the idea that throwing things is specifically related to communication, and that throwing things is primarily communication, is rather odd. Certainly throwing behavior is something that humans are really good at and seems to be a uniquely human skill- but so are a lot of other things that seem to be dominated by very fine motor control. Chimps are crap at it, even if some chimps are slightly less crap relative to other chimps at it. A human can combine speed, power, and control into a 80 mph fastball that goes straight through a strike zone from sixty feet away; a chimp is fairly lucky to hit a target from six feet away.
From this angle, a chimp who can throw things better being also a chimp who communicates better don’t look like a statement on throwing things, they look like a statement on that same fine motor control- two consequences of the same developmental advantage, rather than one driving the other. It’s just easier to test a chimp’s throwing abilities than their writing abilities.
Sorry for the intermittent free ice cream. We’ve been long on busy and rather short on inspiration. In fact that last part hasn’t really changed, which is why I’m leaping on Peter’s meme like a starving otter on a sardine.
Seems NPR is helping some dude promote his book on “cult movies” by putting out a list of the top 100, which is one of those things that’s always guaranteed to get a large portion of the internet, including this one, devoting energy to a topic they normally care about somewhere below the level of “favorite breakfast meat” but above “best brand of toothpaste”.
I’m a little more generous with the definition of “cult movie” than Peter is- I don’t think it has to be good, or even technically qualify as a story, I just think it has to be something that, for whatever reasons, never gained mainstream popularity but did gain enough of a tiny niche with enough people that it still gets watched years or decades after it was made.
List below, what I’ve seen bolded, with comments italicized where I have ‘em.
2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick, 1968 I’ve seen it twice, and neither time was I able to successfully stay awake the whole time. One of the most majestically boring movies ever made.
Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988 It was relevant in 1988, it’s relevant if you’re interested in the history of anime, much better things to do with your time have been made since.
Angel of Vengeance, Abel Ferrara, 1981
Bad Taste, Peter Jackson, 1987 Worth watching once if you like Peter Jackson. Dead Alive is almost the same movie, only good.
Baise-moi, Virginie Despentes, Coralie Trinh Thi, 2000
Begotten, E. Elias Merhige, 1991
Behind the Green Door, Artie Mitchell, Jim Mitchell, 1972 I’ve watched a lot of classic porn, but not this one. Couldn’t be bothered.
La belle et la bête, Jean Cocteau, 1946
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Russ Meyer, 1970
The Big Lebowski, Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, 1998 The Coen brothers are hit or miss for me. This was a hair-parting miss, though it had some priceless lines.
Blade Runner, Ridley Scott, 1982 I rate it as moderately diverting and worth watching at least twice to figure out what the fuck is going on. Stingray likes it a lot more than me.
Blue Sunshine, Jeff Lieberman, 1978
Brazil, Terry Gilliam, 1985
Bride of Frankenstein, James Whale, 1935
The Brood, David Cronenberg, 1979
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene, 1920
Café Flesh, Stephen Sayadian, 1982
Cannibal Holocaust, Ruggero Deodato, 1979
Casablanca, Michael Curtiz, 1942
Un chien andalou, Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí,1928
Coffy, Jack Hill, 1973
Daughters of Darkness, Harry Kümel, 1971
Dawn of the Dead, George A. Romero, 1978 Seminal to the zombie genre. Brilliant for its time. Romero hasn’t really had anything new to say since, though the remake was a good remake.
Deadly Weapons, Doris Wishman, 1974
Debbie Does Dallas, Jim Clark, 1978 Modern porn doesn’t have anywhere near this much of a sense of fun anymore, which I find really sad.
Deep Red, Dario Argento, 1975 I haven’t watched this specific one, but the thing about Dario Argento is you either like him and should see absolutely everything he’s made, or hate him and only see one thing. Sadly I saw two.
Dirty Dancing, Emile Ardolino, 1987
Django, Sergio Corbucci, 1966
Donnie Darko, Richard Kelly, 2001 This is one of those things I always really mean to see and always wind up more or less concluding I don’t actually need to.
Don’t Torture a Duckling, Lucio Fulci, 1972 It’s in our Netflix queue. Close enough?
Edward Scissorhands, Tim Burton, 1990 Tim Burton tries to do John Waters. Mixed results.
Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, Aristide Massaccesi, 1977
Emmanuelle, Just Jaeckin, 1974
Enter the Dragon, Robert Clouse, 1973 Every Bruce Lee movie is the same movie, but this is probably the best of them. Everyone should watch something with Bruce Lee just to see near-complete physical perfection achieved by fanatical and creative training.
Eraserhead, David Lynch, 1977 One third of it, before we concluded paying for a headache wasn’t worth being able to say we’d seen David Lynch’s issues with women and pregnancy at full length.
The Evil Dead, Sam Raimi, 1981 The next two were better, but the first is Raimi proving a point and rather effectively at that.
Fight Club, David Fincher, 1999 I can actually say I saw this one in the theater at midnight before anyone knew how big a hit it was going to be. Fun times, and it holds up surprisingly well.
Flaming Creatures, Jack Smith, 1963
Freak Orlando, Ulrike Ottinger, 1981
Freaks, Tod Browning, 1932 Good movie. Pity it essentially destroyed Browning’s career.
Ginger Snaps, John Fawcett, 2000 Part of. I was a self-absorbed angsty teenage girl for too long to particularly enjoy watching a re-enactment with werewolves.
The Gods Must Be Crazy, Jamie Uys, 1981 No, but I want to. In fact I think I’ll check to see if any of our streaming movie services have it tonight.
Godzilla, Ishirô Honda, 1954 It’s a big rubber monster. Sort of interesting strictly as watching Japan work out its issues onscreen, until that kept going for twenty years.
The Harder They Come, Perry Henzell, 1972
Harold and Maude, Hal Ashby, 1971 Part of. Combine the dullness of Space Odyssey with the angst of Ginger Snaps and there you have it.
Häxan, Benjamin Christensen, 1922
Hellraiser, Clive Barker, 1987 It’s very pretty. If you try to make sense of it you will go insane. Is that meta, for horror movies?
The Holy Mountain, Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1973
The House with the Laughing Windows, Pupi Avati, 1976
I Walked with a Zombie, Jacques Tourneur, 1943
Ichi the Killer, Takashi Miike, 2001 In the Netflix queue. We’ve seen Audition by the same director and it was terrifying.
In Bruges, Martin McDonagh, 2008
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Don Siegel, 1956
Invocation of My Demon Brother, Kenneth Anger, 1969
It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra, 1946
The Killer, John Woo, 1989
Lady Terminator, H. Tjut Djalil, 1988
The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson, 2001–3 The first two. I understand they are a wonderful adaptation of Tolkien’s world and works. I don’t like Tolkien. Also, why is this “cult”? It was massively popular!
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, George Miller, 1981 Was there any doubt? As violently nonsensical as the first one, but with better set pieces.
Man Bites Dog, Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, Benoît Poelvoorde, 1992
Manos, the Hands of Fate, Harold P. Warren, 1966 Through the Mystery Science Theater filter. It wasn’t enough.
The Masque of the Red Death, Roger Corman, 1964
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, 1975 Just to be contrarian, I will not quote it. At all.
Near Dark, Kathryn Bigelow, 1987
Nekromantik, Jörg Buttgereit, 1987
Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero, 1968 This scared the piss out of suburban America when it was aired. Now, not so much.
Pink Flamingos, John Waters, 1972 No, but I’ve enjoyed other Waters when he wasn’t working out his issues quite so pressingly.
Piranha, Joe Dante, 1978
Plan 9 from Outer Space, Ed Wood, Jr, 1959
Re-Animator, Stuart Gordon, 1985 Good movie. Incredibly vile in places, but a good movie.
Reefer Madness, Louis Gasnier, 1936 Yes, but I can barely remember any of it, and no, not for the obvious reason. This one is so nonsensical you don’t need chemical help to be disoriented.
Repo Man, Alex Cox, 1984
Ringu, Hideo Nakata, 1998 Only the American remake. I really ought to see the original.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Jim Sharman, 1975 Yes, and I want those hours of my life back. I think this one is only fun with the audience participation.
Rome Armed to the Teeth, Umberto Lenzi, 1976
The Room, Tommy Wiseau, 2003 I’ve seen parts of it. There aren’t enough drugs in the world to make me think seeing all of it unfiltered is a good idea.
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975
She Killed in Ecstasy, Jesús Franco, 1971
Showgirls, Paul Verhoeven, 1995
Soul Vengeance, Jamaa Fanaka, 1975
The Sound of Music, Robert Wise, 1965
Star Wars, George Lucas, 1977–2005 Yes and I hated it. AGAIN HOW ARE THESE CULT MOVIES? Being science fiction or fantasy does not automatically make a movie cult!
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, Todd Haynes, 1988
Suspiria, Dario Argento, 1977 This is one of the Argentos I saw. Whether you like it depends on whether the imagery is so captivating for you you don’t care if it makes any sense or not.
Tank Girl, Rachel Talalay, 1995 Seen it, have it on DVD. Like it a lot. Even though it, also, makes no sense. To enjoy this one you have to like 90s comics and Lori Petty.
Tetsuo, Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Tobe Hooper, 1974
This Is Spınal Tap, Rob Reiner, 1984 No, but I’ve seen most of the mockumentaries it inspired.
Thriller: A Cruel Picture, Bo Arne Vibenius, 1974
Thundercrack!, Curt McDowell, 1975
El Topo, Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1970
The Toxic Avenger, Michael Herz, Lloyd Kaufman, 1984 Troma films are love/hate. This is probably the best of them. I did not love it.
Two-Lane Blacktop, Monte Hellman, 1971
Two Thousand Maniacs!, Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1964 No, but I saw the Wes Craven remake, which was actually kinda good for what it was.
The Vanishing, George Sluizer, 1988
Videodrome, David Cronenberg, 1983
The Warriors, Walter Hill, 1979 Have the DVD, even. Stingray likes it more than me. It’s kind of like being on cough syrup without the syrup, and prettier.
Witchfinder General, Michael Reeves, 1968
Withnail & I, Bruce Robinson, 1987
The Wizard of Oz, Victor Fleming, 1939 When I was a very small girl. It’s actually a pretty damn scary movie to show a little kid. Return to Oz is much worse, and why the fucking Disney channel aired it as a kids’ movie is a mystery to me. Actually, why isn’t Return on this list? It’s got a much better claim to being a cult movie than some of these.
Why Bad Taste and not Dead Alive? Same director and they’re both obscure, but Dead Alive is a vastly better movie. Why so much Italian horror but no Devil’s Backbone or Orphanage, del Toro before he hit popularity in the states? Why Ichi and not Audition? Why don’t I see any of the Korean cult hits on here- no Old Boy or Tale of Two Sisters?
And thus, NPR gets me to react exactly as I am supposed to to lists like these.
Your turn.
The Center For Marriage Policy explains, in an essay that is kind of like going to a water park after being dosed with LSD, why same-sex marriage isn’t actually about same-sex relationships but is in fact about transforming America into a dystopian Hell in which women form breeding colonies for the purpose of extracting money from men in order to fund being a breeding colony, which men are helpless to prevent because they have no idea where babies come from.
If you think I’m exaggerating, you need to read the thing.
Fisking it would be kind of like trying to calmly and thoroughly debunk the Time Cube, so I’m going to give you some choice excerpts instead. Or maybe it will turn into a fisk, because that’s what it wants to do as I’m going after it with my cut and paste tools. Only time and my supply of blood glucose and headache medicine will tell.
Here is where the rabbit hole starts, which is apparently what happens when a feminist talking to feminists has her transmission received by someone who lives in another dimension:
Same-sex marriage has been the foremost long-term goal of the National Organization for Women (NOW) since January 1988 when feminist leader Sheila Cronin issued this mandate to feminists: “The simple fact is that every woman must be willing to be identified as a lesbian to be fully feminist.”
Now, those of us who live in this dimension have some broad familiarity with the feminist movement and its history understand the context here: that feminism in general and NOW in particular has a history of conflict about whether to welcome lesbians into their ranks and include lesbian issues among feminist issues, or to treat them as politically radioactive. This was a serious divide and a very bitter issue for years. In this context, and the context of “being a woman who is not Donna Reed”- in which being dismissed as just some angry lesbo who wants to do away with men entirely is a very common epithet hurled- what Cronin is saying is that feminists must be able to shrug off “lesbian” when used as an attack, because it shouldn’t matter and it’s going to happen anyway.
Apparently, when crossing the boundary of the Phantom Zone, what she says comes out as this:
Her message was clear. You do not have to be a lesbian, but you must support our transformative political marriage agenda or you are not a feminist.
That’s a pretty good trick for a statement that didn’t even include the word “marriage”!
Forget the adjectives “same sex” and “gay” as prepends to marriage. These are victim-based marketing ploys invented by NOW to send us off into a heated debate about homosexuality and equal rights – distracting us from seeing their real goal of establishing “feminist marriage.”
The only similarity here to the actual quote he uses as evidence of the feminist marriage agenda is that both of them include the word “feminist”. At a stroke we’ve dispensed with homosexuality not only as an issue, but as a thing that exists.
I’m also sure gay men will love to know that their existence, struggle for acceptance, and desire to formalize their relationships are somehow a side effect of a campaign by the National Organization for Women to achieve… well. I’ll let him explain.
Feminists made feminist marriage their top long-term goal twenty-five years ago and invested tremendous resources in it, because they intend to convert marriage into a feminist-controlled government enterprise and subordinate the rest of America to fund it.
Feminist marriage is structurally designed to destroy equality. It establishes three classes of marriage, each with vastly different reproductive, social, and economic rights and protections under Constitutional law.
The fun part is he keeps using the word Constitutional, that’s the title and ostensible premise of the post- that same-sex marriage is unconstitutional- but it takes him two thirds of the essay to explain what part, and he is apparently reading from a document other than the Constitution of the United States. But, then again, when you’re going to entirely invent an agenda for your enemy, details of which bit of their plan to blow up the moon for the forces of Mithras conflict with the law are pretty trivial.
Feminist marriage is a three-way contract between two women and government. Most women will have children, and few women can afford or will go to the extreme of using artificial insemination to achieve pregnancy. Government is the automatic third party collecting “child support” entitlements for children born in these marriages.
Children will be born of extramarital affairs backed by welfare guarantees and child support entitlements. Feminist marriages are automatically entitled with many tax-free, governmental income sources for having children.
You heard it from the Center For Marriage Policy first, folks. The actual goal of NOW and of feminism in general is to stay at home having as many babies as possible while in a marital partnership with another woman for some reason.
Betty Friedan would be so surprised.
Feminist marriage is a marriage between any two women and the welfare state. It constitutes a powerful feminist takeover of marriage by government, and places the NOW in the position of dictating government policy as a matter of “feminist Constitutional rights.”
How is child support a government income as opposed to one half the upkeep of a kid? How is it actually necessary to marry, let alone marry someone of the same sex, in order to have babies, receive welfare benefits, or receive child support? Isn’t this just a rehash of traditional complaints about the welfare state, about whom a social conservative complaint was that the people involved weren’t getting married? What do women get out of this, since most of their money and time no matter where it came from would be going to childcare? What *wet popping sound, gentle rain of splattering brains*
Back in a minute, folks.
Feminist marriage will be far more attractive to women than heterosexual marriage. Sexual orientation does not matter when two women marry and become “married room-mates.” They can still have as many boyfriends as they want and capture the richest ones for baby-daddies by “forgetting” to use their invisible forms of birth control. On average, a feminist marriage will have at least four income sources, two of them tax-free, plus backup welfare entitlements.
So, people don’t want to marry people of the same sex because they want to have sex with them or love them, they want to do it because… because… women would really rather have strictly sexual arrangements, not long-term love or romantic partnership of any kind, because this is trivially obvious somehow, I’m sure. As is the reason why they would need to be married to have a female roommate and have babies out of wedlock.
Of course, the answer to why the author would think this is depressing: because women are innately evil, and love doesn’t exist.
Also, the only forms of birth control are hormonal contraceptives, and men do not know where babies come from.
Can anyone else figure out how “four incomes” works out when the welfare entitlements are “backup”? Are these women working while having a million babies and collecting so much child support it apparently counts as an extra income? Where the hell are they getting their childcare? Paying for it with the child support?
Heterosexual marriage: Traditional marriages between men and women will continue, but be subrogated to feminist marriage and socio-economically dis-incentivized. Those in traditional marriages will pay taxes that will be used to support feminist marriages where child support or welfare cannot be recouped, as occurs in our existing welfare state. Traditional marriages have only two income sources, neither of them entitled or tax-free. Over time, many women will prefer “feminist marriage” because of the very substantial economic and sexual liberation advantages. Heterosexual marriage will be heavily burdened by costly marriage penalties, and be comparatively unattractive to women.
Man/woman marriages will be penalized because taxes on them will be levied from the Department of My Ass to subsidize families with two incomes. Unlike now, marriages will suffer tax penalties, whose reasoning could not be extracted from even the Department of My Ass. They will die out because, again, love does not exist and no one wants to raise a kid with their actual partner, what are you, high? Kids are income generators, not net sinks!
Male-Male marriages: Marriages between two men are destined to be the “marital underclass.” In most cases, these men will become unconsenting “fathers.” Women in feminist marriages will not mention they are not using birth control. Men in male-male marriages will be forced to pay child support to women in feminist marriages and become economically enslaved to these women. The taxpayer will be forced to pay for child support some men cannot afford to pay, as occurs in our existing welfare state.
So, men will marry other men because… because… hey author, why WOULD men marry each other?
Male-male marriages cannot reproduce naturally (a primary factor in Constitutional case law). They can acquire children only by artificial means, and at great expense, by adoption or renting a womb. Most men in these marriages will still have regular sexual encounters with women. Some men in these “marriages” will want to have children. These men will have even more illegitimate children with women in (or contemplating) feminist marriages, most often without informed reproductive consent. Over time, reproductive fraud will become the norm in the United States.
Well it’s not because they’re gay, because gay people are a thing NOW invented, and apparently all they do is screw women and induce pregnancies absolutely no one reasonable could have predicted. In fact, even if the guy wants kids, he is somehow still unwittingly forced into fathering them because… that’s how it works!
In the Center For Marriage Policy dimension, men are apparently extremely stupid.
Also, a huge amount of Constitutional law is concerned with the capacity to reproduce, as demonstrated by… by… god dammit, not even a memo from the Department of Ass.
The longitudinal impact of feminist marriage on reproductive and marital choices of unmarried individuals will be profound. Women who are presently welfare beneficiaries will be propelled to marry each other, leaving unmarried men already sidelined by the welfare state machinery doubly disenfranchised. Women who are not married can enter the welfare state by having a child out of wedlock, and then double their entitlements by marrying another woman on welfare.
So, unmarried men who in the CMP dimension never, ever are with their children are doubly disenfranchised by losing part of their income to support the care of their child, which they would be doing anyway if they did have their children. Also women who are recieving support to go to the care of their child gain a whole extra income by marrying another woman supporting a child.
MATH DOES NOT WORK THIS WAY!
I argue that the structure of feminist marriage, after a full review of its inseparable interlocking interaction with existing federal and state welfare law, is unconstitutional on its face.
The vast majority of women in feminist marriages will bear children out of wedlock, making government the automatic, statutory third party in such marriages with naturally conceived children.
BUT CHILD SUPPORT COMES FROM THE OTHER KID’S PARENT, NOT THE GOVERNMENT. In any way you slice it, both parents pay money, care, and both, and they qualify for welfare benefits if they still don’t have enough to support the kid.
Again: in what possible way is having kids “out of wedlock” while married to another woman different from having them out of wedlock period? *wet popping sound*
This is getting tough to clean.
Feminist marriage directly violates 14th Amendment protection against sex discrimination, and the 5th Amendment is violated at the Federal level.
Here is the text of the 14th amendment: “Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.
Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
It doesn’t mention sex. At the time it was enacted, it didn’t even give women the right to vote, let alone outlaw “sex discrimination”. The only thing in the Constitution that would have was the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, which was never enacted.
Here is the text of the fifth amendment: “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
So either a)He thinks paying for a portion of the upkeep of a kid you fathered as determined by the courts as necessary for the kid is rape and slavery by women and government, or b)Like the fourteenth amendment, the fifth amendment in his dimension is nothing like our earth fifth amendment.
Under the Constitution, the law cannot accept a structure of three-party marriage establishing an arrangement of government-sponsored economic polygamy as a protected, superior class of marriage under any rational-basis test. Secondly, the law cannot accept any marital arrangement that establishes three classes of marriage, where the classes are crisply defined and either rewarded or discriminated against based on the natural reproductive capacity of one sex.
Except THE ENTIRE STRUCTURE IS SOMETHING HE MADE UP BASED ON SOMETHING HE HEARD ABOUT FEMINISTS AND HOW CHILD SUPPORT THROUGH A TIN CAN ATTACHED TO A WAX STRING.
There’s more of this, but I can’t go on; it’s all “and once the Eggplant King invades, we will all be forced to wear potatoes in our britches because the Constitution says so”. Finish it if you will, but we’ve covered the premises he’s based the rest of his opium dream on and frankly my walls can’t take any more brain matter.
Enjoy if you will.
By way of Peter through what was apparently Michael Z. Williamson’s Facebook page, a bit of visual snark:
Now, what I want to talk about is only tangentially related to the point Peter set out to make, and I have no idea what the context of Williamson’s post looked like, but I still think it makes for something interesting to write about, so.
Whether we’re talking about Pattinson in Twilight or Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic or Justin Bieber, guys: don’t worry about these dudes. Don’t worry that they’re not what you’d want to be or want your son or any other guy to be. They’re not for you, and they’re not for your son or any other man. They’re for women, and mostly for younger women and outright girls at that. The modern equivalent of Clint Eastwood in the sixties and seventies isn’t Robert Pattinson, it’s Daniel Craig or Jason Statham. The equivalent of Robert Pattinson forty to fifty years ago isn’t Clint Eastwood, it’s David Cassidy or any of the Monkees. You find them unappealing and vaguely horrifying because they’re NOT what men hopefully imagine themselves to be, or want to be. No man wants to be Cassidy or Pattinson unless the prospect of an endless sea of women in a berserk lust is so appealing they’ll do anything, no matter how degrading*. They’re not a male fantasy at all, nor were they ever designed to be by the people who made and marketed their careers: they’re a sexual female fantasy.
There’s a concept out there you’ll sometimes see referred to in those circles what wonk on about media and gender issues, which is called male gaze. The image above, and especially related issues that are more explicitly about how “gay” people like Pattinson and Beiber are, summarizes male gaze perfectly: it’s the idea that the default viewer, of anything, is a straight man. The only way you can take someone pretty who’s made their entire career off selling their image and body to women is “gay” is if you implicitly assume that whoever is taking them in and enjoying them and paying for them is, well, male, because that’s what consumers of media are.
Media is in the business of selling fantasies, and not all fantasies are for everyone. Hollywood and other entertainment media still mostly go by the default rules of male gaze, so most male characters aimed to sell a fantasy are male power fantasies- what men themselves would like to be themselves. Accordingly, most female characters are primarily constructed around male sexual fantasies- what they’d like to have from a desirable prop in their lives. The older James Bond movies are a pretty pure illustration of this; we’ve got James Bond, who is cool and smart and powerful and brilliant and has every gadget in the world- power fantasy- and any Bond girl, who have names like Pussy Galore. A woman may enjoy media like this (I often do, when it’s not blatantly misogynistic as well as simply centered around male gaze), but it’s not for her, not in the sense of being a fantasy designed for her.
Women have consumer dollars to spend too, so there is also a smaller, but very defined, market for media entirely constructed around female gaze. Twilight is pure female gaze, and all the male characters are constructed as female sexual fantasy the same way that the Bond girls are male sexual fantasy. At first just about all female-gaze products were this kind of fantasy, but as more female writers broke out of the pure dungeon of the romance novel, female power fantasies akin to the male power fantasies started to appear as well**; the “urban supernatural” genre is heavily dominated by female authors, female gaze, and female fantasies, and True Blood would be an excellent example of a piece of media that is mostly if not entirely defined by female gaze- the characters and plotlines are a mix of female sexual fantasy and female power fantasy.
The two assumed points of view and sold fantasies aren’t necessarily kept in their own separate ghettos; female action stars and characters are very often an attempt to combine female power fantasy with male sexual fantasy. (See: anything Joss Whedon has ever done, ever. The lead character in Resident Evil. Most female comic book characters that actually do anything.) The counterpart, male power fantasy and female sexual fantasy, is a bit rarer and usually much more subdued on the female sexual fantasy front, but if the lead character of an action movie always seems to find a way to lose his shirt and has seemingly gratuitous sensitive moments, it’s likely he’s at least a little of this. The lines here get pretty blurry, but if I had to pick examples again, I’d say most James Bond movies are pure male power fantasy, and the Indiana Jones movies are mostly male power with a dose of female sexual mixed in. Indy spends an awful lot of time shirtless, the camera treats Harrison Ford’s body lovingly, and he doesn’t shoot his girlfriends even when they deserve it.
This Shortpacked! cartoon is a pretty good distillation of the divide between male and female gaze and power fantasies versus sexual fantasies. Comic art, by its nature, tends to give away very quickly who it’s by and who it’s meant for. Rob Liefeld: all male power fantasy, male sexual fantasy, all the time. Shoujou***: all female power and sex fantasy, all the time. The Justice League animated series is an interesting example that, even judging by the art alone, seems to be about power fantasy for both sexes with sexual for both taking a backseat but present role; the character designs are exaggerated (the burlier male characters all seem to have shoulders that are about six feet wide), but instead of having their breasts and butts exaggerated as is standard for American superhero comic art, they’re exaggerated in the same way the men are- wide shoulders, big upper arms, smaller hips. Nobody’s bust is bigger than her shoulders are. The women (mostly) have more revealing costumes than the men, but it’s hard to tell how much is to be sexually appealing and how much is simply the legacy of their original character designs in earlier comics- and the male models have some concessions to female gaze as well.
Neither Twilight men nor Bond girls represent anything approaching realism or really even healthy fantasy, but they are what they are and they don’t exist to make the gender they’re not made for, comfortable, or to model anything for them except by collateral damage, as it were. The more explicit they get and the more they descend into the realm of pure fantasy and its rules, the more they tend to make the gender they’re stylizing deeply uncomfortable, precisely because being a pure object is an uncomfortable position to be in. When these types actually have the chance to become dangerous is when few or no alternative, aspirational fantasies are available- when a kid would be in a position to think the sexual fantasies of the opposite sex are the only available aspiration. This is why a dearth of female power fantasy characters that aren’t equally or even moreso male sexual fantasies is a problem, and while it would be if the reverse were true, I don’t think that’s the situation we have today so much as simply some prominent male characters (and I would argue people like Bieber are as much characters as anything) who are straight up female sexual fantasy. This is not to say there isn’t some deeply problematic stuff in it, or in some of the material sold to men and boys as power fantasies- just that I don’t think the risk of men and boys thinking Edward the Sparklepire is a model meant for them to emulate is one of those issues. As with most pure fantasy, the biggest risk for both sexes with the material aimed at them is in coming to believe it has anything much to do with reality.
Or, South Park can talk about it…
*Footnote for men of my generation: Did you want to be a Backstreet Boy or a member of N’Sync when you grew up? Even though all the girls your age were wild for them? No? I thought not.
**This is not to say that aspirational fantasy fiction aimed squarely at women is modern; explicit power fantasies are much moreso. Much of what Jane Austen wrote is aspirational and sexual fantasy for women.
**Okay, maybe not quite entirely all, but going into the details unpacking cultural, gender, and marketing issues there would take a longer post of its own. Suffice to say shoujou anime and manga is still built primarily around female gaze and has its own art style for good reason.
Because everyone loves puppy pictures.
This is the most current picture I have ready to hand of him. As you can see, he’s in the one-ear-up, one-ear-down phase of lethal cuteness, which I expect to last another few days at most. The other one is already making efforts to stand up when he’s outside and doing the most listening to the world around him. If you want a factoid, the cartilage in the base of his ears is stiffening, and this is what’s underpinning them; the more he chews on stuff (and he is a puppy, chewing on stuff is what he does), the more this hastens the process along. Dogs and breeds with floppy ears just don’t get the extra cartilage; dogs with three-quarter tip or tulip ears like collies get stiffened cartilage that only goes up partway.
He’s Kang’s son, and sometimes it shows. He has her bonelessness when he’s tired (I’m convinced his pelvis and most of the bones in his legs disappear to some other dimension when he’s ready for a nap), and also wants to be cuddled like her when he’s tired but not ready to just curl up and nap. He’ll take all the play the big dogs can give him and dish it back, though Kang herself can get so intense I need to intervene before he loses his little puppy mind completely.
He’s growing up. He’s still got a fair amount of puppyish fluff, but I noticed last weekend that his plush puppy coat was shedding, and now when I pet him I can feel the beginnings of longer, stiffer hairs across his shoulders and down the line of his back. He’s also already losing his baby-duck attraction to always following on the heels of one of the rest of the pack and starting to develop more ability to be by himself and to refuse things, which is a little bit sad as I had come to enjoy my tiny cream-colored shadow. I’m not looking forward to my soft puppy turning into an obnoxious adolescent, but at least reliable housebreaking will come with that.
He’s a smart little bugger. He’s worked out that when he’s inside, what we want him to be doing is to be lying down on a dog bed with a toy occupying himself. A few times now when he reads the handwriting on the wall and realizes we’re going to put him in his crate, he’s bolted for the nearest bed, grabbed a toy, and flung himself into a down position, then locked eyes with us once we catch up to see what we’ll do. It’s a ploy to be allowed to stay up. Kang did this when she was a puppy too- but not until she was much older. He is not reliable yet, but he at least knows sit, down, swipe (wave his paw- in-joke), come, growl, and leave it. The growl is an invitation to play, but it’s quite deep and fierce for such a young puppy. If he holds onto that one it’d scare the pants off anyone who didn’t know that- not that we’re in the habit of making people afraid of an already destined-to-be large and intimidating dog without a good reason…
Speaking of, we think he’s going to be huge. He’s already a solid 45 pounds at three months, barrel-chested and with ankles and hocks like a baby horse’s. I’d bet money on him hitting at least a lean 120 as a fully mature adult, and Stingray thinks it’s going to be more like 130. His co-breeder has asked if she can show him, but two intact dogs of opposite sex under this roof aren’t going to happen, and we haven’t firmly decided Kang is never being bred again yet.
He isn’t *entirely* his mother’s son. (Or we wouldn’t have kept him, one of Kang is quite enough.) He’s a lot more thoughtful than she is; while he has her confidence, he spends much more time looking before leaping and is just generally much less impulsive. He’s also more focused- he has a puppy’s typical short attention span, but once something really catches his interest he’ll spend much more time exploring it before he decides he’s done. We didn’t have any pics like the one above of Kang until she was seven or eight months old- he’s also learned how to settle himself down much faster than she did. As I type this he’s napping in the corner, something she wasn’t able to do outside a crate until she was nearly a year old. He’s also more reserved- he’s very sweet with his people, but unlike her he is much less interested in strangers.
He doesn’t have her prey drive, either. He notices birds and animals but doesn’t care much; the one time he managed to accidentally flush some quail, he flailed in shock, fell into a bush, and needed to be rescued. We do think he will be much guardier, though- even this young his first instinct when faced with something strange and scary is to square up to it, puff his chest, and bark. (And then quickly check behind him for backup. He’s still a baby, and not a stupid one.)
His sister, by the by, is now living in Arizona with a very nice family with two boys. She is a small bleached copy of Kang, and as such is a complete little diva and absolutely loving being the superstar in her new home. Co-breeder may yet convince them to let her show that pup, so she may get her wish for a show dog out of this litter after all.
Michelle Bachmann vs. Iowa high school student.
The student wanted to put Bachmann on the spot on her position on gays, and asked rather bluntly why same-sex couples couldn’t marry. Bachmann’s answer was threefold (at least, on pressing, as the student was trying pretty hard to get an answer with a minimum of weaseling):
1. Gay people can marry people of the opposite sex, which is the same right everyone has.
2. Because that’s not the law.
3. Gay people are wrong to demand “special” rights that ordinary straight Americans don’t have. Presumably in this case the right to marry someone of the same sex. “Because of their sex practices.”
Okay then.
This line of argument galls me, to put it mildly. Not because she opposes same-sex marriage, though her position is definitely not one I share, but because of how fundamentally fucking weaselly and dishonest it is. It’s also, in my view, extremely disrespectful to marriage itself.
1. “Gay people can marry people of the opposite sex, therefore they have equal marriage rights” is missing the point so hard it can’t be pictured as anything but flinging yourself to the floor in order to make sure you do. The point of marriage on the civil level is a simplified universally recognized contract legally binding you to someone you share your life with on a level large enough that they need to be capable of making decisions for you in an emergency, be able to inherit or otherwise deal with property held jointly, and so forth. Being capable of forming a contractual partnership with someone random you have no interest in sharing your life with great intimacy with isn’t something anyone wants, gay or straight. Marriage rights isn’t about being capable of somehow getting married, it’s about being capable of marrying your partner. (Or for that matter, partners.)
2. Michelle, you’re running for president. The entire point of having a platform of issues is predicated on the idea that you have some sort of influence on legislation. Saying your position is that same-sex couples can’t marry because that’s not the law is like applying for head chef at a restaurant and saying you can’t make lamb chops because they’re not on the menu.
3. a)Refer to point one. b)Fuck you. c)This is why I say it’s profoundly disrespectful to marriage itself. Marriage is not just about sex; if it were, we’d get married and divorced every time we went through a new partner. No actual relationship with another human being that goes on beyond coitus is just about sex; in the case of relationships people want to formalize in a marriage partnership, your partner’s involvement in your life is nearly universally pervasive to all aspects of it.
I realize that a lot of people can’t get beyond “homosexuality is a behavior, specifically the behavior where you do something that I find personally disgusting” and pretend that gayness is solely about that and it has no other ramifications that should ever impact anyone else ever, but that doesn’t make it real or true, just a sort of willfully privileged blindness.
If you oppose same-sex marriage because you don’t think same-sex relationships are valid or because God disapproves (or both at once) or just because you think gay people are gross, just fucking say so. Depending on which poll you’re going by, slightly less or slightly more than half of America agrees with you. It’s still enough to be political poison for a candidate of either major party to advocate for it, so it’s not as though you’re a tiny and persecuted minority opinion. Just don’t fucking spit on marriage by standing there insisting that it’s all about the right to sign a piece of paper to be bound to someone random, and not your beloved life partner, and wanting to be married to that person is something only an unreasonable pervert would demand because they think what they do in the bedroom makes them special.
If you’re going to oppose something, fucking oppose it, don’t play semantic games with it. If the notion of having your opinions and positions accurately described is terrifying, you don’t belong in the big chair or any other political office, anywhere.
