zoogs
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Posts posted by zoogs
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There's a lot more buzz about his challenger this time around -- I hope that's a good sign. And Ryan has to a much larger degree solidified his own position with respect to Trump, giving less cover for people to tell tell themselves this isn't a referendum on Trump himself.
Yeah, realizing this in the past year or so has made me more upbeat about the Dems' chances. The generic polling numbers have been so positive, actually, but as one astute observer (https://twitter.com/Noahpinion -- can't find the tweet) noted, never underestimate the chances of Democratic voters feeling like they've already won and then staying home and losing.
We have to vote! We can accomplish things by voting! At least we must try -- because as you point out, the size of the margin matters, too.
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2 minutes ago, Moiraine said:
Yes. Just making sure you were paying attention.
Actually, I'm the idiot. I didn't realize the House elections worked that way and thought they were full of crap
That's OK
I only realized this recently, too. It made me wonder how Paul Ryan actually holds onto his position. He has a Democratic challenger this year. Come on, Wisconsin, you can do it. If a purple state can't get rid of Trump's enabler in chief in response to his actions over the past two years, when will we ever stand up to Trump?
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I cannot believe our actual fascination with arming teachers and how they're moving forward with this. Seeing the WH cave to the NRA after signaling a preference for stronger gun control was a toooootallly shocking turn of events.
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I was thinking about this too. The Democrats need to get the senate before Kennedy retires or anyone else retires or dies. The Republicans set a bad precedent with the supreme court by ignoring Obama's nominee. I think the Democrats have to do it to Trump now.
I feel like the only reasonable recourse they have -- should they secure the Senate -- is to demand that Merrick Garland be the next appointment, right a wrong, and call it even. Otherwise, when does this stop? SCOTUS does not serve the whims of the people and there are elections every two years with control of either the Senate, the presidency, or both up for grabs.
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54 minutes ago, Moiraine said:
I got distracted by some idiot replying that all 435 House seats are up for re-election this year.
...that's true, right?
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It's a disorderly White House, full of people who either didn't know or didn't bother to know, or always knew but now find it useful to signal that they care, which they empirically never did.
A recently reported fact about her Senate confirmation, which was I believe one of the closer calls for the Trump administration. The "NO" votes represent an American population 36 million more in number than the "YES" votes, which carried the day. Got to love all these features of our democracy.
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We can reasonably disagree on the article. It is not reasonable to portray "seeing women as something they are already prone to being seen as, too" as the real equality. If it helps to change the subject from women to make the same point: "Progress is finally being able to see Black people on the street as also possibly dangerous criminals."
Making a feminist argument is "mansplaining", but asserting the default, male-oriented perspective as the Actual Feminist position is not? OK. We can disagree, but let's stop getting things this backward. To be clear, I have not and am not accusing you of this term -- you are the one who has brought it up.
The easy headline here is "Met fires prominent conductor James Levine, finding evidence of sexually abusive conduct." You're going through an awful lot of trouble to justify.
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I think maybe a better measure of equality is to recognize how frequently and easily we all fall in the trap of rendering women into provocative attention-seakers with lowbrow ulterior motives compared to men -- and maybe "finally, we have found a woman in this category, too" is like saying "true equality is recognizing that women can also be nothing more than a pretty face with no real talent".
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Case in very much point:
Scare quotes, too.
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It is not such an uncommon thing to have apocryphal legends about family genealogy passed down generation to generation. One thing it certainly is not is Warren's fault. This is right up there with the birther stuff about Obama -- an ugly attack, sadly effective*, and we lose for even engaging in the discussion.
*during all the Obama years I don't think it ever truly sunk in for me just how real the "Kenyan Muslim B. Hussein Obama" stuff was. You hear about it, you see it lampooned almost everywhere, you chuckle about it and then you forget it because after all, look who won the election. Trump winning was a startling jerk to reality. And also, now you don't see it ridiculed in every decent forum because the f'ing President of the United States himself is the guy saying it. Which means not only does he command the prestige of the office with his megaphone, but the respectable outlets fall into the trap of covering the stupid s#!t he says like it's a topic that should be treated with gravitas.
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Lose your soul to own the libs, it's all the rage.
@Moiraine, yeah...I've followed this story only loosely so I don't know many of the details, but my first question here is what made the pursuit of her silence worth $130k. I mean, the guy is almost completely shameless, and it's a fact in which he revels.
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Really good thread from David Roberts here in talking about the lens through which we view every story, in a very default way, and the way it sticks out when it's inverted. A few quotes:
Quote"In these stories, women are bit parts, chapters, passing interactions that shape (or bring down) men. We do this instinctively, subconsciously (yes, even women ... socialization affects us all) ...
"If we valued women as individual human beings, autonomous and freestanding, with their own talents and stories ... we would see this accumulation as an ancient and ongoing tragedy, an enormous squandering of human potential stretched out over generations and generations, still underway as we speak. We would be horrified."
It reminds me when we talk about some scandal-embroiled famous director or whatever and all the talent they had, and the pleas I've read many times before to think instead about the talent we all never got to see because they were silenced, or pushed out, or discouraged from the field because of the harassment they endured.
And speaking of accumulation, take for example the percentage of directors of top movies who are women, it's not high and it's probably a lot lower than you were thinking just now. I remember hearing a couple -- remember that I am a smug, coastal liberal elite who eats soppressata and am surrounded by likewise -- talking about how poor the representation of women onscreen was, how much lower the salaries commanded by female stars. The guy responded, evenly, that this was just the market and what people want to see, and anyway, they needed to be focusing on [whatever work]. Socialization does affect us all, but no, more to the point, it's what the status quo pool of overwhelming male-dominated control of creative production wants to see and assumes everyone else does, too.
Back to the tweet thread, @drvox mentions @rtraister and @JessicaValenti who do a lot of great writing on this subject and are valuable reads/follows to anyone curious.
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Hypothetical, can you be a company that makes custom straight cakes only (which seems to have been the desire)? No more than you could be one that only makes custom designs for non-interracial marriages, I'd say.
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54 minutes ago, RedDenver said:
The debate about the cake owners being allowed to refuse business to someone based on discrimination is clearly against the law. If you're Christian and don't want to do business with people you don't agree with, then don't operate a business. You have the freedom to not have a business. But if you're going to operate a business and have all the legal privileges therein, then you have all the legal responsibilities as well, which includes not being discriminatory.
It's not that clear to me, maybe because I haven't followed the case that closely, but I believe some of the arguments are along the lines of "well, he did offer to sell them cakes, just not personalized wedding cakes unless they are for straight weddings" and "is a for example Mexican tattoo artist obligated to give someone who wants it a tattoo that says 'Mexicans are rapists #MAGA'". The second question seems easy to bat down as not discriminatory. The first one...I don't know, it's less clear, but I do agree with you: if your business includes selling personalized wedding cakes to customers then you should serve everybody.
The really easy solution to this problem is to not be a dick who can't stand the idea of gay love so much that you won't make a gay couple a nice cake for their joyous occasion. I guess the other thing you could do, as alluded to above, is get out of the custom cake business and let it be known that it was the gays or the laws or the liberal activists, or anyone other than yourself, that ruined it for everyone.
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I would amend that slightly: People like Betsy DeVos getting cabinet-level positions is what happens to America when we elect nincompoops like Donald Trump to be President.
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You can find a lot of things very funny if you don't think the people they are punching down matter.
Then again, are victims victims if they aren't white and male?
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Eh, infinitely? I dunno, they're all some range of peas in a pod. It's like this inescapable feature of cable news, I think. The low-hanging fruit always captures most of the attention and drives most of the conversation. Folks like Tucker, to look at it from another view, are very skilled in this area.
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To be fair, I do get a kick out of straight men who really need to go out of their way, however unprompted, to let everyone know they're SO straight.
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I really think it's gonna be Martinez.
Do throw a poll up btw. I just feel like the way coaches are talking, the kind of year it's going to be...there's going to be a lot of opportunity and the new guy will be thirsty for it. I have no dog in this fight, though. It's an interesting offseason for the QB room!
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I really hate to break this to you because I feel like your world can hardly get more shattered, but your attempts at humor really just aren't all that funny.
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When Jon Stewart took down CNN's thoroughly tepid Crossfire, Tucker was one half of their Both Sides.
I've always loved his casually savage takedown of Tucker. "How old are you? 35. And you wear a bowtie."
There are so many thoughtful, intelligent people who could be at the center of the national discourse; something is deeply wrong with us that instead folks like Tucker can do nothing but fall up in spite of their complete mediocrity. When Jon told them, "you're hurting America", there was this hope, so many years ago, that having recognized it we would stop allowing it to continue. Alas...
Incidentally, the reason for this push by Tucker is that it's International Women's Month this month. It's facile and juvenile of him, but it's also no joke at all given his position and his obvious, unfortunate effectiveness in convincing aggrieved, vulnerable men that he's some sort of searing intellectual.
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1 minute ago, Ric Flair said:
People should be entitled to express their views regardless of their race or the color of their skin. And those views don’t carry any special weight based on the color of one’s skin.
This is a good thought; hold onto it.
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Just now, Ric Flair said:
I like gay people, but as a straight man, have no interest in inviting them into my “loving warmth.” ;-)
Unnecessary.
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There are certain folks who think they can claim special victim status and then shout down anyone who disagrees or has a different viewpoint.
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The Term “White Privilege” is Racist
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Sexism - It's a Real Thing
in Politics & Religion
Posted · Edited by zoogs
https://twitter.com/MonstererBunny/status/973388654667272197
Connecting some threads on perspective, film, and the perfectly normal and usually respected valuing of different traits by gender, a Twitter thread:
Particularly good example with the nice compare and contrast:
Lastly the thread gets disconnected somewhere because of just-deleted posts, but obviously it ends in this pleasant exchange. NSFW language warning:
...between a female software engineer and a guy who appears to be unhappy that Trump won, blames it on "feminazi"s such as her, asserts that reasonable and intelligent women hate feminists, and caps it off with the classic suggestion that she's just bitter because she's not getting laid.
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Here is another thread offering some nuanced criticisms of a particular shared quality in some shows which, to be clear, the author nonetheless enjoys (and what else are we going to watch right now, anyway).
I've soured a great deal on the Homer character in recent years and this kind of puts some of my feelings about that in text. Though I kind of feel this extends far beyond cartoons with the whole "bumbling doofus dad / capable tough woman who holds it all together" trope in sitcoms that sometimes gets cited as n example of our culture's woman-revering feminism. It's a reinforcement of the "we suck sometimes, thank you so much for putting up with us" theme that gets mentioned in this thread, and which I feel is less an exercise in self-deprecating humility than it is a hope for things to stay as they are.
Anyway, I'm sorry for posting so much in so many different directions, but I really like this topic and am always finding something. shared or elaborated in an insightful way. Speaking of TV, have any of you watched Covert Affairs? For a CIA spy show I feel it's one that does a much better job than most of either not demonstrating the usual roles, or inverting the trope. Of all the shows I used to watch and have revisited more recently, it's one of the few that is still passing muster.