“Two years ago today, I opened my front door to see a SWAT team standing there.”
Author: Ophelia Benson
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The cardinal tripped and fell below the standards
Cardinal Keith O’Brien, after saying “I never!!” for several days, has given a delicate admission that he was sexually…well he doesn’t say exactly, apart from admitting that it wasn’t quite the done thing. Well he’s a Catholic priest, and a high-ranking one, you can’t expect him to just come right out and say he fucked goats or had affairs with slabs of liver or raped children in the confessional.
Cardinal Keith O’Brien, formerly Britain’s most senior Roman Catholic cleric, today admitted his sexual conduct had “fallen beneath the standards expected of me”.
The Northern Ireland-born cleric stepped down from his post as Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh last month, a day after three priests and one former priest made allegations of “inappropriate” behaviour against him.
After initially denying the allegations, the cardinal last night admitted sexual wrongdoing for the first time, as he asked forgiveness for those he had “offended”.
Lots of squeamish wording there, as the Indy’s scare-quotes hint, and no particulars at all. Inappropriate is it. Hmm. He announced he had a hard-on in the middle of Mass? He played with himself while telling the nuns what to do? He plastered his office with photos of sheep?
And then the apology to those he “offended” is rich. “Sorry for raping you in the bum, little Johnny, hope you weren’t too offended.”
Last night Mr O’Brien, 74, said: “I will now spend the rest of my life in retirement. I will play no further part in the public life of the Catholic Church in Scotland.”
Until the allegations last month, the cardinal had been outspoken on issues including euthanasia and abortion, and had described gay marriage as a “grotesque subversion”.
Yeeeah, that’s how that works. He can marry chickens, but gay marriage is grotesque. One law for me, a totally other kind of law for thee. Now get the fuck off my santified lawn.
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Another “resistance movement”
The Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser does not welcome the “Vaccine Resistance Movement” on campus. It has issued a statement to say so.
FHS disavows any support or affiliation with Vaccine Resistance Movement
The Faculty of Health Sciences (FHS) was surprised to learn that SFU has rented space to the “Vaccine Resistance Movement” for their Summit 2013 at the Harbour Centre Campus. Renting space to outside organizations for events such as these is done without any academic oversight. FHS disavows any support or affiliation with this event which we believe to be anti-science and contrary to good public health practice. We are deeply concerned that the public will perceive the SFU venue as legitimation of the dangerous misinformation that the Vaccine Resistance Movement is known for. Please accept our sincere apologies for the inappropriate use of SFU facilities to promote this event.
That is forthright. Well said.
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One particular kind of harassment is “just a joke”
Catching up. This is from way back in January but I didn’t get to it then. It’s a post on the Ms blog about online harassment of women and what men can do about it, by Ben Atherton-Zeman.
He starts by saying that women get more online harassment than men do.
Racists harass people online; so do homophobes. Most people agree this is harassment. But my gender’s online harassment of women seems to go unquestioned, even defended, in most circles. Yet men’s online abuse of women has been well-documented by women such as Laurie Penney, Jennifer Pozner, Emily May and many other women.
“The sad part is that it works,” says feminist blogger Soraya Chemaly. “I have spoken to many, many women writers who ‘tone down’ their voices or stop writing entirely as a result of threats. … I mean, who wants to wake up in the morning to ‘Stupid cunt’ or ‘I’ll go from house to house shooting women like you.’”
…
Chemaly adds, “The point of the harassment, like harassment on the street, is to make the public sphere seem dangerous and to portray women as provoking a violent response through their actions.”
Pozner agrees. “It’s about the policing of women … using threats to keep us silent.”
And there isn’t much reaction, except from the targets themselves. There isn’t a great deal of blogger solidarity or human solidarity or progressive/liberal solidarity with women who are targets of harassment. That’s changing – some of that change happening right here, with you guys setting the example – but it’s slow.
But most men have remained silent, as we do with many forms of our gender’s violence against women. Many of us blame the victim, suggesting things women can do differently to ameliorate the problem. We tell women to grow a thicker skin, not to “feed the trolls” and not to assume all men feel that way.
Like Vacula. Ben A-Z missed something there: that suggesting things women can do differently to ameliorate the problem is not just victim-blaming, it’s also helping the harassers and telling the women to change what they do in order to appease people who are harassing them. It’s saying “if those harassers are harassing you for speaking out then you should stop speaking out.” It’s treating harassers like weather or a steep mountain, rather than as human beings who can decide how to treat people.
Think of the labor movement. Think of union organizing and strikes. The labor movement often encountered violence from the owners and the goon and scabs they hired. Progressives and liberals didn’t advise union organizers to stop organizing in order to avoid the violence; they did everything they could to expose the violence and to stand with those on the receiving end.
Men’s online abuse results in women hesitating to write, stopping writing altogether and fearing for their physical safety. Many women have told me that such abuse doesn’t just happen when women are writing about feminism, it happens to them all the time. Amy Davis Roth blogged about atheism and was subjected to daily harassment as a result. Roth described a “typical day” as “Wake up. Make coffee. Block hateful messages on Twitter or other social media … Make art.”
All the time. Once it starts, it doesn’t stop. Harassment becomes a career for some people (who promptly accuse the objects of the harassment who write about the harassment of “doing it for the hits”). It gets so non-stop and so obsessive that you can find two adults spending an entire hour doing a podcast to discuss a few comments that A Target made on a Facebook post. No really. I know that sounds incredible, but it’s true. Two adults, plus three callers. An entire hour. A few comments. By one person. On a Facebook post. “Dramatic reading”; discussion; more discussion; more discussion. For an hour.
Ben A-Z has some suggestions for what men can do to help.
1. Listen to women’s experience of online abuse and threats by men. Let us read articles about it – the ones linked here are a good place to start. Instead of suggesting solutions, we can take in how hurtful the comments are.
4. When men harass women online, speak up. We can say something like, “As a man, your harassing comment offends me,” in the Comments sections. Say how it hurts you rather than speaking on behalf of the target.
5. Name the specific silencing tactic being used: name-calling, focusing on a woman’s appearance instead of her argument, etc.
7. Watch for “professional trolls” from the “Men’s Rights” or “Father’s Rights” groups. They will often use terms such as “misandry” and refer to the feminist movement as anti-male or the domestic violence movement as an “industry.”
8. Send supportive emails, letters, candygrams, etc. to feminist women. Thank them for the good work they are doing–not just when they are targets of online harassment, but all the time. “If you see someone doing good work, you can be sure they’re being told they’re fat and ugly,” says Emily May. “Nice emails counterbalance the noise.”
Good advices. You peeps are already doing them. Change is happening but my god it is slow.
Speaking of that, though – Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker signed Adam Lee’s petition a few days ago. That’s good. That’s very good.
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Who was that masked pineapple?
By the way, that whole pineapple thing? Mayhew’s witty “Pineapple go home!” on Facebook, Vacula’s witty repetition of “Pineapple go home!” farther down the thread on Facebook, “Pineapple go home!” as the title of the first episode of Vacula & Porter’s new podcast, Mayhew’s witty cartoon of “Pineapple go home!”?
I take it they have no clue what the pineapple is about. It’s about something. I didn’t make my profile picture a pineapple just because I wanted a piece of fruit as my profile picture. No. No, I made my profile picture a pineapple in solidarity with the Reading University Atheist, Humanist and Secularist Society. There was a little incident last October, which I blogged about several times. I first blogged about it on October 5.
I will just repost the whole thing here, because it’s mine, and I can do that.
Either the pineapple goes, or you do
And on the same day, in another part of the forest…
…another busy representative of another university Student Union meddled with another Atheist, Humanist, and Secularist Society. Reading University this time, and RUSU and RAHS. This time not a Jesus and Mo toon on a Facebook page, but a pineapple named Mohammed.
The NSS quotes a statement by Tim Rouse of the Atheist, Humanist and Secularist Society:
Among the material displayed on our stall was a pineapple. We labelled this pineapple “Mohammed”, to encourage discussion about blasphemy, religion, and liberty, as well as to celebrate the fact that we live in a country in which free speech is protected, and where it is lawful to call a pineapple by whatever name one chooses.
Towards the end of the afternoon, we were informed by a member of RUSU staff that there had been complaints about the pineapple, despite the fact that no complaints had been made at any point to anybody on the stall. Our commitment to freedom of expression meant that we refused to remove the pineapple from our stall. After a few minutes, we were told by another member of RUSU staff that “Either the pineapple goes, or you do”, whereupon they seized the pineapple and tried to leave. However, the pineapple was swiftly returned, and shortly was displayed again, with the name Mohammed changed to that of Jesus.
Shortly afterwards, the second RUSU staff member returned and ordered RAHS to leave the Freshers’ Fayre. At this point, a group of around five students, some of whom self-identified as Muslim, approached the stall and began to criticise us, asking and telling us to remove the pineapple. Though these students mainly engaged in discussion, one removed the label from the pineapple without our permission.
And on it went, wrangle wrangle, until they felt forced to leave, although they continued to hand out leaflets outside the event.
One fire is put out while another is set ablaze.
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Back in the present now.
So you see the pineapple has a meaning – one that even Justin Vacula and Sara Mayhew might appreciate. But they’ve been too busy making videos and podcasts to jeer at us, or cartoons of angry pineapples to jeer at us, to pay attention to things like the above incident. So they jeered at the poor loyal pineapple. Sad, isn’t it.
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Go home, pineapple
Another cartoon, not quite as funny as Bjarte’s, but still funny, in its way.
[Art removed at the request of the artist. It was a cartoon of an angry scowling pineapple next to a sign with an arrow pointing to “Home.”]
[The art can be seen here.]
[Missing art compensated for with amusing Twitter exchange.]
Sara E. Mayhew@saramayhew
@daiapmorgen It’s a pineapple, not an argument. Chill out. Just a doodle of a funny sounding phrase.
Justin Vacula
@justinvacula@saramayhew May I use this picture w attribution for tonight’s#bravehero podcast? http://www.blogtalkradio.com/bravehero/2013/03/03/go-home-pineapple …@justinvacula rather not. It was just supposed to be a doodle of how funny the phrase sounds, not about Benson.Don’t geddit? It helps to know that my Facebook profile picture is a pineapple, and that Sara Mayhew told me to “Go home, pineapple” on her Facebook post in which she picked a fight with me. Justin Vacula found that so amusing that he echoed it. Then he was so taken with that that he decided to do a podcast titled “Go home, pineapple!” for a new series titled – I’m not making this up – Brave Hero. He’s named it after the obsessive loon who does the “ElevatorGATE” blog and Twitter account.
Justin Vacula Introducing the Brave Hero podcast with hosts Justin Vacula and Karla Porter…we’re just two young muppets in a balcony.
Episode one — “Go home, pineapple!” — will be aired Saturday (3/2/13) at 7:00PM EST. We would be honored if #bravehero Sara E Mayhew would call in.
Be a #bravehero and join the growing resistance movement today! Callers — no matter their viewpoints — are welcome and encouraged. Save the online atheist community, save the world.
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/braveheroWeekly live episodes of ‘As The Atheist World Turns’ with @JustinVacula, @Karla_Porter, and guest callers. Drama never dies. #braveheroHe’s thorough, isn’t he. Brave Hero as a nod to the guy who taunted Rhys Morgan for failing his exams and for having a chronic illness. Two young muppets in a balcony as a nod to Sara Mayhew’s taunt at Stephanie and me and Daniel Waddell’s ditto. “Go home, pineapple!” as a nod to Mayhew’s telling me to “go home” as if I had started this brawl when in fact she started it. “Join the growing resistance movement” as if we were the Nazi occupation. “Save the online atheist community” as if the bloggers that Vacula has contempt for were destroying it. “Drama never dies” as if nonstop harassment and denigration of women were “drama” and as if Vacula weren’t an enthusiastic participant himself.
I think telling me to “go home” is especially notable. It’s of a piece with his “advice” to feminists who get harassed by him and his friends, nearly all of which boils down to telling us to stop blogging – in short, to go home. It’s notable that Vacula apparently has no qualms about ordering a woman to “go home!” – as if he’s completely oblivious to the obvious overtones of men ordering women to go home. He’s a strange guy.
Update Sunday morning:
Mayhew is still at it.
Update 2:
Vacula is actually proud of that podcast.
Proud of it. Of doing a whole hour’s podcast, with another adult human being, to discuss my comment on Mayhew’s Facebook post about me. A whole hour! Two people! It’s like being proud of spending two weeks making a peanut butter sandwich.
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No thinking involved
Five students have been arrested in Dhaka in the murder of the atheist blogger and campaigner Ahmed Rajib Haidar. The police say all five confessed to involvement in the murder.
The detectives identified the five as Faisal bin Nayeem alias Dwip, 22, Maksudul Hassan Anik, 23, Ehsan Reza Rumman, 23, Naim Sikder Irad, 19, and Nafis Imtiaz, 22.
Dwip and Anik, who hail from Matuail and Keraniganj in Dhaka, are students of electrical and electronic engineering, while Rumman and Irad, who hail from Jhenidah and Brahmanbaria respectively, are students of electric and telecommunications.
Imtiaz, who hails from Sandwip in Chittagong, is a student of business administration.
Notice all the high tech. I mentioned this to Tasneem Khalil, who sent me the link, and he told me that Islamists recruit the brightest in high tech and finance.
Makes sense. They would, wouldn’t they. But notice how brightness of that instrumental kind can be compatible with moral idiocy. From Islamists to bankers, murderers to technocrats in charge of genocidal wars (I’m thinking of Halberstam’s Best and Brightest here), one kind of brightness does not necessarily imply or include another kind.
The “Borobhai” [senior brother; the mastermind] gave the NSU students links of some blogs and asked them to collect information about the bloggers.
Analysing the posts, the group decided to kill Rajib, who used to write under the pseudonym of “Thaba Baba”, Monirul Islam, the DMP joint commissioner, told the newspersons.
Once the decision was taken, an “intelligence group” was formed to collect detailed information about the blogger analysing his posts on blogs and Facebook, and track him down.
An “intelligence group” with no moral intelligence whatever.
On February 11, Rumman followed their target from Shahbagh Projonmo Chattar to Mirpur-10 intersection. “Rajib was in a bus and Rumman followed him by a bicycle,” said the police official.
Rumman failed to find out Rajib’s house that day. But the next day he succeeded to locate his place at Palashnagar.
“The group later started to collect information from locals regarding his profession, lifestyle, relatives, etc to finalise their killing plan,” said Monirul.
Anik and a couple of others went to Notun Bazar and bought machetes and knives. Anik paid the money, the arrestees said.
On the day of the killing, the group came to know from Rajib’s Facebook page that he would not go to Shahbagh that day and rushed hurriedly to Palashnagar by bicycles and bus, said Monirul.
They reached there around 4:00pm, carrying the machetes and knives in schoolbags.
The group started to play cricket in an alley near the blogger’s house to monitor his return.
As the sun was going down, Rajib was seen returning home. When he neared the gate of his house, Dwip hit him with a machete in a bid to sever his head from the shoulder, but failed to succeed in doing so.
After two more hits, the victim fell on the wall and Dwip continued to chop him, said Monirul.
Why? Because. He was an atheist. What more reason did they need?
“Three of them told us that they were not repentant for what they have done. They said it was their religious obligation to kill Rajib.”
No thinking involved. Just a made-up rule, and stupidly blindly following it, without thinking. Your superior officer tells you to kill everyone in the village, you do it. Your “superior brother” tells you to kill an atheist blogger, you do it.
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Bjarte Foshaug does layers of irony
Bjarte has a new cartoon.
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A feminist film critic defends the Onion’s tweet
“It seemed completely obvious to me that the butt of the joke here is people who say such things about women.”
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Dhaka: 5 arrested in murder of blogger Ahmed Rajib Haidar
All 5 are students at North South University and all confessed to involvement, police say.
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How to read satire
Stacy alerted me to a good (feminist) analysis of the Onion tweet.
First of all, she says, Quvenzhané Wallis is terrific, no question.
But you know what? All of the women at the Oscars last night are awesome. Just to have survived to that level in an industry that, at best, ignores women, and, at worst, actively despises them means they have to be awesome. Maybe they’re not awesome in ways that everyone sees or acknowledges. But in their own way, they’re fierce and strong and bursting with personality in an industry that is designed not to see women that way…
The best examples of how Hollywood hates women were supplied by Oscar host Seth MacFarlane himself. He sang an entire gleeful song about how he saw famous actresses’ breasts in movies, as if he were 12 years old and had no hope of seeing breasts in real life (maybe, with his attitudes, he doesn’t), including movies in which their characters are abused, even gang-raped. (Yup, so sexy, getting a glimpse of nipple as a woman is being brutally attacked.) He degraded women left and right by reducing all their immense talents to how “beautiful” they are or how human carbuncle Rex Reed might insult their body size.
Hollywood and pop culture — including most pop culture watchers, such as the mostly male ranks of film critics and the mostly rank roster of “serious” film fans who populate movie sites from the IMDb to Rotten Tomatoes – is absolutely vile to women, with extra bile if they’re famous and don’t give that particular boy a boner.
And the Onion tweet was parodying that. Not echoing it but parodying it. I saw that as one possible reading at the time, but I saw the shock-horror about the tweet before I saw the content of the tweet, so I was primed not to see the parody reading as clearly as the echo reading. Or I was just stupid. One of those.
Or maybe a third possibility, which is that so much humor these days turns out to include misogyny, to have a misogynist edge, to be compatible with misogyny, to be the product of people (mostly men) who are misogynist. I occasionally watched Family Guy for awhile because I found Stewie and Brian hilarious. I find parts of The Big Bang Theory hilarious. I find Jon Stewart sexist quite often. I’m used to discovering that something hilarious turns out also to be misogynist and/or sexist as well.
It was probably all three of those. Anyway, the parody reading seems like a better fit now – but Twitter can be a bad medium for jokes like that. I know this. People mis-read my jokes aimed at myself as jokes aimed at someone else, and then ignore my corrections. Twitter can be a dangerous toy.
But the point was a good one.
What highlights how outrageous is the loathsome treatment of women on the Web?
Everyone else seems afraid to say it, but that Quvenzhané Wallis is kind of a cunt, right?
That gets attention in a way that calling a famous adult woman the same thing never does. Because it’s clearly outrageous in a way that, apparently, isn’t quite so clear-cut when it comes to an adult woman. But she asked for it by wearing that dress. She’s an attention whore. She likes being in the spotlight. She can stop being famous any time if she can’t take it. We should see such rationales as ridiculous. We can see it when they’re applied to a nine-year-old. But we don’t see it in general.
Well. Okay. Feminist pop-culture watchers see how all women are treated in pop culture as outrageous. But we feminists are still a minority. That Onion tweet was not directed at feminists. It was directed at a general readership that probably has not yet internalized that it’s just plain wrong to talk about women like this, but might possibly understand that it’s just plain wrong to talk about a little girl like this. And might possibly start to get an inkling of a clue.
God damn that sounds familiar. She’s an attention whore. She likes being in the spotlight. She can stop being famous any time if she can’t take it.
She’s a professional victim. She engages in drama for the blog hits. She can stop blogging any time if she can’t take it.
So the point was a good one.
The Onion likely demonstrated some tone-deafness when it comes to issues that some online feminists I respect immensely pointed out, like how women of color come in for extra bonus disrespect and misogyny, and how little girls are inexcusably oversexualized.
But that’s not what this tweet was about. As I think many of my readers would attest, I am attuned to misogyny in pop culture, even the point at which I see it when others don’t. And still, I didn’t see it here. I didn’t see Wallis as the butt of this joke. It seemed completely obvious to me — to the point that I didn’t even have to think about it — that the butt of the joke here is people who say such things about women.
But she reads the Onion much more regularly than I do, so she had a better sense of their overall attitudes than I do. I’ve learned to expect to be suddenly disappointed.
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Muppets are always boys
As I mentioned, I’m not familiar with Statler and Waldorf. So here, via a Facebook friend, is a selection.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14njUwJUg1I
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Imagine
Michael Nugent asks what if Ireland discriminated for atheism instead of for religion?
Imagine if 96% of our primary schools were run with an explicitly atheist ethos – not a neutral, secular ethos, but an explictly atheist ethos – where children were taught that there is no god, and that ethos was permeated throughout the entire curriculum.
The idea seems bizarre, doesn’t it. Surplus to requirements, just as god is. It would be odd to have schools run with an explicitly atoothfairy ethos, too. Secular is all that’s needed. Don’t teach math with extra added gremlins, don’t teach biology with added ghosts, don’t teach geography with added atheism. Just skip it. Don’t pack more than you’ll need. That bag will get heavy, so don’t pack a big coat if it’s not going to be cold.
Imagine if our hospitals were run with an explicitly atheist ethos, with signs on the walls saying that there is no god, and with atheist ethics committees, and with the danger of a dying patient being told ‘this is an atheist country’.
And yet without the danger of a dying patient being told ‘this is an atheist country’ as justification for refusing to prevent the patient from dying by completing a miscarriage, because it’s so very difficult to get from atheism to stupid arbitrary cruel anti-human “rules.” For that you need a Holy Superior Being, and atheism is Un that.
I walked up a trail through a park this afternoon and saw on the wide board at the top of the railing a small written message: “All praises for Allah.” What a nasty message, if you think about it. All praises for the imagined entity, so no praises for any real ones. The hell with that, I thought. Save your praises for real achievement.
That’s another one where atheism has no counterpoint. “All praises for no god”? Yeh, nobody would come up with that. Which is Michael Nugent’s point, of course: swapping atheism makes the absurdity of all the deference and knee-bending obvious.
Imagine if an atheist group that runs most of our schools had been found by various tribunals to have been abusing children, and covering up the abuse of children, for decades.
Imagine if an international atheist group, to which that atheist group was affiliated, that acted as if it was also a state, had been involved in moving atheists who abused children from country to country to avoid facing up to the legal responsibilities of their actions.
Imagine if our state continued to have diplomatic relations with that association, and exchanged ambassadors with it as if it were a legitimate State.
Imagine, further, if an atheist group had special magical men – men only – at the top of the group, special magical men who had a special magical connection to…to no-god. And those special magical men were the ones abusing children, and being protected by other special magical men with a special magical connection to no-god. And they all got away with it because the surrounding society is so deferential to atheism and to no-god that it lets these groups act like a law unto themselves. Imagine all that.
It’s hard to do, isn’t it.
Imagine if there was even one explicitly atheist school in Ireland – not a secular school, but an atheist school, that explicitly taught that there was no god.
Imagine that even one set of religious parents was forced by circumstances to send their child to that school.
We would never hear the end of it until it was resolved.
But in Ireland we have multiple times that discrimination continuing without anyone even thinking that it is a problem.
Why do you believe that your religion is more important than our atheism?
The State certainly should not believe that.
Because a special magical god trumps a special magical no-god.
Yes but why does it?
Ah, that’s a tough one.
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Lazy blogging. Bad writing.
Sara Mayhew must have wanted more attention, because as tonyinbatavia pointed out in a comment, she posted another random tweet about Stephanie and me, apropos of nothing.
Learn to summarize someone else’s point instead of quoting huge blocks of text. Lazy blogging. Bad writing. Examples: @OpheliaBenson @szvan
She’s weirdly persistent about picking fights with me. I don’t know why, apart from wanting more attention (but then there are billions of people in the world, and I don’t know why she wants attention from me in particular). I don’t know her. I haven’t written about her here (except about these bizarre random fight-pickings). I haven’t interacted with her. But pick pick pick.
She did a more extended version (less lazy! less bad!) on Facebook, too. It’s a public post. (We’re not Friends, needless to say.)
The post:
Bad blogging is when you need to quote huge blocks of text. It makes me believe you’re either a lazy or incompetent writer, when you can’t make a summary of someone else’s point.
Her comments, following one by Dan Fincke:
Dan Fincke it takes a lot of work to write a good paragraph. I don’t blame bloggers for not spending their time rewriting others’ ideas when they can simply quote them for their readers and save their hard writing energies for their own original stuff. A blog is a journal, a place you sometimes just record other people’s words that are interesting sometimes.Sara E Mayhew It starts to become really lazy, like Almost Diamonds and Ophelia Benson’s blog, when it’s 90% blocks of quotes and they insert a sentence or two in between.12 hours ago · Like · 1Sara E Mayhew At that point, just link to the entire article you’re discussing. But I guess Zvan and Benson aren’t really generating content as much as just being the two old muppets in the balcony.So I’m a lazy bad writer, so let’s see what content Sara generates. Her latest post is……four photos, of four dresses. And some writing.
Strapless dresses from SammyDress! This wholesale Hong Kong fashion site has incredibly cheap clothing prices, but my experience has been that what you save on items is made up for with very expensive shipping. Quality is typical of Chinese produced fashion—cute on the outside but low quality is seen on the inside of the dresses with imperfect stitching. Petite sizes. I haven’t yet bought a dress from them I didn’t like.
That’s good hardworking writing.
Having conceded that point, I’ll say a few words – of my very own writing, that I wrote myself! – about Mayhew’s claim that quoting is lazy and bad compared to summarizing.
The first word I’ll say about that is “horseshit.” That’s horseshit. It’s not true, not as a generalization. Sometimes summarizing is preferable to quoting, but certainly not always. If it were always preferable, why would the Daily Show use so many clips? The Daily Show is quite popular, and also well thought of. It’s both. It’s considered good tv, good commentary, good humor, good news analysis. Part of what’s good is the use of video clips that show people saying things, so that we can all see exactly what they say and how they say it. A summary would not be better than that for the purposes of the show. The same goes for the Rachel Maddow show and plenty of other shows. The same goes for many many blogs that quote extensively. Some websites do nothing but link to others’ material with a headline and a teaser – like Arts and Letters Daily for example. That’s different from writing a book or an article, but that doesn’t make it worthless.
I’m interested in language and rhetoric, in the words people use and the possible reasons why they use them and the likely effects the words will have. When I’m looking at that I don’t want to summarize, I want to give the actual words, so that readers can see exactly what I’m talking about. This is a new genre that blogging makes possible in a way it wasn’t before. I like the genre, and I use it a lot. It would have been useless to “summarize” what Rod Liddle wrote, for instance; it was necessary to give a good sample of it so that people could see his particular brand of smug laddish dismissiveness.
I don’t consider that a whole lot more lazy than posting four photos of dresses.
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Oh that Resistance
Via Bad Science Watch on Twitter, via Crommunist – Simon Fraser University is hosting the “Vaccine Resistance Movement” on March 12.
Crommunist points out that British Columbia has had recent outbreaks of measles and whooping cough. What the hell are you doing, SFU?
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It’s all so easy
Rod Liddle is going for the contemptuously sexist asshole prize again. All this fuss about Rennard and his way of pestering women; pish tosh, old bean, what a lot of bother about nothing.
I don’t doubt that it is sometimes unpleasant for women to work in some male-dominated trades and professions, because of the behaviour and attitudes of some of the majority gender. Nor do I doubt that plenty of professions are still rife with sexism and discrimination, politics almost certainly being one of them. But I am not convinced that Rennard’s alleged crimes give us much evidence of this. One of the accusations against Rennard is that he ‘propositioned’ a couple of women, despite apparently being aware that they were in long-standing relationships.
Now, it may slightly turn the stomach to be propositioned by a sweating Europhile lardbucket with breath that could stun a badger at 30 paces, but — hell — a cat can look at a king. If you don’t ask, you don’t get, etc. Sometimes if you ask you also don’t get. All the time, it would seem, in the case of Lord Rennard. But the poor bloke should be allowed to ask, shouldn’t he? Over the past 30 years the workplace has become the venue within which we meet our sexual mates, as Chris Huhne will confirm for you. Obviously these relationships have to start, you know, somehow, don’t they? And asking nicely seems to me a reasonable means of finding out if they are going to start at all.
I have the distinct suspicion that Lord Rennard’s overtures might have been considered less obnoxious if he more closely resembled, say, Orlando Bloom or Joaquin Phoenix than Jabba The Hutt. And a similar suspicion that the anger of the women would have been less deeply felt if they hadn’t discovered he’d tried it on with loads of others and that they weren’t special after all. The hand-on-the-knee business is not especially pleasant, for sure; but is it too antediluvian, too chauvinistic, to suggest that it might easily be brushed off?
Give that man the prize.
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Anti-gay Muslim cleric’s Reading university talk cancelled
Adam Goodkin, of the Atheist Humanist Secularist Society at the university, which had planned to protest, said: “We’re firm believers in freedom of expression and free speech.”
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The wonders of anti-vaxxing
A measles outbreak in South Wales: 189 cases.
Parents are being urged to make sure their children receive the measles, mumps
and rubella (MMR) vaccination.So that they won’t get measles.
Dr Marion Lyons, director of health protection for Public Health Wales (PHW), said: “We continue to be concerned at the number of cases of measles we are seeing in the Swansea and Neath Port Talbot areas.
“We cannot emphasise enough that measles is an illness that can kill, or leave patients with permanent complications including severe brain damage, and the only protection is two doses of the MMR vaccination.”
She added that people most at risk of catching measles are children of school age who have not had two doses of MMR.
Get the vaccination.
H/t Roger
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189 cases of measles reported in South Wales
“Measles is an illness that can kill, or leave patients with permanent complications including severe brain damage, and the only protection is two doses of the MMR vaccination.”
