 And the difference is in the paycheck. I might not know very much about U.S. law, but ignorance has never before stopped me from commenting authoritatively and at length about anything, so I find myself with a number of things to say about the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision to throw out a huge sex-discrimination lawsuit against Walmart.First of all (and most importantly): is Walmart single? I know that corporations are treated as people under the law. I know that they are now allowed to make unlimited campaign contributions because of how free speech is and how much democracy flourishes, so it's not crazy to think they're entitled to a romantic life.And what upstanding, self-respecting, feminine woman would not want to go steady with Walmart? Walmart was being taking to court by seemingly billions and billions of women upset only because they were being treated like ladies. Sure, says journalist Liza Featherstone, women "earn less than their male counterparts in nearly every position at the company", and female supervisors often make less money than the male employees they're being paid not very much to supervise, but that's just because, as one store manager explained, men "are working as the heads of their households, while women are just working for the sake of working." I couldn't have put it better! Women work to have extra money to buy lipstick and decorative baubles. As another Walmart employee stated, men "are here to make a career and women aren't. Retail is for housewives who just need to earn extra money." How true, on both counts! I certainly associate Walmart with men hungry for career advancement and women not desperate for money to feed their families. So it's pretty clear that Walmart would make a good boyfriend, the kind of boyfriend who would let me work to buy myself some handbags and potted plants, but count on me mostly for my home-building, hearth-tending skills.
Antonin Scalia, though, has placed an obstacle in my romantic path. Although generally I think of him as both fair-minded and good-looking, he has made a serious misstep in this case. He claims that Walmart has not instituted any discriminatory practices, and that the company should not be blamed for allowing their managers the freedom to behave in a discriminatory fashion. So a corporation is a person, and yet it is not one bit like a person. It has the right to speak freely as though it is a person, but is suddenly not a person with agency and accountability when its employees rush about insulting and mistreating people. I mean, I'd like to hook up with Walmart because it wouldn't expect me take on unladylike responsibilities, or at least would not pay me an unladylike amount to take them on, but I wouldn't be comfortable knowing that every time we had a fight, Walmart could just say that it wasn't at fault and some semi-autonomous network of middle-managers was to blame. So I'll have to set my sights on some other promising potential beau. I'm looking at you, Scalia. I'm willing to become incorporated if that's what it will take to get your attention.
Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
 "What a coincidence! I, too, am a lesbian blogger." I was shocked and saddened when it came out that Eliot Spitzer had been keeping condom-less company with a young prostitute. Not so much because I find it difficult to believe that people who are politically like-minded pay young women for sex, but because I have always liked to believe that awkward, nerdy people don't pay women for sex. It's one thing when overgrown frat boys or smooth-haired reverends turn out to be secret perverts, but when vaguely unfortunate, intelligent men who look like ungainly flightless birds turn out to be secret perverts, I find it disappointing.Then the Weiner dropped, and I found myself nostalgic for the wholesomeness of the Spitzer scandal. Spitzer had sex. With a professional. And at least tried to do so discreetly. An old-timey, old-fashioned kind of scandal. Weiner, another funny-looking, articulate Democrat, was pathologically and self-destructively devoted to showing strange women his penis via The Twitter, and The Facebook. The whole thing was disconcerting and unpleasant.And then the Gay Girl from Damascus was both un-gayed and un-girled, and I found myself nostalgic for Weiner. Amina Arraf, who claimed to be Syrian-American, lesbian, and real, turned out to be a Medieval Studies grad student from Georgia named Tom MacMaster. When it was reported that Amina had been kidnapped by the government, people started to look into her and to not be able to find her and MacMaster was unmasked. Even more bizarrely, one of MacMaster's "victims", Paula Brooks, founding editor of lesbian news site Lez Get Real, then turned out to be a male construction worker from Ohio. NPR's headline summarizes the situation admirably: "Another Supposedly Lesbian Blogger Turns Out to Be a Man."
It's the sympathetic teen girls trying to convince other teen girls they meet online to meet for real in deserted parking lots who are supposed to turn out to be older men in disguise, not the lesbian bloggers.When Weiner weinered, I missed the innocent, straightforward salaciousness of the Spitzer scandal. But when Amina and Paula turned out to be Tom and Bill, I found myself missing the innocent, straightforwardly compulsive, exhibitionist perviness of Weiner. He's dishonest, manipulative, messed-up and free with his privates, but sexual misbehaviour is reassuringly familiar. I am apparently more confounded by men wanting to represent and speak for communities of women who love other women by pretending to be women who love other women than by men who want to show strangers what's inside their pants.I'm sure something will now happen that will make me yearn for the days when straight men just pretended to be lesbians. Maybe Spitzer and Weiner will turn out to be lesbian bloggers in disguise. Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
Some exciting news about women's rights and women's issues from around the world! Egypt
The Egyptian military is now conceding that "virginity checks" were conducted on women rounded up after a March 9 protest in Tahrir Square (a month after Mubarak stepped down). They continue to deny that the female protestors were beaten, subjected to electric shocks, and strip-searched (as is alleged by Amnesty International), but acknowledge that virginity checks were carried out so that those rounded up could not later claim to have been raped by the security forces. RussiaConservative politicians in Russia are trying to introduce legislation that would restrict access to abortions. The legislation would put a stop to free abortions at government-run clinics and require women to have a prescription in order to get the morning-after pill. Most encouragingly, women wanting abortions would have to get the permission of their spouses, or, if they are underage, from their parents. More on how encouraging this is later.United StatesLest you think it's only women in foreign countries who are fortunate enough to have thoughtful decision-makers thinking and making decisions about their rights...Kansas State Representative Pete DeGraaf recently made some innovative suggestions about how women should go about planning for future rapes.DeGraaf doesn't think insurance companies should cover abortion in their general plans even in cases of rape or incest. Instead, he thinks women should be able to buy "abortion-only" policies. When Rep. Barbara Bollier unaccountably raised some objections to this suggestion, the House was treated to the following exchange: DeGraaf: "We do need to plan ahead, don't we, in life?"Bollier: "And so women need to plan ahead for issues that they have no control over with pregnancy?"
DeGraaf: "I have a spare tire on my car. I also have life insurance. I have a lot of things that I plan ahead for."DeGraaf later claimed his comments were taken out of context, and added that people wouldn't need the coverage if they weren't predisposed to killing their children, which certainly suggests that whatever context he's actually using, it's even worse than the one his earlier comments were taken out of. Don't be alarmed!These news items might make you feel depressed, or discouraged, or extremely angry. But all of them also suggest ways in which women can grow and improve, if we're prepared to learn from their example.Egypt: teaches women that they should be demure, modest, and virginal, just in case they're ripped out of a political demonstration and violated.Russia: teaches women that marriages should be built on a strong foundation of open communication, because if they get pregnant, they'll need to get their husband's approval to have an abortion.U.S.A: teaches women to assess future risk and prudently plan for the future. Really, the ultra-religious, right-wing, pro-life lobby is just trying to create a new generation of modest, communicative, farsighted women. Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
What have various experts had to say about the now-iconic photograph of all those Important People watching or maybe not watching the take-down of Bin Laden? Obama reveals his humility and profound presidential confidence by not needing to sit on a giant chair. The presence of Clinton and that other woman is visible proof of the increasing visibility of women in photographs of important events. The fact that Clinton is holding her hand to her mouth is visible proof that women are dangerously emotional and should not be allowed to take part in the taking of iconic photographs. Things like that.I myself find the fact that Clinton and that other woman are in the photo profoundly disturbing. Any little girl or boy will now be able to pick up a coffee table book or commemorative plate, see that photo, and think that women can grow up to do things other than shop for small, decorative tables, hug one another, and learn Romance languages. Thank God for the Orthodox Jews.Celebrating the fact that "women should be appreciated for who they are and what they do, not for what they look like" and respecting "Jewish laws of modesty", Di Tzeitung, an Orthodox Jewish paper published in Brooklyn, published the following version of the White House photo: I applaud their resourcefulness! If women insist on showing their faces at moments of historical import, simply airbrush them out.
I have only one complaint: shouldn't Biden, Obama, and all those other people whose names I'm not going to bother looking up also be respected for who they are, what they do, and not what they look like? I know I find it hard to focus on the significance of the image because I'm so busy furiously objectifying Joe Biden. So here's a retouched offering I hope will satisfy everyone: Perfect.
Di Tzeitung has also inspired me to release a new photo of Stephen Harper's victory speech.
Before: After: Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
Marilyn Davenport, Tea Party activist and elected member of the central committee of the Republican Party of Orange County, has landed herself in hot water by sending a totally harmless, inoffensive, and hilarious email to local Republican officials.
The email included this image: And the words: "Now you know why no birth certificate." As Davenport said when it was suggested the email might just be subtly racist, the whole thing is "much-ado-about-nothing" and she didn't realize it could be considered racist "until one or two other people tried to make this about race". (She has since apologized more apologetically, although no more convincingly.)She's absolutely right. It would take someone aware of history, politics, and other people to realize that this could be seen as profoundly offensive. Her email inspired me to create my own amusing and unobjectionable messages:  Now you know why no brain.  Now you know why no soul. The problem is, these funny jokes aren't nearly as inoffensive because they're about people who belong to a group that hasn't historically been subjugated. So I tried again:  Now you know why so gifted. That is SLIGHTLY more amusing and innocuous. And remember, even if a couple of people "make" my art about anti-conservatism or sexism, I can just say about myself what Marilyn Davenport has said about herself: "I am an imperfect Christian lady who tries her best to live a Christ-honouring life". How better to honour Christ than to send humourous emails that couldn't possibly offend anyone? Who can forget this classic, sent by Christ to his early followers:  Now you know why money-changers at temple so greedy. Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
Hooray for Stephen Harper! He's finally decided to emulate a politician other than himself. Unfortunately, it's Tim Pawlenty.
Never heard of Tim Pawlenty? You're not alone - most Americans haven't either. A former Republican governor of Minnesota, Pawlenty is right-wing, looks like one of those Mormons who proselytizes on the subway, and is stultifyingly tedious. He is currently not setting the campaign trail on fire while running for president.
Harper's choice of role model may initially seem surprising, in that he is already right-wing, subway Mormon-ish, and stultifyingly tedious. However, he's not trying to imitate the OLD Pawlenty; he's trying to imitate NEW Pawlenty.
Pawlenty recently released a non-campaign campaign ad clearly intended to prove he is VITAL, CHARISTMATIC, and PATRIOTIC. If it had been released in the form of text, it would be all red-white-and-blue capital letters. It features noises, and flashes, and quick cuts, and then more loud noises: It is extremely silly. It took Stephen Colbert no time at all to release his own, slightly less earnest version (his response to the original ad is at 4:53, his own ad starts around 6:58 - because I'm in Canada, I can't access the just-the-bit-I'm-talking-about versions available to Americans).It took Stephen Harper only slightly longer to release his own INSPIRING and PATRIOTIC version:
Hooray again for Harper! He has succeeded in reinventing himself as Canada's Tim Pawlenty, in that he is proving himself to be equally as dull and desperate. He's even one-upped the American, in that he's also managed to add derivativeness to the mix.
Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
After the recent disaster in Japan (referred to puzzlingly as "magnanimous" by an anchor on CNBC), one of my friends posted the following inspirational quotation from Mr. Rogers on Facebook:"When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.' To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother's words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers - so many caring people in this world."That's right, I thought. The human spirit can be a resilient and generous one, I reflected. Unfortunately, I then saw another posting from a different friend on Facebook. As far as I can tell, these comments are genuine. I, naturally, tried to find all these people on Facebook, and some of them seem to be real, and the ones who can't be found may well have removed themselves after receiving unwanted wall postings from human beings. Even if they aren't all authentic, the ones I found here certainly are. Lest you think that most appalling responses to the situation in Japan are motivated by Pearl Harbour-inspired vengefulness, I present you with a comment from Larry Kudlow.CNBC host Larry Kudlow (not the aforementioned "magnanimous" one - I'm pretty sure that guy merely got words, rather than priorities, mixed up) managed to find the silver lining in the cloud of devastation, suffering and loss, and shared it with viewers: “The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll, and we can be grateful for that.”So we have violently jingoistic bloodthirstiness and cold, unfeeling soullessness. I'm sure that soon I will once again realize that people can be compassionate, or at least not actively malignant, but for the moment I can only imagine Mr. Rogers saying:"When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say, 'Look for the haters. You will always find people who are hating.' To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother's words, and I am always chilled by realizing that there are so many haters - so many hateful people in this world."
Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
I am worse than Rush Limbaugh. I don't mock people with Parkinson's from some underground lair via ham radio, but I have managed to be worse than Rush Limbaugh nonetheless.Rush's most recent attack on the Obamas (that I'm aware of - a whole day has passed since I heard about this one) involves Michelle's weight and dining preferences. Michelle Obama has made reducing obesity in America her First Lady platform, and Rush finds her activities to that end meddlesome and hypocritical. He claims they are hypocritical because "...our first lady does not project the image of women that you might see on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, or of a woman Alex Rodriguez might date ever six months or what have you." He's not alone. A conservative cartoonist has produced an uproariously funny and artistically distinguished depiction of Michelle Obama eating a giant plate of hamburgers. By all means look at it, but be warned: you'll have to read a hell of a lot of Doonesbury to feel clean again afterwards.So why am I worse than Rush Limbaugh? Rush is criticizing Michelle Obama not for being fat, but for being a hypocrite. He's wrong, and he's insulting, and he's paranoid, but he's not just making fun of someone's figure for the sake of it. I, however, have made fun of someone's figure just for the sake of it.When Rob Ford was elected mayor of Toronto, my post was graced by the following image:  Someone's Been Eating the Gravy Train Rob Ford is undeniably full-figured, and he does talk a lot about a sinister gravy train, but that doesn't mean I should have made a joke about how he's been eating said train. I knew it was cheap and unfair at the time, but I did it anyway.
So Rush Limbaugh unfairly makes fun of people for being fat hypocrites, while I apparently, make fun of people I don't like simply for being fat. I shouldn't have to resort to making cheap and unfair cracks about Rob Ford's appearance when there are so many substantive and justifiable cracks I could be making about his policies.
This week, Rush Limbaugh acted as my moral compass. Perhaps next week, Glenn Beck will teach me an important lesson about intellectual integrity.
Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
Sarah Palin is a more than a talking hairstyle: she is an unendurably stupid talking hairstyle. However, she and the others on the right who do things like give free guns to babies and deny sweet-tempered grandmothers health insurance should not distract us from the fact that there are also crazy-talking coiffures on the left. I might slightly prefer the cuts of their crazy jibs (a stylish coiffure would never be caught dead without a jib), but that doesn't mean the jibs aren't still crazy.
Last week, Sarah Palin was burbling on about blood libel. This week, Rep. Steve Cohen a Democrat from Tennessee, said the following nutty thing on the House floor about health-care reform: "They [Republicans] say it's a government takeover of health care, a big lie just like Goebbels." He followed that gem up with:
"The Germans said enough about the Jews and the people believed it and you had the Holocaust."
I would like nothing better than to be self-righteous. I feel I could be that exceedingly well, and with conviction. But it's very difficult to work up a real lather of complacent self-congratulation and sorrowful reproachfulness when it's not just the people whose politics you dislike who are rushing about comparing their opponents to Nazis. The Republicans have a simultaneously terrifyingly effective and rudimentary propaganda machine ("This health-care plan will kill old people and take your guns away. Are you in favour of killing old people and having your guns taken away?"), but it doesn't seem necessary to call it Goebbelsian. Or to suggest that if people believe what the Republicans are saying about health-care reform, we're in for some kind of Holocaust.
Are there really people out there who hear such analogies and think: "My God! The Republicans/Democrats are exactly like the Nazis! And the suffering of the Democrats/Republicans is indeed comparable to that of the Jews! In the next election, I'll be voting for Sarah Palin/Alec Baldwin"? And if there are, could they make a point of belonging only to one political party so that I could choose to support the other one and dedicate more time to feeling monstrously smug?
Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
Toxic and inflammatory right-wing rhetoric may not be directly responsible for mass murder, but that doesn't mean it's not toxic and inflammatory. Or resilient and resourceful. Today, Sarah Palin added to the already impressively offensive conservative lexicon with her use of the phrase "blood libel." "Blood libel", writes The New York Times, is "generally used to mean the false accusation that Jews murder Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals, in particular the baking of matzos for passover. That false claim was circulated for centuries to incite anti-Semitism and justify violent pogroms against Jews." Sarah Palin, courageously aligning herself with the Jews, referred to the claims that she is in some manner responsible for the carnage in Tuscon as "blood libel" in a message posted today on her Facebook page.This is a very exciting idiomatic development, because for too long parties on both side have been relying on the generous and seemingly random use of "Hitler" as a political slur. George W. Bush was Hitler. Obama is Hitler. Now Palin is expanding and improving upon the WWII analogy by throwing the suffering of the Jews into the mix.It was certainly unpleasant and distasteful when pundits on both sides (there are only two sides) responded to the tragedy by excitedly finger-pointing, but responding to some of the more hysterical accusations of some left-wing commentators by claiming kinship with the Jews is also unpleasant and distasteful (it would be even if Representative Gabrielle Giffords didn't happen to be Jewish). But my primary objection to her use of the phrase involves her choice of forum. Facebook? Isn't it possible there's a more symbolic, more creative, more "no matter how reasonable David Brooks and other moderate Republicans might be, don't forget about all those loons" way to get one's point across?Enter the Palmetto State Armory, which is, according to (inevitably) The Huffington Post, releasing a limited edition line of AR-15 assault rifles with the words "you lie" engraved on the lower receivers. "You lie" was what Rep. Joe Wilson (R - S.C.) yelled during an Obama health-care reform speech (when the President claimed the new legislation wouldn't provide illegal immigrants with medical care).If this weapons manufacturer can honour Joe Wilson, could another weapons manufacturer not seize this exciting opportunity to honour Sarah Palin? I think "Especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible" would look just dandy on an assault rifle.
Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
|
RSS Feed