Slouching toward Bushism

And the police state lurches ever closer, with the SMH today reporting on proposed legislation for “New secret search powers”.

The proposed powers would give police the right to execute search, seizure and surveillance under so-called “delayed notification warrants”, without judicial oversight, and including the assumption of false identities by police to gain access. The subject can be denied notice of the s/s/s for up to six months, with extensions available on Ministerial approval, again with no judicial involvement:

The lack of judicial oversight was justified by the Minister for Justice and Customs, David Johnston, on the grounds that a court or judicial officer might leak news of the warrant.

“I don’t want to impugn anyone, but the security of these operations has to be pristine,” Senator Johnston told the Herald.

The article continues:

The position of the Labor Opposition is unknown. The party did not return calls yesterday.

Filed under: Politics, authoritarianism, law, moral panics, obstreperation

Piggy in the middle

Note: I analogise between racism and sexism in this post. Yes, I realise they’re not the same thing. However, I believe there are enough similarities and parallels to draw useful analogies.

I was having a poke around on fora.tv, a rather neat site with video of book readings, speeches, and appearances. One video is a July 21st reading of Jessica Valenti’s book, “Full Frontal Feminism”.

Asked by an audience member about “men’s emancipation” in the US, Valenti replied:

I have a chapter on men in the book, because I do think that it’s really important. If we’re talking about feminism we have to talk about the way patriarchy hurts men too, the way sexism hurts men too, because If we’re going to build a really strong feminist movement we have to have men involved as well. You know I think that the best way to do that is to say, “Hey, we’re not the only ones suffering from sexism here, this is hurting you as well”.

What struck me here is the contrast between this rather pervasive idea of “men should support feminism cos sexism hurts men”, and ideas about white allies in the antiracism movement. Is anyone going around saying that the only way to enrol white people into antiracism would be to talk to them about the ways in which racism hurts white people? Not that I’ve seen. To me, that would be the absolute pinnacle of repugnant white-centrism. You’d have to be positively festering with self-entitled unexamined white-privilege-boils to think that racism is wrong because it might occasionally hurt white people’s feelings.

There is absolutely no need to centre white people in antiracism. The reason racism is wrong is because it hurts people of colour (and, incidentally, disproportionately women of colour), not because it hurts white people. White people should fight racism, should ally with antiracists, because it’s the right thing to do, not because it’s in their own self-interest. They should ally because that’s part of being a decent human being.

Doesn’t all of the above sound blindingly obvious?

So why is there this pernicious streak of male-centrism in feminism?

How about men supporting feminism because it’s wrong to hurt women, not because “sexism hurts men”? Why are women thinking that this is too much to ask for?

Filed under: obstreperation, peeves

Milking it in California

Edited to add: Two other blogs have now picked up on this story.

The Lactivist notes “The International Breast Milk Project in the News Again“.

And MamaBear at breastfeedingsymbol.org has done some ringing around – directly to the iThemba Lethu orphanage. Her post You’re Going to Want to Read This details the fact the the numbers are still just not. adding. up:

Since the IBMP made their promise to send 55,000 ounces of donated breast milk, they have sent the one shipment of 5,343 ounces in May 2007. Their rate of shipments to Africa is about two shipments a year so far.

Why is it important to know all of this? Because the International Breast Milk Project got 55,000 ounces of donated milk because of Oprah. On Oprah’s show, it was stated that the donated milk would go to Africa, not 25% of it. The IBMP promised that all those 55,000 ounces would be sent to Africa, and that thereafter, 25% of what is donated would be sent. At the current rate and quantity that the IBMP is sending milk (an average of two shipments a year), it would take almost five years to send the originally promised 55,000 ounces to Africa.

MamaBear also notes ways to contribute that don’t line anyone’s pockets: you can donate milk and/or money directly to iThemba Lethu, or to non-profit milk banking or milk sharing networks in your locality.

~~
The O.C. Register today carried this story: Rancho realtor donates breast milk to Africa.

You might recall that I’ve written in the past about the close ties between breastmilk-for-profit Prolacta and the “International Breastmilk Project”. The Oprah-advertised “charity”, supposedly independent from Prolacta, was outed as providing 75% of milk donated for African orphans directly to Prolacta for sale within the United States:

Feed the wo-orld… one baby, anyhow.

Salon’s “Milk Money”: media scrutiny of the IBMP-Prolacta partnership

At the time, I held the opinion that this “collaboration” was essentially a push for Prolacta to gain a supposedly arms-length “non-profit” front for its milk collection activities. And the exploitation of the image of sick black starving babies doesn’t hurt, either. This is nothing new for Prolacta. Prolacta has dubbed its commercial milk-collection arm the “National Milk Bank”, with an “org” suffix (nationalmilkbank.org). When it was first set up, Prolacta-NMB claimed openly on its webpage to be a non-profit organisation. (The claim has since been removed).

Unsurprisingly, women are more likely to donate milk when they feel it is going to a good cause, rather than when they know that they’re being exploited for massive profits by venture capitalists.

Of course, my concerns were dismissed by the IBMP founder. No, she said, we just have this little arrangement with Prolacta, they’re helping us out with processing. We’re not Prolacta, we’re totally independent. Prolacta are being all altruistic in all this, and by the way, aren’t they lovely to donate all these resources for the greater good? Don’t they deserve some good publicity for it?

So guess who’s the director of the new Californian branch of the “International Breastmilk Project”? April Brown. Daughter of Elena Medo. Who’s Elena Medo? The CEO and founder of Prolacta.

Arm’s length arrangement, my arse.

*** If you’re in the USA or Canada and wish to donate milk to a real non-profit organisation, check out HMBANA, the Human Milk Banking Association of North America. ***

Filed under: breastfeeding, ethics, obstreperation

Foregrounding the object redux: rape research from the UK

A while back, I wrote about the effects of the passive voice and agent deletion in media reporting of sexual violence, in Passive Aggression: Foregrounding the Object.

An article in the UK Telegraph hit me between the eyes today: Four out of 10 rape victims intoxicated.

Nearly four out of 10 female rape victims had been drinking before the assault, Home Office research revealed yesterday.
[...]
Alcohol appeared to be most significant in assaults by strangers.
[...]
The overall conviction rate for rape among a total of 676 cases across the eight areas was six per cent – the same as the figure for England and Wales.

Some police forces were more successful at reducing the likelihood that a victim would withdraw their complaint, the research found.

I thought I’d have a go at re-activising it:

“Forty percent of rapists target women and girls who have been drinking before they sexually assault them, Home Office research revealed yesterday.
[...]
Men who raped women and girls they didn’t know were particularly likely to rape drunk victims.
[...]
Some police forces were more successful at increasing the likelihood that a victim would withdraw her complaint, the research found.”

Does it have a different effect, to you?

Filed under: language, obstreperation, peeves, sexual violence

You’re not worth it.

As Tigtog discussed while I had this post desultorily in draft (it’s school holidays here!), the Daily Telegraph has posted a followup on CityRail’s complete lack of any workable emergency evacuation plans for people who can’t walk: CityRail plan to abandon disabled.

The comments section is worth a look. “paul of sydney” starts assigning value to people’s lives, and guess who’s not worth anything?

OK Morris, so its unacceptable for a fellow to be stuck on a train for a few hours while they get a forklift onto the Sydney Harbour Bridge to lift him off. So lets spend $100 million or so of taxpayers money to retrofit each and every CityRail train for something that might not happen again for another 20 years.

Get this, “paul” – the trains shouldn’t be retrofitted, because they should have been built with facilities for disabled people IN THE BLOODY FIRST PLACE. Accessibility shouldn’t be an afterthought. And you, or any reader here, could next week be the person in the wheelchair who gets to sit in a train carriage alone while you burn to death, or inhale toxins, or just starve or dehydrate, forgotten, over hours or days without a means of communication.

Bob Hodge touches on this situation in “The Complexity Revolution”:

“My new friends at NSW Rail would be very unhappy with this story. It would not help much to tell them that this is a standard ‘human interest’ article, nor that it is more complex than it looks. For instance, MacCauley is not typical of standard passengers who usually concern complexity-2 planners of rail networks. He is another butterfly, whose specific needs would be hard to predict or cater for.”

“Hard to predict”? No, no, no, no, no. It’s not a complex, unpredictable trivial detail that people who use wheelchairs also use public transport. It’s not a bizarre, unforeseeable event that sometimes systems will fail and you’ll need to use your backup system. Disabled people aren’t going to go away just because you want to pretend they don’t exist. Sheesh, this isn’t even Public Facilities 101, it’s junior school level.

Can anyone with a knowledge of disability law offer their perspective? Surely “Oh, um, I guess we could say that we, er, just wait for ambulances, then stretcher them out or something, yes, that sounds ok!” can’t be a legal emergency plan?

Filed under: disability, obstreperation, sheer incompetence

Fundiewatch: a Catholic prenatal diagnosis “counselling service”

Two of our local Catholic hospital networks have collaborated to offer a new so-called “counselling service, dubbed “Mamreh”. These two hospitals combined have a lot of community credibility already, as they provide the vast majority of private-hospital maternity services in this State. Baby-catching (or baby-cutting-out, for over half the births in these hospitals) is big business around here.

Mamreh has been taking out full-page ads in the local medical rags pushing their “counselling service” to doctors. The advertisements make no disclosure of the Catholic-medicine rider that the service operates under – which means no condoning, recommending, or counselling on termination of pregnancy, except in cases where the mother’s life is at substantial risk.

This service’s stated purpose? Counselling on prenatal genetic screening and diagnosis. Stating the bleeding obvious, the ad I’m looking at says, “Prenatal genetic screening and diagnostic test information can have profound medical, psychological, and social implications”. No kidding. It goes on, “To add to this there is often only a limited time in which to make critical decisions about a pregnancy.”

This window of defencelessness is crucial. Fundies want to ensure that women are rapidly bustled by their trusted doctors or midwives into a “counselling service” whose primary goal is to hide information from them. The ultimate goal of this type of counselling is to obfuscate information on options and to coerce women into continuing a pregnancy whether they wish to or not – or at least, to delay them just long enough so that the window for a readily accessible termination of pregnancy closes.

Fundies have been pulling this crap in Australia for years, first with tacit government approval and now with open government funding and encouragement, thanks to our papist Health Minister. Attempts to get fraudulent “unplanned pregnancy counselling services” to declare their “faith-based” bias up front have thus far failed.

And now these malignant woman-hating godbags are expanding their vile game to even more vulnerable women – those who are in the initial throes of learning that their fetus has a severe medical problem.

The Mamreh ad veers from there into outright sleight of hand:

“Mamreh Counselling Service explores self, motivations, beliefs and faith in the context of a patient’s own personal, cultural and social situation.”

Would you read this as saying that if your belief system allows termination of pregnancy in the event of severe congenital defect, the service would offer unprejudiced counselling on, and referral for, termination of pregnancy? Well, stop right there. This is not the case. Not remotely.

Do NOT go to this service, or any service like it, unless your goal is to be railroaded into continuing your pregnancy come what may. If a friend or relative has been referred to this service, make sure they know what they’re in for BEFORE they cross the threshold and the forced-birther brainwashing and guilt trips begin. A woman in this awful situation needs absolutely unqualified, unconditional support throughout her decision-making process.

Lying lies and the lying liars who tell them. We hatesss them, we does.

Filed under: ethics, fundies, medicine, obstreperation, reproductive freedoms

Smouldering: most Australians rape apologists

We’ve posted a bit about the mangy asshats who think that certain women and girls deserve to be raped – fat women, for example, or preteen girls who wear particular types of underwear.

And we’ve posted about Nice Guy(tm) sexual entitlement, and the femiblogosphere has discussed and been subjected to comments from men who think they oughtta get a special cookie because they could have raped someone once, but chose not to.

Now, research out of the Australian Centre for the Study of Sexual Assault, as reported in the Age, found that nearly all of their participants felt that the mitigating factors for rape include:

- a woman being drunk
- a woman wearing “revealing” clothing
- the woman and the rapist having had sex in the past
- the rapist being a “nice guy”
- the rapist being “sexually frustrated”

Other recent research by ACSSA has found, for example, that 44% of men agree that “Rape results from men not being able to control their need for sex”.

I really wish this was news, but sadly, it isn’t, not by a long chalk. Outrage fatigue? I don’t know. I still feel a burning anger. But it’s more of an “I’ve been smouldering for years” underground-coal-fire anger than a blazing-petrol-tanker anger. What do we do next? How do we fight this global woman-hate?

Filed under: obstreperation, sexual violence

They’re creepy and they’re … creepy. Three datapoints.

Via IBTP, buried in a long stoush about bigotry against children and whether under-18s are subhuman:

To passer-by, crying child’s ear-piercing rings of abuse.

Marilyn Johnson thought so when she heard a girl’s screams in a Wichita Wal-Mart on Sunday — and she reported it to police.
[...]
“This little girl was about 5 years old and was crying her eyes out,” Johnson said. “Her face was beet red, and she was screaming and coughing and saying things like, ‘I don’t want this! It hurts! Please stop!’ She was grabbing her ears so the adults couldn’t touch them.”

Johnson attempted to intervene verbally, and when she was rebuffed, she called 911. She was told by police to butt out, and banned from Wal-Mart. The article continues:

Ear piercing has long been the subject of controversy among parents. For some, piercing an infant or young child’s ears has deep-rooted cultural or religious meaning. Others pierce babies’ ears because of family traditions, or simply because they like the look or want to more easily identify the baby as a girl.

Because the worst possible fate for an infant or child in our society is to have random strangers mistake them for another gender, it is necessary to poke holes in screaming children and adorn them accordingly. Creepy.

~~
Creepy number two comes via the Kate Harding comments section: American Apparel “Intimates” section. I was in two minds about linking this, so be warned – I don’t know whether these photos could trigger someone, but they might.

Filed under: bigotry, obstreperation, sexual violence

“Only stupid women are breeding” – academipanic from New Zealand

Jim Flynn, Emeritus Professor of Political Studies at a New Zealand university, has pronounced himself the arbiter of which women should be allowed to breed. Note that fathers are completely invisible in his genetic-decay worldview, what could just as easily be an Onion article set in a parallel parthenogenetic society.

The Stuff.co.nz article is here – “Put the pill in tapwater – top prof “.

“New Zealalnd risks dumbing-down its future population if it does not act to boost the birth rate of its most highly educated women, says a world-ranked expert on intelligence. Otago University emeritus professor Dr Jim Flynn said easier methods of contraception, or even contraception in the water supply, could be used to reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies to less educated women. “The lower down the educational scale you go, the less people are in control of their lives, and less in control of planning for children,” he said.

Flynn argues vigorously that race is not a determinant of IQ, but that class can be. “There is no genetic difference between Maori and Pakeha in terms of genes for intelligence,” he said.
[...]

Flynn, an expert on the interaction of class, race and IQ, said in a socially mobile society such as New Zealand’s, those who remained uneducated had poorer genetic material in terms of IQ. Over time poorer genes would take their toll, leading to a “decay” in genetic quality.
[...]

“I do have faith in science, and science may give us something that renders conception impossible unless you take an antidote,” he said. “You could of course have a chemical in the water supply and have to take an antidote. If you had contraception made easier by progress, then every child is a wanted child.”

I’ve picked out just a few assumptions in this article – add your own:

1. Women get pregnant because they’re too stupid to use contraception.
2. Poor women are poor because they’re stupid.
3. Stupidity is genetic – you get it from your mother.
4. We need to act urgently to stop these stupid women from destroying the intellectual qualities of our race.
5. Stupidpoor women are out of control.
6. Men need to force contraception on all women to prevent imminent disaster- hordes of poor, stupid people taking over the world.
7. The best way to do this is to poison the entire population, and provide an opt-out only for smartrich women who can access it.
8. Smartrich women never have unplanned pregnancies. (If they do, it’s a blessing, unlike the social crime of unplanned pregnancies in stupidpoor women.)
9. Oh, it’s not about race. Jim Flynn isn’t a racist.

I’m just going to go back and check it isn’t an Onion article. Nope, it’s real.

Filed under: Politics, Sociology, authoritarianism, bigotry, moral panics, obstreperation, peeves, reproductive freedoms

Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere

We’ve been running a bit of a series on repulsive advertising featuring women’s bodies:

* the Nando’s stripper-mummy-with-a-heart-of-gold: Been trying to find the words
* Pornified racist slavery in the pursuit of fashion: Because “fun ‘n’ edgy” and “pornification of slavery” are so easily confused.
* The Brazilian low-fat yoghurt ads: Ads that make you go Grrr

Today’s edition features a giant grass-painted porn ad on the approach to Gatwick airport. Via the Times Online, the ad features the silhouette of a woman humping a stripper pole, with the text:

Anytime
Anyplace
Anywhere
myprivatedance.com</strong

[image credit: The Guardian]

Because men need gyrating drooling submissive women delivered to their mobile phones wherever they go. I don’t envy those of you who have to put up blokes jerking off to this tripe on the subway, or those of you forced to work in this fucked-up industry.

Filed under: crass, obstreperation