It’s not just the moustache

This guest post is by Helen on the Cast Iron Balcony.

Aaaaaaargh!

It’s (gag) happened!



Elizabeth and the dweeby, creepy, moustached Anthony have finally realised that each other is their Only Trew Love, and they’re going at it like… well, as far as anyone can go at it in this agressively wholesome, goody two-shoes comic strip. I’m not the only one. There is appalled-ness all over the internets.

If you don’t know what I’m going on about, it’s the comic strip For Better or For Worse, or the FOOBiverse, which has been infesting the funnies page of the AGE for the last few decades. I’m drawn back to it time and again by the seeming inevitability that somehow, sometime, something interesting has to happen… and it never does. The strips ususally end with a bad pun, or a trite piece of folksy wisdom, in the final frame.

For years, young twentysomething Elizabeth has been seeing various attractive helicopter pilots and other charismatic, if one-dimensional, characters who inhabit her teaching zone in far north Canada, or wherever it is. Meanwhile, her dweeby High School boyfriend languishes in her home suburb (just around the corner from her parents), married to the evil Therese (who works full time while Anthony looks after their child – you see, he wanted a baby, she didn’t, and she acquiesced when he told her he’d be a SAHD. Well, she.. she… well, she took him at his word! Sheesh! She is the evil to end all evils.) Naturally, everything in the FBOFW plot is grinding hopelessly towards what Shaenon Garrity describes as “the plodding inevitability of the Liz-Anthony pairing”.

Filed under: Culture, crass, peeves, relationships, vitriol

In which I judge a book by its cover

Guest post by Helen on the Cast Iron Balcony.

Thanks to Tigtog for honouring me with an invitation to guest post at Hoyden while she whizzes down mountains.

Recently, the folks at IBTP have been bemoaning the pinkification of everything (something also deplored by Barbara Ehrenreich, Twisty and Tigtog). Coincidentally, while relaxing with the dead-tree paper, I wandered by accident into the My Career section. Normally I would toss this bulky wad, with its depressing articles about young billionaires who are all twenty years younger than me, over my shoulder. This time, like someone driving slowly past a car crash, I couldn’t avert my eyes from a book review by Wendy Taylor (whose column is titled “Expert Advice”).

The name of the book is: “The Girl’s Guide to being a Boss”. Because, presumably, if you’re a grown woman contemplating a position of authority, you’ll rush out and buy a book which refers to you as a “girl”. As if that isn’t enough, the full title as shown by Amazon.com is “TGGTBAB (Without Being a Bitch): Valuable Lessons, Smart Suggestions, and True Stories for Succeeding as the Chick in Charge”. Because, you know, the greatest danger in taking on a management role is that people will think you’re a bitch? And who could resist a book on professional development with a cover like this? Here’s the version shown in the AGE review:

Filed under: Culture, Life, Media, crass, peeves, vitriol

Aargheeheee! The rapier wit of the Gore-Deranged is destroying me!

Carbon Credit Killers.

Why We Do It

The reason we sell Carbon Debits is simple – we want to take away the pathetic excuse of Carbon Credits from those liberals who hide their shame filled lives behind money-bought lunacy. Carbon Credits are simply a way for the rich (Al Gore) to continue to hypocritically live lives that look nothing like what they try to enforce on everyone else in society. We want to take away those excuses.

Our goal is to completely wipe out every Carbon Credit ever bought by selling their nullifying opposite – the Carbon Debit. The guilt and shame that caused people to buy Carbon Credits in the first place will be placed back on them as we let them know that their actions caused us to nullify their credits. They are the cause of us killing trees; they need to face up to their guilt.

This message is important for one reason – Far Left Liberals are lunatics that operate solely on shame of themselves, their success, their country, and their wealth. It is time to expose their ideas and self-defeating idiocy – and selling Carbon Debits is the best way to do that.

Seriously, I hate this site. But underneath all the hateful posturing they may just have a point about the rich simply outsourcing their carbon debt, while people living in poverty are fingerwagged at for failing to embrace their squalor and starvation while knowing from observation that industrialisation is a proven path to relative prosperity.

Then of course I realise that distracting me from important messages about broad ecological responsibility (poor people may want prosperity, but not at the price of toxic contamination when fully informed) and the reactionary attack on rational discourse in the public arena is exactly what they want to happen, and I nearly fell for it.

Complex issues are hard by definition. It’s wrong to try and boil them down to two opposing sides playing chess and trying to sweep the board.

Filed under: Politics, activism/charity, consumerism, economics, vitriol

Cyberbullying watch: Duke edition

Most of you probably know about the Kathy Sierra death-threats episode that has left her fearing for her safety, her blog shut down and her life a mess.

(Above link and rest-of-this-post trigger warning: disturbing content, misogynistic violent threats.)

Some of you might know about last year’s episode of bullying and violent rape threats in a comments thread in the University of New Hampshire school newspaper. A student wrote an inoffensive and brief feminist critique of an advertising flyer; upon which a slew of asshats thought it just the thing to respond with violent outpourings of hate, observations that the woman had not been adequately subject to “deep-dicking”, and that rape with a baseball bat would be just the thing to cure her feminist leanings.

Today a Duke student, Shadee Malaklou, has written a short piece on the her observations of the conflicts between femininity and feminism. (There’s a clumsy ableist barb, but I’m letting that pass for the moment). There is not even anything in the piece that directly addresses men or male behaviour. The article is about the internal conflicts that feminists can experience with regards to “femme” dress and behaviour; a beginning exploration of the conflict Twisty has repeatedly observed between “femininity as-self-policed-subordination” and “femininity as-survival-skill.”

And the comments thread has already started to fly. Let’s hope it doesn’t go beyond the current “idiotic girl”, “Poorly written”, the accusations of psychological disorders, and the speculation that the author is just “confused” and challenged because she’s an Iranian immigrant. Oh, and that she’s unmarriageable (the worst imaginable attribute for a woman!) and “shrill”. I’m amazed it took seven comments to get to “shrill”.

I never used to believe Germaine Greer’s remark that “Women have very little idea how much men hate them.” I always thought she was a little over the top with that one. This week? I’m not so sure.

Filed under: cyberbullying, vitriol

Stopping cyberbullying

crossposted from Larvatus Prodeo

Friday was, on short-notice, announced as Stop Cyberbullying Day by some US blogs. This was in response to high-profile software-usability author and blogger, Kathy Sierra, writing about how she has cancelled an upcoming conference speech and other engagements due to overwhelming fear following hate-speech and threats directed at her online. The threats were at a sufficiently high level that Sierra has reported them to the police and apparently the FBI is investigating them, because making death threats online, just as in “real life”, is a crime.

Sierra wrote particularly about her sense of betrayal that some of the hate-speech was allowed free reign on some “trashtalk” sites (i.e. specifically for sledging others) that were set up and/or recommended by other tech bloggers whom she knows and often meets in person at tech conferences. The trashtalk sites have now been closed down and pulled from the web, at least one of the other tech bloggers Sierra named, Frank Paynter, has apologised unreservedly for his involvement in setting up the sledging site and the only woman tech blogger named, Jeneane Sessum, has felt unfairly included in the names Sierra named, although also apologising unreservedly for pain that has come to Sierra from what she describes as a peripheral involvement in the sledging site. Another named blogger, Alan Herrell aka ‘The Head Lemur’, claims that his blog IDs have been hacked, that threatening posts which appeared to originate from him were forged by someone unknown and that he is so disgusted by the hit to his reputation that he’s taking a break from blogging to regroup. Yet another of the named tech-bloggers, Chris Locke aka ‘rageboy’, is defending himself vigorously from what he sees as an unjustified attack on his reputation contained in Sierra’s post.

There has been great surprise expressed by many that a site set up to encourage free speech for “meankids” (the name of the site) could degenerate into such a pit of festering hate. It was just meant to be “a bit of fun”, a place to “blow off steam” and “be creative”. Many others have expressed surprise at the surprise: without written standards, a tight comments/posting policy and proper supervision to see that standards are met, this sort of degeneration into outrageous abuse, almost as if there is some offensiveness competition, is seen time and time again in “free speech” communities. This was seen in the AutoAdmit forum’s cyberobsession with Jill Filipovic and other female law students — the more outrageous the statements, the more kudos from fellow forum members. The more moderate members are either intimidated or disgusted into leaving and the community becomes a sewer.

Filed under: Media, bigotry, blogging, cyberbullying, interblog, vitriol

Was Darwin a racist?

Anti-evolutionists often make the claim that Darwin was racist as if, even were the accusation true (we’ll get to its falseness shortly), that a racist stance would somehow invalidate his scientific discoveries. These claims have repeatedly been shown to be incorrect characterisations, generally involving selective quoting (and editing) of Darwin’s writings out of context, a practice referred to as quote mining.

Over at Pharyngula, regular commenter Ed Darrell made a comment on one of PZ’s threads about creationist quotemining, and PZ reposted it in full at this post, also called Was Darwin a racist?

Darrell provides 6 punchy numbered paragraphs that debunk the core of this myth/slur against Darwin – well worth a read, even for those of us who’ve seen this debunked before. Anyhoo, the more links to this excellent debunking, the more likely it is that people searching for information about this claim will find the debunking, thus this post.

For anyone interested in further examples of creationist quote-mining, check out the Talk Origins Quote Mine Project.

(Yes, I know I’ve spelt quotemining three different ways. That’s because all three are common. Sheesh, the things I do for search engines.)

Filed under: creationists/ID, urban legends, vitriol

My my, LGF has bounced by

Many of my Aussie readers may be unaware of the reactionary conservative playground that is Little Green Footballs. Well, it appears I’ve had a handful of LGF visitors via Digg since David Jackmanson brought this post of mine to their attention, as they were busy congratulating themselves that via observing various lefty sexists blending asinine misogyny into their anti-Ann-Coulter sentiments they had proved that the entire (we’re so monumentally unified!) Left was just a bunch of hypocrites (watch us vanish in that puff of logic!).

Of course, although I mock (because I love) above, not all LGF habitues are so frivolously illogical. One LGFer, George Felis, was kind enough to leave a reasoned (though wrongitty-wrong in so many ways) comment. I started to respond on the other thread, but it got too long, so I’ve made it a separate post.

Came here from the LGF site too, its nice to see that there is at least one thoughtful post on the subject, even though I had to look half-way around the world to find it.

One of the problems we have hit is the introduction of Political Correctness into what used to be called Edgy Comedy.

Filed under: bigotry, ethics, vitriol

Keating the polemical

Pavlov’s Cat misses Paul Keating’s contributions to public discourse. I do too.

Addendum: My favourite cartoon about Maxine McKew challenging John Howard for the seat of Bennelong, by Nicolson and found via Enderverse.

Filed under: Politics, vitriol

Blogging, blaming and outing or alerting

Hello, visiting Blamers! (and thanks for the emails)

So, it appears I am the only person who’s worked out Switchbutt Dorktor’s identity, or at least the only person who’s owned up to it.

Short summary for non-Blamers:

1. Anonymous doctor posts a couple of rants about obstetric anaesthetic management on his blog.
2. Said rants are filled with disdain for women in labour who don’t want pain relief, insults to midwives and doulas, and disparaging remarks about nurses with qualifications above RN, also a disturbing belief that procedural protocols and medical forms are a waste of time and energy.
3. His sexist and arrogant tone is notied, someone passes the link to Twisty, Twisty’s obstreperal lobe generates a post.
4. Dorktor posts condescending comment to Twisty’s post about how her blog is full of “rabid (and exceedingly retarded) lesbian manhaters”. Also insults women leaving critical comments on his blog.
5. Twisty publishes another post asking if anybody knows who the Dorktor is.
6. Dorktor takes down blog entirely, and gets another blogger who had made an announcement post about his blog to delete that post. Twisty updates her post to include links to cached versions of both blogs.
7. I sleuthe and I find, and without naming him post that I know who he is.
8. What to do now?

Filed under: ethics, health, interblog, vitriol

FFS

Spare me.

Michelle Malkin patting some hack on the back for doing a search and replace on a few paragraphs from the of a George Orwell essay, doing the usual strip-the-context bait and switch, as if he has made some profound intellectual point in comparing Orwell’s excoriation of the ineffectualness of the English left-wing intelligentsia during WW2 and the current anti-Iraq-war movement in the USA.

The original essay, The Lion and the Unicorn, is well worth reading if you’ve never seen it before, or rereading it if you have.

Then and only then go and read the hack from American Digest, with his Updating Orwell for Presidents’ Day. His search and replace on Orwell’s text is pure point-scoring without acknowledging the careful placing in context by Orwell during the preceding 4 and a half parts of Chapter 1, and also the conclusions he came to in the following two chapters.

Orwell deserves more respect than to be abused like this.

Filed under: conservatism, interblog, vitriol