Applying Bill of Ockham’s sharp thing

Carey Roberts, a withered geriatrarch of the he-man-she-haters club, is once again complaining that women are meanyheads: in Misandry in the least likely of places Roberts clutches his pearls over the lyrics of a Country song about a revenge scenario on an untrusted lover.

But it’s the title — Before He Cheats — that turns this song into a bitter gender tirade. Just imagine a male star reaching platinum for crooning, Before She Aborts.

Country songs about Cheatin’, oh my, Carey Roberts! Such razor-sharp insight! Who’s ever heard of such a thing! Why, it’s not as if it’s such a trope in country music that there’s actually songs about cheating songs or anything.

Cause she just started liking cheatin’ songs
And what’s bothering me
I don’t know if its the cheatin’ she likes
Or just the melody

As various commentors over at Sadly, No!’s excellent fisking of Roberts have observed, it’s hard to see how just the title makes this particular country song an outstandingly bitter gender tirade in comparison to such shining lights of relationship modelling as “Momma’s in the Graveyard (Poppa’s in the Pen)” or “He hit me (and it felt like a kiss)”.

You’d think drawing such a long bow would have tuckered Carey out, but no – he’s only warming up for the Hyperbole Steeplechase:

Filed under: moral panics, religion, reproductive freedoms

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

“Hospital overwhelmed by child anorexia rise”

This is just heartbreaking.

News.com.au reports that admissions of pre-teen girls with severe anorexia nervosa to Melbourne Royal Children’s Hospital have risen by over 1400% in the past four years. The article continues:

Clinical leader Dr Andrew Kennedy, who overseas eating disorder patients, said the increases were “staggering”.

“It continually blows our minds how sick these kids can get,” he said. “A 13-year-old girl recently was so malnourished when she came in she had to go straight to intensive care.”
[...]
Kirsty Greenwood, from the Eating Disorders Foundation of Victoria, said: “There is simply nothing out there for these children”.

The Royal Children’s had been trying its best to cope with the increased demand, she said.

“They’ve stretched their resources and finances to the limit hoping that it was just a blip, but the numbers are still going up and they can’t do it any more.”

And PerthNow today reports:

Princess Margaret Hospital clinical psychologist Julie McCormick said PMH was seeing about 80 new patients a year with eating disorders. At present it was treating 200 children for eating disorders, including some as young as eight with anorexia.

Dr Fursland said her clinic, the Centre for Clinical Interventions, was treating about 350 people for eating disorders and there were long waiting lists.

The Brisbane Times has more here, including a case study of an eleven-year-old girl who traces her anorexia to being teased about being “overweight” at school, and being taken by her parents to an obesity clinic. She lost weight, and remained desperately unhappy, convinced she was obese, and ended up spending three months in hospital – a feeding tube in her nose, but without adequate psychiatric and counselling support available. From the story given, it seems that both her parents and the “obesity clinic” attributed her depression/mental illness to her size, and were deluded into thinking that dieting was The! Cure! Meanwhile, the girl herself became lost in the shuffle.

Filed under: fat-hating, health

Why so offended? It’s not like I said any bad words!

“Oh, the civility!” is of course the catchcry of pearlclutchers everywhere, especially on that subset of socially-conservative blogs where a bit of cussing is viewed as inherently and self-evidently an order of magnitude more offensive than calling someone a pervert or a traitor.

Here’s a couple of comments from another blog which point out just how much this “civility” standard is rank hypocrisy, which cuts right to the heart of our Civility Guidelines here at Hoyden About Town.

Rheinhard:

Consider 2 pieces of writing:

1. A lengthy screed written by lawyers and statisticians explaining, with numerous polysyllabic phrases and data extrapolations galore, the benefits that would accrue to the national discourse, the economy, and morality in general should the polity choose to put all of the citizenry who happen to be of Jewish extraction into cleansing facilities (which, it is explained in a technical footnote, will contain only the most humane and sanitary of gas chambers and crematoria)

or

2. A short flyer posted on lamposts telling the Nazi Punks to F**K Off.

Which set of writers would you prefer to dine with?

Filed under: blogging, conservatism, culture wars, ethics, moral panics, peeves

Your friends make you fat

(Subtext: so if any of your mates are a wee bit plump you better drop them quick smart or you’ll be rooned, rooned! Yay, let’s make fat people even more socially isolated and scorned!)

So say all the headlines and radio shows this morning, based on a study in America that has found a correlation between gaining weight and having friends who also gain weight. The talkback shows especially are full of all the talking heads of the Diet Industry sagely shaking their heads and wagging their fingers at the ‘obesity epidemic’[1].

Most of the discussion I’ve heard has focussed on “individuals”, but you know what? The study found that the “friend” correlation only holds up for men.

Filed under: fat-hating, health, moral panics, skeptics

What do disabled people, fat people, and indigenous languages have in common? They’re not disposable.

Read ‘Ems for today:

Sunday Telegraph: Quadriplegic left on train

Mark McCauley, a man with quadriplegia, was abandoned on a New South Wales CityRail train for four hours when the train lost power. The ambulatory passengers were all evacuated one hour into the debacle. Luckily, he had his mobile phone on him. His first call, to CityRail, wasn’t so helpful:

“I rang CityRail and told the lady I was stuck . . . and at the end of the conversation she said ‘That’s fine sir, somebody will get back to you in two or three days’.

His second call was to 000. They just rang CityRail and had a manager call him back. McCauley reports:

“She said we can’t get you off the train until we restore power – it could be in the early hours of the morning.”

Mr McCauley was in need of medication by then. Luckily, construction workers volunteered to remove him from the train with a forklift.

CityRail’s apology? Two one-day free rail passes.

~~

Filed under: Read 'ems, disability, fat-hating, history, indigenous, moral panics

Some of these things are not like the other ones: a quiz

Six of these sentences appeared in the Australian mainstream media this week. Eight didn’t; they have been doctored by me. Can you tell which is which? Click each number for the original story.

1. Three young white people, one of them a police officer, have pleaded guilty to raping a male friend during a night of heavy drinking in Adelaide.

2. An Aboriginal preacher who pleaded guilty to child sex abuse will hear from his victims in court today.

3. Jessica was randomly abducted from her workplace in Ballarat on February 6 last year and raped repeatedly by a white man during a 29-hour, cross country ordeal.

4. Three men charged over the gang rapes of a 12-year-old boy in the remote Aboriginal community of Maningrida in the Northern Territory between April and August last year have been ordered to stand trial.

5. White man Martin, who claimed he was armed with a knife, then took his victim on a terrifying drive to Bacchus Marsh, west of Melbourne, during which time he threatened to rape her.

6. More than 30 Aboriginal men have been implicated in sex attacks on girls as young as 11 from one community after authorities uncovered a second child abuse scandal in a remote West Australian indigenous township.

7. John Nicholous Xydias, a 43-year-old chef living in white suburb Glen Iris with his parents, will appear in the Melbourne Magistrates court on Monday after police alleged he had drugged, raped and filmed 16 women between 1998 and 2004.

8. White serial rapist Robert Fardon is in police custody after being caught in the company of another sex offender who had breached his curfew. Fardon, 58, was arrested yesterday in Brisbane’s west along with fellow multiple rapist Trevor Toms, also white, when an electronic monitoring device worn by Toms alerted authorities to a curfew breach.

9. A man accused of taking a sleeping 10-year-old girl from her bed and sexually assaulting her at a remote Aboriginal community will remain in police custody.

10. A white aged-care worker digitally raped elderly women with dementia under his care, a jury has been told.

11. Police have rescued an Australian child at potential risk from a global internet paedophile ring that used a chat room to stream live videos of children being raped. Four Australian men have been arrested, with more arrests expected. [...] Investigators made the case public after the sentencing of white ringleader Timothy David Martyn Cox yesterday.

12. Three teenagers accused of raping a 12-year-old boy over five months at a remote Aboriginal community will stand trial.

13. In 1972, he was twice anally raped by an older Aboriginal man.

14. The panel appointed by the Government says there’s sexual abuse of children in almost every white suburb in Australia, possibly in all of them.

Filed under: bigotry, moral panics, racism

Living Black

First, a news snippet:

The Age: Indigenous land takeover angers NT govt

NT Attorney-General [and Member for Nhulunbuy] Syd Stirling said Aboriginal communities territory-wide were angry, confused and talking of legal action. He said the territory government was seeking advice from the Justice Department about what shape the commonwealth’s proposed amendment to the Land Rights Act might take “and then what we as a government might do”.

The Central Land Council and Northern Land Council (NLC) were expected to support any legal action and “present a united front”, he said. “If your rights are taken away there is generally a legal recourse and a legal challenge. This is critical to indigenous people in these communities… that permit is a signal to everybody else that they own that land. If that is taken away, and the views are that this is the first step, then you are beginning to unwind Aboriginal land rights.“

LIVING BLACK

But on to the meat of this post – SBS’s Living Black last night was a special on the Federal government’s Northern Territory “emergency plan”. I made a few notes, in case you missed it (or are following along from overseas). The “quotes” are paraphrase – I hope I have represented people’s statements accurately. I have added bits ‘n’ pieces ‘n’ links from the Web. My own comments and extra snippets not from the show are in italics. Bits I found particularly head-explodey are in bold.

Maningrida

First, a snapshot of the self-governing Maningrida community in Arnhem Land, home to 2600 people and a “high profile” abuse case. Their system for alcohol rationing is said to be working well, with everyone rationed two cartons of beer per fortnight. People worry that by banning alcohol completely, more people will go to Darwin to drink, leaving their children behind. The community is working on alcohol-related problems, with community “strong women” having started their own night patrol, getting children off the streets.

Filed under: Politics, Sociology, authoritarianism, bigotry, indigenous, moral panics, racism

“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

Lame jokes

I’m looking at you, Pavlov…

Once there was a boy who had no arms, legs, or torso. In other words – he was a head. He used to roll to school, and roll home again. He was teased unmercifully, and the girl he had a crush on wouldn’t give him a second look.

When a fairy godmother appeared and offered the boy one wish, he asked to be turned into an orange in the girl’s lunch box. (Obviously a rather dim bulb, this one.)

So, long story short, girl forgets to eat her orange, goes off on school holidays, and at the end of the school holidays the girl discovers the mushy mouldy orange in her lunchbox, and throws it against the wall, splat!

The moral is: Quit while you’re a head.

In the US, conservative culture itself is the lame joke. As Lauren at Unsprung explains: “A janitor who watches too much 20/20 was chagrined when he learned that the bag of human fetuses he found in the girls’ locker room was actually a sack of rotted oranges. …pro-life group protesting outside sadly put down signs and went home“.

Amanda Marcotte:

Imagine you’re a junior high school janitor and inside a girl’s locker you discover a Ziploc bag full of goo and rot around some unidentifiable object. What do you assume right off the bat it must be? A discarded and rotten lunch? At worst, a bag of puke? A prank of some sort?

Try a human fetus. (H/T.)

As you imagine, the bag of goo turned out not to be the discards from some sort of young teenage sex cult, but was in fact a rotten orange, though they had to verify this through the Dallas County Medical Examiner. (Well, the medical examiner probably had quite the laugh over this, so all is not lost.) And in retrospect, it might have seemed a little unwise to assume straight off the bat that junior high students are collecting fetuses in bags, but that they might be doing what kids do and being a bit sloppy in cleaning up trash left in their lockers. But let’s cut everyone involved in this a break. We all know that females are born naturally duplicitous, craven and immoral, and that they get a rise out of having all sorts of sex so they can lie about it and avoid the consequences of forced childbirth….

…Anyway, Bush-appointed members of the FDA believe that there’s a likelihood of emergency contraception-based teenage sex cults, so why would it be such a leap to imagine that junior high girls are running around having sex with the boys and escaping the due punishment by with Sapphic abortion parties in the girls locker room? It’s not like the Bush administration would have members that had a poor grasp on reality, right? The way the war is going certainly demonstrates that. Why I bet these teenage girls today with their girl power and their Title IX are able to self-abort by playing Britney Spears records backwards. That’s how far this country has fallen, due to the feminist infiltrators.

Lends a new meaning to the word loinfruit, doesn’t it.

(Boom-tish.)

 
 
 
Guest post by Helen

Filed under: conservatism, fundies, moral panics, reproductive freedoms