HystericallyBored
NYTimes has a wedding profile for a couple that consists of a transgender man with three children from previous marriages as a female and a transgender woman. It’s a milestone for me– I’m sure it’s happened before, but that’s first official announcement of it I’ve seen.
This is what I would have played as they walked down the aisle: Why not?
[whohit]They Love Each Other So[/whohit]
John McCain was a good politician, better than most, more average than most. He was more like you and me– real. He was concerned about the common man. The common man who puzzled every day over just how to manage his 24 acres estate.
Of course you don’t have 24 acres. You’re lucky if you have a quarter of an acre. You’re lucky if you have a quarter, period, free and clear.
What’s the big deal?
Congressmen make about $174,000.
It just struck me that even John McCain, who– like all of them– loved to insist that he represented well the working classes, and that he cared for people like you and me, and that he understood how hard it was to get by nowadays, and so on and so on– even John McCain had a 24 acre estate to fall back on when he was sick of wandering around Washington in his limo with his driver and security guards.
There should be some people in Congress with 24 acres. There should maybe be a few with 1,000 acres. Maybe even one or two with 10,000 acres. These people have interests and concerns. They should be represented. They should have a voice, so that the vast majority of Congress with their apartments and condos and mortgages and maxed out credit cards, don’t tilt the playing board too far in their own direction. Success should be rewarded.
Now, about those other members of Congress. Yes, I know– no members of Congress take a bus anywhere.
What does Congress do? One thing they do is decide how much money to put into public transit and infrastructure. 600 mostly white men voting on whether or not it’s really necessary to improve public transportation. 600 mostly white men with generous employee-provided health care deciding on whether or not the government should even bother helping you get health care. 600 mostly white men who live in bland suburbs, or expensive downtown condos, or 24-acre estates, deciding on how much toxic waste can be dumped into your drinking water.
How many, do you think, should be representative of the working class? How many should know what it’s like to take a bus somewhere, or fly coach, or take out a payday loan, or have to borrow from friends to cover the deductible on their health care? How many? How many?
Do the Trump acolytes, his mesmerized followers, understand that there is not a single member of Congress who lives even remotely like them? [There are, in fact, a few who have more liabilities than assets, but I will insist that anyone who owes $4 million is not poor– they just haven’t cashed out yet.]
If I lived in the U.S., I think I would start a political party that is constitutionally committed (I mean the party’s constitution) to having a composition that accurately reflects the social-economic status of the country. So it would have to have, out of 100 candidates, about 20 who are really poor, 30 who are middling, 30 who are doing pretty well, and 20 who are prosperous. Of the 20 prosperous candidates, we’ll allow five to be filthy rich.
Okay: come up with legislation that we can all vote for.
[whohit]24 Acres[/whohit]
What is an “unwelcome sexual advance”? Under the Obama Administration, this thing, this “unwelcome sexual advance” was considered, by definition, harassment. That is, it constitutes harassment plain and simple without any other aggravating factors. Make an unwelcome “sexual advance” on someone and you are in trouble. Big trouble.
Not clear? Think of a “welcome” sexual advance. What is it? Is it when a woman or a man says, “please touch me or kiss me or oogle me”? Did you ever do that? Put it into words, or writing, in advance? You are out on a date with someone and you say, “why don’t you give me a kiss?” Or is it more likely that you will lean in and give him or her a kiss, without a formal announcement or invitation.
You will not know if it was welcome or not until it is too late. If it is unwelcome, you have committed an unwelcome sexual advance. You are guilty of harassment.
Everybody thinks they know what it means. No, you don’t. What is a sexual advance in the first place? It is an action that is intended to evoke a response from the subject that might indicate receptivity to sexual activity with this person. That’s what an “advance” is, of a sexual nature. It is not the sex itself though it is “sexual”. It is not intercourse. It’s not nothing, sitting on your hands waiting to see if something happens. It’s an “advance”– a tentative move forward to explore, test, provoke.
You won’t like an advance if you don’t like the person doing the advancing. But that’s the point: if your advance meets resistance, you back off. If you don’t back off– I agree with the mainstream here– you are committing an offence.
Nor is it usually a verbal question. It’s a move, a hand on a knee, leaning in, touching, sitting on someone’s lap, even patting a bum (before you object, I can tell you it happened to me, and it was exactly what I thought it was). It’s lots of things, most of which, if attributed to a politician, will elicit squeals of horror from the sanctimonious. You monster! You must be punished! You must show me that you are totally contrite before you may be allowed to resume your career.
The Obama Administration played around with phrases: “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature”. Here’s some shocking news: “conduct of a sexual nature” does not just apply to “why don’t we go sit in the back seat for a while, honey”. It applies to, “Tommy is such a brat, let’s chase him” and “why don’t you come join me on the couch” and “could you walk me home?” and “you are so mean to me” and “you want to hang out together” and I know how to improve my tips 30%: shorten my skit and undo the top button of my blouse.
I think the general public operates as if it believes that there is a very clear, thick demarcation between conduct of a sexual nature and conduct that is not of a sexual nature. But, like, allegedly, gender identity, I believe it is more like a continuum, and that it can sometimes be very hard to draw that line, and I know that a lot of us are very hesitant to admit it when our own behavior does cross the line. There is no way to determine, objectively, whether any of a myriad of teasing, provocative, funny actions is conduct “of a sexual nature”. The phrase is absurd. There is no clear, definitive line between many social behaviors and many sexual behaviors.
Flip it over for a minute: what is a “welcome” sexual advance? If we claim that we know what an “unwelcome” sexual advance is, then we must know what a “welcome” sexual advance looks like. More importantly, we better know what the difference is. But how can we, until it’s too late? We can’t.
How would you know it was welcomed if you hadn’t received a “sexual advance” to begin with, or in return? Step closer to a person you like– what if he or she leans towards you? Should I bring my lawyer along on this date?
[whohit]The Unwelcome Mat[/whohit]
I think what offends me the most about the whole process of nominating and confirming a new justice to the Supreme Court is the utter, contemptible phoniness of it all: Honestly, I have no opinion on abortion at all. None whatsoever. Never thought about it. Gosh, if a case ever comes to me if I’m on the Supreme Court, I will certainly think it over very carefully. Who knows what my opinion will be.
So Donald and Mitch and Paul and Vice-Wienie Pence and the entire evangelical community are all excited about you on the off chance you might vote against Roe v. Wade?
Why don’t the Republicans simply announce they are looking for a Supreme Court Justice who will restore the right of the state to control womens’ bodies? Get it out there and get over with it. Why on earth don’t they proclaim it, celebrate it, relish it? They won, they have the votes, let’s do it!
Susan Collins met with Kavanaugh and came out of the meeting assuring her feminist supporters that Mr. Kavanaugh sees Roe v. Wade as “settled law”. She needs this cover, because she is committed to a pro-choice position and it would be a betrayal of her constituency, in moderate Maine, to choose otherwise. So she needs this cover story, that Kavanaugh has assured her that Roe v. Wade is “settled law”. When he votes to overturn Roe v. Wade (probably incrementally), she needs to be able to say, “I never thought he would do that when I voted to confirm him”.
Does Susan Collins know this is a lie? Is she lying? Probably. She puts on a good show, like John McCain, of being moderate and centrist, but almost invariably votes for the Republican platform.
They know why and you know why. They could never win an election in most states on that platform. They always have to be very vague about it even while their supporters openly celebrate the possibilities. I figure they would lose about ten seats in the Senate if those Republican Senators campaigned on a the promise of ending abortion rights.
“Honest, I have no opinion on abortion. None whatsoever. Never even thought about it. What is ‘abortion’? Is it something bad?”
In his record, it is amazing how many different rationales Kavanaugh provides for invariably deciding in favor of stock holders, police, corporations, security agencies, negligent employers, ISPs, all the while insisting he has no political bias. The constitution itself, you see, clearly says “the stockholders, owners, and oligarchs are always right”.
When the state tries to ensure that all citizens have the right and opportunity to vote in elections– that’s “over-reach”. Excessive. Intrusive! When it wants to see who you’ve been calling on your cellphone, by golly, the constitution itself says right there, “you have no privacy”.
[whohit]The Great Mime Parade[/whohit]
“The Work” is a searing documentary about a program at Folsom Prison to get men imprisoned for violent crimes to face their deepest anxieties and grievances about their past, their absent fathers, brothers who betrayed them, and so on, in a kind of large psycho-therapy session moderated by social workers and joined by volunteers from the community, and largely led by the inmates themselves.
Filmed in 2009 but not released until 2017. Frighteningly raw at times– and not to everyone’s taste. You can see some of the volunteers hang back, then get drawn into the confessional style confrontations. Violent fathers. Absent fathers. Abusive fathers. Fathers who expected too much or too little.
Then one of the volunteers reluctantly recounts how his father was disappointed in him for fetching the wrong tool several times, and then sent him into the house. This is transformed by some of the inmates into some kind of traumatic thing that contaminated the volunteer’s relationship with his father, though it seems more likely it was and remained trivial. No, no, you’re concealing a deeper wound. It must come out. It was a strange sequence.
Other sequences are more intense, in which a person howls and thrashes his outrage while embraced tightly by the other men. One volunteer, Brian, says something condescending that really aggravates an inmate. He seems to actually believe he should be automatically respected by these men because he is smart and wise and together. They hate him. Later, he calls a native inmate, Dark Cloud, “gentle”, which he misinterprets as an insult. Dark Cloud lunges at him, prevented by the other inmates. Just how suitable was Brian for the experience? Didn’t they screen?
At times, searingly compelling. It is claimed that none of 40 men who went through the program returned to prison. I remain skeptical. I see some of this kind of programming as similar to faith healing and charismatic church services, speaking in tongues, and so on. It’s all very dramatic and full of lingo, but is there any real evidence that, 1) all of the experiences related by the participants are real or true, and, 2) that any of it is really therapeutic, at least, in the way the conveners think it is.
It is not difficult to imagine that the love and acceptance these men express towards each other doesn’t make them less dangerous to anyone outside of their artificially created circle of trust. Implicit in all of this is the suggestion that these men committed crimes primarily as a consequence of a deprived or abused childhood. If you are in this circle, you seem obligated to come up with something and to cry and to thrash and scream, and it would not be hard to imagine a deprived participant making something up, or exaggerating, in order to fit in.
I’m not sure it doesn’t work. Maybe, for it’s own reasons, it does.
When the volunteer relates about his dad’s frustration with his inability to find the right tool, he also adds that he feels guilt over bringing this relatively trivial issue up among men who have experienced genuine trauma, but the men will have none of it. They like him. They urge him on to confront his trauma-inducing father, to weep and thrash, and break through, and confront him (one of the inmates role-plays for him). It’s a moment in the film that is nearly comical and made me think of a potential SNL skit, which some might think disrespectful.
Yes, it is. But let’s be clear: in my mind, it doesn’t diminish the real emotions felt by the inmates, or their expressions of rage.
[whohit]The Scream[/whohit]