The title says it all. From SMBC, of course:
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal’s Opabinia Cartoon
For Your Enjoyment: The Best Opabinia Joke in the Last 540 Million Years
Pervert Justice
Just another Freethought Blogs site
The title says it all. From SMBC, of course:
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal’s Opabinia Cartoon
While we all know that Mike Pence is a complete jerkwad for touching expensive things he clearly has no business touching (…and for a few hundred thousand other things…) what has been largely missed in the otherwise excellent coverage is the message he actually came to NASA to give.
Pence gave a speech – before proving his ignorance and/or rejection of the concept of consent – promising all of us that Trump was going to make NASA great again.
So, we’ve all heard about Mike Pence’s inability to learn things that the median 8 year old has long mastered, but one thing I found more depressing was the makeup of the top results when one attempted to Go Ogle “Pence do not touch” this morning. Here are my first 6:
We Hunted the Mammoth is a website probably at least vaguely familiar to any reader of Pervert Justice. While WHTM may or may not be to your taste, author/curator David Futrelle has discovered something interesting and terribly, terribly funny about the tastes of a certain misogynist. While I highly recommend you spend some time browsing the site and especially reading the particular post in question, I cannot stop myself from stealing a few snippets of Futrelle’s work and pasting it here for your enjoyment. Permit me to begin by reposting the very interesting writings of a particular misogynist discovered by Futrelle:
While PZ focuses on Roger Ailes’ death and the resignation of a truly partisan hypocrite (but I repeat myself), Jason Chaffetz, I have been reading about the end of another career.
The Daily Beast is reporting that
Representative Robert Fisher, the Republican who was recently unmasked as the creator and chief moderator of The Red Pill, one of the internet’s most notorious forums for misogyny, resigned on Wednesday [H/T WHTM]
To be clear: he wasn’t resigning from The Red Pill, he was resigning from his position as a state Representative in the New Hampshire House.
I hope you read the recent post on Republican efforts to preserve the ability to commit rape after someone who previously consented to sexual activity revokes that consent, even when the activity includes things not covered by the original consent, such as violent force.
Some people will wonder how and why someone like Amy Guy, who by all accounts I’ve read sounds a very strong and capable person, could possibly offer any form of sexual consent to someone like Jonathan Wayne Guy, who had a history of acting abusively towards Amy Guy. For many, that history will understandably justify the fear of something horrific that might lead Amy Guy to minimize her risk by consenting, and, hopefully, by consenting help shape exactly what happens next. The hope is that, despite having sex only out of fear, exercising some agency can help make what happens next less traumatic than it might otherwise be.
Content note for All The Racism, including graphic photos; witch hunt links contain All The Sexism.
A while back I wrote on Pharyngula about losing my patience with the phrase “witch hunt”. Witch hunts were real things, actively targeting real people for death. They weren’t “partisan”. They didn’t seek actual lawbreakers out in both Massachusetts and the Carolinas, but more aggressively sought out Republican lawbreakers in Massachusetts and more aggressively sought out Democratic lawbreakers in South Carolina. They didn’t take actual evidence and hype it more than it deserved: actual evidence did not exist. What was used as evidence came solely from the prosecutorial imagination.
Worse, witch hunts still take place today, and Christian denominations still encourage them.*1 While I don’t know of any recent witch hunts in the US or Canada, I’m more than happy to condemn this trivializing use of “witch hunt”.
All of which to say that I have been even more offended for even longer at hearing the misuse of “lynch,” “lynching” and “lynch mob”.
Yet more anti-trans bathroom bills are now considered reasonable bets to become law, this time in Texas. Gov Greg Abbott has made a public declaration of support for (further) weaponizing bathrooms through state legislation. Two bills that had this potential have been kicking around Austin’s statehouse for the last few weeks, but the public support has not gone unnoticed.
They say the US is a nation of immigrants, but I find the number of people born outside Canada who currently live in Canada and who make their way into my social circle to be much higher than the persons born outside the US who made it into my social circle while I was in the US. It’s anecdotal, of course, but “Where are you from?” seems to be somewhat less stigmatizing, somewhat less othering than in the US.
Not that it’s not stigmatizing. Not that it’s not othering. Just… 21% less. Like the Canadian dollar, eh?
On the other hand, because so many people are immigrants, the question seems to get asked even more up here. So I wonder if this cartoon from the Nib illustrates a problem that is less hurtful overall. I’m not sure it’s even answerable, but if anyone can stop the racist villains who persistently other the people I like and love and just kinda know, it’s for damn sure the Yellow Power Ranger. Don’t believe me? Then take it from Shing Yin Khor:
Go read the rest of Shing Yin Khor’s cartoon at the Nib. It’s sooooo worth it.
Bear with me a moment: despite the background, this is really all for your amusement. Or mine, anyway.
I am in the process of re-reading some Wollstonecraft and I came across something that I did not remember, something of which I obviously took no special note the last time I read her. In the midst of explaining her opposition to any and all standing armies (You go, Wollstonecraft!) she explains that in such a heavily regulated and even dictatorial environment, those who know in advance that they are destined for promotion have no reason to behave well, and even little to study their military craft. While only some, blessed by family title or fortunate connections, will be corrupted by the idle time and the lack of incentives that results when one’s promotions are automatic, she argues that others are corrupted too.