Politics

Politically, I’m very liberal — about as far left as one can go without sliding into Libertarianism.

EstroBlaster!

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Apparently, I’m a 50-something gun-toting impotent Republican.

At least, that’s sure what it seems like judging by the junk mail I get. For some reason, I’ve ended up on some hilariously odd mailing lists. I get occasional mailings from the AARP welcoming me to my retirement years, the NRA asking if I want to join or contribute money to one thing or another, and so on. Today brought the best mailing yet, though.

Prairie picked up the mail and started flipping through the envelopes. Handing one to me with a puzzled look on her face, she asked, “What mailing list are you on?” The envelope she handed me had a somewhat softcore porn-ish shot of a man and woman in bed, with the text “THE FIRST TRUE REVOLUTION IN MALE SEXUAL POWER IS HERE…NOW!” emblazoned across it.

“I’m really not sure,” I said and popped it open. Pulling the folded newsletter style paper out of the envelope, my eyebrows shot up, and I started to laugh at the headline that greeted me: “THE PROBLEM IS NOT TESTOSTERONE – The Problem Is That You Are Being Deluged with Female Hormones. You Are Being Feminized and You Don’t Even Know It.”

Feminized? Oh, no — what’s happening? Am I losing my manhood? Is my manliness being sucked away, turning me into some swishy girly-man? This can’t be true!

EstroBlaster Detail

Reading on, I chose bits and pieces to read to Prairie aloud, until both of us had stitches in our sides and tears in our eyes. The advertised product, EstroBlaster, is yet another in a long line of herbal supplements aimed at men who have (or are being convinced that they have) a little less fuel in their rocket than they did in earlier times. I haven’t seen too many of these ads, so I don’t really have a basis for comparison, but this one’s marketed using an absolutely hilarious mix of misogyny, homophobia, and scare tactics.

A few choice quotes…

…more and more research is coming out. There is a terrible secret that you should know about.

The Secret Problem of Estrogen Dominance

You are being deluged with female hormones. That, on top of naturally falling male hormone levels, can cause a condition called estrogen dominance.

You are being turned into a woman, and you don’t even know it.

What’s happening is that large amounts of female hormones are slipping through the water treatment plants of most major cities. Even in the country the water is filled with them.

Estrogen is passing right through women and into the water supply — where it can’t be removed.

In fact, there is enough estrogen in the water right now to change male fish into females.

Recent statistics even show that more young men are getting plastic surgery to remove their “male boobs” than there are young women getting breast augmentation.

EstroBlaster Detail

Not only that, but the rate of young boys turning into girls is frightening. One group that monitors this problem said:

No one compiles official statistics on transgender youths, but everyone agrees that their numbers are rising quickly.

…it took months to narrow down a powerful formula at a good price. We named it Estro-Blaster — after what it’s designed to do…blast the estrogen out of your system.

**Get Back the Sexual Drive and Ability You Had as a Teenager… Wanting Sex Every Day – The Ability to Get Hard Every Time – And Even Spontaneous Erections! (The Kind You Used to Have to Hid in School When You Got Up to Change Classes…You’d Have to Carry Your Books Down in Front of Your Pants)

After years of falling sexual ability, I was amazed one day, when out and about, that I was getting a “spontaneous” erection.

I didn’t even have to touch my penis. It just began swelling to an erect state.

You can imagine my surprise — and pleasure. This hadn’t happened to me since I was in my twenties. Many years ago.

I felt like a man again — a real man.

EstroBlaster Detail

As if all this wasn’t funny enough, there were two sources listed in the flyer. At first I was surprised that there were any sources listed — this didn’t seem like the kind of thing that would be worrying about sourcing its information. Then I noticed that one of the sources was a forum post on Free Republic, one of the most notorious far-right rabid conservative spaces on the ‘net today, and far from being anything that I’d even remotely consider a ‘trusted source.’ The second was a small excerpt from an article titled “Treatment of Young MTF Transsexuals” on a site called “Second Type Woman,” which (at least on first glance) doesn’t exactly strike me as the kind of source most people should be basing their pharmaceutical decisions on.

All in all, it made for a very entertaining evening.

And, apparently, I’m a fifty-something gun-toting impotent Republican.

Good to know!

A little tense…

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One of the most common constructs of political speech is what’s technically known as the ‘passive tense,’ which conveys what happened without directly assigning any specific responsibility. For example:

The passive is used when the subject of the verb action is not as important as what happened. Note the difference between

  1. He burned down the house. (Active verb)

  2. The house was burned down. (Passive verb — who, or what, caused the house to burn down is not known, or is not as important as the fact that it burned down.)

Politicians use this form a lot, as it’s a convenient way to weasel out of why something happened.

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales fell back on a classic Washington linguistic construct on Tuesday when he acknowledged that “mistakes were made” in the dismissals of eight federal prosecutors last year.

The phrase sounds like a confession of error or even contrition, but in fact, it is not quite either one. The speaker is not accepting personal responsibility or pointing the finger at anyone else. It is a construction that other officials, from Richard M. Nixon’s press secretary to Ronald Reagan to John H. Sununu and Bill Clinton, have used when someone’s hand was caught in the federal cookie jar.

While listening to this week’s edition of NPR’s ‘Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!‘, I heard mention of a wonderful new term for the passive tense, also mentioned at the end of the just quoted NYT article:

The nonconfessions inspired William Schneider, a political guru here, to note a few years ago that Washington had contributed a new tense to the language. “This usage,” he said, “should be referred to as the past exonerative.”

International Women’s Day

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International Women's Day Logo It’s International Women’s Day today.

International Women’s Day has been observed since in the early 1900’s, a time of great expansion and turbulence in the industrialized world that saw booming population growth and the rise of radical ideologies.

The new millennium has witnessed a significant change and attitudinal shift in both women’s and society’s thoughts about women’s equality and emancipation. Many from a younger generation feel that ‘all the battles have been won for women’ while many feminists from the 1970’s know only too well the longevity and ingrained complexity of patriarchy. With more women in the boardroom, greater equality in legislative rights, and an increased critical mass of women’s visibility as impressive role models in every aspect of life, one could think that women have gained true equality. The unfortunate fact is that women are still not paid equally to that of their male counterparts, women still are not present in equal numbers in business or politics, and globally women’s education, health and the violence against them is worse than that of men.

However, great improvements have been made. We do have female astronauts and prime ministers, school girls are welcomed into university, women can work and have a family, women have real choices. And so the tone and nature of IWD has, for the past few years, moved from being a reminder about the negatives to a celebration of the positives.

So make a difference, think globally and act locally !! Make everyday International Women’s Day. Do your bit to ensure that the future for girls is bright, equal, safe and rewarding.

So — hooray for women!

March 13: Vote No and Hell No!

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March 13: Vote No and Hell No!

On March 13, vote NO and NO. Seattle citizens have been offered two unacceptable options for replacing the Viaduct: a hideous elevated structure that will be taller than the existing one and 50% – 200% wider, or a late-breaking, financially questionable “tunnel lite” option. Seattle can do better, and telling leaders neither on this non-binding advisory ballot makes that point clear. Vote NO and NO.

This is an all-mail election. The last day to postmark your ballot is Tuesday, March 13. King County will be mailing ballots to voters starting on Wednesday, February 21. There are two separate questions on this advisory ballot. Vote NO and NO.

(via Metroblogging Seattle)

Are ‘diggers’ the internet’s neocons?

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A couple of disclaimers to start with:

  1. I don’t use digg (outside of setting up an account which has rarely been touched).

  2. The analogy is probably quite strained, and I keep bouncing between two ways of expressing it, neither of which I think are quite right:

  • internet : politics :: digg : internet
  • neocons : politics :: diggers : internet

That said…

Wil went on a rant today about diggers dragging the ‘net down to somewhere below the least common denominator.

I’ve been a Digger for a long time, and always felt like I could rely on Digg’s homepage to reliably and consistently direct me to interesting and useful content, accompanied by insightful, funny, and interesting commentary.

My, how things have changed in just a few months. The links (that make it past the bury brigade) are still pretty good, but for whatever reason, the maturity and behavior of the average Digger has evolved into, well, something resembling a middle school lunch room. While Digg has always been a great way to share your creation with a large audience on the Internet, the associated grief that frequently comes with being exposed to Digg’s userbase has lead to several sites blocking Digg, shutting off comments because of abusive Diggers, and using complicated .htaccess rewrites to send Digg’s traffic away.

This struck me as being the same basic premise of part of what Mike was talking about here (some of which I mentioned yesterday) only applied to neocons and the internet in relation to politics, rather than to diggers.

I think this is a specific result of the rise of neoconservatives to cultural and political power. Note that I don’t attribute this to conservatives or conservatism, but specifically to _neo_conservatives. I don’t believe that the neoconservative political or social culture is interested in conducting their affairs with civility or with any degree of compromise — and therein lies the problem, as it creates a culture of war. I may not have written about politics in quite a long time…but during that interim, I’ve constantly linklogged to neoconservatives’ actions throughout the American political and social culture, and they are always extremist and seemingly operating under the slogan of “no quarter given.” And although I had hoped this extremism might die with the end of Bush’s Presidency, it seems as if moderates are willing to metamorphose into extremists if it gets them the power they seek (McCain) or that other extremists are ready to jump into the situation the moment a void forms (Romney).

It’s that same all-or-nothing, no-quarter-given, us-or-them, black-and-white viewpoint that our culture is rapidly sinking into. No matter whether the arena is politics or the net, online or off, there seems to be no room left for people who actually want to talk to each other, even if they don’t agree. Respectful discourse, on the whole, doesn’t exist anymore — and how can it, when we’re too busy shouting down the opposition to actually listen to what they have to say?

Hatred Fatigue

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I missed this when it was first posted, but thanks to this (also excellent) post of Mike’s, I’ve just discovered a nicely concise explanation as to why I’m not posting about politics as much as I used to: Hatred Fatigue:

I also seem to be experiencing something that, for lack of a better word, I’ll call “hatred fatigue” — namely that, after over five years of abhorring almost every single action, day in and day out, the Bush Administration and neoconservative movement takes, there’s a part of my brain which is simply screaming “I can’t stand it anymore!” — it not being Bush and neocons, but instead the sheer weight of continued pessimism and fear.

Similarly to Mike, while my primary posts have lost much of their political content, my linklog is not exactly devoid of links tagged ‘politics‘. As frustrating as it is to see what I see going on in this country, it’s hard to bother trying to make my voice heard when discourse today never seems to be a rational, respectful discussion of differing points of view — instead, anything that isn’t what we believe is to be damned, vilified, cast out, and exorcised, by any means necessary.

What strikes me as particularly troublesome…is how this incident demonstrates the uncivil demeanor of this country and our relationships with our political opposites. And my definition of civility needs some clarification: I do not mean prudish stuffiness. I mean the treatment of another human being with simple, decent respect, even as you acknowledge with no rancor that your position differs significantly from theirs.

It’s a rather sad commentary on our current culture that as a whole, we’re so intolerant of other viewpoints. There’s nothing wrong with other viewpoints, and neither is there anything wrong with disagreeing with other viewpoints. When we stoop to destroying people in order to destroy their viewpoints, however, there is something seriously, seriously wrong.

Bonus thought experiment that Mike brings up, but that I don’t have time to poke at right now (other than to say that at first blush, I agree with where he’s going):

The Internet is a powerful tool, and it has wired us all up to each other in metamorphosing ways that I still believe our culture hasn’t fully assimilated yet, and perhaps won’t for generations to come.

The Internet allows that intrinsic incivility — that Hatred of the Other — to be both concatenated and ring-led with no lag time or delay. There’s no organizational time needed; all that’s needed is a charismatic figure and its followers.

[…]

The Internet has done such great harm to us as a political culture because, viewing it on the much larger scale of societal development (as opposed to human lives), we’ve suddenly become wired up to each other far more quickly than we ever were before.

[…]

As a species, I don’t think we were sociologically equipped to be hooked up to each other’s beliefs and to handle the combined weight of Internet-scale movements and politically biased memes. I simply don’t believe that as a species we’re going to get an okay handle on this situation, wherein we’ll somehow, someday resort to a situation where we find an easy peace with each other. I think that unless somehow such vitriol and rage falls out of vogue, a possibility I find so small as to be nearly non-existent, we’re going to be culture-warring and meme-warring with each other until the sheer massive neglect of society’s normal business causes something catastrophic to grind us to a halt.

What do we do if the only way to combat this culture of hate is to unplug?

Initiative 957

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This has my support, my signature if I find someone canvassing for signatures, and my vote if it should actually make it to the ballot: the Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance‘s Initiative 957.

If passed by Washington voters, the Defense of Marriage Initiative would:

  • add the phrase, “who are capable of having children with one another” to the legal definition of marriage;
  • require that couples married in Washington file proof of procreation within three years of the date of marriage or have their marriage automatically annulled;
  • require that couples married out of state file proof of procreation within three years of the date of marriage or have their marriage classed as “unrecognized;”
  • establish a process for filing proof of procreation; and
  • make it a criminal act for people in an unrecognized marriage to receive marriage benefits.

Absurd? Very. But there is a rational basis for this absurdity. By floating the initiatives, we hope to prompt discussion about the many misguided assumptions which make up the Andersen ruling. By getting the initiatives passed, we hope the Supreme Court will strike them down as unconstitional and thus weaken Andersen itself. And at the very least, it should be good fun to see the social conservatives who have long screamed that marriage exists for the sole purpose of procreation be forced to choke on their own rhetoric.

I’m in. Of course, other people aren’t so excited…

Cheryl Haskins, executive director of Allies for Marriage & Children, agreed with [I-957 filer Gregory] Gadow’s group on at least one point about the initiative: “It’s absurd,” she said.

Haskins said opponents of same-sex marriage “have never said that the sole purpose of marriage is procreation.”

“When we talk about defending the institution of marriage, we’re talking about the union of a man and a woman,” she said. “Some of those unions produce children and some of them don’t.”

With I-957, “you’re dictating people’s choices in a way that is utterly ridiculous,” she said.

Which, of course, is the point.

The [Washington State Supreme Court majority] opinion [upholding Washington’s ban on same-sex marriage] written by Justice Barbara Madsen concluded that “limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples furthers the state’s interests in procreation and encouraging families with a mother and father and children biologically related to both.”

Gadow said the argument is unfair when you’re dealing with same-sex couples who are unable to have children together.

“What we are trying to do is display the discrimination that is at the heart of last year’s ruling,” he said.

I’d add that the language as written is also unfair to heterosexual couples who can’t (or for any reason prefer not to) have children, hetero- or homosexual couples who adopt, or any other combination or situation you can come up with that’s not the husband, wife, and two point five children scenario. I was disgusted with the ruling them, I still am, and I’m quite amused by I-957’s approach to poking at the issue.

Sign me up!

Faux Klingons

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I just heard about this through last Sunday’s ‘Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!‘ show (which I just found out is available as a podcast, since I never manage to remember to turn on the actual radio), and I think this might be the best Iraq War analogy I’ve heard yet:

One Minute Speech by Rep. David Wu, D-Oregon, 1st District, Portland:

Mr. Speaker,

Four years ago, this administration took America to war in Iraq without adequate evidence. Since that time, this administration hasn’t listened to the American people, it hasn’t listened to our professional military, and it certainly hasn’t listened to this congress.

You know, it’s said of a prominent businessman in downtown Portland that he never listened to anybody, and that if he was ever drawn in a cartoon, he would be drawn without ears. Now, this President has listened to some people: the so-called ‘Vulcans’ in the White House, the ideologues. But you know, unlike the Vulcans of Star Trek, who made their decisions based on logic and fact, these guys make it on ideology. These aren’t Vulcans! There are Klingons in the White House!

But unlike the real Klingons of Star Trek, these Klingons have never fought a battle of their own. Don’t let faux Klingons send real Americans to war. It’s wrong.

So. Very. Awesome. I love this.

Apparently, there’s a book out called Rise of the Vulcans focusing on Bush’s core advisors, who have dubbed themselves “Vulcans” after the Roman god of War. Wu just took the Vulcan thing and ran with it. In entirely the wrong direction.