The Antisocial Socialist

Let's start it off with the Horrifying Story of the Day. After one half of an elderly gay couple was hospitalized after a fall, Sonoma County douchebags confined the couple to two separate nursing homes and sold off their possessions. One of the men died alone, the other was eventually released from the nursing home and is now impoverished.

Um, I can't even deal after reading that. Here's a picture of a puppy:



Anyway, apparently what you can do is blog about this, pass it on over Facebook or Twitter. Send a letter to the local paper, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, at letters@pressdemocrat.com.

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I really liked Adam Savage's speech to the Harvard Humanist Society.

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Via ironed_orchid: Are you worried that you're not a smug enough liberal? Check out the new ethical dilemmas. (Spoiler: It's okay to pee in the shower. Um, good to know. Please don't pee in mine.)

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The worst vehicle in the world, probably driven by the worst person in the world.

It's been a good few days for me, emotionally as well as politically, by which I mean that I've won every fight I've picked and that's put me in a hell of a good mood. And I've picked a number of fights in unusual places for me. Granted, with people far below the level to which I was accustomed (I was called a "Canuck faggot," "commie fascist," and "traitor," none of which are effective counter-arguments to the points I was raising)—and let's be honest, I didn't so much as win arguments by rational discourse as the people I was—ahem—debating kind of couldn't figure out what the polysyllabic words meant.

And there was another issue, which struck me as I was groggily impersonating a CSIS agent at 6 am before I had my morning coffee (these things happen). Which is that the sorts of arguments I've been getting into with people who hold reactionary political beliefs are simply not winnable by any party, owing to radically different character alignments.

( cut for flippancy and possibly the dorkiest thing I've posted besides the steampunk pictures )

I feel obligated, as a dweller in a tiny, dusty corner of the feminist blogosphere, to comment on the Lori Gottlieb thing. Lately, she seems to be on the covers of those magazines meant to make middle class women feel bad about themselves as well as in the sections of newspapers that are meant to make middle class women feel bad about themselves. Lori Gottlieb is—for those of you who are lucky enough to avoid that shit—a very sad woman. She wants a dude to marry her. She also has pitiful self-esteem. You can tell by the pictures; she is skinny as hell but she's still resorting to a MySpace angle for her publicity photos. Also she thinks she's old. And ugly. Neither of which she is, physically speaking, though in spirit she's a bit of an ogre.

Gottlieb's groundbreaking theory is that, had she settled in her youth for one of the many dogged Nice Guys^TM who pursued her, she would not currently be single and miserable. I have my own theory. I believe that anyone who writes a book titled Marry Him: The Case For Marrying Mr. Good Enough (or in fact, has it on their bookshelf) is going to have a hard time ever getting laid for reasons that I'm sure are obvious. Not to mention the fact that she's publicly and brutally fat-shamed at least one ex-boyfriend (who sounds like a pretty nice guy), under her real name no less, means that she's probably going to have difficulty even getting past introductions, let alone to first base.

Generally speaking, someone so obviously pathetic wouldn't be worth an even half-thought-out post even on a slow news day, but I happened to be reading Chatelaine and there was a long interview wherein she bemoaned the tendency of uppity feminists, sorry, modern women, to be entitled about dating. She even mentioned Sex in the City (which amuses me given that the one episode I saw was all about settling for a guy who was a flake and treated the protagonist badly but was good enough), that whipping girl of empowerful pseudofeminism. And it occurred to me just how useful such Serena Joys are; they're the flip side of the Superbowl ads. Submit, submit, submit, even if he marks his territory with piss around the toilet and dirty socks on your bedroom floor and expects you to clean it up, even if he hates you, because at least he's not beating you, and without him, you'll get old alone with only your cats for company. Apparently she slags on the idea of having a tight-knit circle of girlfriends, even though that is fucking awesome and everyone, male and female, ought to be entitled to a tight-knit circle of girlfriends. But I suppose that threatens the dreary cage of co-dependence that she so fantasizes about.

File under: Don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Via springheel_jack:

"The glue of the military ethos is what the Greeks called philia - friendship, comradeship or brotherly love... the source of the unit cohesion that most research has shown to be critical to battlefield success. The presence of open homosexuals in the close confines of ships or military units opens the possibility that eros - which unlike philia is sexual, and therefore individual and exclusive - will be unleashed into the environment, manifest(ing) itself as sexual competition, protectiveness and favoritism, all of which undermine the nonsexual bonding essential to unit cohesion, good order, discipline and morale."

- Wall Street Journal contributing editor Mackubin Thomas Owens

There are few, if any, paragraphs that have ever failed quite so spectacularly as the one above. Marvel at the fact that the author must have never so much as been in the same room as a history book in his entire stunted and pathetic life.

Just. Wow.

outcastspice found this bit of hilarity from the National Socialist Post,* along with Jezebel's response. And because I can never pass up an opportunity to mock the National Socialist Post, let's take a closer look!

If the reports are to be believed, Women's Studies programs are disappearing at many Canadian universities. Forgive us for being skeptical. We would wave good-bye without shedding a tear, but we are pretty sure these angry, divisive and dubious programs are simply being renamed to make them appear less controversial.

Well, it turns out that our friends here don't actually support capitalism as much as they claim to. Because, as a general rule, universities don't really offer programs that no one takes, so presumably, there are students who wish to take Women's Studies courses and are paying for that privilege, and hence the universities offer them, and this sort of concession to supply and demand cannot be tolerated.

Who has an anti-feminist bingo card on them? Tick off "angry," and wait until you see the next paragraph.

( this could get long )

Here are the five stupidest stories to make the headlines in my five-minute scan of today's news.

5. A French parliamentary commission proposes banning niqabs and burqas
Presenting conclusions after six months of hearings, the panel also suggested barring foreign women from obtaining French visas or citizenship if they insisted on veiling their faces. I've already blogged before about why I think this is moronic, but to reiterate: Men deciding what women can and cannot wear is fucking sexist, regardless of whether the motivation is patronizing pseudo-feminism, post-911 paranoia, or a misguided interpretation of Muslim dress codes.

4. Nashville censors tell a Toronto theatre group to "tone down" Romeo and Juliet
"If Mercutio doesn't offend the Nurse with his line about the bawdy hand of the dial being upon the prick of noon and she doesn't try to exit in protest, then what happens to the rest of the play?" When I was in 9th grade, we had to study this play. Okay. I think it's not the greatest choice for high schoolers, but whatever. Our English teacher showed us the Zeffirelli film and censored the sex scene by holding a white piece of paper in front of it. This is probably the root of my Victorian porn fetish or something.

3. Children's TV show hosts detained by London police for terrorism.
"We were stopped, not arrested, but they had to say 'we are holding you under the Anti-Terrorism Act because you're running around in flak jackets and a utility belt', and I said 'and please put spangly blue hairdryer' and he was, like, 'all right'." Really, London? Really?

2. Tofu cream pies are terrorism.
A Liberal MP says he believes the federal government should investigate whether the pieing of Fisheries Minister Gail Shea by a woman opposed to the seal hunt constitutes an act of terrorism. Never mind that this story creates a weird mash-up in my head that involves Osama bin Laden starring in a Marx Brothers movie. This story gave me an intense craving for pie. Plz to be serving up more of this sort of terrorism and less of the blowing-stuff-up sort, kthnx.

And the stupidest story of the day...

Get ready...

Drum roll...

1. SoCal school district bans the dictionary.
A Southern California school board has pulled the Merriam-Webster dictionary off its shelves after a parent complained about the entry “oral sex.”

Okay, so you, like everyone else in the world, looked up dirty words in the dictionary and tittered. In fairness, we were all in fifth grade, when "poo-poo" stopped being the funniest thing ever*, to be replaced by "self-abuse" (what?). Maybe it even, well, made you a little hot. You can admit it, I won't judge.

But did you ever encounter a dictionary that defined "oral sex" in such detail that you would know how to do it? I'm pretty sure Merriam-Webster doesn't.

Poll-time!

[Poll #1516926]

Comment with your rants about descriptive versus prescriptive dictionaries.

* I jest, of course. "Poo-poo" is still funniest.

Hah. Nothing like coming home from a hard day's work and banninating a couple of incomprehensible trolls from free_palestine. If my Russian friends could pop over to their LJs and let me know what the deal is with these guys, that would be fabulous. Because they don't make any sense in English, and they are all over political comms lately. I hope they at least appreciate my Stalinist userpics.

I shall also take this moment to decry the poor quality of trolls in free_palestine as of late. Not like I've really been free to deal with them, so perhaps it's just as well, but you'd think at least the Gaza Freedom March might have stirred up some interesting flamewars.

I stood in the cold and dark, shivering, telling myself that I ought to probably walk to the subway station rather than taking the streetcar. That's what I'd been doing until the weather turned, and it wasn't that horrid out. But the St. Clair streetcar is normally quite fast, and I'd recently been ill, and so I gave in. A distant part of my brain noted the blue flashing lights up ahead, but this was Toronto, a large and relatively civilized urban centre, and there are frequently blue flashing lights that have no impact on my life or travels whatsoever.

At last, the streetcar arrived, and I piled into one of the seats, turning up the volume on my trusty Ministry of Culture. I was so engrossed in listening to Of Montreal and losing a game of Solitaire that I barely noticed that the streetcar had stopped moving. Several people stood up and walked to the front of the car, having an animated discussion with the rather weary looking driver.

"...about 15 minutes," I heard, which is never what you want to hear on public transit. I tugged out one earphone.

"Can you let us out to walk to the subway?" As I mentioned, it wasn't far.

"Can't open the doors," the poor driver said (I realized that he had just been asked this question multiple times). "It's a garish parade of inbred parasitic Nazi-sympathizing douchebags.*"

"We're stranded here until they go by," a woman told me.

"This is the third time it's happened to me tonight," the driver added. "They've got secret service cars and motorcycle cops and it's a mess from here to Weston."

"Jesus," I exclaimed. "Your tax dollars at work!"

"I can't believe they need this many cops," the woman added.

"You know," I said. "At my school, we can't even afford to have textbooks for every kid. And yet we can afford this farce?"

"You'll get no argument from me," she said. "I'm no monarchist. One bulletproof car wouldn't have been enough?" (Monarchists, of course, do not take public transit.)

Just then, the scum-sucking scions of a decaying empire cruised past. You could tell by their hair. We were trapped in a royal traffic jam! I am fairly certain there were inbred idiots in the pissy little backwater where I grew up (you don't need to import them all the way from England) but no one ever halted St. Clair to let them through.

"It's not like anyone's going to take a potshot," I added. "This isn't the 1800s." Unfortunately.

"What do they do exactly? What contribution do they make?" a man asked.

"Nothing," I said, "they just take." My fellow stranded travellers nodded in agreement.

Finally, we were allowed to go. We bid each other a friendly goodnight. I was disgusted at this opulent display, but my heart was warmed by the fiery righteous outrage of the good people of this city.

And that is how I came a stone's throw away from the bloody royals, but was unable to throw a stone.

* I may have taken some liberties, gentle readers, with our good driver's phrasing. He probably just said "it's the Royal Family." But his tone said everything.

[Poll #1464216]

So I have been a little social butterfly lately, making up for lost time. It's been great to catch up with folks and have a life, though I'm still quite sick and I am probably not as entertaining as I would be otherwise.

But yeah, one of the things that needed catching up on was attending the weekly Women in Black/Jews Against the Occupation/whatever vigils. I haven't been since winter vacation. Anyway, since I've been gone, we have apparently acquired our very own dedicated counter-protester with the best-ever counter-protesting sign:



The problem is that his arm got sore after awhile so he indicated that the bad guys were also the folks waiting in line at the ROM. Which maybe they are, I don't know. I know some good people with ROM memberships, but then, I didn't know that my friends and I were bad guys either.

Later on he disappeared and reappeared wearing a Canadian flag as a cape, which I guess is his superhero alter-ego. Otherwise he looked the same, though, so it was about as effective as Clark Kent's glasses.