Your ex-boyfriend’s favourite public intellectual who looks like a bear with sonorous background narration from Werner Herzog finally got around to insulting grad students after insulting everyone else, world reels in horror.
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I think it’s unlikely I’ll manage to avoid hearing what happened on Game of Thrones before I get back to my DVR and air conditioning and large bed next Thursday night, so I think I’m gonna pull the trigger and spoil it for myself on my own terms, as captain of my domain.
(brief pause while Nicole googles)
Oh.
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I am not linking to the garbage piece the Chicago Sun-Times ran about Laverne Cox (update: they yanked it), which deserved to share space with reptilian conspiracy theories and ads for pieces of the True Cross, but this is a pleasant response:
Back in November, I was following the Illinois gay marriage debate on NPR. I’m mincing garlic when I hear some asshat on the radio say something along the lines of, “homosexuals are an abomination.” ON NPR, YOU GUYS. The thing is, they were clearly just trying to find a voice of opposition to the gay marriage debate. When there are thousands of people holding up equality signs and hugging outside the state capital, they probably thought, “this story sounds a little too ‘rah rah gay rights,’ we better get some balance in there.”
But what balance is being provided here? When did misogynists get to stop telling reporters why women shouldn’t vote? When did racists stop being quoted when news organizations covered the desegregation of schools?
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This new kind of fire hydrant looks like it has feelings AND a cervix:
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In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, or maybe he didn’t, but either way vast ribbons of peat came to rest under what became the foothills of Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau, and in time the peat became coal, and later the railroads arrived, along with mines and coke ovens, and near one lazy arc of the Tennessee River workers built homes to return to after their long days of burrowing and burning, and the homes became a town, and the town was called Dayton.
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There were a dozen eggs, three mangoes, and six black plums, and that was a problem. The family in the bodega line would have to cut something from the bags waiting on the check out belt—the modest haul overspent the Women, Infants, Children food-assistance voucher good for only a portion of their appetite. The clerk removed three plums and placed them on the far side of the register, declining an offer of safekeeping from a family member she deemed had other intentions.
Perhaps you’ve seen a similar case of nutritional triage; perhaps you’ve experienced it yourself. In the age of increased economic segregation, though, there’s a good chance you haven’t. If you grow up in suburbia and live in higher-income urban enclaves, as I have, EBT food purchases—and the resulting sacrifices—are likely alien. Following deliberations about food assistance and other poverty programs is no substitute for watching human need contend with stark reality.
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Visually-interesting ways to review excellent books!
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Poetry prize from The Walrus!
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I don’t even want to think about the mass grave in Galway, but it happened.
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Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
Man, GoT. I don’t know about anyone else, but I have not been able to sleep properly since Sunday night.
I read GoT spoilers, so I knew what was coming, and once that scene arrived, I just couldn’t deal, so I fast forwarded through it, and then deleted that episode off my DVR posthaste so as to never see it again.
I have read the books, so I knew it was coming … but what a visual. Eurgh. I had to warn my roommate in advance (she’s hair-trigger squeamish) or the screams of horror would have been unending.
I had no clue how they were going to show that scene, they certainly didn’t back away from it. And it feel it was much crueler for non-book readers, since I didn’t find myself particularly attached to Oberyn in the books.
It seemed a lot rougher on the show.
Yeah, I definitely didn’t think it was THAT gruesome in the books, but it’s also been a while since I read that scene.
… Is your username a reference to Teen Girl Squad?
It is, indeed!
THAT’S THE BEST.
Yeah, the way I read it in the books, it’s pretty quick.
Oberyn really comes alive in the show, so it’s particularly cruel to the viewer. I couldn’t help myself from somehow hoping they’d let him live this time. Other stuff had been changed, right?
oh, definitely – and I mean, one of my friends has read the books but he completely forgot about this scene. he just had no particular attachment to book!Oberyn. but in the 24 hours after Sunday’s episode I got like 6 different traumatized reactions via text. it was brutal.
The visuals were orders of magnitude worse than the words on the page.
I knew what was coming and I’m totally not ashamed that I closed my eyes, covered my ears, and went “lalalala” like a little kid.
Yuuuuuuuup. I hid behind a pillow the whole fight and had my husband narrate. After the terrible noise, when it was all quiet he kept saying “don’t look.” Basically until the credits rolled.
Yeah, I had read about what happened, and my husband watched before we watched together, so he told me when to look away and when it was safe to come back. I kept asking stuff like “was that his head?” and “is that him screaming?,” though, because I like to know how awful what I’m not seeing is.
My boyfriend literally leaped on top of me and covered my eyes with his hands yelling “NO, BABY, NO DON’T WATCH!” and I was like WHAT WHAT and then I saw the aftermath. It was the nicest bit of chivalry I’ve ever had.
+100 pts to Prince Charming!!!
I also hid my face and squealed loudly enough I couldn’t hear it. I have no regrets.
I don’t read the books, nor watch the show (but I DO read the Wikipedia pages about the characters/plot, so I know most major book spoilers) and I love the time of the year when GoT is on. The Twitter and filmed reactions on YouTube are just beautiful.
Which is to say, I have been looking forward to this episode for a while.
I’ve read the books, so story spoilers don’t matter to me. But my husband always wonders why I read GoT reviews and read comments before we watch the episode a week or two later.
Yeeeahh…I’m pretty happy I know about this one in advance. *Gets blanket ready to put over head.*
My boyfriend has officially quit the series over this. Just too gratuitously awful. (I read the first four books but don’t watch at all.)
I think I might be on the same boat. Oh god oh god oh god the screams.
I did not know what was coming and I really, really had gotten my hopes up that things would turn out for the better.
And then they very aggressively did NOT.
It was amazing to me that DESPITE knowing what was coming, I was STILL stupidly hoping Oberyn would prevail.
I’ve read all the books and everything but this is the first time the HBO show has actually managed to make me wish I hadn’t seen the thing with my eyes. I have gotten through all its other horrid gruesome visuals, but this one was just too much for me. I found myself actually a bit queasy after watching, and wishing I’d seen it further away from bedtime, because the visual just stuck in my head.
I watched this season of Hannibal so that was nbd.
Actually the only violence on GoT I’ve found truly upsetting were: Roz, and when they put Grey Wind’s head on Robb’s body. And of course hearing Brienne’s screams that one time, but you don’t actually seea nything.
I already miss Pedro Pascal.
ME. NEITHER.
I only read the books after watching the show, so didn’t know it was coming. Still, once I heard that something bad was going to happen, I totally predicted the death . . . and yet nothing, absolutely nothing, could have prepared me for that scene. So expertly, horrifyingly done . . . like, you get that little glimmer of hope and then BAM, hope SMASHED, hope smashed in the most grotesquely nightmarish way imaginable.
Oh shit the screeeaaamms. Ellaria’s faaaace.
I don’t think I will evereverever recover from this.
I took one look at the ugly words forming about Laverne Cox and swiftly high-tailed my ass in the opposite direction while shouting “YOU DON’T GET TO DECIDE, ASSHOLE!”
Laverne Cox is a beautiful, perfect woman and people who are cruel about her are people I don’t want to know.
Man, the retroactive apologies that publications put out about things like this always blow me away. “Upon further consideration, we concluded the essay did not include some key facts and its overall tone was not consistent with what we seek to publish.”
YA THINK, SUN-TIMES?
While the author darkly broods and grumbles about the end of free speech.
I can only assume that “upon further consideration” means “When we started getting a bunch of angry phone calls, we decided maybe we should actually read the piece.”
That article is SOME BULLSHIT and it’s hard to believe they published it in the first place. The Sun-Times looks appallingly bad for having allowed such ugly visceral bigotry under their aegis.
Ok, sorry for derailing, but I can’t wait for the open thread.
ANIMAL DEATH TALK
Today Bonny brought in a dying bird, that shrieked at me, and I made her drop it and on the advice of the RSPCA took it to the vets. They sadly had to put it to sleep, as Bonny had torn it’s leg half off and broken its wing.
ANYWAY, in the discussion on facebook later, a friend linked me to these wonderful people, who rescue injured birds and release them back into the wild where possible, and they could probably do with donations.
http://www.wingandaprayerhaven.org.uk/#/the-haven…
If you have some spare cash, consider lobbing some their way to help them do the good they do.
For a second I thought Bonny would be your human child and was rather upset that she would tear the leg of a bird off. Then, as I too am the proud mother of dogs and cats, I realized Bonny must be a pup… must be… right?
Cat.
If it was a child they’d be at the therapist, like, NOW.
OMG I totally read this as a human child too and was like WTF? Makes much more sense as a cat!
That’s what I get for calling a cat by a human name.
I’m not sure why I didn’t figure it out the first time, I am very used to dogs bringing in dead animals… Or other gross things from outside.
This is the vicious murderer in question
SO FIERCE! Does she like belly rubs?
Loves them.
Oh man, Zizek. I prefer my humanities “superstars” to be actually humane, thanks.
I’ve read about half a dozen pieces by or about Slavoj Zizek and I still have no goddamn idea what his work is supposed to be about, and I suspect that most of the friends who prominently display his books on their coffee tables don’t either.
He is a wino someone gave a degree and a book deal to as a hilarious prank. Academia plays rough; you should see the one where they release three greased poststructuralists into a building marked 1, 2, and 4.
I honestly don’t quite get the why for many people on this site an interest in Marxism equals male douchebaggery. Is that an American stereotype because leftist philosophy is seen as an academic pursuit of a self-aggrandizing privileged minority? if so, I don’t quite understand it – socialism and Marxist thought have so many long-running connections with feminism and there continue to be many important female thinkers variously involved this area of theory (Chantal Mouffe, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, to name a few). Does a staunch capitalist make for a better partner?
I think there are a lot of normal people who are INTERESTED in Marxism, but it takes a very certain kind to chew your ear off at a party about something they only vaguely understand.
Oh, totally. Anecdata-lly, if you identify as a MARXIST, as opposed to someone who has read Marx and finds his views interesting and of some merit, you are usually a tedious boyfriend with little interest in watching my DVR with me. Similarly, if you were to walk around parties saying “I am fundamentally a capitalist, do you know what’s in that bean dip?” it is unlikely that you are going to get a lot of phone numbers.
okay, thanks! Funnily enough, the interviewer in the article you linked to seems to fit that bill. Žižek’s exasperated rant on annoying students is more of a reaction to that dude’s silly, vapid questions.
Exactly. And normally, this type doesn’t actually understand Marx in any real sense. It’s the posing, not the Marx, this is the problem.
If you’re nice, I’ll let you touch my first (US) editions of Capital. 🙂
It’s a particular type of Marxist we dislike. One many of us have had interactions with – the white, liberal male who has come from a life of unexamined and unacknowledged privilege, who talk down to women and who assume that the interests of women are inferior and awful and something to be ashamed of.
And claims to be a feminist while actively silencing every woman’s voice he hears.
as for me i just find it silly and boring
I spent half of my college and graduate school careers (philosophy and linguistics) perfecting my eye roll at boring and silly windbags.
Silly and boring: that’s the way I feel about present-day capitalism and its effect on Europe (debt, refugees, mass poverty, etc.). I can take a hint though and shall proceed to shut up about it – your site has instilled in me an abiding fear of becoming a liberal Ted .
If only we could bottle the emotion you’re feeling and put it in dart guns.
I’ve had/worked near three managers that identified as Marxist, and they were all the best; good advocates for employee safety and training, extraordinarily fair about hours and wages, and amazing at conflict resolution. They all worked in agriculture and seemed to be the men the country needed – so the Toast’s dislike of Marxists caught me off guard until I realized, you know, #notallmarxists
Yeah it’s just like three out of four odds that when you get a guy who primarily identifies as a Marxist or some tendency therof in the US it’s either an edgy pose or else one of those ISO cultists who cluster around university campuses like flies, introduces himself by talking about how Stalin gets a bad rap, and worries intensely that if he doesn’t sell enough copies of Socialist Worker this month he’s going to get Kicked Out Of Communism. Not a whole lot of surviving organized, partisan Marxist tendencies in the US!
You know what they say: are you a white man talking about Marxist theory, because you are all class.
Because if they have anything worthwhile to say they’re called Hoxhaists
B 🙂
B-)
I’ll be perfectly honest: a lot of marxism, and marxists, disregard race, gender, sexuality, and ability like they’re wearing literal (or liberal? hah) blinders. I like my marxism queer and my socialism feminist. (And I have no problem making fun of a certain kind of white dude who runs around thinking he’s solved the world because he realized that class is like, a thing)
In this case, at least, it’s because the Marxist in particular is demonstrably, proudly, and frequently a jerk. I mean, if saying that suicidal students really just ought to go ahead and kill themselves doesn’t qualify for douchebaggery, I’m not sure what does.
No but don’t you see
He’s being ironic
It’d take a great and unique mind like his to think of something like that.
That Galway story and the complete disregard by the Catholic Church of women and children as human beings deserving respect is one of the many thousands of reasons why I am not only no longer a Catholic, and will never be a Catholic again ever.
I imagine that the Irish Catholic Church is where GRR Martin gets his ideas for the treatment of women in GoT
I got to have a rage stroke first thing this morning because I read the comments on a different article about the mass grave, and some commenter was going on about how it was a “different time” — as if 1950 were 1392. And it’s not like the nuns murdered them, they just died of totally preventable disease! Raaaage.
Oh good, I just got to the point in the The Guardian piece where the priest made pretty much the same argument. MORALS.
Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these. Unless their moms were unmarried sluts, then just bury them in a septic tank out back.”
I literally had NO IDEA about this and it is horrifying. I am (was?) a Catholic and always thought all the “bad stuff” was long in the past, or the actions of just a few crazy pedophile priests. I have been having to rethink that… I don’t know. It’s still hard to believe that the faith I grew up with isn’t true, and I suppose I will always believe in its precepts, and I really like Pope Francis, but can I really say that I am part of a church that did these things?
It is the very fact that young women, pregnant out of wedlock, were locked up, forced to work, unpaid, underfed, their children treated like trash and starved and then thrown in the sewage tanks that appalls me. That they consider these women as beneath redemption and their children as trash could not be made more clear. This is the distillation of misogyny. It isn’t the distant past – it happened when my mother was alive.
If anyone else had done this same thing they’d go to prison for false imprisonment, child endangerment, and a hundred other things. There is no excuse.
I also note that nothing seemed to happen to the men that necessarily were also responsible for these pregnancies.. Did they get locked up forever in workhouses? Did they publicly shamed, and then disappeared? I don’t think so. The State and the Church were complicit in this. There is nothing they can say that will explain this away
Heck it happened when WE were alive. That is the thing that terrifies me. How can you do these things to other human beings, and still say you are acting in God’s name?
You might want to look into the movie made in 2002 “Magdalene Sisters” based on the interviews/research/personal stories the filmmaker studied/documented.
I don’t know if this helps – but when I learned some of the bad shit the United States had done, I wondered if I could say that I was part of a country that did these things.
But then I thought “this place has been really good for me and my family; we aren’t serfs, we’re alive, rule of law applies to us. Fuck the people who screwed it up, I’m going to work hard to make it as good for other people as it was for me. I will help make the future better.”
I don’t know if my nationalism can be painted onto religion though; it’s nice that the nation has “fixing shit that was a bad idea” written into it’s code.
Hm, that is actually very good food for thought. I think one difference between the church and the US is that (for most people anyway) leaving the US is not a realistic option, so one is faced with the choice of staying and saying “but not me” and staying and helping, whereas with the church there is a choice between (i) staying and saying “but not me,” (ii) staying and helping, and (iii) leaving and helping from the outside. I don’t know. I’ve been saying for so long “look Catholicism isn’t all bad, look at our cool pope” and then something like this comes out that was happening less than ten years ago and it’s not just “standing by and doing nothing about an evil,” it’s “actively committing systemic abuse that was condoned at the highest levels.” I don’t know why this hits me so much harder than the pedophilia scandals – I think with those there was always a way to hide behind the idea that it wasn’t known, and it was only a few bad apples… But this seems so vast.
When I observe how my own brain justifies stuff, it’s really easy to do little nudges – not following up on instincts, tapping a rule a little because a friend asked – it’s when it comes down to writing down policy that’s wrong when your brain starts screaming about you being a terrible person.
So the ignoring pedophilia is fucking terrible and awful and shameful, but it’s not impossible to see how people in the Church faced it with the part of their brain that is good at shielding them from conflict and dissonance – either you don’t notice, or you have to choose between hating a friend and being a terrible person. It’s easiest to not notice. Fine. I know that, I can guard against it, it’s terrible, but I know where those switches are.
The policy; where someone had to sit and write down that shit instead of facing their sins; holy shit, there is no excuse, if your brain can accept enacting that and not make you tear out your hair and never stop weeping – I don’t know how that shit can be justified. I don’t recognize how someone can do that and still think of themselves as a good person, and that makes it extra scary for me.
I just read Roger Ebert’s review of the Magdalene Sisters movie, and he makes a very interesting point. The church has been a force for good in some places. And others besides the church have conducted the same evil (see, e.g., middle eastern countries where women are stoned for committing adultery). We are quick not to condemn all Muslims for the sins of some of their members. Perhaps we should not be so quick to condemn Catholicism. The thing that frightens me is that we think of those Muslim countries where women are oppressed as third-world, non-advanced countries. And we certainly don’t think about Ireland that way. I think the most astonishing thing about this situation is that when it is happening in a country we consider our equal in development, we think it could happen to us, and that we are not so advanced after all.
I like that. That makes a lot of sense.
Giving too much airtime/attention to minority views is a thing! False balance is a really big problem in scientific discussions, especially over things like climate change, and can be extremely harmful to progress and public opinion.
I really enjoyed the segment about that on John Oliver’s HBO show.
“You don’t need people’s opinions on a fact. You might as well have a poll asking which number is bigger, 15 or 5? Or, do owls exist? Or, are there hats?”
http://youtu.be/cjuGCJJUGsg
Edited because “bigger” is not the same as “better”.
That John Oliver segment was what immediately popped into my head too. “I can’t hear you over the weight of scientific evidence.” Love it.
As someone who used to edit a Walrus magazine, I got irrationally stoked.
BUT OKAY: I’m gonna yell at the Atlantic piece (lol, what else is new?). I mean, I guess I like the tack it takes, but the whole, EVERYONE people on SNAP benefits are constantly managing hard choices and also not eating and also did you know that watching people navigate EBT is hard to face? comes off, to me, as really, really, really fucking patronizing. Especially given that there IS a lot of coverage on this and a lot of people who are very angry and trying to explain why it actually is a big fucking deal that SNAP benefits actually got cut by a lot of fucking money (maybe not billions) but they were still cut! They were cut when more people than ever need nutritional assistance! Including many people read as middle class!
I mean, I can maybe understand if you grew up in some suburb that is having NO issue with economic decline and rising food prices, but lots of non-inner ring and “declining” suburbs are having TONS of people who are using food pantries and nutritional assistance. Rural communities and their issues with it are part of the reason the Farm Bill exists as it does! And so I suppose if you live in a super wealthy suburb, why are you even reading the Atlantic online anyway, you’re probably not? I just like, really? REALLY? No shit, most of the wealthy ass white dudes in congress are out of touch, but this is what rapidly expanding inequality looks like.
Although fuck yes to Barbara Lee! Sorry, sorry, it has been a long morning and this is an issue near and dear to my hear that I’ve done work on and in fact written about (yay Billfold!) in the past and ugh I don’t know.
I know it seems basic but seriously, there are a lot of people who are totally (and probably willfully) insulated from this stuff. I used to work in a state capitol and the level of distance and ignorance that most Republican politicians had towards poverty and poverty programs was absolutely jaw-dropping. Like people sitting on committees just idly going “I hear that all these people are using their WIC stamps to buy whiskey! Why don’t they just invest their money!” And you’re like how the fuck could you have that idea as an adult human, especially when overseeing these programs is part of your JOB, but there it is. They just have no idea.
Yeah, there is a lot of “people are using their food stamps to buy junk food!”
Which like… ok in THEORY the politicians could have their hearts in the right place and want people to eat well (lol like this could ever happen outside of theory). But! If there was a proposed law to limit junk food purchasing in the non-SNAP population, like the soda thing in NYC, Republicans are/would be the first in line to complain about the heavy hand of government interfering with their personal rights and privacy. Not to mention that junk food is calorie dense and cheap so yeah, no shit people might want to buy it if they’re trying to stretch their limited food dollars. There are complaints when people use SNAP on “fancy” foods too. It’s a no-win situation. And the most important thing of all: people have the right to eat whatever the fuck they want!! Organic kale smoothies or Fritos. Your food=your choice.
(Providing better nutrition education and improving healthy food access and giving people enough nutrition assistance funds to actually feed themselves and their families well, THAT is a way to start addressing these issues if politicians really cared at all.)
Yeah, bureaucracy and red tape are TYRANNY if wealthier people have to deal with it, but you can dump endless paperwork and guidelines on the poor and it’s never enough, because “ending fraud and abuse” is more important than any poor person’s ability to feed themselves.
Speaking of terrible things, in the past few years a bunch of states have moved to pass laws that would prohibit people from withdrawing direct cash transfer benefits (which are already regulated to hell and back) from ATMs that are in or near strip clubs. Because I’m sure that’s a HUGE issue. I mean, it’s where our legislators spend their paychecks, they must imagine the poor are doing the same.
“Yeah, bureaucracy and red tape are TYRANNY if wealthier people have to deal with it, but you can dump endless paperwork and guidelines on the poor and it’s never enough, because “ending fraud and abuse” is more important than any poor person’s ability to feed themselves.”
THIS.
Whole lotta people feel like if you’re using THEIR TAX MONEY (for the like two poor-people government benefits, not Social Security or working as a defense contractor or driving on the highways) they own you and get to play massa.
In a house share right now with a guy who likes to tell hi-liarious stories about how when his sister worked at Safeway she would follow the families she knew were on WIC through and out of the store, and once, get this, saw one get in a new car!!! Outrageous! He doesn’t think the weird part of this is his sister following these people around.
This sounds like an excellent opportunity to trot out your merry little high-school mean-girl laugh.
“Oh it’s so funny, following people around like a little _spy_. Like she’s undercover in the supermarket!”
You mean like this?
http://www.theonion.com/articles/woman-a-leading-…
you can have a nice car and still be eligible for WIC if there are certain circumstances too. I worked at a grocery store and this guy was using a WIC check (to buy baby food which is what most people with WIC checks or food stamps bought in my experience) and gave me this long lecture on how I should stay away from drugs because his daughter is an addict and had twin babies she can’t take care of and it was kind of condescending as hell but he had a point. Also, one time an obnoxious colleague made a comment about people using WIC checks to gamble and I told him exactly why that was really stupid. It was pretty great.
The whole, “what if we banned using SNAP on junk food” though — I see a lot of people on facebook and shit talk about this like it’s a solution, and politicians and writers, but like…food deserts, man. That’s a thing. Many people on food assistance programs live in areas where there are NO accessible grocery stores, or places that sell fresh produce. They are forced to buy processed food not only because it’s cheaper, but because fresh food is literally not available, or fresh produce is prohibitively expensive and limited. Same reason a lot of poor people eat fast food. There are FAR MORE McDonald’s in urban poor areas than Albertson’s or whathaveyou.
(I feel strongly about this thing)
(see also: people complaining about poor people being “fat” bc all they eat is junk and fast food somethingsomething lazy somethingsomething try harder. I. WILL. END. YOU.)
yay feeling strongly!
Yeah, I mean, for me at the end of the day, I think that we should feed people. That’s it. Frankly, you wanna use your EBT for booze? I actually don’t really think that’s a problem. Especially because the clusterfuck intricacies that is the Farm Bill as well as the multinational giant food conglomerates (and let us use “food” with a giant dose of salt) means that, ha ha, our income tax dollars? That’s… yeah, that’s not really … how… things are funded. Which is just another head-banging issue as to explaining to people how service provision works, but oh man. I think the issue is not to run away, at least for me, but to remind people that going hungry in this day and age is a travesty.
My husband’s cousin married a man from New Zealand, and we were at a wedding, the only two non-Spanish speakers. We started talking about welfare – turns out he identifies as conservative.
Me, “Yeah, but I don’t want people to starve.”
Him, “Oh, yeah, they should get food. And housing, clearly.”
Me, “Health care?”
Him, “Oh obviously. And job training, child care, clothing, education (including university), utilities, transportation – you need all those things to get a good job.”
Me, “Anything else?”
Him, “Well, counseling, cell phones, and maybe one vacation a year? No more, and not to anywhere fancy. Because mental stability is also important for getting a job.”
Me, “I am… not clear on what you don’t want people on welfare to get.”
Him, “Alcohol. I don’t want my tax dollars to pay for beer.”
Me, “OK. That’s fair.”
So that’s my standard for being opposed to spending food stamps on anything. Make sure people are on the third of fourth tier of Maslow’s pyramid, and you can be a jerk about beer.
Oh yeah. Problem is, in the United States there’s been a concerted effort to muddle people’s understanding of what welfare is, so that most people who are against welfare (or on the fence) really do believe that people on welfare are spending it all on liquor, ice cream, and lotto tickets or something.
Our “food” already comes with a giant dose of salt!
:/
Yep, exactly. Anyone who’s saying “people shouldn’t be allowed to spend food stamps on junk” doesn’t get the bigger picture.
YES! It makes me furious that so many people would rather believe that poor people are inherently lazy or stupid or gluttonous or whatever than acknowledge that there just plain isn’t access to fresh, healthy, affordable food in a lot of low-income communities.
We also waste a lot of food in this country at a lot of different points in the production cycle. No one should be going hungry.
Agreed. It frustrates the hell out of me.
Oh, I have no doubt that these politicos willfully ignore this, however! I think what this article is trying to do is to hold these people out as a way to have its readership acknowledge its own ignorance and try and accept its unequal spot?
As someone who recently finished a master’s of policy, the ability for people to have no concept of how policy translates down is not lost on me. But this shit rubs me alllll the wrong way. And to the comment below, yep, good times Oklahoma. But also, figuring out EBT hustles takes a lot of brain power too. Let’s try and see Rand create his own fucking informal economy.
Oh LORD the eye rolls I make to myself in my policy classes..
I think my head just exploded in rage. At least learn the BASIC DEFINITION of a program before you disparage it based on your classist, not-at-all-based-in-reality assumptions!
Totally and willfully insulated is a great way to put it. That population does not want to be disabused of their notion of the lazy, grasping poor. Feels real similar to when I listen to well-off doctors tell me about how their one Canadian friend says that actually universal healthcare is not so great.
I’m Canadian. One of my (American) SILs has tens of thousands of dollars of debt due to medical bills, but she’s the first to tell me that my universal healthcare is awful because we Canadians have to pay higher income taxes in order to fund it.
And also we might have to wait in lines to get health care? I met a MEDICAL student in Missouri was was appalled at the Canadian health care system because of queues.
I was like, girl you have been brain washed real talk. Triage based on need is normal and good, and also, waiting a few hours or days weeks or months is better than waiting FOREVER for affordable care.
Also, people have to wait in the emergency room/for the doctor’s schedule to open up as it is anyway???? WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE
Exactly. We also ration care based on wealth, class, race, gender, so that argument gets to me too.
I’ve had to wait way longer in Doctor’s offices in America than I ever did in the UK.
THIS so hard. Of course I should wait around in the ER if I have a broken wrist, even if I’m rich as Midas. Of course the guy with the heart attack should go first. That’s just common sense. That’s just humanity.
And listen, folks, I’m Canadian, and I have to say the health care here is stupendous. It really is. There are lots of problems with health care in our country (especially in rural areas – I’m in a big urban centre), but overall, experientially and anecdotally I give the whole thing a big thumbs up. My parents both had crazy life-saving heart interventions, a close friend of mine has very intense mental health treatment needs, which are met, my doc lectures me about getting exercise and asks after my anxiety. Etc.
Yep. I’m in a Canadian rural area, and while it sucks that we have to go to one of the larger cities for the more advanced stuff, I don’t know anyone who would trade it for the US system. My boyfriend’s grandfather is in one of the larger cities for surgery right now, and you know what hasn’t come up once? Cost. The idea of having to base medically-necessary procedures on ability to pay is abhorent to even the most conservative people I know.
What do you think of things like the SNAP challenge? I have mixed feelings but since you know a lot about this issue, I’d like to hear your opinion!
Honestly, I think these things can be good because it does at least take the idea of SNAP and puts it into the open. Do I think it still makes it some sort of horrifying outlier experience when a Congressperson or journalist (Hi, WBEZ! Love your food coverage, felt a little weird about it this year!) is like, living on not enough money for food is HARD? Yeah, kinda. I think that’s what’s so bizarre to me about this– to be receiving nutritional benefits or to be food insecure is not some experience that is far away to most people, at least statistically. Yet we still treat it like this.
I think if we took things like the SNAP challenge and tried to bring in bigger contexts to it–like hey, we should promote more policy changes for EBT users to use their moneys at farmer’s markets or farm stands! Or hey, huh, I wonder if maybe minimum wages were raised or food access was examined, maybe that would change how people could spend their money on food?
Ultimately I think this is good because it keeps conversation alive, but you know, nobody ever talks about the complexities of how nutritional assistance works and how you know, if you live near Whole Foods you could use your SNAP there, but if you live only near Wal-Mart (see: rural places) you might be eating differently. And I think that’s part of why people don’t think about EBT or talk about it–it is complicated and brings up so many feelings and food, man, people love to eat it and fight about it.
Well, yes, I did grow up in a place where I never saw anyone buy groceries with government assistance. People wrote checks, generally. And yes, it was privileged! And wealthy! And very white! These places exist. I am also decently well-educated. With degrees!
But, it was not until I moved to a place with a vast, yawning chasm of income inequality – pretty much the U.S. economy in miniature – that I saw how public assistance actually works in practice. I saw how people had to remove groceries from the belt, because they couldn’t afford them. I saw how they had to make two transactions – one with public assistance, usually staples like milk and eggs, and one, usually with just a few items with a very small amount of cash. I’ve also imagined just how fucking uncomfortable it must be to have to do this, while a crowd of impatient well-off white people stands in line behind you, watching.
So I think the more that is written about this kind of thing, the better. Because I can’t be the only one who grew up without seeing this, and as soon as I did see it, I realized just how fucked up it is. And even where I live now, it’s easy to avoid if you shop at specialty stores like Whole Foods.
Fair enough. Also, the Whole Foods nearest me, near North/Southside dividing line of Chicago has people using EBT all the time. Plus after the slew of hipsters using food stamps! adjuncts using food stamps! pieces I’ve been reading, I assumed it was more common place. Thanks for the reminder!
Yeah, it wasn’t where I grew up at all. But where I live now, all the time. I don’t actually go to the Whole Foods here, so not sure how it is 😉
I actually grew up the opposite! I grew up in a pretty rural area (or at least an agriculturally-based economy), where there was a big class divide, and at least half the population was on EBT or WIC, etc. I worked at a grocery store, and that reality of watching people take things off the belt, of watching others get impatient while I helped them do the math necessary to make ends meet AND get what they needed (it was worse with WIC, because there are some really stupid stipulations about which brands you can and cannot buy), drove a lot of it home for me. It still feels strange to live in a suburban area now where that reality is further removed. It’s surreal, because I know it exists, in large quantities. It’s real, but it’s so easy not to see it.
WIC! Oof.
And if anyone is still hanging out here, I’d love to keep talking about it. There’s something about all this that is making me itch and it is a question I have a lot when people who admit to not knowing about how EBT and WIC and SNAP works which is basically, like, we should feed hungry people. We should feed them. That’s it. And I’m guilty too, having written about how food insecurity looks in some urban areas in a way that is just trying to explain it, and I don’t know how I feel about that. Like, on the one hand, I want to educate people and explain things, but there’s this other part of me that has a visceral reaction of, even if you have no idea or find this … hard to watch? interact with? (??), like, moving on from our privileged feelings about it needs to just happen and we need to be more about look, we need to feed children and poor people! WE NEED TO FEED THEM! this should be a right!
I dunno… it just always strikes me that most of the people who are talking about food insecurities on a lot of progressively minded online platforms have somehow never been anywhere near food insecurity, and we need reminders of that somehow, when all the urban centers I’ve lived in in the domestic US has had such a presence of so many people using SNAP/EBT/WIC that it was everywhere. And I want somehow to just be in the middle of that instead of claiming some space of “FOOD STAMP USER” or “What’s a SNAP card?”.
Yes, I wish conversations about food assistance could be expanded to talk more broadly about what food accessibility looks like in the United States as a whole, and into campaigns to improve accessibility. I support, obviously, loosening restrictions on how and what amount of money the gov’t gives people to buy food, but it’s true that it doesn’t solve larger problems of WHY so many people are so hungry. But then those problems are connected to a whole host of OTHER problems like minimum wage, debt, local economies, etc.
I didn’t see it until I actually worked at the grocery store.
Yep! The US is very economically segregated, so what you see, depends a lot on where you live or where you’ve travelled. The rural areas in California tend to be very economically diverse, so if you worked at a grocery store (or any rural area, I’d imagine, I mostly know California) you’d see just about every kind of person – and need – walk through your door.
Same here, it’s not something I ever saw, and thus ever thought about, until very recently. Even living in Chicago, it’s not something I see happen very often. I’m with you, the more written about it, the better.
The Walrus is a Canadian literary magazine, it doesn’t actually have anythiing to do with walruses.
I’m really disappointed in Canada right now.
That was a cool book review – I’ve been wanting to read The Empathy Exams & now I’m even more looking forward to it.
I’m halfway through it and DEVOURING it, though I did skip the essay on Morgellon’s because I knew it would drive me bats. Warning you in case you are the same!
I’ve been reading it and it’s crazy, crazy good- I keep foisting it upon people. This woman is a seriously talented essayist.
And I did read the Morgellon’s one, too. I think it should be required reading for body theory classes alongside Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva.
The Hail Dayton article is gorgeous and I’m going to really delve into it at lunch because it deserves more than a skim. (Dayton, Tennessee, btw. Not Ohio, as I thought for the first idon’twanttosayhowlong.)
delurking to ask: Has anyone else read this thing about Maya Angelou and her love of cooking? http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/04/dining/recallin…
Something about this is really rubbing me the wrong way, even though I know it’s meant in good faith and it’s supposed to be about uncovering something private and beautiful etc etc etc but does it HAVE to be cooking? Does it have to fucking DIET ADVICE???? This is Maya Angelou! Jesus Christ.
I mean, am I supposed to read this and be like, “Oh! I know how amazing Maya Angelou was but I didn’t realize HOW much until I knew that she also struggled with eating her feelings! LADIES, amirite”
You have an excellent name for lurking.
If I click on that link, am I getting excellent recipes? Because I don’t really want to click on ragebait.
Thank you!
And there aren’t even any good recipes. Just: “Gourmet without being gourmand, she became conscious of her weight in later years. When I sit to table, I always remember her advice on dieting.”
COME ON.
What the even hell.
“In the days since Maya Angelou died last Wednesday at 86, much has been written about her poetry, plays and memoirs, but little about her skills as an accomplished cook, cookbook writer and home entertainer (in both senses of the word).”
I WONDER WHY.
I feel the same about GoT that I feel about Funny Games, that movie Martyrs that Nicole tweeted about, and other media that heavily features torture and death. NO interest in watching it. LOTS of interest in reading about it. I couldn’t really rest until I saw Buzzfeed’s image-heavy (though not super explicit) breakdown of the duel. What is wrong with me?
I don’t know, but it’s wrong with me too, I think – I cannot watch the Hannibal tv show but I love Cleolinda’s recaps of it. (One of my friends literally has a “safe for naomi” tag on her tumblr for non-gory Hannibal posts.) I don’t even know.
I mentioned in a different thread that I take joy in the reactions to GoT but don’t watch/read it. I love reading about it as well, and look at aaaaalll the gifs of major character deaths.
Maybe we’re all just dead inside and this is what it takes to make us feel things.
lollll i have literally never heard of Slavoj Žižek, so he can’t be that great
He likes to troll people over whether he is serious or not about still being a Stalinist. But he can actually be pretty good about puncturing group beliefs/ big unspoken ideologies, even if he is also irritating at times. I think a lot of people (including his followers) misunderstand him and/or take him too seriously because they have no sense of humor.
His film “A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology” is worth watching.
and yet i probably will not watch it
also there is a funny twitter of a person pretending to be Žižek commentating on the NFL, which I like more than actual Žižek or actual NFL, because it is like “I regret that I will not be able to appear in public foer a month or so, as Joe Namath harvested my beard hair for his coat” https://twitter.com/ZizekOnNFL
He loves musicals.
He’s also nice for those of us who grew up in Eastern Europe and laugh at jokes about horrible things happening to random people.
Has anyone else been watching Louie? Is anyone else as angry and disappointed as I am?
What happened?
I think this is the most nuanced summary I’ve seen so far.
Basically, he’s using violence against women & rape as a way to be ~edgy and controversial~ and I am not amused.
Thanks for the link. I’m skeptical of Louis CK’s position as like, the white dude for us! because I don’t think he is as on “our” (women’s, people of color’s, poor people’s) side as he pretends. It’s disappointing to see this kind of shit play out.
Well, he’s Mexican-American, so some of it is something he does have lived experienced with, though he obviously outwardly presents as Mega White Dude and gets all the privilege which comes with that, especially now that he’s Rich.
I’ve seen this argument a lot, and while I’m not surprised, I really didn’t read it this way at all. I felt like everything about the framing, the comedy set preceding the attempted rape, the blocking, and even Pam’s dialogue all go out of their way to state that this behavior is WRONG WRONG WRONG. I felt like he was using violence against women as a way to show what a lost mess Louie is right now.
I’m sympathetic to the idea that it shouldn’t have been depicted at all, for any reason, but the main argument I’m seeing is rather that we were somehow expected to support Louie, when in fact it seemed to me like he did everything possible to make the character repulsive.
Yeah, but my whole point is that I’m not okay with using rape and violence as a means of establishing his character as repulsive.
Understood. His gender politics have always been more simplistic than a lot of his other positions, so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised? I will be interested to see how he addresses this in the next episode, and sincerely hope it’s not horrifying.
A lot of prestige TV shows have a fringe audience who fully support their white male lead’s awfulness. Sometimes this is just people reading their prejudices into the show, but sometimes it isn’t. Game of Thrones just had a major male character rape his sister/SO and continue his redemption arc as if nothing happened. I don’t think these depictions should be off-limits, but with a platform like Louie you have to be careful what you communicate.
I’m with Vulture and am going to wait until next week to see where he goes with it.
Twitter alerted me to this extremely important story about a guy who saved a bear from drowning.
A FUCKING BEAR.
Goddman right he’s a hero!! Also I like that they describe the dude as a “biologist/badass.”
This man will be able to seduce anyone he fancies for life.
slides over glass of bourbon and whispers; let me tell you about the time I rescued a *bear*
AMAZING. Badassologist! Here is an important picture from that article!
A FUCKING BEAR, THOUGH.
Got damn.
That man used to be my friend’s boss! I asked Friend how his new boss was and all he said was, “google him.”
True story: my ex-boyfriend (as predicted!) left me that Zizek book about Lenin once, and after we broke up I sold it in shitty condition on Amazon for $23.
Guys, the patriarchy hurts everyone! We are sexist towards freaking HURRICANES!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weath…
http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2014/06/03/318…
“Stop acting so “blustery”” Heeeeeee! This is great.
Not so much, actually: http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/06/0…
Zizek, geez.
But my thing is, why don’t we have more “public intellectuals” here in the US?
Or is it just pundits now? That makes me have a sad.
In order to have intellectual celebrities you sort of needs a mass culture that gives a shit about intellectualism.
I’m pretty sure Zizek is famous not so much for the qualities of his critique as for being a gross communist slob on TV, sorta like an Andy Kaufman thing for academics.
He has a bit of mass appeal past the look. He tackles some pop culture, too, in that winking way where you can say “you know what this movie’s REALLY about?”
I feel like Britain is also lying down on the public intellectuals job? I mean, Dawkins and Hitchens; the foremost public intellectuals of our time? Really?
The line between the two is certainly extremely blurry. Like, honestly, I’m really not sure what the difference is, which I suppose suggests that the answer to your question is yes.
If they wear a bowtie, they’re a pundit.
Lol! Pundits aren’t intellectuals! I think some of them can barely boil a kettle.
HOW DID YOU KNOW THAT HE IS MY EX-BOYFRIEND’S FAVORITE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL?
Because he is. I dated this insufferable dude for about 3-4 months (I was new to my city and he was really the first person I met), and he loved Zizek and Mailer and Hitchens and telling me he was not a hipster even though he’s basically what you see in the dictionary when you look up hipster. Also I think of those three he’d only ever actually read Hitchens, and just knew the other two as being hipster buzzwords. Barf barf barf.
I saw that link and thought, “I’m sure that doesn’t apply to me,” and then I clicked on it and went, “Oh.” Because I totally did briefly date a guy who loved Zizek and would talk about little else. The Toast is always right.
I think you’re right. The only thing that Zizek and Hitchens had in common was atheism, and even then their perspectives are completely opposite (Zizek has been part of the recent old-school lefty rediscovery of Paul).
If The Toast wants I can become a sort of secret police on other dudes bore people into submission with hipster buzzwords. And I’d read my one Zizek book in peace and never talk about it.
Thank you for verifying. I knew I was right about Mailer, because I’ve actually read at least one of his things, and when he brought him up to impress me, thinking I obviously hadn’t heard of him because I am “preppy,” he kind of panicked when I knew at least a little about what I was talking about, and he quickly changed the subject (because GOD FORBID I know more than he does about something!). I couldn’t bust him on Zizek because I hadn’t read any, but when I asked questions he always brought things back to Hitchens, so tl dr, you have further confirmed that he is just a self-important faux-intellectual asshole!
In re “balanced” viewpoints, Autostraddle had a very good piece on the same topic recently too: http://www.autostraddle.com/there-may-be-two-side…
I had a teacher in college (he was a grad. student of course) who used to just pace the floor and mutter “you are all so fucking stupid.”
I have so many feelings about Sansa Stark. Just…so many feelings.
Me. Too.
Is one of them, “HOLY BADASS, BATMAN!”
and another, “oh please girl run away, run away to Dorne and never ever come back”
?
Tell me about your feelings.