BREEEEEE NEWSSSSOOMMMMMMMEEEEE (also, credit for that soon-to-be-historical photo goes to Adam Anderson.) You can watch the video here. I have watched it maybe a thousand times. She is a perfect human being. She should be on all of our money.
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This is a far more sobering video, although incredibly powerful, and I don’t know anyone worth knowing who wouldn’t joyfully trade the (wonderful) celebrations and (significant) accomplishments of this last week if it meant that Emanuel AME had a normal, quiet Bible study on June 17th, so maybe cool it with the “Obama’s best week ever” stuff.
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I know we’ve already talked about this, but the HORROR of this situation in the Dominican Republic is so vast. People toss around accusations of things being “like the Nazis” with great regularity, but retroactively stripping citizenship from an ethnic group is literally one of the first things the Nazis did.
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Scalia may be wrong, the mantra went—as it always does!—but he is intelligent and witty.
This is an odd sense of wit. Scalia is not just wrong. He is wrong in the same way that the thousands of anonymous conservative Twitter accounts with default egg avatars swarming liberal politicians and pundits are. He writes his dissents using the same jokes and the same arguments. If Scalia’s ostensibly witty writing displays a keen legal mind, then we are witnessing the blossoming of a new age of legal scholarship in Hillary Clinton’s at-replies. Because Antonin Scalia is, essentially, a Twitter egg.
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Friend of The Toast Nicole Pasulka on Desert Hearts, which was not perfect but still very important:
Welcome to the world of Desert Hearts—a film adaptation of Jane Rule’s 1964 novel Desert of the Heart. Before The L Word gave us six seasons of TV about a group of lesbian friends and lovers, before Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon robbed and killed a sadistic mobster and escaped in a cherry red pickup truck, before every awkward “lesbian kiss” on primetime TV, there was this affirming, optimistic romance. Desert Hearts was one of the first movies to centre on a female love story that allowed the women to be together, and it was a revelation when it was released in 1985. Before then, most on-screen lesbians had fallen prey to some combination of murder, suicide, vampirism, nervous breakdown, or heterosexuality.
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What it’s like to be in recovery from an eating disorder during Ramadan:
“It’s becoming an issue that’s growing among young girls from south Asian communities, including Muslim girls,” Ahmed tells BuzzFeed News. “One thing I noticed while I was researching this was that social services didn’t have a clue about ethnic minority girls dealing with eating disorders.”
According to Ahmed, some eating disorder units are also “ill-equipped to deal with young South Asian girls with eating disorders”, often because it was “less likely these cases would be picked up” as statistically, they would be less likely to be reported, and because of “ingrained stereotypes about south Asian culture” in some hospital wards.
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Mallory’s dad wrote this really great thing in Christianity Today about Charleston:
I have gone to church my whole life. I have never wondered if someone might enter the church and kill me or kill those I love because of the color of my skin.
I have heard that verse from Isaiah many times. I have always taken it as a metaphor—“no weapon formed against you shall prosper.” Who would form a weapon against me? But weapons formed against the people of Mother Emanuel brought them from Africa, and kept them in slavery for 250 years, and declared in the U.S. Constitution that for census purposes they were 3/5’s of a person—“almost” a person; then kept them out of schools and out of voting booths and out of offices and out of the front of the bus and out of neighborhoods. And kept them out of churches, countless churches, in obvious ways and subtle ways.
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lolll choire is on it
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Toast reader Lindsay is looking for people to take part in an online study of how early career professionals (less than 7 years in) think about and pursue their goals at work. The study involves responding to short surveys sent via text messages throughout the week. In return for participation, you’d get $36, a $5 Amazon giftcard, and a personalized summary of your responses. More info here!
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I have watched the second episode of True Detective season two, and you shall hear more about it shortly!
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This deleted comment is just spam, but I really like it:
Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
If you love corgis so much, why don’t you just get a bunch of them! Then post pictures of adorable corgis, that’d show ’em.
Everyone would be really mad, definitely. Super super mad.
You know what would really irk people? If you dressed them up in one of those little hot dog bun costumes and put up pictures.
“Who, me?”
For reals, I read that deleted comment and was all, “Who are you to be trash-talking octopoda’s delightful corgi?”
Ooooo, so mad! See it is working already!
Corgi Con Coverage! For those who need more corgi only. Persons who have sufficient corgi in their day already should postpone this dose until tomorrow, or side effects could include dying of stubby-legged big-eared cuteness.
Oh you mean my Instagram?
Spamcommenter is so right, I AM in love with the corgi. How could anyone not love their adorable teddybear faces and foxy ears?
And weirdly-proportioned heads! And teensy legs! They are clearly terrible.
Parts of Scalia’s opinion read like a deleted comment from this site.
“The substance of today’s decree is not of immense personal importance to me.”
Uh huh.
Antonin Scalia’s Opinion on Gay Marriage:
#nohomo
Seriously, dudes rushing in to scream about how much they DON’T CARE about stuff like gay marriage or representation in science fiction or the right to birth control coverage- no one believes you.
Are we sure he isn’t just trolling us?
That is the cutest spam username ever. I would totally provide my bank account information to any wealthy, desperate widow going by minigoldenretriever.
Has anyone else come across this piece on Amy Schumer? http://theweek.com/articles/560613/amy-schumer-is…
I am more than a little disappointed to find out that the woman who made that great Friday Night Lights parody also thinks it’s fine and dandy to make fucked up racist jokes about Latinos being rapists. Solidarity is really just for white women 🙁
For some reason my comment replied way at the bottom so I’m trying again: Yeah she’s been like this for a while and her responses to even mild criticism of the way she handles race related humor have been increasingly gross (see this response that she posted the other day against an otherwise praising article that critiqued some of her racial humor: https://twitter.com/amyschumer/status/61518217357…. I’ve found she’s more likely to make racist jokes in her standup which is why I think a lot of people who find her through her show don’t know about it as much.
What really bothers me is her reaction that because she’s a feminist she’s automatically in our corner and we should shrug it off, like 99% of her racist humor is targeted at women of color so I’m not sure what she wants from us? I had to stop watching her show because every joke she makes about latinas put a horrible taste in my mouth (and certainly did not give me the impression that she was in my corner, in anyway). She also has weird issues with asian women, including a whole bit in her Mostly Sex Stuff special where she mocks and imitates a group of asian women in the audience every time they get up and leave the room to get a drink.
Ah, the old “I can’t be racist, I support woman stuff” argument. Lovely.
Super disappointing. I still love a lot of the work she’s done, but it’s always a bad idea to worship someone and think they can do no wrong. The points made in this article are certainly valid, and I hope Amy Schumer really hears them and makes some changes in the future.
Ugh. Disappointing but not surprising. Thanks for the link.
As luck would have it, I was actually sitting back and watching Amy Schumer clips on YouTube this weekend, and one of the suggested links was a portion of stand-up she did regarding race.
It was awful. It was maybe 3 minutes, but I couldn’t get to the end. She just kept throwing out stereotypes about different people of color. For all the good she does, Amy seems to have some real problems with race. 🙁
Amy’s standup, like Sarah Silverman’s and Anthony Jeselnik’s, is done in character as a terrible person – in this case a terrible, thoughtless, racist, dumb white girl. She’s not poking fun at minorities, but at the dumb white girls who traffic in racist stereotypes in how they see the world. Should that make a difference?
Except that her in character as a terrible human being is not functionally different from her actually being a terrible human being, so no it doesn’t make a difference.
Can you point me toward evidence of her actual terribleness, outside of her standup? Genuinely asking. I followed the Twitter link above but the tweet had been deleted.
Sorry about that, the twitter link seemed to work this morning. Here it is again: https://twitter.com/amyschumer/status/61518217357… it’s also screencapped here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/28/amy-schu… .
Thanks! I think what she said is obviously problematic – she’s resorting to the old “it’s funny because people laugh” and “trust me I’m a feminist” bullshit. At the same time, she’s addressing the problem head-on, and then engages with critics at length in the many replies to her tweet, asking them what offended them, and how they felt, instead of denying their claims or being defensive. That’s a surprising amount of nuance, and it gives me hope that she will improve on this.
So i was still typing my comment below when you posted it and I see what you’re saying but I’m personally not comfortable waiting until she learns how to joke about me and many other women like we’re people too. So many people have good intentions and terrible actions and I sincerely hope she learns from this and improves on it but I think she needs to get a bit more comfortable with what are ultimately mild critiques (there was a lot of praise of her in the Guardian article her tweet was responding to!) before she can really get to a better place with her race based jokes.
I read your comment below and you’re totally right about everything. Thanks for taking the time. You and all POC and WOC shouldn’t have to wait for her to get educated and respond better to criticism. But I really hope she does, mainly because she’s so on point with some of her feminist satire, that if she gets her shit together in this department she could be really great. In my dreams I envision her teaming up with Sasheer Zamata for the Intersectionality Sketch Show.
I hope she does to! She’s clearly capable of tackling difficult subjects and I would love for her to use that to incorporate jokes about race that are done effectively instead of mean spiritedly. If she learns from this and grows I would absolutely go back to watching her show, it’s just that in the mean time it’s a little too much for me to watch <3
Also re the “not functionally different” comment above, obviously I can’t speak for @grace_adieu but I think that was in reference to the fact that making terrible racist jokes doesn’t magically become progressive just because she says she’s playing a character? She makes these jokes in her standup, they pop up in her show, they come in her public appearances (most recently when she was presenting for the MTV movie awards), and they show up in her responses to any criticism she gets for her race related humor. We never see anything suggesting that these aren’t her personal opinions unless she gets criticized which is when we get the “no don’t worry guys I love everyone” canned response that all white comedians give.
She can’t seriously go around making racist joke after racist joke, often punching down specifically at women of color (while magically managing to punch up for white women) and then be surprised when she gets pushback on that. The fact that she magically pulls out the “it’s just a performance” card for any criticism doesn’t really change anything. Functionally, making a racist comment about asian women and then being like “lol, jk” about it isn’t different from straight up making that racist comment. And if she wants to do that and if she feels that’s progressive then fine, but expecting women of color to take that because she’s ‘in our corner’ without any proof of that is really ignorant of her.
If you convincingly pretend to be racist all the time how are the effect of your statements any different for the people who have to deal with them? At best her humor benefits white people who want to pat themselves on the back for not being like her but she’s given me no proof that she doesn’t have serious issues with women of color that she doesn’t want to examine. I would love if she treated these jokes with the same care and intelligence that she does with the rest of her humor, particularly with things that affect white women or that involve all women (without referencing race) but she doesn’t and it doesn’t seem like she will so she can’t really be affronted that people are critiquing that.
If an attempt to critique something can be mistaken for the thing it is supposed to be critiquing, then I question its effectiveness as a critique.
I don’t know enough about Amy Schumer as a person, and I would certainly hope she has good intentions. But the road to hell, and all that…
I had the “‘watched a sketch, looked up her stuff on YouTube, noped out” reaction last year, only to watch her get occupy more and more bandwidth, and I’ve been waiting for someone to bring this up. It’s not that I’m always WHERE ARE THE RECEIPTS but in this case the receipts? Are big, racist, unfunny receipts.
I have watched that eulogy more than a dozen times. So many messages delivered throughout, and the closing! So strong. Say what you will, this is a President who can deliver a message. If you haven’t taken the time to watch it yet, even if you’re not a believer, I can’t recommend it strongly enough.
It was amazing. Also, I feel like the style and delivery of that eulogy are perhaps more in line with how President Obama might prefer to deliver his public speeches, but feels he has to stay measured and reserved. My wife and I are hoping that he reaches or exceeds a Jimmy Carter level of ex-presidency. He can be such a force for change even after he leaves office!
“My wife and I are hoping that he reaches or exceeds a Jimmy Carter level of ex-presidency.”
Yes!!! What a great thing to look forward to!
Also, I have gotten so accustomed to “Obama the Professorial Statesman” that I was very pleasantly surprised to hear “Obama the AME Preacher” arrive at the eulogy, although why shouldn’t he?
Yeah, it was really powerful. I almost felt like I was peeking into something not made for me, because the level of resonance with the crowd, all the call-and-response, the way he was communicating with them — man, it was so personal. I don’t know if he grew up in a black church, but he knows the language.
Holy cow, YES on the resonance. I listened to the service live on a SC NPR station while I was in my car and the recording was so intimate I felt like a voyeur. It sounded like someone had put the mike in the middle of a pew somewhere, and the audio picked up all the normal human shuffling and sneezing and all the emotional responses and words of the congregation. I’m not sure if it was broadcast on TV, but at the end of the service the pastor was telling everyone how to process out, he referred to “the Reverend President” and got what sounded like a thunderous standing ovation.
Damn. I really hope that speech gets remembered in decades to come, as one of the most significant of his presidency. (Also I love envisioning the textbooks of the future, which will definitely play audio and video right from the pages.)
a. I don’t think it’s that it was Obama’s “best” week ever, it’s just that it’s his week that most looks like it was written by Aaron Sorkin. Or at least it would if somehow someone had said something terrible and dismissive to Valerie Jarrett.
b. The mini golden retriever is just jealous.
I dare you not to fall in love with that corgi puppy. Go on, I DARE YOU.
Fellow Toasties might enjoy this essay on Taylor Swift doing what we all swore to do and destroying people who hurt her in public and being awesome while doing it.
Yes, I might enjoy that. I haven’t even finished reading it because I am savoring it like the latte that mr.table just delivered to me at work.
If you would like to read a piece about TSwift, MadMax, and Superheroes, try this one:
“Swift’s been countering that narrative lately by playing up her same-sex friendships in social media, making her Instagram feed into a real-life demonstration of what the point of the Bechdel test is.”
I keep toggling back to this puppy while reading the Scalia Twitter egg thing, like this puppy is going to save me.
End result?
Bree Newsome for the ten dollar bill!!
Toastettes! I missed the Open Thread but I need your advice. How do I find a good therapist/counselor? I think my relationship needs moderator right about now.
I have no advice to give on this, I’m just seconding the need to find a good therapist! I’ve been to two counselors and a psychiatrist, and none of them seem to be able to help my social anxiety with OCD tendencies, which seems like it should be a pretty basic thing for a therapist to work with?
Blergh. I’m sorry you’re having trouble with that.
Fwiw, here’s my story. I have PTSD and I’ve gone through many, many therapists of different flavors.
I’ve had the best luck going to someone with specific experience and training in treating trauma, rather than a generalist. I suspect that social anxiety and OCD might be similar, even for a mild case. For trauma, there are definitely different schools / approaches and I’ve figured out which general therapeutic approaches work best for me through trial and error, plus a little thoughtful research and a lot of luck.
For me, going to a center specializing in treating my specific trauma made a big difference – they did an intake and assigned me to someone based on my needs (and availability). I found my first really great therapist that way (plus three ok to decent ones).
Well it sounds like maybe finding a group or center would be an easier way to find the right person! Now I just need to find one covered by my insurance, hehh. 😛 I hate that part of finding a good therapist is grinding through a bunch of them until you find the right fit. Mental illness itself is a barrier to picking up the phone and getting help for your mental illness! Human brains, what the heck.
Insurance makes everything more complicated, argh. I completely agree with cleo, but would also like to add that if you have anyone you feel comfortable getting recommendations from, I’d suggest making sure that you ask them why they liked the therapist as well as just whether or not they liked them – personal rapport and preferences really matter on this one, and someone can be a wonderful person and a great therapist and still not be the right therapist for you.
“Mental illness itself is a barrier to picking up the phone and getting help for your mental illness!”
So, so true.
I’ve mostly used personal recommendations to find therapists – asking friends who’ve been through something similar. Other people I know have gotten good recommendations from their doctors.
I’ve seen therapists with aprivate practice and through a center or group practice. The advantage of doing a center or group practice is that they can (try to) match you to a compatible therapist.
Other thoughts – good chemistry with your therapist is important for a good therapy experience and it’s especially important for couples therapy. Both parties need to feel safe and comfortable. It’s fine to do an initial session and decide not to see them again.
If anyone is in Toronto I have an amazing therapist, especially great for couples counselling, that I can recommend.
I know Ontario associations have online referrals (eg: http://opajoomla.knowledge4you.ca/index.php/findp… but a personal recommendation is usually the best if you can get it.
I actually found the great therapist that I was seeing until recently on Yelp. I have good insurance and common enough problems that it wasn’t too hard to look through the well-reviewed therapists in my area and find one that would work, but obviously YMMV. I found it really helpful to look at what people said they had gotten from therapy with different people and see if it matched up with what I was trying to get from therapy.
Bree Newsome is my new idol and inspiration. I don’t even know where to begin. Like. Climbing a flagpole, tearing down an oppressive flag, shouting Biblical verses at a corrupt authority, and calmly and knowingly walking to arrest for one’s stand for justice–like, even ONE of those actions is something to aspire to. How does a person become awesome enough to perform all four at once?!
I would start by working on climbing skills and bible verse memorization. Then escalate the badassery. It’s a long term sort of project, I would guess.
Because holy shit, that takes some high levels of awesome.
SHE SHOUTED BIBLICAL VERSES AT A CORRUPT AUTHORITY?! I DIDNT EVEN KNOW THAT PART OF THE STORY
::FAINTS::
Watch the video with the sound turned up!
Yes!!!! What she shouts from the top of the flagpole is a modification of Samuel 17:45–which is what David shouts to Goliath right before the slingshot. (original verse: “You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the Lord.”)
LIBERATION THEOLOGY, ACTIVATE!
Fucking Scalia. I think the thing about Scalia is, it IS true that he’s a facile writer — he writes easily, I think, and he argues easily, and that’s his problem. The easier it is for a person to articulate something the more likely they are to think that it’s true; this is how we tell the difference between things that are fantasy (hard to think of, because we made them up) and reality (easy to think of, because we observe them in nature).
Scalia’s just the same as everyone else, he believes what he believes and goes to whatever lengths he needs to in order to justify it (in his case, a grotesque kind of parochial cruelty); but because he’s so facile at argument, he never feels like he has to question it. If a regular person makes a case, and he doesn’t have some previous easy-to-remember-cliche to rely on (preferably one that rhymes), and they have a hard time putting their thoughts into words, they might think twice about whether or not what they’re saying is true.
Clarity of writing might be a hallmark of clarity of thought, but quality of writing isn’t a hallmark of quality of thought, I don’t think, as Scalia neatly demonstrates.
Something I think is funny is how Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito always expose how ultimately bad Scalia’s positions are; they always break with him, presumably because they find his facility with language compelling, but when they try to write their own opinions on the issues they always make a complete fucking hash of it. Thomas sounds like he’s just making up a new moral philosophy with each paragraph; Alito sounds like a particularly annoying D&D player whose entire sense of personal worth hinges on him knowing the player’s handbook better than you do.
Oh damn, that is some deep thinking for Monday morning. But it explains so much at so many lawyers that I’ve known.
Man, lawyers are the worst at this. A lot of this I am guessing at based on personal experience — I went through my college years with that same kind of facility that inured me to other people’s opinions. (This is especially a problem when you’re arguing with people in person, because so much of personal or facebook-arguments is a kind of performative, “I’m right because I can provide an answer quickly” rather than “I’m right because I can provide a good answer”.)
But eventually, if you’re a healthy person and not a legal scholar whose attitude is essentially calcified by your getting enshrined to a legal body that literally cannot be contradicted, you start to realize that just statistically, you’re more likely to be wrong about most things than you are to be right, and this ought to make you suspicious about how easily you can justify your own opinions.
On his law school admissions essays, Scalia was that kid who wrote, “I’ll be a good lawyer because I love to argue!”
“I’ll be a great lawyer, because I can win an argument no matter which side I’m on!”
Also, oh shit, that first comment to the Scalia article is brilliant:
“I think the final word on Scalia’s supposed “brilliance” is simply that if he was actually smart, he would probably be right every once in a while.”
Thank you, gilbertkittens, you are a hero for our age.
I agree that Scalia is mostly a fuck, but he is right sometimes. Good on (certain aspects of) the Fourth Amendment, good on the Confrontation Clause, good on sentencing. And can’t forget his dissent in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, where he was the only one to write what should have been obvious: you can’t just lock up an American citizen without trial because some bureaucrat thinks he might be dangerous.
Well, he was pretty bad on sentencing when it came to the execution of people with mental disabilities, but on the other hand, I think this is probably a statement meant to inform by humorous exaggeration rather than strict literality, which is why I think it’s a great comment, but would make for a poor dissenting opinion from a Supreme Court justice.
I guess I just want to raise awareness of the fact that Alito, while far more colorless and therefore obscure, is literally never right except in certain unanimous decisions. Scalia still has some features of a lawyer/judge; Alito is a pure GOP functionary.
Well, that is true, and I agree. Fuck Scalia, but fuck Alito more.
Yes yes yes. Scalia gets more hate because he writes more dissents, but Alito is the real danger. He is, as you say, just a shill for the party without any legal consistencies and even worse, he’s younger.
“gilbertkittens”, between username and comment, sounds like someone we should recruit. Do we have a recruitment poster?
I am not familiar enough with either Scalia’s writing or conservative twitter to know if the argument in the article is true, but I think it’s absolutely important to remember that writing ability is not a measure of total, well-rounded intelligence and character. I do some editing for work, and I know an awful lot of really smart people who can barely compose an email. (Let’s not even get started on my friends who are in academia). And I know some truly gifted writers who do not have anything especially interesting to say.
I also think that liberals get caught up too much in thinking that our way of thinking is the most informed and logical, and that anyone else who is smart and knowledgeable will naturally arrive at our own position. But most arguments in politics take the form of “A will lead to B,” where A is your policy and B is a just and prosperous world where the boxcars all are empty and the sun shines every day. But while we’re busy arguing that A leads to B, conservatives are actually arguing that Y leads to Z, where Z is some sort of conservative bizarro world where women know their place and you don’t have to hear this got-damned hip-hop music on the radio. They may be right insofar as Y actually leads to Z! That doesn’t mean that their priorities aren’t completely fucked up, or that they have any understanding of what life is like outside of the grumpy-white-man bubble.
tl:dr instead of marveling at the idea that somebody can be both smart and wrong at the same time, maybe we should be parsing out the way that our moral values underpin our logic so that we can better make the case for progressive policy
Well, you don’t need to tell ME, I’ve been saying for years that it’s a travesty against civilization that for some reason we conceded “morality” as a Conservative virtue, rather than talking about how everything they believe is a perversion of all decent and humane values.
Huzzah! Nice, nice, nice. But how in the world do we do that? My scientist brain cannot come up with an experiment that will result in knowing how moral stance leads to logic process.
Heh, I’m having flashbacks to my high school debate career here. In Lincoln-Douglas debate format, you start with a “value,” say justice, or quality of life. The debate then comes down to a) whose value is most relevant to the question at hand and b) whose position best “fulfills” the value. It gets more complicated than that, and of course real-life political argument isn’t going to be that formalized. But I think it’s a good approach to have in mind. That way when conservatives are arguing that a public assistance program isn’t working because too many people are still using it, for example, instead of getting bogged down in bureaucratic issues we can say “wait, is our endgame here to move people off of assistance, or is it to make sure that every person who needs help at any given time is able to get help? And why do we favor one goal over the other, in the first place?
You have put into words something that I have felt to be true for a long time. I was, at one point in my life, on the conservative side of the fence and I think that allows me to better be able to see that frequently the two sides are arguing past each other, rather than attacking the root parts of each side’s argument.
Bree Newsome is a hero for not only taking down the flag, but also for being able to climb a flag pole. I don’t even like climbing stairs.
She is great and that picture is great.
Also also for promoting safety! She wore a helmet, like a SENSIBLE badass.
Sensible Badass is my new Superhero name
And she brought a spotter!
I don’t know if it’s true but on Twitter reporters were saying she only learned to climb two days before, specifically to do this. All the more remarkable!
This one is a bit preachy, hope you don’t mind…
It can be argued, in many ways
that climbing a pole is no great feat
it has been done, on other days
for no more than a visual treat
But Bree Newsome, braving arrest
Climbed a pole 54 years high
and in doing so addressed
this filthy insult to the eye
Of good-willed people everywhere
who know and despise this polity
and do not hesitate to declare
the time has come for equality
Ten thousand Newsomes aren’t enough!
Everyone must match her bravery
all must stand with her and say
152 years since we ended slavery
Is far too long to tolerate
the white supremacists who fly
their smug and bloody flag above
our heads, while innocents still die.
Oh dang, I actually think this is the best one yet.
We need an anthology of these. Seriously.
PREACH.
I am absolutely in love with the line “Climbed a pole 54 years high”
Me too! I am smugging big-time this morning.
Same.
Making me cry! Good one, Library_Mole. Very good one.
Yeah she’s been like this for a while and her responses to even mild criticism of the way she handles race related humor have been increasingly gross (see this response that she posted the other day against an otherwise praising article that critiqued some of her racial humor: https://twitter.com/amyschumer/status/61518217357…. I’ve found she’s more likely to make racist jokes in her standup which is why I think a lot of people who find her through her show don’t know about it as much.
What really bothers me is her reaction that because she’s a feminist she’s automatically in our corner and we should shrug it off, like 99% of her racist humor is targeted at women of color so I’m not sure what she wants from us? I had to stop watching her show because every joke she makes about latinas put a horrible taste in my mouth (and certainly did not give me the impression that she was in my corner, in anyway). She also has weird issues with asian women, including a whole bit in her Mostly Sex Stuff special where she mocks and imitates a group of asian women in the audience every time they get up and leave the room to get a drink.
That should have been in response to @PierrePoutine and her comment about the piece on Amy Shumer.
IntenseDebate likes to keep us on our toes, I guess.
Her response is TERRIBLE. It’s on par with the kind of pathetic responses male comedians offer when they make rape jokes (‘But I love women so it’s okay’).
That Latino rapist joke gave me such a visceral sense of disgust, particularly given the way that the ‘men of colour are rapists’ myth has gotten a lot of mileage lately with that white supremacist terrorist in Charleston and Donald Trump’s comments about Mexicans. Way to go Amy, thanks for encouraging them.
Yeah, that joke was awful. I expect Donald Trump to say awful things about us Mexicans, but I did think of Amy as a ally and a like-minded person and that was a not-funny-unless-you’re-racist joke.
I’m a little weirdly glad that examples are provided so the next time I overhear someone gush about Amy Schumer I can point to them. Ah well.:/ I saw people quoting her Twitter response re. racist jokes and critiquing it, but had no context as to what it was in reference to.
Yep. I’m off to share this with all the Amy super-fans I know, to get them to stop trying to make me feel like I need to be one of them. I don’t like her humor. Sometimes she does a sketch that points out flaws in society, but with sketch comedy she has a team of writers, and I don’t think she deserves all the credit for the good ones, since her standup is so questionable.
She also had that weird piece on The Hairpin, but they switched their commenting system so her weird defensive response in the comments is gone now and I guess you’ll just all have to take my word for it? (sorry.)
http://thehairpin.com/2011/07/a-goodbye-to-ambien…
y’know, they promised to migrate the old comments on the hairpin (and billfold), but I’m starting to worry they never will and I will no longer get to revisit old hairpin drama when I’m bored.
Listen buddy, if I wanted a dog with stubby little legs I’d get a Clumber Spaniel or a Sussex Spaniel.
YES! Clumber (and Sussex) Spaniels are the bestest spaniels!
MORE CORGIS FOR ME
A friend of mine went to school with one of Scalia’s kids; said kid was apparently saddened by all of the hate he is seeing towards his dad out on the internet. My first thought was, “welcome to what women, POC, trans people, etc. deal with every day. This is a world your dad helped make.”
My second thought was that the kids of people who are willfully and famously on the wrong side of history probably always have complaints about how their parents are remembered. But that is nobody’s problem but theirs, and their parents. And it is vastly outweighed by the harm that people like Scalia do to the millions affected by their wrong-headed decisions.
http://www.theonion.com/article/scalia-thomas-rob…
IDK, maybe Young Scalia could start a support group with Liz Santorum? (Does Christopher Buckley’s book talk about “how to deal with your dad being a bigot and asshole?”)
I don’t know. I only read Little Green Men, and it was mostly about how George Will (thinly veiled) is an asshole.
Maybe Paul Thurmond can serve as a role model for children of famous wrong people.
http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2015/06/29/confederate…
Came back to the office after a week out sick, only to find that my computer was found to have a virus and IT wiped my hard drive in my absence and reinstalled everything. I called IT and said, “K but you guys backed my stuff up before wiping it right?… all my documents and stuff?” and the guy was like “I don’t…. think so?” so you can imagine I freaked out a little bit. But it turns out they did back it up so all is well! Now I just have to deal with minor annoyances like the 562320 tabs I had open are all gone and since my browser has just been installed there’s no history for me to refer back to.
Speaking as an IT support pro, that is very bad service. I sympathize.
Ugh, that is the worst. Word of advice from someone who’s gone through 4 work computers in 2 years – make sure they also transferred your email archive to the new computer. I have no emails from my first year on the job and a three month gap in my second year because the person who transferred my files forgot, and it’s one of those things you don’t notice for weeks.
My sympathies! But LOL, your computer decided to be sick the same week you were sick — you have a close relationship, the two of you.
Epigram
Ken Paxton, Texas AG
told his county clerks
with the SCOTUS he does not agree,
and they can continue to be jerks
Now singing “I’m in love with the corgi” to the tune of OT Genasis’ “Coco”
“I Want Corgi” to the tune of “I Want Candy”
I think one of the easiest ways to start is by doing a search on psychologytoday.com. There are options to customize your search and you should be able to see if folks are available for couples counseling. Another option is to call customer service for your health insurance (if you are insured) to see who is covered in your network. Good luck!
Sorry to do this on a link roundup, but Pittsburgh Toasties who want to meet for happy hour or something… please fill out this form!
http://goo.gl/forms/gCLvPeHMMo
This article came out a few days ago, and since I’ve not been around lately, I’m not sure if anyone has already shared it, BUT Slate published a lovely piece about Persephone Books which might interest some of you.
P.S. Hi, Toasties! I’ve missed you!
Link in case anyone else had trouble: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/20…
I love them and have to pretty much sit on my hands to not buy more more more. At least until I move into my NEW PLACE(!!!!) and have built-in bookcases!
Persephone Books are so great. When I go to their shop I often get sucked into buying three books at a time because it’s technically a saving (the third one is half-price), even though the sensible thing would be to not spend the money in the first place.
We have this org-wide electronic document management system that we’re supposed to save all our files to as opposed to saving them locally. So in theory, something like IT randomly wiping your hard drive shouldn’t matter, and if I had lost anything it would have been my fault for not backing things up to the system. Still, it’s bad enough coming in to work and seeing that someone used my computer in the first place, even without the added unpleasantness of removing everything that made that workstation mine.
I freak out if it looks like someone sat in my chair while I was gone, but messing with my computer, whoa.
Toasties, this weekend my fellow misandrists and I recorded “If Men Go To Hell, Who Cares?” for your listening pleasure, and I have it stuck in my head SO BAD right now. It’s eating my day.
!!! WHERE?
You complete me.
That a supreme court justice should have such a poor knowledge of world history is disturbing, to say the least.
I would very much like to receive emails from a mini-golden retriever. He can recommend other dog breeds if he wants, or just send me nice dog-related compliments and encouragement, like, “It’s cool that you’re so on top of poop clean-up,” and “The borgi will let you cut her nails eventually. Just keep at it!” I guess I crave validation from my actual dogs. Yikes, Kat.
For a minute I was all “wait, am I still an early career professional?” It turns out that I have been working at “career-related jobs” for five years but I’ve had full-time jobs of many varieties for eleven years, so THANK GOODNESS NO.
Bree Newsome is going straight on my (lengthy) list of Great Women. I also hope she changes her name immediately to Bree Awesome.
Has everybody here heard about CNN and the “isis” flag at London pride?! http://www.buzzfeed.com/davidmack/cnn-takes-a-pou…
NSFW if your office does not approve of grainy pictures of flags that are CLEARLY COVERED IN BUTT TOYS. Or intense schadenfreude. I can’t believe NOBODY caught this. Like…some of those are clearly dick-shaped? Even if you don’t recognize a butt plug, SURELY someone at CNN has seen a penis?!
Cackling forever.
There was a Vox explainer that suggested that the best thing to come of this is that now every CNN producer is going to have to ask “wait, is this real, or is it just a bunch of dildos?” before every story goes to air.
“Official CNN Sex Toy Identifier” would look great on my resume, and it would also be great to tell people about at a high school reunion.
“So, what do you do?”
“Oh, I work for CNN; I let them know when the story they’re about to run is actually just a bunch of dildos.”
My sister works at CNN. I posted that to her FB wall with the comment “You should probably get an arrangement of samples and review them with everyone on staff.”
No reply yet. Pretty sure she just put me on ignore 🙂
John Oliver covered that last night! So perfect — along with how he pivoted from marriage equality to transgender rights. Yay!
My divinity school president wrote a book asking where all the prophets have gone. The answer: they are emerging every day now, and Bree Newsome is one of them.
I was sad to see the backlash against the rainbow Facebook profile photos that cropped up yesterday. I have a lot I could say in response but it boils down to “this is the tipping point you’ve been working towards, enjoy it”.
What’s the gist of the backlash?
i really can’t begrudge anyone a little resentment of a whole lot of privileged people putting on the symbol of a community they’re not part of, even if it’s celebratory. Especially if you’re not super enthused about marriage and haven’t seen anywhere near the same support for less mainstream queer causes….I gotta wonder how many rainbow-profiled folks were making snarky Caitlyn Jenner remarks a few weeks ago. I also saw a couple posts noting the hypocrisy of Facebook cheering on gay marriage while still enforcing its shitty real name policy and allowing hate speech on its platform.
on the other hand, my little heart is so warmed by the posts I’ve seen from other LGBT friends saying they’re so happy to see rainbows everywhere and to know their friends are allies and more folks than ever are unafraid to stick a rainbow on their public face.
really this week on social media has been a great illustration of how many different opinions and outlooks fall under the “pro gay rights” umbrella, even within smallish friend-groups. I don’t want to rain on anyone’s outright happiness at the ruling and the big shows of support for it, but we gotta be okay with also hearing “do better, allies.”
Yeah, I kinda get it too. It just feels like, geez that was the very least you could do. Like it’s so insanely low stakes it’s practically meaningless.
My very favorite thing to see on FB in the wake of the decision was all my friend’s same-sex wedding photos reposted. Brought me to tears, especially for friends in Cali who had been married multiple times and had the right given and then taken away over and over. Now they can be sure it will finally “stick.”
Rainbows that turned up in my FB were all from fellow queers or allies in the spirit of congratulation and bonhomie. I added one myself. Then I went to Twitter and saw that Facebook was marching in the SF Pride parade despite still being squick-monsters about transfolk and name-changing and felt kind of gross about it. Everybody knows I’m a BFQ though so I don’t feel like undoing it sends any message to FB. Hopefully continued sharing and resharing of posts they’ve hypocritically taken down which were calling out verbal threats and abuse will slowly wake them up.
It’s a tipping point of some kind, yes, but for a lot of queer people it also feels hollow. It’s a tipping point for a very specific political goal that accomplishes a lot of practical gains right now, but still leaves a lot of queer people out in the cold, especially queer POC and trans folks. I just hope enough rainbow-profile-allies are also getting the message that the movement isn’t over and that the queer community still needs ENDA and housing protection and healthcare and immigration reform.
It’s a tipping point but it also feels like a bunch of straight folks getting on the “party!” train when they’re not on the train for a lot more significant issues. Or straight people showing up to Pride to get wasted and gawk at queer people without realizing the history of the event as a form of protest and even riot.
And as someone else mentioned, it was also a little jarring to see Facebook trot it out and shout hooray for marriage when they’re still booting trans people and others from their network for not using their “real” names. For some queers it feels a lot like, which LGBTQ people really count here? Outsiders tend not to see the ways oppression effects different members of the queer community in different ways.
So I personally don’t feel bad about having some reservations to a rather meaningless form of social media support. But I don’t begrudge other people who saw all the rainbow icons and felt safer or more supported or welcomed by their networks. I am genuinely glad for them.
Yes to all of this, but I also think we ought to acknowledge that lots of QPOC actually DID celebrate this decision and have chosen to get married. I observed a very awkward FB wall conversation over the weekend between a QPOC who said that marriage equality did nothing for their community and a married QPOC who felt erased by that statement.
Yes of course it affects everyone differently and just like some QPOC actually do benefit from it, some white people don’t. It’s impossible to make entirely accurate blanket statements about exactly who does and who doesn’t benefit from marriage equality because everyone has their own specific intersections, oppressions, experiences and privileges. We can only point out trends.
The larger statement I was trying to make was that I got my feathers ruffled a bit by OP saying something along the lines of “wow, queer people calm down, marriage equality and this specific kind of visibility are your/our goals achieved” but like, that’s not completely true and the queer community is not a monolith. Some people celebrated this. Some people celebrated with reservations. Some people didn’t celebrate that much at all. Just like I don’t begrudge people who felt bouyed by the proliferation of rainbows, I also don’t begrudge people who felt it didn’t mean much at all or were actively annoyed by it.
Totally understand where people are coming from with the backlash, but I’ve also seen just how much the rainbow profile pictures mean to my friends who come from more conservative backgrounds or cultures. I have a couple friends who aren’t out yet because of some intense homophobia in their family, and adding the rainbows/having friends from the same background change their photos both showed them some unexpected support and sparked some serious discussion in their families. In certain circles, anyways, it’s pretty meaningful.
We gotta edit out some chatter, and then I’ll submit it as a “link.” Can you keep it together ’til then?
Barely.
I’m honestly not sure.
WHO CARES (WHO CARES)
OH LORD (WHO CARDS)
https://soundcloud.com/bequilles/if-men-go-to-hel…
I adore that Mallory’s dad clearly read her discussion with Carvell Wallace and took it to heart and included some of that message in his piece. A+, Mallory’s Dad!
Strange/awesome deal of the day! The Color Purple is currently $.09 on Kindle over at Amazon.
http://www.amazon.com/Color-Purple-Alice-Walker-e…
Red alert on the survey: you have to live in the US. I’m a Canadian and spent about 15 minutes filling it all out, only to need a US resident status and US mailing address to get paid 🙁
Bree Newsome is FANTASTIC and I was extremely delighted to learn that she went to my college.
with apologies for my ignorance at some political/judicial matters that are American, my initial reaction to the news was “Clarence Thomas is on the Supreme Court? but he’s an almost-rapist!”
apparently being publicly known as a sexual harasser doesn’t really dampen your career progression prospects. that’s a bummer.
(I started a new job at the IT sucks and now I’m logged into intensedebate/wordpress but can’t post with it. Ugh.
Yeah, no, that’s always my initial reaction to Clarence Thomas, and I’m an American with a reasonable degree of interest in the Supreme Court.
Re: Desert Hearts. Helen Shaver is my aunt-in-law! She’s a super-cool woman.
Re: Scalia (and also poetry, since it seems like poetry is now A Thing in toastean comment threads).
“Jiggery-pokery” makes for an excellent beginning to a double dactyl (double dactyls are like limericks but FANCIER), so there are now several Scalian double dactyls that you can read in this thread https://twitter.com/GretchenAMcC/status/614155344… and please contribute if you like!
"Mental illness itself is a barrier to picking up the phone and getting help for your mental illness!"
So, so true.
Oh you mean my Instagram?