Whiskey Fire

Another Busy Day for the Cut-Out Witch

Oh, Ann Althouse, you wife-beating drunk.

I am hurt. You and I, Ann, we go way back, and Wayback. And to even earlier! But in your latest, I am only "the blogger." Sniff...

Since the blogger is a lefty blogger, and lefty bloggers stereotype me as a righty blogger, the blogger could not perceive any feminist critique in what I was saying. His idea was that I'd just said the "stupidest thing [he'd] ever seen Ann Althouse say."

This is so fucking boring. But whatever:

His idea was that I'd just said the "stupidest thing [he'd] ever seen Ann Althouse say." He proceeded to make a huge deal out of the mundane fact that a woman who'd had children — and thus was a "mom" — would still use birth control to stave off unwanted additional pregnancies. At that point, she couldn't "avoid motherhood" — my phrase — because she would already be a mother. Crushingly obvious fact noted.

And by you, ignored.

"Birth control moms" is still an awkward term, containing a distracting contradiction. You're distracted even if you stop and think about the way some women with children use birth control not to avoid acquiring the status of mom, but to avoid additional mothering responsibilities.

Right, so my point stands, dummy. "Birth control moms" describes probably all actual moms -- that would be the point. "You're distracted" here means "Ann Althouse realizes she has said something crushingly dumb and wants you to pretend otherwise, and she thanks Christ her moron commenters have had their thumbs surgically attached to their asses, probably via their nostrils."

The rest is not so much silence as it is a lost winebox-muddled halfwit struggling with the concept of subordinate clauses. Watt is up with that anyway!

Oh wait.

This.

Apparently, we're talking about women who are not merely going to be manipulated by scaring them that the government might ban birth control, but who are adamant about their entitlement to have their insurance fully cover birth control pills and who hate the idea of giving exemptions to the religious organizations that are portraying the proposed insurance requirement as a violation of their religious freedom rights.

Yeah, that's good English.

 

Crrritic!

Yastreblyansky: "Poulos has something in common not so much with Beckett the writer as Lucky the thinker." Also: James Poulos as Lucky, Tucker Carlson as Pozzo, David Brooks as Didi, Ross Douthat as Gogo.

Hehindeed indeedheh.

More on the Greek Garbler

I read the Poulos pieces. I found them both extremely difficult to understand. When I say that, I don't mean it a ha ha funny way, I mean I actually found most portions of the essays undecipherable. That his writing is pompous and pretentious is obvious, but that it is just plain unreadable is inexcusable. I mean, when I was reading them I kept asking myself stuff like "Am I missing something here?" "Do I need to work on my reading comprehension skills?" "Am I secretly stupid?" "Have I forgotten how to read?" Because--I swear--that mess just came off as something I imagine William F. Buckley writing after huffing some spray paint. It was almost poetry in its own weird, bad way.

SO, I was glad that Crooked Timber weighed in. The relief for me was learning that--assuming the author is correct in his interpretation--when I accidentally stumbled across a decipherable point Poulos was making, I was actually correct in detecting an actual point. Hallelujah! I'm not stupid or insane! What I thought Poulos was saying in the most labored, pretentious, roundabout way was this: Women, being all soft and sensitive and mothery and shit, should act as a civilizing force on men.

 

According to Poulos, men are brutes, sure, but they are the DOERS in our society. We women? We're the sitter-backers and supporters of these brutish but brilliant creatures. Men, you go out there and follow your dreams. DO! SEE! CONQUER! CREATE! BE BRILLIANT! And when you get done doing, seeing, conquering, creating and brillianting, we'll be here to pop out your babies and tenderly mop your brows. So that you may return to the battlefield of life. A battlefield that's probably just a little too rough for us nature-bound mother-creatures.

Some astute comments from the CT thread include the observation that someone like Poulos would never think to ask what men are for or what Black people are for, because that would be deeply offensive. But I guess, in the end, we women don't count as people, so his question is acceptable. Another commenter notes that what Poulos is hinting at is that women should essentially serve as a support staff for men. Put your dreams and ambitions on hold, ladies--THE MENZ ARE BRILLIANTLY BRUTISHLY BRUTING!

Before I wrap up, I'd just like gently remind people who advocate that women take a passive role in life that you cannot have it both ways. You cannot ask that women do "women's stuff" and at the same time devalue and denigrate things that are thought of as "woman's work." A lot of woman's work is dreadfully hard, boring, and unrewarding. It's also never done:

And we do not value it. We do not appreciate it. So perhaps we should we should address that before anything else.

 

--vacuumslayer

Are You Really Making Me Bitch about You Interfering in My Successful Heterosexual Marriage?

Gosh. This may be the stupidest thing I have ever seen Ann Althouse say.

Honestly.

Politico attempts to frame the meme "birth control moms."

You know, like "soccer moms" and "security moms." But it's distractingly oxymoronic: if you use birth control, it's to avoid motherhood.

Uh, ahem.

I've been married for 14 years. MollyI & I have had three children together.

During almost all of that time, she's been on birth control.

We wanted two kids, we got three, shit happens. Not complaining.

But there is nothing at all ridiculous or distracting or "oxymoronic" about "birth control moms." It's perfectly sensible. You're a woman in a happy, monogamous, heterosexual relationship. You still want the pill. You're her husband. You agree. Why not?

Fucking hell.

This is the 21st century, no? Right? Century 21?

"Avoid motherhood"?

Mother of three? We've had sex more than three times? What the fuck? You know, grownups? Us? Not you, necessarily?

The rest of Althouse:

Except... soccer moms don't play soccer. And security moms — is that really a famous term? — aren't providing the security. The "mom" part of the term is about... well, what is it about? It's what patronizing politicos call the women who they imagine don't think, but emote and intuit their way through elections. Or perhaps, in part, it's that women who are mothers are concerned about the children. In that light, a "birth control mom" isn't a woman who wants her birth control devices. As a soccer mom likes to see the kids playing soccer, a birth control mom likes to see the kids using birth control, when they fuck, which they will do... you can't stop 'em... or if you think you can, you might already be a Santorumite.

No, a "birth contol mom" is a woman who demands her birth control medication paid for according to the terms of her employment as regards insurance, even if she works for the Catholic Church. As well she fucking should.

I'm a straight white monogamous married dad. Never even divorced! I'm Gabriel Conroy, bitches!

And they are fucking with my intimate relationships?

Who the fuck are they coming after next? Rich people?

Bitch about stupid Politico phrasing, sure, but don't pretend that makes obnoxious, sexist insurance coverage decisions inoffensive.

That's Entertainment

Setup:

Campaigning in Ohio on Saturday, Rick Santorum displayed his culture-warrior side in full force, as he harshly attacked President Obama by suggesting the president wanted to see more disabled babies aborted and accusing him of projecting his values - which Santorum claimed were not rooted in the Bible - on the Catholic Church.

More setup...

He lambasted the president's health care law requiring insurance policies to include free prenatal testing, "because free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society."

More setup...

But Santorum doubled down on his attacks, accusing the president of forcing a new moral code on the Catholic church.

"The president has reached a new low in this country's history of oppressing religious freedom that we have never seen before," he said. "If he doesn't want to call his imposition of his values a theology, that's fine, but it is an imposition of his values over a church who has very clear theological reasons for opposing what the Obama administration is forcing on them."

Asked about the fact that the president is a Christian, Santorum answered: "He says he's a Christian, he's a Christian," and would not elaborate on how to balance competing ideas about contraception within the broader faith. But he was firm in painting the president as promulgating a "new moral code" that he contended was "intolerant" of the church.

Aaaaaaand -- PUNCHLINE!

"You ask a lot of questions about the social issues," he accused a reporter who asked if he would speak out on those issues during a general election race.

Right.

Gosh-darn Lame-Stream Media, forcing Rick Santorum to spout all this religion stuff that he'd rather keep to himself. I blame Soros and his Media Matters hired goons. If it wasn't for them, Rick Santorum would never on his own say anything hard right and crazy, not to mention unpopular.

The Funny

Echidne posts this, and it is great.

The funny here strikes me as very close to the funny you get in Portlandia.

Is there any sort of right-wing analogue?

No, honestly, I'm asking -- is there? Is there any sort of right-wing analogue to Portlandia? Is this even possible?

Can wingnuts have a sense of humor about themselves?

Actually sort of asking.

It's Just a Joke! It's Not a Joke. It's a Joke.

You probably recall the very funny joke that the old-timey Rick Santorum sugar dad Foster Friess told last week. If not, here it is:

“This contraception thing, my gosh, it's so inexpensive,” Friess told host Andrea Mitchell. “You know, back in my days, they'd use Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn't that costly.”

Now, if you're like me, and I know I am, you probably thought to yourself, "self? Looks like Rick Santorum is having his ridiculous presidential campaign financed by a horrible wealthy ancient asshole. Why am I not surprised? Because this isn't surprising, that's why." And then you didn't even bother mentioning it on your lame-ass liberal comedy snark-blog, because while it is kind of entertaining to drop grenades into fish-barrels, no matter how clever you are, the 9,145,213rd joke on any given topic is going to suck. (See Facebook, et passim.)

But then, if you rummage through the Corner, you'll note that the inmates are still playing poo-catch about this shit, days after everyone else reached the obvious conclusion that Foster Freiss is an embarrassing ancient madman trying to breathe life into serial dipshit Rick Santorum's chances to become King of the First World. (Cue a frizzy-haired Freissenstein placing a coprolite at the top of a Transylvanian tower, sticking a metal rod in it, and screaming "give this turd... LIFE!")

It begins with this depressing emanation from Michael Poterma.

Anybody who knows me knows how much I love awful jokes — including the real wheezers that everybody else thought were funny in the schoolyard, but somehow I am the only one who continues to think they’re funny decades later, as I enter advanced middle age.

Anybody who knows him thinks "fuck me I want to die, make him stop!" would be more precise. Do you know why whenever I am driving the car and my children are in the car and we pass a cemetary I say "people are dying to get in there"? Because I am a meanspirited sonofabitch, that's why. Also my dad did this to me, and besides, I have some sort of vague whiteguy notion that this will keep them from joining the Wu-Tang Clan.

So it's not clear what Poterma is blithering about. Besides this:

True: A joke shared among friends after a half-dozen scotches sounds rather different on a stone-cold-sober national MSNBC broadcast. I trust my feminist bona fides are in order: I reject the point of Friess’s joke as the dinosaurial misogyny that it is, and I reject the anti-sex, demeaning-to-women ideology that it represents.

To be fair, Poterma says that if you go to Freiss's blog you will discover a Compelling Excuse for His Joke. I myself did not get any farther than the hilarious banner picture of gay cowboys farting.

True comedy fans, however, will note that Poterma has said that an obviously misogynist anti-sex joke is what it is... at The National Review Online. Bourdieu would describe what happens next a "call to order":

The sooner we move beyond this, the better, but: What “anti-sex, demeaning-to-women ideology”? It was ill-advised, as he quickly appreciated, and I’m not sure it represents anything more than a lapse of judgment and a lack of an editing filter. And I trust the ideology you reference has nothing to do with the most liberating one I’m aware of  – see my recent Q&A on In the Heart of the Gospel — (that which Rick Santorum is known to buy into)?

Edna O'Brien had this cold in 1960. But still. There are just some things you can't say at NRO -- that climate change is caused by humans, or that the Catholic Church may have in some isolated incidents been guilty of sexism. This is why people who know what they are talking about take NRO seriously.

Fortunately the Old Poop exists to recklessly paste stray facial hair on poor innocent bunny rabbits just trying to escape:

If, as I do, you live in the country, you have dozens of neighbors like Miss Strader – nice high-school girls who babysit your kids; you lose touch, they move to the next town, and you bump into them a couple of years later doing the late shift at the diner or the general store; they’re 23 or 24, with three kids by three different guys. And they’re still nice, and still kinda pretty, if aged beyond their years. But life and its opportunities are fled.

Hence birth control, more money for rural schools, better pay for teachers in rural schools...

“Free love” is free in the same sense all those government programs funded by Chinese debt are.

"Go to school, get a job." That is the Modern Left, motherfucker. A promise. Not a threat.

Dog Day Afternoon

Pictures from the West Virginia Panhandle

(Posted by ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© and cross-posted at my place. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.)

~

Champion Officially

The ghastly recent effusions of James Poulos are, to be sure, awful. But how awful is James Poulos, really, in a wider, historical sense? And in what category ought his awfulness to be properly classified?

These are, to be sure, ridiculous questions, but that hardly makes them less analytically useful for those of us who keep track of this morbid shit. Scott lumps Paulos in with Kim DuToit, but... trying for middlebrow? -- maybe, but I don't buy it. Paulos is definitely shooting for Highbrow. Your David Brooks and Tom Friedmans, that's middlebrow. DuToit's "brow" was always Uni.

But that only makes us wonder, does James Poulos truly deserve to be called the Worst Writer on This or Any Other Internet?

Note that even legendary spazzes like Lee Siegel don't make the cut. For years, the title of the Worst Writer on This or Any Other Internet has gone indisputably to Paul J. Cella, for classics such as this.

Poulos sure is a contender, but you know what? Old veteran Cella is still out there punching.

It is a mark of the degradation of our civilization’s sexual constitution that most folks accept without critique the popular reduction of “sexuality” to the momentary pleasure of the act. The irrevocable connection of this act to such momentous matters as human procreation and the perpetuation of society has been obscured by an extraordinary collection of deceit, impudence, fraud and hucksterism.

Western society has now spent many years involved in various experiments where the culling of younger generations comprises the true (though concealed) content of a vast propagandistic effort of reducing procreation to that momentary pleasure. We have embarked, under false pretenses, on a revolution in the human sexual constitution.

He means that white people are aborting all the babies that in the past old white people used to enjoy devouring, hence, the Musselmen will soon rule Oslo. Or close enough.

And here is Cella writing a poem.

And then there is this:

Tim Tebow proved his mettle as a passer

Poulos, I'm afraid, is not even of McArdle level bad, as of yet. Don't trade in your Ben Shapiro for him as of yet on your fantasy wingnut league squad, is what I'm saying. (Cella's poem is the tits. More this week-end.)

 

The Adults Will Talk Now

*rubs eyes, shakes head* What year is this? It's 2012? Really. I never would have known, had I gone by the biggest issue of the day: contraception.

It's bad enough that we still have pedophiles, god-botherers and war-mongers beating the "pro-life" drums; it appears these disingenuous fucks will never let the issue of abortion go...not when there are so many sluts to shame. But now birth control is up for debate? Good gosh. And it's bad enough that we have to discuss it at all...but if we must, I insist that the discussion be held amongst adults. I will begin.

Here's the thing--I'm talking to you, pedophile priests, rape apologists, fundie Christians, and misogynists (in other words, all the grown children of the world): People, being sexual beings, have sex. Half the people on the face of the earth are women. Yes, women have sex, too. Some people find sex pleasurable, and would like to have sex without the fear of getting pregnant. If you find this offensive, I suggest you do not have sex for any reason other than procreative ones. What I don't suggest you do is tell me how and when to have sex. See, when you do that, you are not exercising your religious liberty, you are trying to exercise control over my life. This just will not do, and I won't stand for it.

Awhile back, I decided that when it comes to matters of sex and sexuality, the best, most moral choice I could make was to not worry about what other people did in the bedroom. This has a couple of advantages. The great thing about not giving a shit about anybody else's sex life is that you don't have to give a shit about anybody else's sex life. Plus, I don't have to expend energy being an assholish moral scold. Whew. It's so freeing. Y'all should try it sometime.

Sexual activity exists on a spectrum. Let's say, for argument's sake, that at one end of the spectrum is lights-out missionary position sex and at the other end is tonguing a hairy asshole while having a dominatrix stomp on your balls and having midget take a dump on your chest. You may find that latter scenario distasteful. And even though I had Fetus-O's for breakfast this morning, I do too. But the great thing about that scenario is that no one is making me partake of it.

I have a fundamental disagreement with those who frame sex as not only a moral issue, but THE moral issue. In a world filled with misogyny, racism, genocide, starvation, and a thousand other things that genuinely make life miserable for much of the earth's population, this just makes no sense to me. Sex is not a moral issue. Unless it relates to those who cannot or do not consent. Rape is amazingly awful, obviously.

I've digressed a bit. The point is that sexuality is part of the human experience. You can dislike this, but what you can't do is change it or pretend it's not so. If you find this vexing, I suggest you point your accusing fingers at your Gawd, who--after all--gave us all our naughty, bulbous, tingly bits, according to you. And while you're pointing your fingers, making all men into neanderthal rape-machines and women into whores and Madonnas, the rest of us will be having emotionally-fulfilling, joyful, healthy, consensual sex. Don't like that? Go fuck yourself and GROW THE FUCK UP. The adults are talking now.

--vacuumslayer