Whiskey Fire

Dark Night of the Blithe Contrarian

I seem to recall for years being Solemnly Cautioned by Serious Thinkers to avoid maliciously maligning the True Motives of Sincere Heartland Pro-Life Activists.

Why, it would be shocking and irresponsible and counterproductive to even insinuate that the anti-abortion Right was in fact all about misogyny, deep down and at heart at the heel of the hunt.

Nossir!

Pro-Lifery was all based on Profoundly Held Values, not girl-hate to do with girls having the sexy sex. Gosh no. 

Right.

This GOP primary has been all kinds of horrible useless, but the very least, it has for now and forever proven, indisputably, fuck that noise. 

LIMBAUGH: What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke [sic] who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex. What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex.

This is not to say that William Saletan won't be able to triple-Lutz some sort of head-ass contortion to deny the obvious at some future date. It's just to say that misogyny has now been brutally outed as one of the cardinal Family Values, and that toothpaste just ain't going back in that tube.

MAS. And then... Enter the Stupid!

Good grief.

1. Condoms are not the pill.

2. You can't make "taxpayers" pay for contraception, because there are government programs to distribute condoms?

3. Oy:

Women can visit centers in Harlem and the Bronx to arrange for their contraception — including more permanent methods such as the ring, the patch, and the Pill. If their insurance covers contraception, the insurance must pay for it. If it does not and the woman in question is living below the federal poverty line, she will be given the contraception without charge. 

Well, that surely shows just how easy it is for women everywhere to get free access to the pill! Just go to Harlem or the Bronx and get means tested!

4. This is all crap. NOBODY is annoyed with the Bishopy position on health insurance because they think you could scour Manhattan and never find condoms. (!) (It's such a weird fuccking premise.)  We're annoyed because we have this crazy idea that if we pay into a healthcare insurance program, it should be up to us and our doctors how we pay for our healthcare. 

5. But this was funny:

Indeed, there are so many condoms available in my Chelsea neighborhood that I’m beginning to wonder how I ever missed them.

I'm not.

Successfully Retiring an Inane Turn of Phrase

The Republican insistence on referring to appropriate taxation of the greedy rich as "punishing success" bothers me a lot. It's one of those phrases I feel sure is meant to appeal to the childlike vanity and aspirations of the wingnuts and needle liberals. It's a stunningly shallow definition of success as the amassing of wealth and power, and nothing more. It's a strange--and I would argue deeply unhealthy--way to measure it.

What about all  the teachers who are sending our kids out into world well-prepared for the challenges life will bring? What about the mothers and fathers who are raising good and decent human beings? What about the artists and musicians who make the world a more lyrical and lovely place to live? What about the people who touch other people with humor or kindness or wisdom? What about the people who make something of themselves using the sweat of their brow and sheer stubbornness?

See, I did that.

*needle scratch*

I started messing around with Adobe Photoshop because I was a (childless at the time) homemaker looking for a way to express myself creatively and to feel productive. (I don't have a college degree, so finding a decent job was probably not on the horizon. I had the great privilege of being able to stay at home and "explore.") So I spent countless hours teaching myself the program. When I began making my art, I never dreamed anything would come of it; I figured I'd create a few trifles to appreciate mostly privately. I never dreamed it would turn into this.  

Oh, don't get me wrong. I hardly make any money doing this. I receive a check for less than a $100 bucks from the site that hosts my gallery about every year. But my prints sell semi-regularly (lately with more frequency) and my work has been published in a variety of digital art mediums. The prints above are all recent sales. It's a thrill and it's a kick. But according to the Republican definition, it's not a success. What the hell?

 

--vacuumslayer

Fair Touching

I am impressed by Sandra Fluke and I think she should be applauded for her pro-freedom stance. She had to know she'd be slimed, as she was (We'll get to that), but she went out there anyway and defended an important point. Very ninja, very cool.

If early second-decade 21st-century politics has brought us any benefit at all, and it hasn't, because we knew this already, it is to underscore just how much Modern Conservatism is predicated upon virulent misogyny. This is indeed impressively nasty.

Speaking at a hearing held by Pelosi to tout Pres. Obama’s mandate that virtually every health insurance plan cover the full cost of contraception and abortion-inducing products, Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke said that it’s too expensive to have sex in law school without mandated insurance coverage.

Apparently, four out of every ten co-eds are having so much sex that it's hard to make ends meet if they have to pay for their own contraception, Fluke's research shows....

$3,000 for birth control in three years? That’s a thousand dollars a year of sex – and, she wants us to pay for it.

Yes, us. Where do you think the insurance companies forced to cover this cost get the money to pay for these co-eds to have sex? It comes from the health care insurance premiums you and I pay.

Wow. 

First off, "co-ed?" (Checking calendar. Baffled to discover 1962 is behind us.) "Co-ed"?

Next I guess would be that I'd be more than a little bit surprised if a certain proportion of this hot Hoya sex were not occuring between opposite-sex hot Hoyas. But as we'll see in the lovely tour we're about to take through Scoldy Wingnuttia, this is a point never acknowledged. 

Also for this shouty CNS nonsense, where the hell does this kind of crap stop? You find out that a co-worker in 1998 once ate 6 Twinkies in a row, you sue the Government to get back whatever tiny fraction of your premiums somehow factored into his bypass? Just how dumb would you have to be to think that you would be More FREE! if your employer could at will say "I morally object to paying for that procedure!" (Don't answer that...)

But the nastiest, cruelest issue here is the slut-shaming. Which is insane and obnoxious. And weird. Note:

she and her co-ed classmates are having sex nearly three times a day for three years straight, apparently.

At a dollar a condom if she shops at CVS pharmacy’s website, that $3,000 would buy her 3,000 condoms – or, 1,000 a year. (By the way, why does CVS.com list the weight of its condom products in terms of pounds?)

Assuming it’s not a leap year, that’s 1,000 divided by 365 – or having sex 2.74 times a day, every day, for three straight years. And, I thought Georgetown was a Catholic university where women might be prone to shun casual, unmarried sex.

Because the pill and condoms are used exactly the same. Right.

Smart women (who would be likely to go to grad school at Georgetown) will insist upon a condom for random hookups. (Which happen. Sorry, Pope.) For relationships, it's the pill. My wife and I have been monogamous since the 1990s, and for birth control, we prefer... the pill! And we've had three kids! And we might even still be Catholic if the hateful crazies had not assumed control.

But the significant point is the nasty and disgusting inane statistics mangling to personalize it and say, essentially, "this slut is having sex four times a day, on your dime..." And the unsaid leftover, "the whore deserves it, or ought to."

I mean, look at what TBogg went and found, this crap about pregnancy being "a lifestyle choice." And then happily discover this at the site Mr Bogg examines, where the current top post is a gleeflul fap-fap about women getting surgically enhanced tits. 

Yep. Women ought to be always sexually available to men, the contemptible whores, why aren't they virgins?

It is so fucking weird. And then you get this weird shit:

Birth control pills can be purchased for as low as $9 per month at a pharmacy near Georgetown's campus. According to an employee at the pharmacy in Washington, D.C.'s Target store, the pharmacy sells birth control pills--the generic versions of Ortho Tri-Cyclen and Ortho-Cyclen--for $9 per month. "That's the price without insurance." 

One, I call bullshit.

Two, so? That has nothing to do with the actual issue, whether or not your employer has the right to tell you what you and your doctor can decide about your own healthcare.

Three: "Either this Georgetown law student is too dumb to shop around to reduce her lifestyle costs, or she’s using abortion as birth control, or she’s just lying about this whole thing."

"Is she a slut? Probably. On the other hand, what a slut."

Fluke had to know she'd get this horrid blowback. I admire her guts. Why is my daughter going to have to fight my grandmother's fight, again? I'm in her corner, anyhow. But damn. 

 

The Other Funny Jokes

Andrew Klavan is a tall bald asshole. It is not clear as to whether or not he is biodegradable, so as to whether or not he has anything to contribute to anything beyond the periodic emission of CO2 remains undetermined. He doesn't seem to understand the profound racism of Gone with the Wind. So forgive him, Lord... oh wait fuck him. 

Here is a comical thing he has effused.

Pardon the long quoting...

Desperately racing to catch up with the conservative sociologist Charles Murray whom they so despise, the leftist New York Times front-paged a story Saturday that basically bore out the central findings of Murray’s new book Coming Apart.

More than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage. … The fastest growth in the last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s. … One group still largely resists the trend: college graduates, who overwhelmingly marry before having children. That is turning family structure into a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of marriage increasingly reserved for people with the most education.

The leftist Times adds:

The shift is affecting children’s lives. Researchers have consistently found that children born outside marriage face elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional and behavioral problems.

In other words, educated people do better because they marry more. They’re also, according to Murray, more religious and industrious, which further improves their lives.

I mean, HOLY SHIT!

In the first place, this is a whole big Fuck You to Rick Santorum and his "trying to make college affordable to everyone is a snob" thing.

And also...

If marriage and religion give smart people joy and improve their living standards, why don’t they spread the word?

The word about how everyone who has ever gotten a 4 year degree has had awesome gay sex and worships Stalin? Madness!

And are well-educated wedded women really voting Republican by a solid majority? I married one, and I don't recall as she ever much cared for Rick Lazio...

But then it's my job in our relationship to look pretty, so we don't get traffic tickets. Giggle. I'm just a boy.

Gracious...

The Jokes

This is the joke I missed the other day after linking Powerloin. Here is Powerloin talking funny nonsense.

We are remiss in not having written about the Peter Gleick scandal. Gleick is a founder of the liberal Pacific Institute and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is an expert on water resources, not climate. Like many left-wingers in irrelevant fields of study, he has irrationally strong feelings about global warming.

Here is why this is a very funny joke.

The Heartland Institute maintains a stable of 13 scientists on retainer for the express purpose of attacking the work of the Nobel Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), according to budget information released last week in the Heartland document dump.

The scientists, ranging from one of the world's least credible deniers-for-hire (Dr. S. Fred Singer) to a sessional lecturer on the evolution and history of the domestic dog (Susan Crockford), include no top climate scientists currently publishing in the peer-reviewed literature.

The best paid "expert" on the Heartland list is Craig Idso, a former Director of Environmental Science at Peabody Energy (the largest coal company in the world).

Like many hacks in relevant fields of getting paid, the Heartland hitmen are passionately intense about denying science.

And then there is this colossal trainwreck (I mean this comments section spectacle for the ages).

Seriously, if you have a powerful interest in watching a putz libertarian engineer fight mustachefully to avoid eating science, here it is.

If you're also feeling chipper, you might just wonder what John Fucking Hinderbucker's particular Science Competency might constitute.

The High Standards Of the Elite Liberal Media

Erik Loomis depresses me by reading Andrew Revkin. Megan McArdle? "Investigative journalism"? Really?

So let's go sub-McArdle, to PowerLine, and John Hinderaker. Because fuck.

The Heartland Institute is a superb organization that deals with a number of issues, including climate science.

Right.

We have cited Heartland’s research many times.

Huzzah!

Oddly, a couple of days ago, I was about to make fun of this exact Hinderaker post partly on the grounds that it contained a a nonsensical claim that many of the people opposed to the scientific consensus regarding climate sceience are not climate scientists. This shit got deleted, probably because one of the inmates realized it was insane. Hello, Mr. Hinderaker! Sue me. If you don't, I know you're a liar! Ed-- ugh, have to fix this.

And so forth. (I'm actually telling the truth, as it happens.)

Chunky Neckbeard Emporium Founder Thinks Calling Women Sluts Is Funny and Necessary

Remind me to quit clicking links in the Gaybortion-o-sphere; it only gets me into trouble. Speaking of trouble, ladies, don't get into it. Don't get into trouble. You know, "trouble." In other words, keep your fucking legs closed, slut. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!! Get it? It's a joke, only it's not, but it is, but it's a good joke because the underlying message is good and TRUE, dammit. Why can't you sluts just keep your legs closed?! Mark Steyn likes the Aspirin joke because it's not a joke to him. And if you find it deeply misogynistic, too bad for you, slut.

These are lines about societal views of sex, and, while they’re certainly “antiquated” (in Michael’s word), the response to Mr Friess suggests an attempt to criminalize not the gag so much as the attitude underlying it.

Criminalize it? Oh, if only, Neckenbeardensteyn. Yes, obviously a lot of slutty people--for the purposes of this entry we'll call them "women"--find it goddamn offensive. Because what it implies is that if women have consequence-free sex, they are sluts, which in Chunkyneckbeardshire is the worst thing you can be. Are you a liar? S'okay. Are you a hypocrite? Grand! Are you a chunkyneckbearded bully? Throw this man a ticker-tape parade!

"Where the slutty Hobbits at?!"

 A woman Neckenbeardensteyn wishes all the sluts women of the world emulate? The one who said this:

All that Swinging Sixties. It didn’t do anyone any good, did it?

‘Easy sex and the Pill. Marriages were ruined. I never did approve. I never really enjoyed the sex.’

I think it's the idea that some woman somewhere is enjoying sex that really shrivels the wingnut-o-sphere's already shriveled Cheetos dust-covered penises. Women are not entitled to sexual fulfillment, full-stop. I'd like to comment on what residents of Chunkyneckbeardshire think about male sexual fulfillment. Oddly, they never discuss it. It's almost as if a man's sexual health and fulfillment are not subjects are that up for debate. I wonder why, especially since so many of these cretins seem to think men are little more than primeval rape-machines.

I demand that we start imploring the residents of Rapingshire to...oh, I don't know..."tuck it in" or "slap it down" or "hack it off with an ax, if it gets too uppity." You know, UPpity. Come on, THAT'S FUNNY. Or, we could all move to Actlikeanadultown and recognize that people are sexual beings and provide them with the proper reproductive care.

PS--I know Thers already touched on this, but it made me so angry, I wanted to address it, too, only with long, winding sentences that may or may not make sense.

--vacuumslayer

A Shout in the Street

I dislike Thomas Friedman for many reasons. Especially irksome is how he has made taxi-driver anecdotery so utterly toolish. I have a personal grudge about this because I myself have a for-true-real taxi-driver anecdote that, uh, I think isn't entirely bullshit. I'm going to tell it here now because this is my fucking blog dammit.

The last time I was in Ireland was 7 years ago. On the way back home I took a cab to the Dublin airport. The cabbie was a Professional Irishman sort, and fair play to him. But I can kind of play that crap too, especially if I've been drinking. And, uh, I had been drinking. So after a bit we cut the shit, and for some reason I told him that I'd fairly recently finished reading John Cooney's biography of Archbishop McQuaid.

He hadn't read it, but he was deeply curious about the Main Question -- which was, at the time, "was your man a pedophile?"

I gave him my honest response: there was nothing in the book that provided any sort of direct evidence that he was.

But I also said that there was no reason for any serious researcher to conclude that widespread child abuse had not occurred under McQuaid's watch, and that if this was something McQuaid cared about, he was in a position to have stopped it. He didn't.

The cabbie heard this. Shook it off, if still mad. And said:

"It wasn't just the sex stuff. I remember that they were allowed to beat the hell out of me and that was fine."

He then said that when he was nine he was standing lined up on a stairwell, and a Christian Brother was irked at him, and so he was slapped against a wall and forever after had trouble concentrating about... anything.

This claim is plausible by even the most casual examination of the historical record.

For five decades, Catholicism had a wonderful opportunity to show how a particularly faithful nation could be made into a Paradise.

Fucked that one up, you know?

Roman Catholicism had unprecedented cultural and social sway over a confessional modern nation for about a half a century... and its legacy is mass child beatings, not to mention large-scale child rape.

Do you know why I hate this shit? Because Tim Father fucking Corcoran could have screeched it.

I'm lapsed, motherfucker.

(A bit of bravado here; it's not like this is easy. The intimate and tribal, etc.)

Pulling an Althouse: Me Talk Pretty One Day

 

Reading this yesterday got me thinking of my own struggles with the English language.

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.

As soon as I read Thers' "Yeah, that's good English" comment, I began regretting  my own train wreck of a sentence:

But if I were someone who thought that a straight white man should be the focus of everything and that shows that portray women and minorities as anything other than supporting players who meekly stand around in the background, subtly cheering for their own degradation are inherently offensive and an intentional jab at conservatives, I'd find it pretty terrifying.

Yeeeeeeah, that's not pretty. And I'm not sure it's that understandable. Did I pull an Althouse or a--zomg, no!--Poulos? I hate to sound bleggy, but how would you smarty-pants readers have put that thought together? There has to have been a better, more readable way. I'm ok with the fact some of my personal blog entries are the kind of thing that could cause a rash of English professor suicides, but I do prefer my serious, cross-posted entries to not be public executions of the English language. Help an Althouse out, please!

--vacuumslayer

The Secret of the Young Cluck

Mssrs. Bogg and Ailes have been chronicling the thrilling junior detective adventures of Megan McArdle, who is exactly like Nancy Drew, only unappealing, obsessed with garish kitchen appliances, and (dammit) not fictional. This is McArdle's latest. It is actually rather remarkable. Sincerely. Here. Read this, and try to avoid remarking on it by exclaiming "whatthefuck," or some variation of similar:

There's been a bit of back and forth with some correspondents, asking why I was not outraged about the East Anglia hack?  Interestingly, no one has asked me why I wasn't outraged by the Buffalo reporter who called Scott Walker pretending to be David Koch--which seems to me to be a closer parallel.

Interestingly, Megan McArdle is paid to inform the public as to any inane, ideologically convenient non-sequiturs that flit into her capacious elfin skull.

It gets better!

Scientists and journalists are held to higher standards than, say, your average computer hacker. Trust in our work product is dependent on our personal integrity, because it can't always be verified independently.

I beg pardon, but I entirely missed Megan McArdle erupting in righteous wrath at any right-wing blogger, right-wing journalist, or "main-stream-media" figure who said boo about the fact that private correspondence was stolen and then grotesquely misrepresented. Why, I rather recall this particular lachrymose disingenuous crap emanating from her en-dive of a granite-countertopped Internet hangout back in the day, as it happens.

You have to love the "scientists and journalists" becoming the "our" up there, though.

The idea that Megan McArdle is "held to standards" would be comical, were not one to glumly realize that she does meet certain very firm standards every single time she blathers online. These are just not the standards of science or journalism. If she ever were to accidentally commit science or journalism, she would not hesitate to clutch her sterling-silver $8000 toaster to her bosom and most heartily repent her thoughtcrime.

Someone who has just said that it is very bad if you steal things, but has demonstrated that she has no problem using stolen goods, has a fascinating set of ethical guidelines, at least from a clinical point of view. Hence, I consider her newsletter oddly edifying, though I decline to subscribe to it, in any sense of the term.

(This post made me very tired. I was going to make fun of PowerLine, but that will have to wait until tomorrow.)