Tag: sexism

MSNBC supports white supremacists unless they fire this man

Crossposted at http://www.dailykos.com/story/…

What does Pat Buchanan have to do to get fired from MSNBC, show up to work in a white sheet?

    Yes, Virginia, there is a white supremacist on MSNBC.

    His name is Pat Buchanan.

    Some of Pat Buchanan’s previous statements include these quotes.

    “Take a hard look at Duke’s portfolio of winning issues and expropriate those not in conflict with GOP principles, [such as] reverse discrimination against white folks.”

frank.mtsu.edu

    And yes, that is David Duke whom Pat is referring to.

    Sadly, that is just the beginning, and it barely even scratches the surface.

    At the bottom of this diary there are e-mail addresses where you can demand that this racist hack be given das boot for the hateful bile he spews forth, bile which has no place in 2009 or America in any year.

RNC calls Nancy Pelosi – PussyGalore..

Crossposted to MotleyMoose

Just when you think, RNC, and the Republicans in general, have realized that this country have moved on and left them in the dust. No more appeals to our worst and base instincts with racism, sexism and homophobia are going to work with majority of the folks. RNC releases this misogynistic video to make their point about Nancy Pelosi.

Book Review: Environmentalism in Popular Culture

This is a review of Noel Sturgeon’s (2009) Environmentalism in Popular Culture, an interesting book of feminist cultural criticism.  Environmentalism in Popular Culture offers the most readily-accessible critique of an American mythology of the environment that I’ve read yet.  Though it makes some rather quick connections between its identity politics categories and environmental analysis, it maintains the reader’s interest throughout.

(crossposted at Big Orange)

Charlie Gibson’s Boner

Gibson Aims At Palin: Shoots Himself In Face. Shoot-out at the ABC corral and another media big-wig bites the dust. How did the Alaska hockey-mom manage to turn the tables on yet another so much smarter east-coast big-shot? Easy: by asking sensible questions, followed with succinct measures of straight-talk.

Attacking Alaska Governor Sarah Palin established the opposite of what Obama bots in the media had been hoping to accomplish: by confirming male media’s anti-Palin-McCain bias (again): and that Gov. Palin is exactly the sort of Vice-President America needs in the White House.

Sarah heard Gibson out, focused on the target, and squeezed the trigger: delivering the only fact that matters to 99% of Americans:”if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country. In fact, the president has the obligation, the duty to defend.” Next question.

Dems whining about an effective ‘elevator speech’ on national security could learn a lot from Palin’s remarks: straight at the target with every shot in the black. Clear statements nobody can mistake, friend and foe alike.

Dems fire blanks on questions of national security. Dems can’t even get a bead on a ‘foreign policy’ sitting-duck like Palin, a hockey-mom who just found out she’s slated to become the first female Vice-President in American history. And this isn’t the first time Dems have missed.

We can thank Dems for letting the least popular and most ineffective President in US history destroy America’s stature in the world, terrified Republicans might call them names. George Bush is still sitting in the White House, largely because all the Dems together couldn’t or wouldn’t lay a glove on this feckless narcissist. Dems simply nominated one of their own.

McCain made a wise choice. Palin’s message: defend America and demand exacting analysis from subordinates and area experts. Gibson and the rest of McCain’s critics can’t seem to look past Gov. Palin’s chest. If they could they’d see what many average Americans already see so clearly: a strong passionate heart that sings true for the red, white and blue.

Sarah Palin is precisely the kind of home-cooked apple-pie spiced with black-powder wisdom America needs to recover from Dem capitulation during the last eight years. Not a dish Dems are likely to savor, but a banquet for Americans starved for change and working for a bright American century.

“Mother is the word for God on the lips of children everywhere”

The charge of SEXISM really doesn’t help women’s causes to lead, not to say there isn’t sexism out there, but it is too loosely thrown around and is being used as an excuse and a roadblock to any real dialog. SEXIST is the charge directed at anyone who questions Sarah Palin about ANYTHING, but particularly when it is directed at Palin’s ability to take care of her children and the nation at the same time. It is what her supporters are first to point out in their sexism charges.  Never mind those same concerns were voiced about Michelle Obama, the difference is the Obama’s didn’t whine about it and charge sexism. They met it like everything else, head on, acknowledged our concerns and assured us in real ways the girls weren’t weren’t going to be sacrificed for ambition or even the greater good of the country. Follow me below the fold for my take on the mother issue.  

Holy Crap! She’s My Age

Like everyone else, I've been mesmerized for the last few hours by the spectacle of Sarah Palin's selection as John McCain's running mate.  A few known facts about her are repeated…over and over.  And over.  But there's something I'm starting to see…and it's really pissing me off.  So you get…more outrage.  Our currency and gift.

Overcoming Bias

Here Dr. Washington was introduced by Judge W. S. Bullock, in an address that for sincerity and the highest praise can have no equal.

“Dr. Washington, you are engaged in a great work.  We sympathise with you in the delicate and arduous undertaking… My countrymen and my friends, I commend to you our distinguished guest on this occasion.  He comes upon a mission that we welcome.  He is the leader of the negro race in America… He is taking the benighted, vicious, ignorant and superstitious negro from their [his] condition and clothing him in the garments of industry, intelligence, and morality.  In short, he is qualifying the negro for citizenship.”

~From The Booker T. Washington Papers, Volume Eleven, page 484.  The above is a press release issued by the office of Dr. Washington

When reading the above, the most striking thing about it is how absolutely insulting it sounds, towards both Booker T. Washington, and to black Americans in general.  It would sound horrible if anyone today said this about the accomplishments of Dr. Washington.  It would be unforgivable if anyone said this about any contemporary person.  But at the time, he himself categorized it as the highest of praise.

What is the point of this example?  Well, for starters, that context is often everything.  We know all of the words, but they mean much different things to us today than they did to people then.  At the time, that was the height of progressivity about race in America, while today, it would be too insulting and antiquated a perspective to even voice public ally.

Privileged, anxious: Let’s not talk about who’s got it worse

Mark Halperin’s comments yesterday that the Hillary campaign was presenting Obama’s race as an argument to superdelegates to get them to cross sides into her camp left me confused: is sexism worse than racism, so we need to vote for Hillary because things would change more, or is racism worse than sexism, so we need to vote for Hillary because Obama can’t win in the general?

Because we’ve definitely heard both. I don’t know how many Clinton supporters have made the former, from Gloria Steinem to Geraldine Ferraro, and for those of us sitting on the sidelines of these two profoundly complex and privileged people getting caricatured as their race and sex, it’s annoying. And such comments are definitely not moving the discussion forward.

As I’ve said time and time again, to say flatly that one is worse than the other erases the intersections of race and gender, rendering black women invisible and white men normal, denies the way factors such as ability and class play into the lives of the candidates, and ignores the multiple narratives on race and gender that work differently to prevent people from reaching various aspects of their potential.

Torture: Suffering for Beauty

I got a little out of the news loop when I was on vacation.  Now it’s 3 AM and I have jet lag, so I’m catching up.  The Blackwater stuff keeps piling up, and Media Matters did me the favor of a day-by-day review of what happened with the Rush Limbaugh fiasco.  I see where some MN vets are being denied the GI bill, and that it is apparently okay to deny medical coverage to small, vulnerable children.

Now Bush says “We don’t torture.”  I suppose that depends how one defines “torture.” 

George Carlin talks alot about “euphemisms.”  You know – where they simply replace words that make people uncomfortable, to shade the truth?  So “toilet paper” becomes “bathroom tissue”?  A “mattress” is a “sleep system?”  “Torture” is now “interrogation methods”.

So anyway, the President says we don’t torture, but maybe the shock has just worn off.  Otherwise, how do you explain this commercial?!

(Thanks toNyc Alberts, NYC, who originally saw this commercial on television late at night in a longer version, and finally tracked it down & also wrote about it)

By the way, The New York Times Sunday editorial was entitled |”On Torture and American Values” and contained this statement:

“Once upon a time, it was the United States that urged all nations to obey the letter and the spirit of
international treaties and protect human rights and liberties. The people in much of the world, if not their governments, respected the United States for its values. The Bush  administration has dishonored that history and squandered that respect.”

UPDATE: I posted this after it had been up all day at Democracy Cell Project and I wanted more discussion.  On Nyc’s suggestion, I sent it to the main women at Feministing, who he’d contacted after he first saw it.  I’m headed for Docudharma.  Any other ideas, let me know.  Don’t see comments on here but have gotten some email such as “It’s no better than if it were about child molesting” or “It’s an obvious example of corporate propaganda to soften the image of torture.”

Not to mention:
Ordinary commercials (which are usually in bad taste or have crappy music) are annoying enough….

Have we gotten so low in our degradation scale under the Bush administration that we can make light of torture, the worst thing we can do to our fellow human beings (and other animals on the planet) and casually accept pseudo-torture to sell beauty products…? (Beauty products?!?)

I find the commercial offensive in the extreme. Eeeeeeeeowwww doesn’t begin to describe the mental/emotional recoil I had when watching it.

Gotta go wash out my eyes and disinfect my ears… but how do I get the images and the sounds out of my brain…?

Creepy, in the extreme.

See also Nyc’s blogpost which paralleled mine, at A Pen Warmed In Hell.

Blandness Girl

I remember a time about 25 years ago when it was possible to find unisex toys quite easily and more people were motivated to do so.  The assumption I made was that things would gradually get less oppressive for women, minorities and children and that society would progress.  After all, the Cold War was coming to a close, and the Berlin wall was taken down in this era.  We had not had a recent major war and the worst shadow was Reagan, but that didn’t seem insurmountable.  I had highest hopes for feminism and environmentalism and wasn’t ashamed to be linked with either movement, despite the demonism of “Liberals” by the right.  I guess I was aware of the nascent danger posed by the “Silent Majority” bullshit and the “Christian Coalition” concept.

However, I did not anticipate that things would get worse, much worse, in the arena of children’s toys.  I work with children, which is an excuse to play with children’s toys, and I have helped develop them when I was in research. 

The toy aisles are segregated once again, from the dollar stores to that big toystore downtown with life-sized elephants.  Boy colors are black, blue and maybe red and girls live in a pink, purple and turquoise universe.  If a boy wants a “doll” it had damn well be an action figure, particularly a military one, with “accessories” such as tanks and guns. 

& now we keep hearing about poison toys – lead, mercury, magnets to swallow.  & the contagion has spread all over the world as unscrupulous manufacturers have the toys made where labor is cheaper.  It’s kind of revealing when the manufacturer has English-as-a-Second language, as this doll found in Paris at Oberkampf Market reveals.  (see also Silenced Majority Portal

Dsc05196(Oberkampf Mkt, Paris)

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