1) The continual linking in Republican speeches and media outlets alike of Palin's pro-forced birthlifery with the fact that her youngest has Down's. Because, obviously, no pro-choicers have ever chosen to give birth to children they knew to be disabled. Only someone whose personal beliefs prevented them from having an abortion would undergo something so awful as having a disabled child.

2) The description of her, and for that matter Oddly Named Child #2, as having 'chosen life' and all that. Funny how convenient the language of 'choice' is when if they had their way it wouldn't have been a choice, because nobody would have that choice.

Continued on page 94.

The Medicalisation of Everyday Life

I'm not 100% behind everything in it - I always get a little sceptical whenever sweeping statements about 'invented diseases' are trotted out because things like CFS are so often included, and hey, invented disorder or not my current brand of SSRIs does stop me finding quite so many things overwhelmingly terrifying - but some parts really stand out. And I do owe Ben Goldacre several for giving me ammunition against people who said "but, but, teh FISH OIL! How will you ever achieve academic success?" for however many years.

The World Health Organisation’s Commission on the Social Determinants of Health reported this week, and it contained some chilling figures. Life expectancy in the poorest area of Glasgow - Calton - is 28 years less than in Lenzie, a middle-class area just eight miles away. That is a lot less life, and it isn’t just because the people in Lenzie are careful to eat goji berries for extra antioxidants, and a handful of brazil nuts every day, thus ensuring they’re not deficient in selenium, as per nutritionists’ advice.

People die at different rates because of a complex nexus of interlocking social and political issues including work life, employment status, social stability, family support, housing, smoking, drugs, and possibly diet, although the evidence on that, frankly, is pretty thin, and you certainly wouldn’t start there.

But we do, because it’s such a delicious fantasy, because it’s commodifiable and pushed by expert PR agencies, and in some respects this is one of the most destructive features of the whole nutritionist project, graphically exemplified by figures such as Dr Gillian McKeith PhD. Food has become a distraction from the real causes of ill health, and also, in some respects, a manifesto of rightwing individualism. You are what you eat, and people die young because they deserve it. You hear it from people as they walk past the local council estate and point at a mother feeding her child crisps: “Well, when you look at what they feed them,” they say, “it’s got to be diet, hasn’t it?” They choose death, through ignorance and laziness, but you choose life, fresh fish, olive oil, and that’s why you’re healthy. You’re going to see 80. You deserve it. Not like them.

Mother to ~5 year old son: "No, Georgie, you cannot 'accidentally' bite your brother in the face".

Obama names VP candidate! Dude.

I am in Oxford for a few days, and thus automatically feel better about life despite the whole still-not-having-job-or-flat business. Specifically, I am crashing at the_mousehole (aka loneraven, chiasmata and soon-sebastienne's lesbian commune of joy), with other sundry visitors, and engaged in communal cooking of butternut squash risotto. I was charged with de-seeding the squash, and then this happened.





We're all very sorry.

Not-at-all-current-events-related link of the day: this is one of the saddest things I can recall reading. As in, cry-til-stop-breathing-properly sad. It would be even if every one of the people profiled was a calculating serial murderer, but god, the whole thing is so heartbreakingly fucked.

Dupure is one of 2,270 juveniles across the United States who were sentenced to life without parole, a punishment second only in severity to the death penalty. All were under 18 when they committed the crimes. Six of them were 13, and 50 of them were 14 - an age at which US law forbids them to drive a car, give medical consent, vote, leave school, sign a contract, drink alcohol in a bar, serve on a jury, be drafted in the army, live away from home. Yet they were tried as adults in an adult court and given no possibility of a second chance.
...
Michigan is one of 41 states in America that allows children under 18 to be imprisoned for the rest of their lives. The US is among a tiny minority of countries (Somalia is another) that have refused to sign up to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child that expressly forbids the practice. Only three other countries - Israel, South Africa and Tanzania - mete out the sentence and they have collectively just 12 prisoners serving it.

The Amnesty/HRW report mentioned in the article is here; I've read the introduction and am seized with the desire to curl up in bed with hot chocolate. I mean, it's not like I didn't know about all this - and, indeed, hadn't read other reports - but I just got hit with the weight of it again, you know how it is.

ETA: slasheuse's google-fu found the Michigan state profile of the first woman featured (the others can also be found on that website). There but for; when I was cramming for Prelims, she was being told she would never go outside prison again.

Oh, god. I have been showing my sister THE ONLY STAR WARS FILMS EVER MADEthe OT over the past three nights, we just watched RotJ, and I welled up at the end. A lot.

This can only mean one thing.

I have finally completed my transformation into Tim Bisley.

Computer update: after not being enlightened after poking round the BIOS and being overwhelmed with the sheer number of things it could be, I took it to the nice and non-ripping-off tech shop in town. Man said it was probably the hard drive, he needed a closer look overnight and that if it was the HD then they'd replace it for not-too-much. If it is just b0rked, well, it was three years old and there wasn't anything essential that wasn't backed up (though wah, all my music, and also wah I will have to wait til I have money again before being able to replace). Thanks to everyone who commented, I am just too nervous about making things worse by fiddling.

In two days I will be 21. I have very little clue about what to do - subservient_son is visiting, which will be nice, but otherwise am basically going to be mooching around Norfolk for another week. Maybe I should just wait til I get the whole future thing sorted out, though that might be a while, and then have a joint birthday-and-moving celebration...

On that, if anyone felt like thinking of me around 2pm tomorrow, that would be nice. I have never actually had a job interview that consisted of more than "You're available between these dates and have higher brain functions, right?", so am somewhat full of butterflies. *clings to flist*

Aaargh! Internet! Help me!

My beloved laptop, with no cause I can think of (no external devices or new programs; it hasn't even been connected to the internet for the last month, so hasn't downloaded any updates), has suddenly refused to start up and shown ( this screen ) I've tried starting up on each of those settings, and each time it's returned to that screen. I can't even get safe mode up, and have no idea what to do, because all the google results for that error screen assume you can at least work in safe mode.

I'm running Windows XP on a Compaq laptop, if that helps.

....

In other better news, have Surprise Interview on Wednesday in London, for a quite-shiny job I am not going to post about for fear of jinxing. *crosses everything, tries to think of responses to questions, rereads everything she has ever written about economics, etc*

1) Huh. Another one for the "actually, I thought he was dead already" folder...

2) Remember me banging on about how it takes a man to get media attention for things activists have been banging on about for decades? (No.) Well, take two. Gee, magazines presenting women as a series of disembodied tits and giving advice on how to nag your girlfriend into anal sex might not contribute to exemplary gender relations? Oh, have a cookie.

Of course, as I said on theladiesloos, I bet he won't be pilloried in the way Clare Short was, cos Clare Short was fat and plain and a nasty shouty woman.

3) c/o loneraven:

Skin Coloured is intended to be a collaborative, visual exploration of what it is to be non-white in a white culture. Make-up, plasters and tights - even when they're marked "flesh-coloured" - are not the colour of skin that isn't white. And whilst white women may have trouble matching these items to their skin, for women who don't class themselves as white, this inconvenience is symptomatic of a wider problem.

To help illustrate this problem, therefore, Skin Coloured is looking for submissions. Send us photographs that illustrate the inadequacy of provisions for non-white people, and we'll post them on the blog, and hopefully both those submitting, and those who're here to learn, will gain something from it.

Further information can be found here.

[Am, obviously, not in a position to contribute, but am passing it on for anyone who is. And if anyone comments about how it's haaaaaaaard for white people too, I will laugh at you. Lots.]

4)

more cat pictures

1) Equality Now: Urgent Action for Kobra Najjar
Equality Now is urgently concerned about Kobra Najjar, an Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery who lost her final appeal for amnesty. Iranian women’s rights activists working on her case report that Kobra has exhausted all domestic legal remedies and that her execution by stoning could happen any time.
...
Please write to the Iranian officials below, calling for Kobra’s immediate release, the commutation of all sentences of death by stoning and the prohibition by law of all cruel, inhuman and degrading punishments in accordance with Iran’s obligations under the ICCPR.

2) Sexual harassment okay as it ensures humans breed, Russian judge rules
The judge said he threw out the case not through lack of evidence but because the employer had acted gallantly rather than criminally.

"If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children," the judge ruled.
[Check the figures. They're astonishing, at least to me.]

3) Horrific "feminist advocate" and sexual assaulter is now trying to get his sentence lightened and claims to "still wholeheartedly identify with feminism." Yeah, whatever.
Cara: You claim to want to work for your welcoming back into the feminist community and yet still call yourself a male ally and still think that after sexually assaulting a woman you can “identify with feminism.” That’s not working. It is your privilege showing in manifestly repulsive ways. Stop this charade, and stop making it all about you.

4) Penny Red: On Gaze
A recent study by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity found that 18% of women would rather give up 10 years of their lives than be obese, and up to 30% would rather be severely depressed and slender than fat and happy.

5) Another Woman Dead, The Blogosphere Largely Doesn’t Notice
Angie Zapata was murdered on July 17th. Her murderer claims that he was so enraged by the idea of having sex with her that he had to kill her to reassert his manhood.
[more on the trans-panic defence]
5a) Cis Feminists: Trans Issues Are Important

6) Unsurprising story of the week: Daily Hate et al spin pointedly egalitarian MoJ proposals into being about hurting teh pore menz and letting hysterical wimmen run amok.

And now, I am going to sit in bed with Ultimates and possibly some hot chocolate. Ooo, I'm such a rebel, me.

[There's no way of synching LJ with del.icio.us, a la LoudTwitter, is there? Hmmph.]

The Lathe of Heaven: very good book, but not one to read last thing before bed. Ugh. Horrible twisty fever-dreams, and am still twitchy and headachey...

(Am very much feeling the le Guin love currently, having finally got round to reading The Left Hand of Darkness last week. Which was as great as everyone claimed, though funnily enough almost eclipsed by she short story "Coming of Age in Karhide", which almost made me cry in the middle of the library...)

I made you a post about the things I liked and did not like about Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, but nerdcakes ated it and got there first. Seriously, ( spoilers )

See here and here also for a bag of yes, in particular ( spoilers again )

I do love Nathan Fillion though. Lots.

Christ on a pogo stick, I do fucking hate the Daily Mail. I don't know why I was spurred to remind the world of this fact by that article rather than any of the multiple greater fails, but I do.

Watchmen trailer! Zomg! Okay, so the CGI is probably not done yet and it might well be crap, but seeing how RIGHT it looks makes me flail nonetheless. As does this. Interesting that there's (afaik) no sight of Rorschach as yet, but it is a teaser.

Countdown to Alan Moore having a tantrum in 5...4...

ETA: Official HD release is here.

Things I have not improved at in the slightest in the last ~6 years (an ongoing series):

- Browsing the LGBT section of the local library without glancing over my shoulder in a paranoid fashion every five seconds, spotting a hot girl at the computers and getting distracted, and stepping forward (looking the other way) into a pillar.

Good to know.

(In other news, I have dyke!hair had a proper haircut for the first time in a year, and am SO relieved. Next time I suggest growing my hair any longer than jawline level, remind me that I just don't know what to do with it. My hair is now lovely and spikey and you can stroke the back of my skull like a cat. Mrrao.)

France has denied citizenship to a Moroccan woman who wears a burqa on the grounds that her "radical" practice of Islam is incompatible with basic French values such as equality of the sexes.

The report said: "She has no idea about the secular state or the right to vote. She lives in total submission to her male relatives. She seems to find this normal and the idea of challenging it has never crossed her mind."

The woman had said she was not veiled when she lived in Morocco and had worn the burqa since arriving in France at the request of her husband. She said she wore it more from habit than conviction.

Sooo...seeing as this is so awful and all, I guess the citizenship of the male relatives in question is also under fire?

Er...

That's it.

...whoa. (click for bigger image)

There's commentary on how this plays into right-wing slurs, which is probably true given that a swing section of the electorate believes them. I think the flip side, however, to "the wrong people" potentially benefiting from this, is the idea implicit in the NYer's defence that it's obviously satire, because, hey, it's the New Yorker! They're the "right people" - lefties, that is. But how does that absolve them of using the really racist tropes at play here to gain publicity (which, yes, all this provides, but c'est la vie)? The line from blog-trawling that hit home most was here: proof "that you can revel in racist depictions of Black people as long as you have a really good reason". Outside the Aren't We Enlightened circle-jerk of leftie publishing, it's not very clear the NYer is a particularly shining example of anti-racism in general, or doing much to debunk the slurs in particular. (The cover article isn't about them; it's about Obama's Chicago background, which is a welcome distraction from OMG HE LIVED IN COUNTRIES FULL OF BROWN PEOPLE but raises the question of what the hell that cover is even there for)

What other images and tropes do right-thinking lefties have carte blanche to distribute? Cartoons of gay newlyweds spending their honeymoon raping children, or of a hook-nosed Joe Lieberman cackling and sitting atop a huge pile of money? Images of a sexualised Michelle Obama being lynched and Hillary Clinton being portrayed as a crazy angry woman to discredit her? Oh wait...

I don't know if it's possible for a white artist and editor to do anything but contribute to racism when they reproduce this kind of talking point. Same reason as I laugh in the face of straight people who say "oh, well, when I used 'gay' as an insult I was reclaiming it! You should be grateful!". But am not quite able to articule why beyond the above, maybe the links are more useful.

Last week: Playing with small sis. Cat invaded board. Made awful joke to subservient_son.

Today:


I'll go sit in the corner now. Kids, get a joint honours degree in economics! You too can lose friends and alienate people!

A victory for people who can't be bothered to do their fucking jobs everywhere! As long as your bigotry has a religious pedigree, at least.

Oh well. Nice afternoon with a couple of school-people. Comments to last post making me sniffle. Still no career. *hums cheerily*