The Stuff: RCP Scary, Pregnancy As Punishment, Hipster Race Analysis

Wow. The RCP is fucken lame. And kinda scary. Just thoughtcha should know.

• An excellent post at Pandagon regarding the true effects of HHS Secretary Sebilius’ historic and unprecedented veto of the FDA’s approval of making Plan B available over the counter and available without prescription to teen girls, effectively leveraging forced teenage pregnancy as a lifelong punishment preventative measure for sexual activity. And I am horrified when I read comments by parents on the internet saying that they will actively support the sabotage of their child’s future by denying them access to birth control. I am just floored at this thinking. Please, please do not ruin your own child’s life by denying them birth control. And creating a new life as a form of punishment for your kids being sexually active? Just, wow. And yes, I actually read comments giving many versions of that argument. And that’s what it boils down to: pregnancy as punishment. I feel sick now…

• So get rid of that nasty gut feeling with something that is fucken hilarious.

• One cop’s take on police subculture and dissent.

• It’s too bad gay people are forcing heterosexual spouses into adultery. The nerve!

• An incredible and beautiful encounter with some of the non-human primates we are lucky to share the planet with:

• This is exactly what you don’t do to special needs kids.

• Hipster race analysis (or How White Kids Should Not Tell Persons of Color How to Feel):

Pandagon’s Marcotte on the Influence Paul Elam and MRAs Have on Actual Men’s Advocacy

I am not the only one who sees through the False Rape Society and Paul Elam’s bullshit. Amanda Marcotte takes on the Good Men Project’s founder, Tom Matlack, whose mind has been apparently poisoned by the likes of Paul Elam. It appears that Matlack’s style of confrontation is just like Elam’s:

When you make a bunch of baseless, unevidenced, generalizing arguments about a group of people—in this case, feminists and women as a group—and when challenged, cannot and will not provide evidence, you’re not making argument. You’re simply being prejudiced. Tom is whining that feminists don’t feel empathy for “men”, even though I quoted men extensively in my rebuttal to him and demonstrated ample empathy and understanding of men—starting with the understanding that “men” are not a monolith. He’s got nothing. He’s just spouting sexist blather and, when called on it, whining about meanie feminists instead of proving his arguments or hell, even giving a specific example of what the fuck he’s talking about when he accuses women as a group of being so mean and unaccepting of men.

I highly encourage reading Marcotte’s article over at Pandagon. Flame on.

The Stuff: Abortion Games, Pentagon Claims, and um yeah…Ayn Rand Was Fucking Weird

• This ridiculous anti-abortion campaign is an insult to every living person on Earth. Awww, poor wittle Johnny is giving up video games until women cease to need abortions, so let’s all deny women sovereignty over their bodies and let women who need lifesaving emergency abortions die—that way Johnny can get back to playing Call of Duty. *puke* (Full disclosure: I love video games.)

• Breed Specific Legislation (BSL) attempts to vanquish socially unpopular breeds of dog. But now, there’s dog disguise kits to remedy these puppy-eugenics measures. (Hat-tip to theagitator.com, authored by Radley Balko.)

• This interview with acclaimed anthropologist David Graeber is an intriguing and informative read, I recommend reading it through. It covers many subjects, including the nature of debt and what direct action means. Here’s an excerpt:

Q: Your latest book is called Debt. One of the arguments you make is that the reason the idea of debt has so much power is because no one has any idea what it actually is. Did you get any closer to understanding what debt is?
A: Yes. Debt is the perversion of a promise, a promise that has been perverted through mathematics and violence. I’m not saying mathematics is bad, but the combination of mathematics and violence is extremely bad. A debt is a promise to give a certain sum of money, in a certain amount of time, under certain conditions. It is a contract that is ultimately enforceable through the threat of force. The problem is that through a genuinely perverse historical alchemy, we’ve come to see such acts of violence as the very essence of morality.

• As you may know, the National Defense Authorization Bill 2012 has passed, and has some possibly tremendous impacts on civilian rights in the U.S. But did you know that it could also chill internet speech and target movements like Occupy Wall Street via cyberspace surveillance? Says Kurt Nimmo of the declaration by the Pentagon of the internet as a “domain of war” (featured in the article linked to above):

It will work with the Pentagon to militarily neutralize the threat posed by activists and the alternative media.

• An explanation of why good men shouldn’t put up with rape jokes, regardless of how opposed to sexual violence you are.

• Support Bradley Manning! Also, I posted this on Facecrack, but I’m going to repost my comments on Wikileaks and information-exposing tech here:

I love the work Wikileaks has done, but the truth is Wikileaks has been over for a year now. Wikileaks did what no one else could accomplish, but the tools for journalists and whistleblowers have evolved, and we are now past the centralization of this information-exposing movement, moving into broader, decentralized tools such as OpenLeaks and other things that put the power into the hands of the whistleblowers and journalists, with no necessity for a middleman such as Wikileaks. Wikileaks was the advent of this movement and deserves praise as such, but it was simply a snapshot, a transitional form in the evolution of this movement. Thank you Wikileaks! And hello, future information technologies!

• Last but not least, Ayn Rand was fucking weird.

A Short Expression of Posthumous Gratitude Toward Christopher Hitchens

Christoper Hitchens: Thank you for showing me just how poor the arguments from design are, how atrocious religion is, and that I shouldn’t be afraid to not only not believe in fairy tales, but to be vocal about it as well. Your writings and debates on religion were a huge and empowering influence on my life, regardless of my disagreements with your post-9/11 political transformation. You won’t be reading this, but maybe someone who needs to discover your writings will.

My Response to acatalogueoflies.com Claims About My FRS Writings

I have posted the following response to this entry about me.

“It is strange that you attempt to imply that I have made false rape accusations. My criticisms specific to the FRS are not accusations of rape and abuse. That is an attempt to sling some mud, and in poor, poor form. Despite what you attempt to imply, I have not made any accusations of rape or abuse. I have, however, pointed out that the ideology of Paul Elam and his MRA cohorts is one toward the distrust and disempowerment of female-bodied persons, in such a manner that the outcome fosters a tolerance for and erasure of rape culture and survivors of rape. Examining the writings of Elam on other non-FRS sites reveals his vicious animosity towards female power, and the outcome–not the alleged intent–of his so-called False Rape Society is what is important. (notice that it is not the False Rape Accusation Society, but that it is “False Rape,” as though rape itself doesn’t exist or is not a problem.) I believe that the goal of FRS and most of the salient manifestation of men’s advocacy functions not to make life better for men, but to make rape culture more impenetrable and rape easier to access. If that is not the intent of the FRS, that is irrelevant–because that is the outcome.

As to saying there are five of them, I was not referring to false rape accusation victims; I was referring to the administrators/owners of the FRS site: as it turns out, I was wrong. There is only 1 of them, and his name is Paul Elam. He has no staff, no non-profit status, no actual agency. That is because the network he works with consists of very few people making very big noise.”

A catalogue of lies, indeed.