Category: Media and Culture,

More women unconvinced that Al Franken’s resignation was best for women

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Domestic Affairs,Leave a comment

More than 30 Democratic senators — at least a third of them women — called on the former comedian to leave Congress, but the pushback those lawmakers are now receiving, even from women, reveals just how differently some women view the way lawmakers should respond to the sexual mistreatment of women.

Susie Tompkins Buell, a longtime donor to Democratic women senators …described the push for Franken’s departure as “unfair,” “cavalier” and somewhat politically motivated — “a stampede,” “like a rampage,” she said, speaking in stark terms about senators she has backed for years, naming Gillibrand in particular.

“They need to know that some of their biggest supporters are questioning why they did that,” Buell said. “We have to do things conscientiously and fairly. He didn’t have the chance to defend himself.”

Nearly 6 in 10 — 57 percent — of Minnesota women did not want Franken to leave office, according to a Public Policy Polling survey.

…“If we set this precedent in the interest of demonstrating our party’s solidarity with harassed and abused women, we’re only going to drain the swamp of people who, however flawed, still regularly vote to protect women’s rights and freedoms. The legislative branch will remain chockablock with old, white Republican men who regard women chiefly as sex objects and unpaid housekeepers, and we’ll show them how staunchly Democrats oppose their misogynistic attitudes by handing them more power.”

More women unconvinced that Al Franken’s resignation was best for women – The Washington Post

hmmmm

Koch network to spend $400 million during 2018 midterm election cycle

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Media and Culture,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

Some of the $400 million for 2018 will be spent on electing GOP candidates. The network also plans to spend heavily promoting tax reform and other achievements of the GOP-controlled government, including Veterans Affairs reforms and Trump’s conservative judicial picks.

Koch network to spend $400 million during 2018 midterm election cycle | TheHill

hmmm

Survivor and Liberator Reflect for Holocaust Remembrance Day

On By peanutgallerynhIn Europe,, Media and Culture,, Military,Leave a comment

Moskin, who served in the Army with the 66th infantry, 71st Division, recalls that his side of the experience started when a group of U.S. Army combat soldiers stumbled upon a prisoner-of-war camp, holding mostly Royal Air Force members, near Lambach, Austria. The British prisoners told the liberating soldiers that they’d heard rumors of a different kind of camp, a concentration camp for Jews, just a few kilometers away.

…“There were dead bodies on the left, piles of dead bodies on the right — and their arms and legs looked like broomsticks covered with no flesh,” Moskin says. Slowly, the ones who were still alive stumbled toward them like “the living dead, zombies,” in striped pajamas with a sewn-on star of David, calling out in German for food, water and cigarettes.

…“I remember saying the German for ‘I am also a Jew.’ It just came out of me. I don’t know where I heard it,” Moskin says. “An elderly man, very emaciated, started to smile and came towards me and he went down on his hands and knees and started to kiss my boots, which were tainted with blood, vomit, and feces. I knew he was trying to be affectionate toward me, but it made me very uncomfortable to watch him kissing my filthy, bloody boots. So I picked him up under the armpits, and as he came up towards me I could see open, festering sores going up and down his neck, and lice coming out of those sores. You could imagine that I wanted to pull away because he smelled so badly, but I didn’t. He had wrapped his arms around me and he was crying. He kept saying ‘Danke [thank you], danke, Jew.’ That’s when I lost it a little bit and started to cry.”

In the days that followed, word trickled in from other Army outfits that the events at Gunskirchen were just one liberation among many.

“Every time we found out,” Moskin recalls, “we said, ‘My God, how many of these damn hellholes are there?’”

…Preserving that story, and its lesson, is a job that Moskin feels remains unfinished.

“I’m going to be honest with you, my generation failed,” he says. “We didn’t get rid of the hate and prejudice. There’s still hate out there, all over the place.”

But, as Katz sees it, that’s a job that will never be complete — which is why it’s important to remember that, even at the worst moments in human history, luck and goodness can run counter to evil.

“Even then, there were people that were good and kind,” he says. “Same thing now. There are some people that will always hate, and there are people that are good, and that’s just human nature.”

Survivor and Liberator Reflect for Holocaust Remembrance Day | Time

Lord…..

Trump asked to borrow a Van Gogh painting for the White House. He was offered a golden toilet instead.

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Media and Culture,Leave a comment

The emailed response from the Guggenheim’s chief curator to the White House was polite but firm: the museum could not accommodate a request to “borrow” a painting by Vincent Van Gogh for President Donald and Melania Trump’s private living quarters.

Instead, wrote the curator, Nancy Spector, another piece was available, one that was nothing like “Landscape with Snow,” the lovely 1888 Van Gogh rendering of a man in a black hat walking along a path in Arles with his dog.

The curator’s alternative: an 18-karat, fully functioning, solid gold toilet – an interactive work entitled “America” that critics have described as pointed satire aimed at the excess of wealth in this country.

Trump asked to borrow a Van Gogh painting for the White House. He was offered a golden toilet instead. – Chicago Tribune

Heh

Larry Nassar Complained About Listening To Survivor Statements And Judge Aquilina Wasn’t Having It

On By peanutgallerynhIn American Injustice System,, Chick Stuff,, Media and Culture,Leave a comment

Ex-Team USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar was sentenced to up to 175 years in prison on Tuesday, after more than 150 women and girls came forward to accuse him of sexually abusing them.

[Circuit Court Judge Rosemarie] Aquilina called issuing the sentence a “privilege,” adding: “I just signed your death warrant.” 

Aquilina has been praised on social media for focusing on the survivors over the last few days. When one survivor, Amanda Cormier, explained that she loved to write songs as a teenager, but that she hadn’t written one since the abuse, Aquilina gave some advice to the woman and her unborn baby:

“It seems to me, after this, you can finish writing. You found your voice,” Aquilina said. “It’s a strong, effective, brave voice, and you have a child coming. Maybe what you need to do is start and finish a lullaby.”

…Nassar wrote to a letter to the judge, complaining that he was unable to handle the continued victim impact statements because of his mental state, and which contained the phrase: “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” 

…”You need to talk about these issues with a therapist,” the judge told Nassar. “Contrary to CNN’s headline, I’m not a therapist.” Moments later, she threw the letter onto the ground.

Larry Nassar Complained About Listening To Survivor Statements And Judge Aquilina Wasn’t Having It

Justice served.

These are the obscure Trump staffers who are systematically dismantling the federal government

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Money, Class, and Poverty,, Religion,Leave a comment

Because Trump has appointed very few officials, the small group of conservative activists who are attempting to implement his agenda could hold outsized influence. A leaked document from Trump’s Domestic Policy Council, reportedly leaked from the Office of Management and Budget and published in October by Crooked Media, identified eight Domestic Policy Council members who are apparently quietly leading that charge as points of contact.

…Rob Goad
Handling education policy for the Domestic Policy Council is Robert T. “Rob” Goad II. The leaked document suggests his work has focused on two key priorities: expanding school choice and making colleges and universities share some of the responsibility for student loans. Both efforts would divert federal funding for public schools toward private and even religious schools.

…In his Trump administration capacity, has he has made news twice. First, he was the administration staffer tasked with defending then-Education Secretary nominee Betsy DeVos against plagiarism charges. Then, he hosted a media conference call to announce a Trump executive order on “education federalism” — an order that, Goad admitted to reporters last April, does virtually nothing.

Laura Cunliffe
Laura Cunliffe is the point-person for changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Farm Bill, according to the leaked document.

…She spent most of the past five years at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) administering child nutrition programs under President Barack Obama. As a USDA program analyst, she joined with nutritional advocates in 2013 to make the rounds explaining the department’s new healthy school snack requirements. Two years later, she gave a keynote speech on the importance of child nutrition programs at a foster-parent conference.

In her new role, she appears to be now working to eliminate much of what she worked to implement in the past administration.

James Sherk
The point person on labor issues is James Sherk. According to the document, his priorities are to reduce benefits to federal employees and labor unions.

…He is a 2003 alumnus of Hillsdale College, a Michigan school known as a “citadel of American conservatism” with a stated mission of not “succumbing to the dehumanizing, discriminatory trend of so-called ‘social justice’ and ‘multicultural diversity.’” As an undergrad, he penned an article for the college paper denouncing all government stimulus programs.

…He opposed public sector employees’ right to bargain collectively, embraced so-called “right to work” laws, and fiercely opposed a $15 minimum wage. He worked to defeat the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have made it easier for workers to unionize.

…Kara McKee
The memo identifies her as point person for proposals to allow Pell Grants to be used for job training, to cut or “repurpose” some job training programs at the Department of Labor, and to repurpose Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act funds to increase private-sector partnerships and apprenticeships.

…The efforts in particular to cut federal programs is very much in line with her long history of pushing to decimate government.

Peter White
Peter J. White is the point of contact for issues related to aeronautics and space, according to the document.

…White’s former boss Brooks boasts that he “consistently receives the highest rating in Congress from NumbersUSA,” a notorious anti-immigration group known for racist attempts to convince black people that immigration takes away their jobs. Brooks’ views on immigration and other judicial issues are far-right — he once complained that the Democratic Party had launched a “war on whites. White also served as his old boss’ conduit to the Trump administration when Brooks was upset in January that the new administration did not immediately rescind protections for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as kids.”

…In his Trump administration role, White authored a presidential executive order reinstating the National Space Council, which President Bill Clinton disbanded in 1993 as part of a larger effort to reduce White House staff.

White is a member of the conservative Federalist Society. While space policy may be one area where White and the Trump administration are not pushing for massive cuts, it remains to be seen whether they will push for a massive privatization of the space space.

…Darin Selnick
Darin Selnick has been tasked with fixing the Veterans’ Affairs department, according to the document. And that apparently means privatizing it.

So far the VA is in the process of outsourcing its electronic records system, replacing its in-house Vista system with an estimated $10 billion to $18 billion system through the company Cerner. A recent push in Congress on a bill to overhaul the Veterans Choice Program, which proponents say would give veterans more flexibility in receiving care from private doctors (but opponents warn could effectively dismantle the VA), also aligns with the leaked list of Trump administration priorities — though it’s unclear if Selnick has been involved with the legislation.

…From 2013 to 2017, he served as senior veterans affairs adviser for Charles and David Koch’s libertarian dark money group Concerned Veterans for America, which is trying to push veteran healthcare into the private sector and has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on electing Republican U.S. Senate candidates.

…His role in the Trump administration would seem to be chiefly a continuation of his longstanding pro-VA privatization activism.

Katy Talento

Two women are listed on the document as overseeing the health policy area: Katy Talento and Alexandra “Alex” Campau.

In that capacity, the duo would be trying to dismantle a long list of USAID and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention health programs aimed at curbing sexually transmitted diseases, obesity, chronic diseases, teen pregnancy, and infant mortality, and improving environmental health and workers’ safety.

Now, the administration’s fiscal year 2018 State Department and USAID and CDC budgets propose drastic cuts to global AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria programs, global health initiatives, and a range of chronic disease prevention and health promotion programs and grants.

…[Talento] has written columns for the right-wing news site The Federalist arguing birth control causes miscarriages and abortions and is a form of medical malpractice. She opposed funding for HIV/ AIDS research while working as a U.S. Senate staffer in 2003 because she claimed it supported Russian prostitution.

…The New York Times, in a July profile, called Talento one of the “architects” of Trump’s reversal of the Obama administration’s requirement that health insurance plans cover birth control.

…Alex Campau

…Her work shilling for the healthcare industry make her a prime fit to dismantle important initiatives and programs intended to improve global health.

These are the obscure Trump staffers who are systematically dismantling the federal government – ThinkProgress

hmmmm

Harvard can save West Station, bu tthe question is are they willing to back up claims of being a good neighbor by putting their money where their mouth is?

On By peanutgallerynhIn Boston,, Infrastructure and Transportation,, Money, Class, and Poverty,, Schools,Leave a comment

[State Representative Michael] Moran’s district includes much of Brighton and Allston, including the site of a massive project that would take down a decrepit Mass. Pike viaduct, straighten the highway, and free up dozens of acres, now owned by Harvard, for new development.

…In a public comment letter also signed by other elected officials representing Allston and Brighton in the House, Senate, and Boston City Council, Moran urges the state to “monetize the total benefits” to Harvard — the “single biggest beneficiary” of the Pike realignment — to guarantee the construction of West Station sooner rather than later. In other words: While Harvard has already committed to covering a third of the station’s cost, the state should hit the school up for the majority of it.

…In general, the Greater Boston region, which might otherwise have become the eastern end of the Rust Belt, shouldn’t take its universities for granted. Yet there are some problems that only an institution like Harvard can solve. It would be a shame if the university stood aside as a major transit hub — the key to an urban vision for Allston — fell victim to bureaucratic inertia.

Harvard, only you can save West Station – The Boston Globe

CVS bans photo manipulation in store beauty brands, pressures suppliers

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Media and Culture,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

CVS Pharmacy President Helena Foulkes, who made the official announcement at the National Retail Federation’s convention in New York, said the decision reflects an acknowledgment that “unrealistic body images” are “a significant driver of health issues,” especially among women. About 80% of the chain’s customers are women.

“We’re all consuming massive amounts of media every day and we’re not necessarily looking at imagery that is real and true,” Foulkes said in an interview. “To try to hold ourselves up to be like those women is impossible because even those women don’t look like how they appear in those photographs.”

CVS bans photo manipulation in store beauty brands, pressures suppliers

hmmmmm

Hawaii False Missile Alert: Emergency Worker Reassigned

On By peanutgallerynhIn Hawaii,, Media and Culture,, Military,Leave a comment

The mistake occurred after 8 a.m. Saturday when the employee initiated an internal test of the emergency missile warning system — a drill performed regularly by the agency after it reinstated its Cold War-era nuclear warning system in response to North Korea’s ramped up ballistic missile tests. The Washington Post reports that the worker sent out a false warning after choosing “Missile alert” from the dropdown menu that initiated the internal test. He should have chosen the “Test missile alert” option instead.

Hawaii False Missile Alert: Emergency Worker Reassigned | Time

hmmmm

Aziz Ansari and Grace

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Media and Culture,Leave a comment

[Media directed at young women in the middle of the 20th century] didn’t prepare teenage girls for sports or stem or huge careers; the kind of world-conquering, taking-numbers strength that is the common language of the most-middle-of-the road cultural products aimed at today’s girls was totally absent. But in one essential aspect they reminded us that we were strong in a way that so many modern girls are weak. They told us over and over again that if a man tried to push you into anything you didn’t want, even just a kiss, you told him flat out you weren’t doing it. If he kept going, you got away from him. You were always to have “mad money” with you: cab fare in case he got “fresh” and then refused to drive you home. They told you to slap him if you had to; they told you to get out of the car and start wailing if you had to. They told you to do whatever it took to stop him from using your body in any way you didn’t want, and under no circumstances to go down without a fight. In so many ways, compared with today’s young women, we were weak; we were being prepared for being wives and mothers, not occupants of the C-Suite. But as far as getting away from a man who was trying to pressure us into sex we didn’t want, we were strong.

Was Grace frozen, terrified, stuck? No. She tells us that she wanted something from Ansari and that she was trying to figure out how to get it. She wanted affection, kindness, attention. Perhaps she hoped to maybe even become the famous man’s girlfriend. He wasn’t interested. What she felt afterward—rejected yet another time, by yet another man—was regret. And what she and the writer who told her story created was 3,000 words of revenge porn. The clinical detail in which the story is told is intended not to validate her account as much as it is to hurt and humiliate Ansari.

…But we’re at warp speed now, and the revolution—in many ways so good and so important—is starting to sweep up all sorts of people into its conflagration: the monstrous, the cruel, and the simply unlucky. Apparently there is a whole country full of young women who don’t know how to call a cab, and who have spent a lot of time picking out pretty outfits for dates they hoped would be nights to remember. They’re angry and temporarily powerful…

The Humiliation of Aziz Ansari – The Atlantic

hmmmmmmmmmmm

Columbia Journalism Review: Don’t blame the election on fake news. Blame it on the media.

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Media and Culture,Leave a comment

We agree that fake news and misinformation are real problems that deserve serious attention. We also agree that social media and other online technologies have contributed to deep-seated problems in democratic discourse such as increasing polarization and erosion of support for traditional sources of authority. Nonetheless, we believe that the volume of reporting around fake news, and the role of tech companies in disseminating those falsehoods, is both disproportionate to its likely influence in the outcome of the election and diverts attention from the culpability of the mainstream media itself.

…“the average US adult read and remembered on the order of one or perhaps several fake news articles during the election period, with higher exposure to pro-Trump articles than pro-Clinton articles.” In turn, they estimate that “if one fake news article were about as persuasive as one TV campaign ad, the fake news in our database would have changed vote shares by an amount on the order of hundredths of a percentage point.” 

…the sheer outrageousness of the most popular fake stories—Pope Francis endorsing Trump; Democrats planning to impose Islamic law in Florida; Trump supporters chanting “We hate Muslims, we hate blacks;” and so on—made them especially unlikely to have altered voters’ pre-existing opinions of the candidates.

…A potentially more serious threat is what a team of Harvard and MIT researchers refer to as “a network of mutually reinforcing hyper-partisan sites that revive what Richard Hofstadter called ‘the paranoid style in American politics,’ combining decontextualized truths, repeated falsehoods, and leaps of logic to create a fundamentally misleading view of the world.” Unlike the fake news numbers highlighted in much of the post-election coverage, engagement with sites like Breitbart News, InfoWars, and The Daily Caller are substantial—especially in the realm of social media.

… They found roughly four times as many Clinton-related sentences that described scandals as opposed to policies, whereas Trump-related sentences were one-and-a-half times as likely to be about policy as scandal. Given the sheer number of scandals in which Trump was implicated—sexual assault; the Trump Foundation; Trump University; redlining in his real-estate developments; insulting a Gold Star family; numerous instances of racist, misogynist, and otherwise offensive speech—it is striking that the media devoted more attention to his policies than to his personal failings. Even more striking, the various Clinton-related email scandals—her use of a private email server while secretary of state, as well as the DNC and John Podesta hacks—accounted for more sentences than all of Trump’s scandals combined (65,000 vs. 40,000) and more than twice as many as were devoted to all of her policy positions.

…The extent that voters mistrusted Hillary Clinton, or considered her conduct as secretary of state to have been negligent or even potentially criminal, or were generally unaware of what her policies contained or how they may have differed from Donald Trump’s, these numbers suggest their views were influenced more by mainstream news sources than by fake news.

…Of the 150 front-page [New York Times] articles that discussed the campaign in some way, we classified slightly over half (80) as Campaign Miscellaneous. Slightly over a third (54) were Personal/Scandal, with 29 focused on Trump and 25 on Clinton. Finally, just over 10 percent (16) of articles discussed Policy, of which six had no details, four provided details on Trump’s policy only, one on Clinton’s policy only, and five made some comparison between the two candidates’ policies. The results for the full corpus were similar: Of the 1,433 articles that mentioned Trump or Clinton, 291 were devoted to scandals or other personal matters while only 70 mentioned policy, and of these only 60 mentioned any details of either candidate’s positions. In other words, comparing the two datasets, the number of Personal/Scandalstories for every Policy story ranged from 3.4 (for front-page stories) to 4.2. Further restricting to Policy stories that contained some detail about at least one candidate’s positions, these ratios rise to 5.5 and 4.85, respectively.

…There were profound differences between the two candidates’ policies, and these differences are already proving enormously consequential to the American people. Under President Trump, the Affordable Care Act is being actively dismantled, environmental and consumer protections are being rolled back, international alliances and treaties are being threatened, and immigration policy has been thrown into turmoil, among other dramatic changes. In light of the stark policy choices facing voters in the 2016 election, it seems incredible that only five out of 150 front-page articles that The New York Times ran over the last, most critical months of the election, attempted to compare the candidate’s policies, while only 10 described the policies of either candidate in any detail.

…10 is an interesting figure because it is also the number of front-page stories the Times ran on the Hillary Clinton email scandal in just six days, from October 29 (the day after FBI Director James Comey announced his decision to reopen his investigation of possible wrongdoing by Clinton) through November 3, just five days before the election. When compared with the Times’s overall coverage of the campaign, the intensity of focus on this one issue is extraordinary. To reiterate, in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election (and that does not include the three additional articles on October 18, and November 6 and 7, or the two articles on the emails taken from John Podesta). This intense focus on the email scandal cannot be written off as inconsequential: The Comey incident and its subsequent impact on Clinton’s approval rating among undecided voters could very well have tipped the election.

…Some important misconceptions about Obamacare held by large percentages of the American public—for example, that almost 40 percent (and 47 percent of Republicans) did not know that repealing Obamacare would cause people to lose Medicaid coverage or subsidies for private insurance. 

…Consistent with other studies of media coverage of the election, our analysis finds that The New York Times focused much more on “dramatic” issues like the horserace or personal scandals than on substantive policy issues. Moreover, when the paper did write about policy issues, it failed to mention important details, in some cases giving readers a misleading impression of the true state of affairs. 

… In sheer numerical terms, the information to which voters were exposed during the election campaign was overwhelmingly produced not by fake news sites or even by alt-right media sources, but by household names like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN. Without discounting the role played by malicious Russian hackers and naïve tech executives, we believe that fixing the information ecosystem is at least as much about improving the real news as it about stopping the fake stuff.

Don’t blame the election on fake news. Blame it on the media. – Columbia Journalism Review

hmmm

Louisiana teacher handcuffed, arrested after bringing up brass salary at school board meeting

On By peanutgallerynhIn American Injustice System,, Gulf Coast Region,, Money, Class, and Poverty,, Schools,Leave a comment

Louisiana teacher handcuffed, arrested after bringing up brass salary at school board meeting – NBC News

Jeezus Kerrreyst…. Clearly some of the individuals involved need to be put in handcuffs and dropped into the swampy morass that is the Louisiana justice system but the teacher is not in that group….

Trump questioned why ‘pretty Korean lady’ analyst wasn’t working on North Korea

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Media and Culture,, Military,, Race,Leave a comment

Meeting with the analyst as part of a briefing on a family being released by militants in Pakistan, [Trump asked] her where she was from.

“New York,” she replied.

Trump pressed on, asking her where “her people” are from.

When the analyst responded that her parents were from South Korea, the president reportedly responded by asking a nearby adviser why the “pretty Korean lady” was not negotiating with North Korea’s government on behalf of the Trump administration.

The analyst, whose name was not released, is reportedly trained in hostage negotiation, not diplomacy.

Trump questioned why ‘pretty Korean lady’ analyst wasn’t working on North Korea: report | TheHill

452px-jesusfacepalm

In the war between millennials and baby boomers we have forgotten about the work-hard, play-hard Generation X

On By peanutgallerynhIn Media and Culture,Leave a comment

Boomers live in the past and have ransomed the future. Millennials fear the future and are ignorant of the past. Generation X acknowledges what has gone before, learns from it, and resolves to shape the future into something better.

In the war between millennials and baby boomers we have forgotten about the work-hard, play-hard Generation X | The Independent

lol! …and spot on.

The #metoo Moment Isn’t (Just) About Sex

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Media and Culture,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

What it’s really about is work, and women’s equality in the workplace, and more broadly, about the rot at the core of our power structures that makes it harder for women to do work because the whole thing is tipped toward men.

…One of the perils at hand — as we try to parse how butt-groping or unsolicited kissing can exist on the same scale as violent rape — is a reversion to attitudes about women as sexually infantilized victims.

…The thing that unites these varied revelations isn’t necessarily sexual harm, but professional harm and power abuse.

…Sexual harassment may entail behaviors that on their own would be criminal — assault or rape — but the legal definition of its harm is about the systemic disadvantaging of a gender in the public and professional sphere.

…To cross powerful men is to jeopardize not just an individual job in an individual office; it’s to risk far broader professional harm within whole professions where men hold sway, to cut yourself off from future opportunity.

…As hard as it is to stir concern over women’s sexual autonomy, we do have a long history of wanting to protect (some) women’s virtue. It is also true that we still rile ourselves up more about a woman’s sexual violability than we do about her professional autonomy or rights to public and economic equality.

…Glenn Thrush, who is accused of making unwanted advances outside of his workplace, against colleagues he did not directly supervise, would seem to give fodder to those worried about a sex panic: It raises the concern that bad passes, made between adults at a bar, might get condemned as sexual harassment in a way that assumes the women in question to be incapable of full sexual participation.

…A man telling a story about how a female colleague came on to him and he put a stop to it has the potential to do damage to the woman’s professional standing — rendering her as needy, undesirable, and showing professional bad judgment — while bolstering the man’s, by framing him as responsible, mature, professional, and ultimately desirable to the opposite sex.

…What makes women vulnerable is not their carnal violability, but rather the way that their worth has been understood as fundamentally erotic, ornamental; that they have not been taken seriously as equals; that they have been treated as some ancillary reward that comes with the kinds of power men are taught to reach for and are valued for achieving.

…A woman who is harassed, or who is in a workplace where other women are, might feel vividly the full weight of the system that’s not set up with her in mind, and see with clarity how much more difficult her professional path will be at every turn, how success might not be on her terms, but on terms set by powerful men. She might feel shame, or embarrassment that worms its way into her head, affects her confidence. She will likely spend time and energy focusing on how to maneuver around the harasser, time and energy that might otherwise be spent on her own advancement. Some women decide to play along; maybe their careers will benefit from it or maybe they will suffer, but they may long wonder whether their success or failure was determined not by their own talents or even by a lucky break, but rather by how they responded to a man. This is especially difficult for very young women, those with fewer economic or social resources, who lack professional networks and professional stability; it’s these women who are most likely to be targeted. The whole thing might begin to feel overwhelmingly difficult, hopeless, perhaps not worth the fight. It can mean a sapping of ambition.

…The frustrated conversations between some Democratic women in the Senate had gone on for a week, held sometimes, literally, in the Senate’s women’s restrooms: What should they do [in response ot he allegations about Sen. Franken?]

Those women surely knew that if they did not speak out against Franken, they would be tarred as self-interested hypocrites; they probably also understood that if they did speak out against him, they would be viewed as self-interested executioners.

…The shitty position women are so often put in: as the designated guardians, entrusted —whether as colleagues or wives — with policing men’s bad behaviors, they will get dinged for complicity if they don’t police it vigilantly enough, and risk being cast as castrating villainesses if they issue sentence.

This Moment Isn’t (Just) About Sex

hmmm

Former Facebook Exec: ‘You Don’t Realize It But You Are Being Programmed’

On By peanutgallerynhIn Media and Culture,Leave a comment

Parker has said that social media creates “a social-validation feedback loop” by giving people “a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.”

Just days after Parker made those comments, Palihapitiya told the Stanford audience, “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” Palihapitiya said. “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem—this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”

Former Facebook Exec: ‘You Don’t Realize It But You Are Being Programmed’

hmmmm

A Senior Republican Senator Admonishes Trump: ‘America Is an Idea, Not a Race’

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Race,Leave a comment

It was just after President Trump had finished railing in the Oval Office against African immigrants he said came from “shithole countries” when a senior Republican senator, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who was there to negotiate a deal on immigration, spoke up.

“America is an idea, not a race,” Mr. Graham said, according to three people familiar with the exchange on Thursday. Diversity was a strength, he said, not a weakness. And by the way, the senator added, he himself was a descendant of immigrants who came to the United States from “shithole countries with no skills.”

A Senior Republican Senator Admonishes Trump: ‘America Is an Idea, Not a Race’ – The New York Times

hmmmm