Missed this the first time around: "Don't Get Raped"

This is one of my new favorite blog posts on the subject, and I'm sharing it with you after missing it the first time around: "Don't Get Raped." Or, Everything Leads to Rape.

QOTD: "Rapists rape. Rapists raping lead to rape." Victims are just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

What To Do When You Realize Your Privilege Is Showing.

Step 1: Strike self on forehead.
Step 2: Say "Oh, crap!" (feel free to be creative here by substituting the term "crap" with another term such as "shit" or "fuck". NB: avoid terms that might be construed as having racist, sexist, or classist connotations, as you already know your privilege cluelessness. Keep it simple to avoid an iterative loop.)
Step 3: Say "I'm such an idiot for not seeing that before!"
(Optional steps 3B-3C may be initiated by member of relevant minority saying, "Well, that's because you're privileged and didn't have to think about it before." In which case, you may respond by saying, "augh! I know!")
Step 4: Say "Now I know better. I won't do that again."

Final step: KEEP THE PROMISE YOU MADE IN STEP 4. This requires you pay more attention to the oppression of people different than you. However, by noticing your privilege once, you've demonstrated you can do it again. So, practice.

(This public service announcement brought to you by a recent moment of recognizing my white privilege.)

I agree with every single word

The Sunday Morning Come to Jesus Moment on Second Amendment Solutions

Here’s the real question, what exactly do these people think “Second Amendment Solutions” are?

Seriously, when you talk about “taking back America,” when you talk about “taking our guns to Washington,” when you talk about “taking them out,” when you talk about “the blood of Patriots” and civil war what exactly are you talking about? When Chuck Norris talks about a “second Revolution” what exactly is he saying? When Sharron Angle talks about “Second Amendment remedies” what does she mean? When Joe Miller talks about the Second Amendment and then hires a security company made up of radical militiamen who talk of taking up arms against the US Government, hell, who have taken up arms against the government, what exactly does he mean? When Glenn Beck stands on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and talks about Second Amendment rights, when he invites the NRA onto his show to explain why Americans, each and every one, need access to fully automatic assault weapons and 30-round magazines, what are they getting at?

I’ll tell you what they mean.

They mean a women, a US Congresswomen, the wife of a US serviceman and astronaut, shot point blank through the head and lying in a puddle of her own blood.

That’s exactly what they mean.

Because that, my friends, is exactly what a “Second Amendment solution” looks like.

Read the whole thing.

Naomi Wolf Wants To Out Rape Survivors?

Julian Assange's sex-crime accusers deserve to be named The shielding of sex-crime accusers is a Victorian relic. Women are moral adults and should be treated as such.

Oh, Naomi, I think your use of the word "relic" is entirely misplaced. For relics are old and dead, and sexism, honor killings, and the vilification and hatred of women, are not.

1. Wolf asserts that the idea a woman is fragile and unable to withstand public scrutiny is a core reason for not naming sex-crime accusers back when women still wore corsets every day, but ignores the idea that a woman's 'honor' was considered so vital that she was perceived as, by being "sullied" through the crime committed against her, as having shamed her entire family in addition to herself.
2. Wolf asserts that not naming a sex-crime accuser makes the crime harder to prosecute. I'm not sure that it does, but if you accept that premise as true, the anonymity of the accuser is not the problem, nor the cure, but a symptom of a system that is unwilling to take sex crimes seriously. Endemic sexism and sweeping accusations under the rug will not go away by allowing accusers names to be published so that they can be vilified directly and by name as part of the process of a sexist system sweeping them and their accusations under the rug. The problem is the system, not whether the accuser's name is published.
3. In fact, publicizing an accuser's name will enable the prosecution to be swept under the rug through trying, judging, and executing the accuser in the aforementioned court of public opinion, by slut-shaming the woman, and thereby dismissing her and her accusations. Ergo, publishing her name doesn't improve the perceived situation, it just allows women to be disregarded in a particular way. Come, come, if there's anything the experience of being a woman subject to some sort of sexual assault has taught us, it's that no woman is safe from the rending claws of being judged a slut in the court of public opinion, or, having her assault treated dismissively ("oh, come on, it wasn't really *rape*"), or, incomprehensibly, both at once.
4. The examples Wolf gives are disingenuous - she conflates accusations within a private university and the military-sexist complex with a criminal case in state or federal court. How, when someone has been charged with a crime and is being prosecuted, does not publishing the name of their alleged victim(s) stop that process from going forward? It's already going forward.
5. Not publishing the name of a victim protects their privacy and protects them from #3 listed above. It is the *accused* who has the right to see and cross-examine his accuser in a court of law (at least in the U.S.), not "everybody else."
6. Wolf says that publishing the names of rape victims helps show others that anyone can be raped. Disingenous again, as the class of persons most often victimized (women) know this already. We are taught it every day.
7. Wolf asks, "Can judicial decision-making be impartial when the accused is exposed to the glare of media scrutiny and attack by the US government, while his accusers remain hidden?" - her implicit answer is 'no', but how is it rectified by publishing his accusers' names? After all, can judicial decision-making be impartial when the accusers are exposed to the glare of media scrutiny and attack by the crushing weight of a patriarchal system, while the accused's 'honor' remains untouched? Or he's even considered, approvingly, as a 'stud'?
8. "It is no one's business whom a victim of sex crime has had sex with previously, or what she was wearing when attacked. Laws exist to protect women from such inquiries." And yet, still, she is judged. And vilified. And threatened. And treated like she is the criminal. Anonymity is not the cause of those behaviors.

The problem isn't that women should be treated like adults (moral or otherwise). The problem is that women aren't treated like, you know, men.

Honestly. What crap will I read next?

Don't Sit There and Pretend That You Had Nothing To Do With It

You purveyors of hate speech against liberals, you normalizers of violence against people for being a different political party than you. You made this possible. You incited this. You. You. You.

Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords shot

Latest Developments in Arizona Shooting

ETA:

Political 'Vitriol' Cited in Arizona Shooting

Following Giffords Shooting, Sarah Palin's Crosshairs Website Quickly Scrubbed From Internet

Grijalva: Tea Party Must Look At Their Own Behavior

Such Mind-Blowing Hubris from the Religious Set

This is what I have to say to those who claim God will smite down California for letting two women get married:

If your god is truly infinite, all-knowing and all-powerful, how can you ever presume to know His Will? To suggest that God will strike down California with a mighty earthquake is appalling hubris, claiming that you know what God wants, thinks, truly desires. How dare anyone claim to be humble before their Lord and God and also claim to know His Mind with this clarity? How can an imperfect creation contain His Perfection?

The two concepts cannot be reconciled, and thus I say unto you who try to wield God's wroth as your own weapon: you lie. You lie vilely, and you betray your faith in the process. I pity you for your smallness.

Bye 2010, and Good Riddance

I was just reading Wil Wheaton's end of 2010 post, and happy that 2010 was a good year for him. It's funny how you feel you know someone you've never met, but Wil has that gift of being real, only online, and yet maintaining his privacy, and it's something I've admired about him for a long time.

But I wish 2010 had been a good year for me; I believe, overall, it hasn't. I have a day job, that's good. I quit working as a librarian (job #2), which was good (tired...too tired) and bad (money) and continued working as a professor in the fall (job #3). I like professoring. You always learn when you teach.

Basically, I struggled a lot to keep my head above water and it doesn't seem to have made any difference. Like large chunks of America, I'm pretty fucking depressed about the whole thing. From the bottom of this deep hole, 2011 doesn't look like it'll be any better.

End of an Era

No, no, I don't mean the end of 2010, though I hear that's sometime around now. I mean sidra.vitale.net does not exist anymore, and this blog is maintained fully on blogspot.com now (see the URL above?). Why, you ask? Because this is and always has been a Blogger blog, and I used Blogger's FTP service to ftp the contents to sidra.vitale.net, which was a webhost with ftp access back-when and now keeps ftp access as some sort of legacy thing (Christ. FTP a 'legacy' thing. *shakes head* In Internet time, I'm fucking ancient.*) that's bound to die just like Blogger killed their FTP functionality last year or so, and no room/access to do something like install WordPress or MovableType. And so, there was no point to keeping it once it expired this year. And every dollar counts, you know.

I miss the innocent days of Internet's youth, I really do. Remember Gopher? Archie? Telnet? Remember Usenet? Building a computer from spare parts? (Dare I breathe the word...bboard?) Back in the halcyon days, http was one protocol among many. Wow.

Humans do tend to gravitate toward visual user interfaces, don't we? Although, texting has been giving the full-feature Internet a run for its money. It will be interesting to see what (new or existing) technology dominates in another 10-20 years.

The world has changed so much...but, *still* no flying cars. As I remarked in a recent Twitter post (speaking of the world changing), I can pretty much watch a movie anywhere in the world on a portable device of some kind, and yet, no flying car. The Future(tm) has its priorities wrong.

* Oh, don't look at me like that. If you're reading this post at all, you're most likely equally ancient in Internet time, or older. But we look *awesome* for our age, right?

Some Knob Decides to Boycott American Women

Idiot Starts Boycott of American Women.

Knock yourself out, kid. You just boycott away.

What I find interesting in his litany of complaints is essentially that American women are least likely to know that their place is to remain beauty-compliant, good cooks, and want to have (and presumably raise) gobs of kids. Because everything he's saying boils down to American Women (we are a monolithic group-mind entity, you know that, right?) acting like their needs and desires matter as much as his is offensive to his delicate masculine sensibilities. After all, to ol' Dougie here, it's not like women are real people or anything. So why do American women have to go around acting like it? What's the world coming to?!

Good luck on the boycott, Doug.

Today is the Intl Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers

Today is International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.

It Just Blows My Obstreperal Lobe Every Time

That you, male person in a suit jacket in a court walking purposefully with papers, assume that I, female person in a suit jacket (and, admittedly, sneakers rather than heels) in a court walking purposefully with papers, am not also a member of the ever-so-cool Lawyer Club. Just. Like. You. Only with different gonads.

This is supposed to be the twenty-first century.

To My 4th-Grade Teacher Mr. O'Mary

Thank you, sir, for the moment when you called me aside and told me that I had very high test scores and asked me if I understood what that meant, and when I said 'no', told me the most important thing anyone in my life ever told me:

That means you can be anything you want when you grow up. You can do anything you put your mind to, that's what this means.

I say thank you, sir, for telling me that before anyone ever got to me and tried to tell me that girls can't do math. I say thank you, sir, because you believed what you said, and I believed what you said, far, far more than I believed strangers who looked at me funny for liking 'boy stuff.' I say thank you, sir, because I believe that statement circumvented a great deal of the stereotype gap for me so that I never doubted I could be a scientist if I wanted to. Not only did I believe I was as good as if not better than every man I ever met in the physics program at UC Irvine - I had my 4th-grade teacher to prove it.

I have never, in my life, questioned my ability to learn something, or be something, if I put my mind to it. Now, I *am* an INTJ, and learning things is what we do, but your simple statement codified my belief system for me at a young age, too young for me to even realize it. Well timed, sir, and well put. Thank you, sir, for helping clear my way.

Here's to Friends

Here's to friends.

And now for something completely different:

I shocked the hell out of the Tortoiseshell of Gondor the other day. Poor kitty. It all started (hey, wait, don't leave, everyone on the Internet likes cat stories, right?) while I was in the shower and I heard an odd noise, so I pulled back the curtain and the ToG was in the hall outside the bathroom, so I called her name to make sure she was OK, and when she trotted over, all "Mom's talking to me!" and reared up to put her front paws on the edge of the tub as I bent down to make eye contact with her (I'm nearsighted) she got this utterly HORRIFIED look on her face. I mean, her little kitty jaw dropped and her eyes got like saucers when she realized there was WATER coming from a THING in THE WALL. OH GOD, THE HORROR.

Needless to say, the ToG left the field of valor with some alacrity. Discretion, you know, being the better part, and all that.

"Stop Being Such a Scientist!" - No, Stop Being Jackasses

On Living on Earth (NPR) this morning there was an interview with Randy Olson, who has written "Stop Being Such a Scientist", a book that, I understand from the interview, urges scientists to hone their communication skills and start telling stories because that's what you need to get people to understand and engage with whatever the scientific idea is.

Now, OK. Excellent idea. Scientists do need to do this. But, one of the questions asked of Olson at one point implies isn't this a condescending book, telling scientists (!) to learn how to talk down to dumb schlubs properly because the lay audience is simply that fucking stupid? Well, yeah. But here's the problem (Olson evaded this implication of the question pretty well): as long as we live in an American society that devalues and insults intelligence, you bet your ass scientists need a book to teach them how to sneak scientific knowledge into cool stories, and that such an approach is necessary. The problem isn't scientists learning how to tell cool stories, which is a skill of great value in any society because humans relate and learn through stories, but that America has raised generations of people to make fun of anyone who cares about shit enough to learn something complicated and be passionately engaged with their work, and to marginalize and ignore what they have to say.

Bitch, Esq.

Given how much time I spend lamenting things, legal, feministical (that's a word, I just made it up is all) in addition to providing color commentary on life, the universe, and everything, should I change the name of this blog from ...Parenthetically Speaking to Bitch, Esq.?

Conundrums, conundrums.