Random spam generator?
It’s increasingly difficult to tell them apart:
Sex crime springs from fantasy, hallucination, delusion, and obsession. A random young woman becomes the scapegoat for a regressive rage against female sexual power: “You made me do this.” Academic clichés about the “commodification” of women under capitalism make little sense here: It is women’s superior biological status as magical life-creator that is profaned and annihilated by the barbarism of sex crime.
This is hilarious. Check out Tenured Radical today. And you thought that not-so-concealed, not really carrying idiot in Idaho last week was going to be the dip$hit of the month! To wit:
Preeminent Native American historian Jeani O’Brien wrote to UI Board of Trustees Chair Christopher Kennedy to ask him to reverse UI’s decision to un-hire Steven Salaita, and to say that considering the climate of intellectual liberty at UI, she’s super-duper glad that she turned down the university’s offer to become Director of Native American Studies a few years back. She prefaced her two-paragraph letter with the words “I’ll be brief.” Kennedy’s entire response: “You were not brief enough.”
OK, that was intemperate and clearly demonstrates that the public pressure is getting to him. His email to O’Brien was an unforced error, but here’s the really boneheaded move: he left his personal contact information in his email to her, including an office and cell phone number, which Tenured Radical in her blog post today omitted out of an abundance of civility. It’s like he’s just now learning about this new technology “electronic mail,” or “email” for short, that (a la Stephen Greenblatt 20+ years ago) is all about the “infinite mimesis.” Yes! One assy email can richochet around the nation and the world for others to behold and wonder at your assholery, on blogs and Twitter and Instagram and Pinterest and you name it. Nothing ever goes away on the internet. Continue reading
Lucky dog!
My weekends are just too freakin’ short this semester, as I’m teaching two lecture classes on a MWF schedule. I honestly don’t mind teaching three days a week–I’m just frustrated that I don’t have a discretionary extra day to prep for Monday lectures, finish the neverending piles of grading, etc., let alone think for 20 minutes about how to get back to writing my book and figuring out what needs to happen archival research-wise before I make my base camp at the feet of the San Gabes. What’s with the MWF; can’t we get a MWR, or a MTR, or a TWF? Let the people who teach twice a week show up on Mondays and Fridays, as they’ll have three weekdays in-between without classes to TCB.
I know this is an academic blog, but you didn’t come here to see me b!tch about my mostly-imaginary and very temporary frustrations now, did you? So here are some random tidbits of THC, TBD (The Big Dog), and OMs on TDIS (Thank Dog It’s Saturday).
I’ve been thinking about marriage today–gay, straight, what have you. Fratguy and I have been in a civil union for 15 years. I think that’s the right term, as we were “married” by a notary (you can do that in Maine), but because we’re an opposite-sex couple, everyone calls us “married,” although neither of us wanted to darken the door of any church in the service of enacting our civil union.
But you get used to this kind of thing when you’re in a straight union–a lot of the time you benefit from other people’s assumptions about you. It means (for example) that you don’t have to carry around your marriage license as proof of your legal relationship. The words “husband” and “wife” really are magic in that respect–I’ve never been asked to prove it. My husband’s agreement about our status suffices.
Sometimes those assumptions are annoying–such as when other people lay their trip about what marriage is on you, and judge your marriage by their standards, not yours. (These assumptions are almost always about the behavior of women in marriages, not the men they’re married to. Men usually benefit from the assumptions people make about them as married men, even if those assumptions are totally wrong.)
In any case, this is all just a windup to direct you to go read Madwoman with a Laptop‘s thoughts on her 29 years with the woman whose wife she will never be, along with a really thoughtful analysis of civil unions, gay marriage, and her very intentional rejection of marriage and wifedom although her state now permits same-sex marriage. Continue reading
OK, OK–I know it’s getting tiresome to read about me being right all of the time. But–seriously: Who ever would have predicted that it’s a bad idea to appoint a man to the U.S. Senate who never ran for office or won a single vote in his entire frikkin’ life? The Denver Post reports today on a new Survey USA poll on all of our statewide races, but of course the result that is really interesting is the poll showing former Colorado Speaker of the House Andrew Romanoff pulling slightly ahead of Unelected Senator Michael Bennet in the August 10 primary, 48 to 45 percent (margin of error 4.1 percent) with 8 percent of Democrats undecided as to how they’ll vote. (That’s a twenty-point turnaround from where the race was in a mid-June Denver Post poll, with Bennet at 53 and Romanoff at 36.) ColoradoPols has some analysis here–clearly, they’re crapping their pants because they’ve been mocking and laughing at Romanoff’s campaign all year long and have been shilling pretty hard for Bennet for reasons that are difficult to fathom. (Strangely, they spin this poll as “a story you already know.” Well, not if you’ve been following ColoradoPols for the past year!)
The Denver Post article has a pretty good laff line here: “‘The fact that Bennet has Barack Obama ads on everyone’s television screens multiple times a day right now shows that he’s scrambling to win this primary,’ said Eric Sondermann, a Denver political consultant. ‘That is not an ad you’d run in the general election.'” Well, no wonder Romanoff is pulling ahead. If Bennet thinks running ads featuring President Obama here is a good idea even in a Democratic primary, then he’s a bigger idiot than even I would have guessed. Obama is not popular here, not even among Democrats, and especially not among the kinds of Democrats who are inclined to mail in a vote this week. Even many liberal Coloradoans go for the “I’m an independent thinker and I’ll represent the people of Colorado against Washington interests” blah blah blah. This is a state that likes its mavericky Senators, left, right, or center.
Here’s a little recap as to why I think Bennet is such a supreme tool: Continue reading
Check out Lara Logan’s comments on Michael Hastings’ reporting on General Stanley McChrystal in Rolling Stone last week. She says:
“Michael Hastings, if you believe him, says that there were no ground rules laid out. And, I mean, that just doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me,” she said, adding that she knows McChrystal’s staff and McChrystal doesn’t have a history of interacting with the press. “I mean, I know these people. They never let their guard down like that. To me, something doesn’t add up here. I just — I don’t believe it. “
So far, no one–neither the General nor his staff of Lost Boys–has said that Hastings’ reportage wasn’t accurate. There’s always going to be some carping and jawing when someone gets scooped, but all you have to do is read Hastings’ article to see why he was privy to a lot of talk and behavior that Logan never saw in her years on the war beat for CBS in Iraq and Afghanistan. From “The Runaway General:”
“Who’s he going to dinner with?” I ask one of his aides.
“Some French minister,” the aide tells me. “It’s fucking gay.” Continue reading
Don't we already have enough rich, white "Teds" in the Senate?
What???? You mean it wasn’t a super-duper awesomely fabulous idea to appoint a man to the U.S. Senate with zero political experience and without him ever having proven he could win a single vote? Who indeed ever would have predicted this?
It’s an early poll, so take it for what it’s worth, but both Governor Bill Ritter and Senator Michael Bennet face an uphill battle for (re)election. It couldn’t happen to more deserving white ruling-class d00dly d00dz! Continue reading
Tenured Radical has a boffo deuce of posts this week: First, in “More Annals of the Great Depression: What Divides Us, and Why,” she writes about the fact that the budget-crisis hill some of her colleagues want to die on is the (astonishingly generous!) tuition benefit at her university, although it is only for children of faculty members. She writes,
I would like to point out that the loose coalition of the willing that does not consider this cut unthinkable is made up of gay people and straight people; the coupled and the uncoupled; the married and the unmarried; those who have dependent (or formerly dependent) children and those who do not. I mention this because one of the first things people make sure to tell me in particular is that they are not homophobic (you know what? If you feel you have to say this, you are homophobic. I didn’t bring it up, you did.) Several of the kinder scolds suggested that we who were not with the program would understand this issue better if we actually had children and better understood the sacred bond between parent and child. The most ignorant argued that the childless were not excluded from this benefit, and could access it any time we liked by having, adopting or inheriting children. Of all the unspoken assumptions, perhaps the one best masking itself as intellectual common sense was that we who are childless at Zenith do have a moral and ethical commitment to our colleagues’ children, because it is these children who, as adult workers, will earn the professional wages to pay for our government benefits in retirement.
In other words, because I haven’t had children, regardless of how much I have paid into Social Security over the years, I will become a welfare queen in old age. And as I sign my government checks over to the BMW dealership and the grog shop, it will not be just any children who support me in the style to which I am now accustomed, but the children of my Zenith colleagues. . . .
No, they respond: nothing will do but an unlimited benefit reserved exclusively for the children of Zenith. Continue reading
Well, it looks like I won’t have to be the one to spark a Colorado Democratic primary fight after all: Former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff has filed papers to challenge our appointed U.S. Senator, “just one vote” Michael Bennet.
The two of them are both straight, white, male, Wonder Bread twins–neither of them could win a one-man charm contest. Romanoff will have to run to Bennet’s left, which will be a good thing. (And there’s plenty of room to swim around in over there!) Romanoff’s background isn’t quite as posh as Bennet’s, and he has the advantage of having run and won several elections. Accordingly, Romanoff has statewide connections with labor, Latinos, and the Dem machine–none of which Bennet had until last January, or has in any depth now. (Most of his money has come from out-of-state–Daddy’s rich friends and the Old School Ties presumably swung into action for him, to the tune of $900,000!) Continue reading
Meghan McCain
24 year-old Meghan McCain was one of the few bright spots of her father John McCain’s presidential campaign last year, and she’s deeply concerned about what she sees as the Republican party’s lack of message for young people. (And personally, I think she’s right–although it’s not like the Democrats have all that many prominent young leaders in their camp, either.) Well, 44 year-old talk radio host Laura Ingraham has decided that a trenchant critique of Megan McCain’s ideas is beyond her, so she has resorted to name-calling, as in, McCain is “too plus sized to be a cast member on the television show The Real World.” Nice. Well, this is what you get when you advance the eminently sane argument that Ann Coulter is a nutter, not to mention an ineffective spokesperson for selling the G.O.P. to the younger generation: ” I find her offensive, radical, insulting, and confusing all at the same time. . . . if figureheads like Ann Coulter are turning me off, then they are definitely turning off other members of my generation as well. She. . . appeal[s] to the most extreme members of the Republican Party—but they are dying off, becoming less and less relevant to the party structure as a whole.”
McCain is correct–the G.O.P. has a major youth problem, and based on conversations with my students, jumping up and down about gay marriage and Bill Clinton’s sex life in the 1990s is, shall we say, not the way to go, my friends. The majority of people in their twenties don’t even understand, let along share, the animosity towards gay people and gay marriage that motivates the older end of the Republican base, and please recall–even 29 year-olds today were only eighteen when Clinton was impeached. For better or worse, they just don’t care about the signal event that made the careers of right-wing pundits like Ingraham and Coulter. Continue reading
Historiann 