The Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Trump

So many of us have said for so long that Trump is authoritarian. Some of us even said Fascist, though that definition is up for debate and if it means anything, shouldn’t be merely a synonym of authoritarian.

Nonetheless, our warnings fell on 62,984,825 deaf ears. It seems that a heck of a lot of people thought that Trump might be hostile to some persons’ rights, but not their own rights.

Frankly it reminds me quite a bit of how in the anti-domestic/sexual violence community we’ve been saying for years that if someone can’t show respect to an intimate partner, that bodes ill for that person’s propensity to violence more generally. Since heterosexual relationships are most common, this has often taken the form of warning that men who abuse women need to be taken more seriously as threats to their communities. In a world where most lawmakers are men, men who didn’t fear they might end up in an abusive relationship with a man, the glowing-scarlet flag of intimate partner violence has been treated as little import. We’ve slowly changed perceptions so that at least the actual violence to the intimate partner is treated, legally, as violence against others might be. In other words, violence against women isn’t treated as a warning sign of future dangerousness to a community, but is more frequently than it once was taken as an actual violation of the laws against assaults and/or batteries.

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If you read one thing today, make it this

The Baton Rouge advocate reported yesterday that the mother of a baby killed in a car crash has been charged with negligent homicide.

I’m not one to say that the loss of a child is by definition punishment enough when a parent or parents are responsible for fatal injuries to a child. I’m perfectly fine with charging parents who refuse to get medical care in the face of an obvious health crisis. I’m fine doing that whether they did so because of some issue that ultimately has a reasonable basis (:cough: Tuskeegee :cough:) or whether they did so because of some issue that has nothing rational even at some distant core (:cough: faith healing :cough:). The charges, however, need to be proportionate. In this case, they clearly are not. But you’ll have to stay with me to get more on that later.  [Read more…]

Tamil Nadu’s Medical System is Making Me Sick

From Agence France-Presse via RawStory:

Thousands of poor women in India’s Tamil Nadu state have been offered free cosmetic breast surgery, including implants, its health minister said Friday, because “poor people also have a right to look beautiful”.

Fuck sexism right out of the universe.

When I say sexism kills, I’m not being metaphorical. I’ve argued (as have others) that feminisms save men’s lives. The easiest mechanism to trace is the reduction in women killing men who are intimate partners as anti-violence shelters become available in an area. This study estimates shelter/hotline availability to correlate with a 2/3rds reduction of murders of men by women in intimate relationships with those men. The correlated reduction was 87% in the case of such murders of Black men. Causation is trickier to prove, but there are a number of good reasons to believe that feminist actions generally and the availability of shelters and hotlines specifically did cause at least a significant portion of this decline.

While theoretically it’s possible to provide shelters and subsidized breast modification surgeries, you know that’s not how this works. Tamil Nadu is now using its medical service to bolster sexism … which, I’m sure, will ultimately cost lives.

As I said: fuck sexism right out of the universe.

Putting Noah to Shame

Imagine a male African American baby born in the US in 2012. According to the CDC and the NVSS, that baby would have a life expectancy of 72.3 years. Now imagine that baby ends up living more than 3600 years. Trans folk and other persons, I bring you the Opportunity Rover.

Expected to have a life of 90 Martian days (90 rotations of Mars or about 92 days and 8 hours on earth), the Opportunity Rover has now been performing tasks of exploration and discovery for 5000 Sols – over 14 years and 18 days on Earth (5128.5 days).

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A Demonstrated Talent For The Job

Public Relations is the art of using mass communication to change how people feel about politicians, celebrities, products, and especially entire corporations. One Spanish woman, Carla Forcada, felt she had the capacity to do this work quite well. The company where she applied to work, Impulsa Comunicación, had other thoughts on the matter. Ever mindful of the benefits of Public Relations, Forcada screen cap’d their message to her and aided them in making it reach further than they ever imagined:

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