Ed Brayton’s Good Cause

Friend of FtB Ed Brayton is trying to help a victim of domestic violence and her 3 year old child move across the country (Arizona to Michigan) to escape an abuser and reach family members who can help her til she gets on her feet.

Go read his original post, and if you are able and feel inclined, please donate. Moving cross country can be expensive and the “just rough it” strategies for saving money are dramatically less possible when you have a 3 year old child who would have to rough it with you.

Also, anti-domestic violence used to be my field before I went into law, so if you need attention to a particular anti-violence cause or have particular questions related to anti-sexual violence or anti-domestic violence that you want to ask, please feel free to let me know in the comments or even send me an e-mail (though I don’t check this account daily) at my nym, cripdyke, on the google mail domain (.com, of course).

Ireland and Michael Nugent Win One – A Good One & A Big One.

So, the Irish constitutional provision authorizing the criminalization of blasphemy has now been repealed. This means that to the extent that the constitution of Ireland protects speech, it will now protect it just as extensively when that speech has religious content as it previously did when the content was other than religious. The Guardian notes that, while this is a win for all of Ireland (with 65% voting on the winning side and all Irish gaining in freedom), Michael Nugent and Atheist Ireland have been advocating for this for a long time:

“It means that we’ve got rid of a medieval crime from our constitution that should never have been there,” said Michael Nugent, chairperson of Atheist Ireland, which had campaigned for years to have blasphemy taken out of the constitution.

Nugent said the result was another important step towards realigning national laws with contemporary Irish life.

“The population has moved on, [people are] no longer controlled by the Catholic church, but a lot of the laws that were put in place are still there,” he added. “We have to chip away at them and get the state to catch up with the people.”

I know nothing about Irish politics, but this bit sounds good too:

Voters also returned president Michael Higgins to office, giving the 77-year-old poet and human rights campaigner another seven-year term by a comfortable margin.

65%+ voted a few months ago to repeal the Irish constitutional ban on abortion. 65% voted to repeal the Irish constitutional blasphemy exemption from free expression protections. And 55% voted to reelect a “human rights campaigner” to the office of the Irish presidency.

Of course, there is a snake in the grass, Ireland or no. The 2nd place finisher in the presidential election was Peter Casey who was polling dismally just days ago, but shot up to 20%+ by throwing hatred and demeaning stereotypes at Irish travelers, then defending his prejudice by insisting that it can’t be that bad, because it’s not racism, because the travelers don’t constitute a race.

The fact that Casey got more than 20% should be an embarrassment as well as a check on the potentially pacifying exuberance that can easily come in the wake of successful campaigns for positive change.

So congratulations, Ireland, but please don’t get overconfident.

 

 

Accountability Is The ONLY Radical Idea: Oh, and look what we have here!

I’ve been saying for years now that accountability is the only radical idea. You can propose single payer health care, you can propose shutting down entire federal agencies, you can propose a post-racial, post-sexual orientation society where everyone gets randomly assigned sex partners for 6 days before sex partners are randomly reassigned for the next 6 days, but nothing about any of those ideas is radical unless there are actual consequences for failing to implement them.

You can have the most hare-brained scheme proposed by the most hairy-eyed word-bomb thrower*1, but hare-brained schemes tend not to get actual implementation, and when things get hard, people will give up unless the consequences for giving up are worse than the consequences for moving forward.

So think about it: which would produce more screaming about radical change, a US president saying that they’re working on a proposal to tighten the laws and increase the penalties for white collar crimes, or a US president restructuring the justice department’s priorities so that no laws are changed, no new crimes are created, but every time a company is found to have committed a crime, the justice department actually sends the people that run the company to jail for conspiracy to commit that crime? ShearsonLehman defrauds investors and profits to the tune of US$12 billion, then negotiates with the feds to reduce the financial penalty down to US$250 million? Okay. That sucks. We’re incentivizing lawbreaking right? But if the top 200 corporate officers each spend a minimum of 12 years in prison, that’s a fuck of a lot more incentive for ShearsonLehman not to break the law going forward than the profit is an incentive to break the law. Also, when fucking EVERYONE involved in the conspiracy goes to jail, you get a fuckload more whistleblowers because they don’t want to be the least powerful person in the conspiracy, with no way to stop the fraud from getting too brazen, but with just as much criminal culpability as the persons at the very top of the corporation. The net result is a hell of a lot more effective than adding new penalties to some dusty book of laws without ever providing a credible threat than any executives will face any consequences at all.

Accountability, then, is the ultimate – and ultimately the only – radical idea. This is also why accountability is as rare as a mountain-dwelling tree wearing a tricorn and denying the existence of the FSM in front of CNN’s cameras on Talk Like A Pirate Day.

But wouldn’t you know it, while NBC isn’t willing to create actual structures of accountability, it appears that they’re actually going ahead with a little accountability mimicry. And not just NBC, but apparently at least one talent agency as well. “What’s that?” you ask. “What is our fair Crip Dyke on about?” It is just this: Megyn Kelly has been mutually dumped by her current talent-rep agency, and while apparently there has been a movement towards separation for a while now, the agency that Kelly was courting for her next monagentous relationship called off the engagement. You want more? Kelly’s ultimate boss, NBC News Chair Andy Lack, has made it clear he’s kicking her to the curb.

“But accountability mimicry?” you say. “Dear Crip Dyke, wouldn’t this be actual accountability?” I understand the inclination to think so, but that’s not exactly likely. If you read the article, NBC has been upset with Kelly about ratings, they’ve been upset about her insensitivity pissing off her guests in ways that created bad publicity for the show, and most of all they’ve been upset because – with notable exceptions during discussions of Kavanaugh and the guys to whom she wants to show actual favoritism – she repeatedly returns to the topic of sexual harassment in the workplace and expresses the opinion that guys should get fired for that shit. Of particular note, she has criticized NBC personalities and the NBC brass – including, yes, Andy Lack – for an environment in which sexual harassment is allowed to flourish. Andy Lack might be particularly upset about that last one because it comes across as actually being true, given all the evidence and shit.

So now when Megyn Kelly decides to rant about how blackface is just a jolly-happy-funtime and can’t we all just agree to let a little racism slide between whites, the outrage among many people around the country is certainly genuine, and the outrage among prominent Black presenters on NBC is probably genuine, but there are good reasons to question whether consequences imposed by management are actually motivated by her racism. This may not be accountability so much as backstabbing, revenge, and an effort to secure impunity for sexual harassers and the managers who enable them.

Nonetheless, I say celebrate. Break open that juice box and take a good, hard suck at that straw, because when people get fired on the pretext of their racism, sooner or later the 300 million people who aren’t following inside politics at the big media companies are going to think that racism is an actual fireable offense. This is a classic example of the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon unintentional performativity. Performativity is a concept most frequently associated with feminist Judith Butler, and is intended to describe acts that create the truths they portray. Someone who has no wife, but who tells your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke, “I take you as my wife,” may very well (if certain preconditions are met) actually gain a wife by saying those words. Performativity is especially important in the Butlerian analysis of gender where a person say, “I am a woman,” far less frequently using actual language as such a person might do by brushing on some eye shadow or donning a dress. And, in performing gender in this way, one may very well become a woman at least for the purposes of how others will treat you on that day. But here’s the thing, if one does that often enough, then one gets treated as a woman with regularity, and in being treated as a woman with regularity, the psychological and sociological traits that adhere to women eventually adhere to the person performing womanhood. At that point, one might be said to have become a woman through performing womanhood and the performativity cycle, though much longer than even a wedding, is finally complete.

In the case of unintentional performativity, one can accidentally initiate this cycle. Of course, it’s not actually peformativity if the performance does not eventually create the reality, so unintentional performativity is not a one-off. It must actually begin or continue a pattern that eventually creates the reality it depicts.

Let me be clear: I do not think that NBC is getting rid of Kelly because of her racism. However, taking advantage of her racism to fire someone that NBC dislikes for other reasons requires making the case that it is reasonable to fire someone for their racism. Moreover, Kelly has a contract which is guaranteed unless she is fired for a sufficiently serious cause. So if NBC really wants to keep their money, and/or if they really want to hurt Kelly (the latter being the more likely motive), they have to make the case that it is not only reasonable to fire someone for a defense of blackface, but that it is unreasonable not to fire someone for such statements.

NBC, then, while clearly anti-accountability judging by the tolerance they showed to Matt Lauer and others, is going to be making the public case that those who use prominent media positions to spread racism must always be fired. We may suspect that an institution like NBC with its history of tolerating sexism and racism has other motives, but in portraying racism as a fireable offense, NBC is making racism a fireable offense.

Make no mistake, this is a feud between different members of the wealthy and powerful, and none of those directly involved actually want accountability for the wealthy and powerful. And yet, what today begins as mere consequence will someday become the outcome of accountability.

Today is a very, very good day.


*1: One of my favorite commenting pseudonyms in the ever!

Plausible Theory Wednesday: Donald Trump Sent Bombs To Political Enemies

I feel compelled to note that evidence has not yet ruled out the theory that Trump ordered close family members to send bombs to prominent elected democrats, democratic fundraisers, and media outlets Trump considers unfriendly. The theory that Trump did so in order to assassinate political opponents and usher in a permanent Presidential revolution must be the subject of investigation.

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Presented Without Comment: “I Thought I Was Going To Die”

Content Note for, like, almost everything.

And to be clear, it’s not that I don’t want to comment, it’s simply that i don’t know what to say about setting someone’s hair on fire:

A 13-year-old girl is recovering after a classmate set her hair on fire, while other kids looked on laughing.

The incident happened while she was waiting at a bus stop, two blocks from the Gompers School, last Tuesday. Eighth-grader Nevaeh Robinson says a fellow classmate used a lighter to set her hair on fire.

“When it happened, I panicked real fast, because I thought I was going to die because it burned my hair so fast,” she said.

Don’t think that everything is okay except for this one minor “lighting another kid on fire” incident either:

Two years ago, a classmate broke Nevaeh’s thumb at another school.

I’ll let Nevaeh’s mom say a few words:

Robinson wants to see the bully kicked out of school.

“I want expulsion if you’re setting kids on fire,” said Robinson.

Ya think?

 

 

This Is Your Megyn Kelly On Blackface

Truly political correctness has gone amok!

says Megyn Kelly, political savant terrible hosting NBC’s Today show. What is the great calamity this time? Well, universities’ fascist policing of student behavior, of course!

Okay, but what, precisely, today, is so much more fascist than universities’ behavior on other days? Megyn Kelly lets us know:

There are strict rules on what you may and may not wear issued by someone who thinks they’re the boss of you.

Oh, joy, this sounds fun! What are the rules? Who are the horrible victims here? Could it be white people? Why, yes! Yes it could!

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Must. Not. Reference. Princess. Bride.

Oh, holy heck Mike Pence: you would leave me no choice except for the fact that you’re so damn obvious about it that I don’t have to write the (now tired and old) joke myself. From the Washington Post, when Pence was asked if Trump might not be telling the actual literal truth about that migrant caravan:

Well, it’s inconceivable that there are not people of Middle Eastern descent in a crowd of more than 7,000 people advancing toward our border

He went on to give folks an important lesson in geography, at least according to the more extensive RawStory reporting of his remarks:

“There are statistics on this,” Pence insisted. “In the last fiscal year we apprehended 10 terrorists or suspected terrorists per day at our southern border — from countries that are referred to as ‘other than Mexico,’” the vice president said. “That means from the Middle East region.”

Ah, yes. The administration that struggles to define sex and gender now struggles to define Mexico – that country which includes, apparently, every land on earth that is not the United States or the Middle East.

fFs: I can haz kompuhtent leedr nao?