Dear Wingnuttia,
Congratulations. With this latest five-alarm inferno of assembly-line red-baiting stupid you have finally roasted the shark that you gleefully keep jumping over and covered its charred remains in a burial shroud that maybe-kinda-sorta looks like scary Muslim head gear. Try not to choke on any donuts in the midst of your perpetual orgy of faux-outrage.
Hugs and kisses,
mattt-che-hussein-arafat-motherfucking-free-mumia-bastard
(h/t maha)
by matttbastard
Hmmm:
Vets for Freedom is a swiftboating group attacking Barack Obama, and the McCain campaign is using the exact same attack. There are close ties between the two organizations: have they illegally coordinated their activities?
How close are these “close ties”?
Two of John McCain’s campaign co-chairs, Senators Lindsay Graham and Joe Lieberman, turn out to be advisers to an anti-Obama 527. There’s nothing illegal about this, but it does violate McCain’s stated policy of not…having members of his campaign team also work with 527s involved in the presidential campaign.
I’m sure the Man Crush Express will soon be all over this less-than-straight talk like sprinkles on donuts.
Yep.
Any day now…
by matttbastard
Nothing says teh funnah quite like a user-generated snuff film:
In the video, a group of male co-workers bored at work begin to chant Boys v. Girls as a challenge. Thing is, there’s only one female in the group, so it’s essentially all the boys ganging up on one girl to torment her…brutalize her…violate her…and eventually kill her. Then they’re seen dragging her body into a storage area for the dead bodies of all the other female co-workers with whom they’ve evidently played this fun game.
Web 2.0 just made satire do a full 360 in its grave (and yours truly throw up a little bit in his mouth). Again, Backlash = user manual for the zeitgeist–with Henry Makow playing the role of tour guide.
(Note: if you want to watch the vid, Liss has posted it at her pad–view at your own risk. )
by matttbastard
The BBC reports that over 100 nations have reached an agreement to ban the use of cluster bombs–with a notable abstention (yeah, I think you know what’s coming):
[I]n a statement, the Pentagon stood firm, saying: “While the United States shares the humanitarian concerns of those in Dublin, cluster munitions have demonstrated military utility, and their elimination from US stockpiles would put the lives of our soldiers and those of our coalition partners at risk.”
You know, at this point, I for one am sick to death of this (selective) obsession with demonstrable military utilitarianism and how it trumps basic fucking human rights and the lives of civilians. (Remember them? Technically, you aren’t allowed to kill them–wild, I know.) Let me second Cernig’s demand that the next US president break ranks with the kewl kidz in Russia, China, India and Pakistan (thank Christ the Harpercrats tepidly support the treaty, for now, at least), hold his or her nose, and join noted dirty fucking hippies like Pope Benedict XVI and United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in support of the ban.
by matttbastard
[I]gnoring “the little things” in favor of “the big stuff” makes the big stuff that much harder to eradicate, because it is the pervasive, ubiquitous, inescapable little things that create the foundation of a sexist culture on which the big stuff is dependent for its survival. It’s the little things, the constant drumbeat of inequality and objectification, that inure us to increasingly horrible acts and attitudes toward women.
– Melissa McEwan, Feminism 101: “Feminists Look for Stuff to Get Mad About”
(h/t Alberta: Get Rich or Die Trying for the video)
by matttbastard
I wonder if this brilliantly ridiculous idea was conceived in the zealously modest environs of Orlando…
by matttbastard
Historian Andrew J. Bacevich discusses the new American militarism.
by matttbastard
According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s News Coverage Index, coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has slipped to 3 percent of all American print and broadcast news as of last week, falling from 25 percent as recently as last September.
The.
Surge.
Is.
by matttbastard
Monica Roberts on transitioning, ethnicity and why names hold so much importance:
African-American mothers, as descendants of Africans, realize that there’s great importance to the name you choose for your child. It says a lot about the individual, their family and their connection to the community at large.
They spend a lot of time carefully putting together combinations of names, poring through various baby name books, and considering various factors in consultation with the father and sometimes the soon to be grandparents before coming up with that combination of three names that gets entered onto your birth certificate soon after you exit the birth canal and enter the world.
Names carry a lot of weight in our binary gendered society, and transpeople know this reality all too well. It’s why one of the first things we do when we finally start making those moves to transition is choosing a name that accurately represents who we are. It’s one reason why our fundamentalist enemies spend so much time making it hard for us to legally change our names and the gender markers to go with those names.
I believe that some of the negative friction that happens between transpeople and their mothers is fueled in one small way by the fact that many of us unilaterally choose our new names as part of the process.
Granted, some of that friction is caused by the parents rejecting their child in the early wake of the child’s announcement of their wish to transition. But sometimes when we logically paint the worst-case scenario for transition and presume that we’re going to get cut off from our immediate family’s love and it doesn’t happen, then I submit that one way to facilitate bonding of our families into the transition process is to allow them that input in the name change decision.
As they say, read the whole damn thing.
h/t Liss
bastard.logic 