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Javier E

The Sexual Politics of 2016 - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is a revolution in manners, a rejection of the civility codes of the educated class. As part of this, he rejects the new and balanced masculine/feminine ideal that has emerged over the past generation. Trump embraces a masculine identity — old in some ways, new in others — built upon unvarnished misogyny.
  • Traditional misogyny blames women for the lustful, licentious and powerful urges that men sometimes feel in their presence. In this misogyny, women are the powerful, disgusting corrupters — the vixens, sirens and monsters. This gynophobic misogyny demands that women be surrounded with taboos and purgation rituals, along with severe restrictions on behavior and dress.
  • Trump’s misogyny, on the other hand, has a commercial flavor. The central arena of life is male competition. Women are objects men use to win points in that competition. The purpose of a woman’s body is to reflect status on a man. One way to emasculate a rival man is to insult or conquer his woman.
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  • Trump represents the spread of something brutal. He takes economic anxiety and turns it into sexual hostility. He effectively tells men: You may be struggling, but at least you’re better than women, Mexicans and Muslims.
  • I’ve grappled with determining how much to blame Trump’s supporters for his rise. Many of them are victims of economic dislocation and it is hard to fault them for seeking a change, of course, even if it is simplistic and ignorant.
  • But in the realm of cultural politics, Trump voters do need to be held to account. They are participating in a descent into darkness. They are supporting a degrading wrong. This is the world your daughters are going to grow up in.
Javier E

Donald Trump has one core philosophy: misogyny - 0 views

  • Trump wants us to know all about his sex life. He doesn’t regard sex as a private activity. It’s something he broadcasts to demonstrate his dominance, of both women and men. In his view, treating women like meat is a necessary precondition for winning, and winning is all that matters in his world. By winning, Trump means asserting superiority. And since life is a zero-sum game, superiority can only be achieved at someone else’s expense.
  • It’s an entirely Darwinian view, where the alpha male has his pick of females, both as a perk and a means of flexing his power over lesser men. It’s the mindset that made his assertion of his penis size in a national debate almost an imperative—if he let the attack on his manhood slide, his entire edifice might crumble.
  • When he owned the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants, he would screen all the contestants. His nominal reason for taking on this role was to make sure that his lackeys weren’t neglecting any beauties. His real motive was to humiliate the women. He would ask a contestant to name which of her competitors she found “hot.” If he didn’t consider a woman up to his standards, he would direct her to stand with her fellow “discards.” One of the contestants, Carrie Prejean, wrote about this in her book, Still Standing: “Some of the girls were sobbing backstage after [Trump] left, devastated to have failed even before the competition really began ... even those of us who were among the chosen couldn’t feel very good about it—it was as though we had been stripped bare.”
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  • The joy he takes in humiliating women is not something he even bothers to disguise. He told the journalist Timothy L. O’Brien, “My favorite part [of the movie Pulp Fiction] is when Sam has his gun out in the diner and he tells the guy to tell his girlfriend to shut up. Tell that bitch to be cool. Say: ‘Bitch be cool.’ I love those lines.” Or as he elegantly summed up his view to New York magazine in the early ’90s, “Women, you have to treat them like shit.”
  • Women labor under a cloud of Trump’s distrust. “I have seen women manipulate men with just a twitch of their eye—or perhaps another body part,” he wrote in Trump: The Art of the Comeback. Working moms are particularly lacking in loyalty, he believes, and thus do not make for good employees. “She’s not giving me 100 percent. She’s giving me 84 percent, and 16 percent is going towards taking care of children,
  • This is one reason that evangelicals, both men and women, gravitate to Trump, despite his obvious lack of interest in religion and blatantly loose morals. He represents the possibility of a return to patriarchy, to a time when men were men, and didn’t have to apologize for it
  • In 1989, Trump had returned home from a painful scalp-reduction surgery, intended to remove a bald spot. His ex-wife Ivana had suggested the doctor—and he blamed her for his suffering. He held her arms and began pulling hair from her scalp, then tore off her clothes. Hurt writes: “Then he jams his penis inside her for the first time in more than sixteen months. Ivana is terrified … It is a violent assault. According to versions she repeats to some of her closest confidantes, ‘he raped me.’ ” When the story resurfaced last summer, Trump’s campaign disavowed it. When Hurt was writing his book, Trump’s lawyers forced the author to include a statement from Ivana in the book, “A Note to Readers,” which softens the account but doesn’t disavow it: “As a woman, I felt violated, as the love and tenderness, which he normally exhibited towards me, was absent. I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”
  • The scene offers a graphic summation of Trump’s retrograde beliefs and real brutality. What’s worse, the same spirit informs his politics—the rampant cruelty, the violent impulses, the thirst for revenge, the absence of compassion. Misogyny isn’t an incidental part of Donald Trump. It’s who he is.
anonymous

Seoul's Advice to Pregnant Women: Cook, Clean and Stay Attractive - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Before giving birth, check that your family has sufficient toilet paper. Prepare ready-made meals for your husband, who surely “is not good at cooking.” Tie up your hair, “so that you don’t look disheveled” even as you go without a bath. And after the baby arrives, keep a “small-size” dress in sight
  • the government can ill afford to fumble as it desperately tries to compel women to have more babies and reverse the world’s lowest birthrate
  • The pregnancy guidelines were first published on a government website in 2019. But they caught the attention of the public only in recent days, causing an outcry on social media
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  • Yong Hye-in, an activist and politician, said that under the guidelines, a woman’s child-rearing responsibilities were doubled by having to care for her husband too.
  • A petition started online last week, which has been signed by more than 21,000 people, called for a public apology from officials
  • While the most offensive parts of the guidelines have been removed, some of the advice remains online
  • Other countries in the region, including Japan — which also has an aging population and a low birthrate — have broad gender disparities, especially in relation to pregnancy.
  • “Why are we looking for the cause of the low birthrate from far away? It’s right here,” wrote one person on Twitter
  • It made no mention of any responsibilities for husbands. But it did have some suggestions for how to remain attractive to them.
  • Though South Korea has become an economic and cultural powerhouse, many women still experience misogyny in very practical terms
  • the gender pay gap in South Korea is the highest among its 37 member countries. Working women earn nearly 40 percent less than men, and many stop working when they have children, often pressured by their families and workplaces.
  • Women were also advised to check their household essentials so that their family members would “not be uncomfortable.”
  • These declining populations pose a threat to the countries’ economies, making it all the more important that governments tread carefully in incentivizing women to have children.
  • Ms. Vitale, who works primarily with foreign women married to Korean men, said that though Korean society had traditionally perceived pregnant women as “incapacitated,”
cartergramiak

Opinion | Trump's Misogyny Might Finally Catch Up With Him - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Several of the women said that, because they don’t believe what they hear from mainstream media, they have a hard time distinguishing truth from falsehood.
  • Another from the same state said she was “scared” about the election because she doesn’t trust Kamala Harris. A woman from Florida had already voted for Joe Biden, but a few of the others were considering voting third party.
  • I strongly suspect she’s remembering wrong — the “Access Hollywood” story would have been very hard to miss in October 2016. But it’s telling that she can no longer quite imagine how she could have supported Trump after hearing him boast about his penchant for sexual assault.
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  • Needless to say, there wasn’t. Most women did indeed vote for Hillary Clinton, but Trump won either a plurality or an outright majority of white women, enough to give him the presidency. There turned out to be far less of a political penalty for vulgar misogyny than some of us realized.
  • Then Trump’s incompetence came home. “Once the pandemic hit, once there were personal consequences for their lives, there was an absolute shift in how people talked about Donald Trump,” said Longwell.
  • She tries to avoid almost all political news, and doesn’t trust what she does come across. Where she lives, she said, she hasn’t seen a single Biden sign, and she knows very little about the former vice president. But she’s planning to vote for him. If women defeat Trump next month, it will be because of everything he’s done to defeat them first.
carolinehayter

With 'husbands' remark, Trump has sealed his fate with women (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

  • As President Donald Trump pleaded for the support of suburban women at a Michigan rally Tuesday evening (amidst a pandemic and economic crisis that have caused a mass exodus of women from the workforce), he argued that he deserved their votes because "we're getting your husbands back to work."
  • rump's assumption that all women have -- or should have -- husbands is also terribly retrograde and offensive and will almost certainly be off-putting to single women (among others
  • Biden's support among White women (the ones Trump is clearly angling for when he says "suburban") is 18 points higher than that of Hillary Clinton when she ran against Trump four years ago. But, with these latest remarks, the President has probably put the final nail in his own reelection chances with many women voters.
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  • Before Tuesday, it would have been hard to imagine how Trump could have offended women more than he already has. The president has, of course, been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women (allegations he denies) and been caught on tape bragging that he can get away with sexual assault. He has regularly disparaged and demeaned women -- including his own daughter -- by talking about their appearances rather than their accomplishments and by calling them offensive names.
  • misogynist but not necessarily a sexist. On Tuesday evening, Trump made clear that he is both.
  • A man who is a misogynist, according to Cornell philosopher Kate Manne, punishes women who won't do what he wants. Trump's behavior has long made it evident that he fits this bill. Meanwhile, a sexist, Manne says, believes men are better than women at things like business or sports.
  • Before Tuesday's comments, it wasn't entirely clear that Trump was a sexist; he did put some women in powerful positions in his administration and in the Trump Organization. But by appealing to suburban women to support him because he's helping their husbands, Trump suggested he believes the workplace is the proper domain of men. This is textbook sexism.
  • The implications here -- that he believes all women have or should have husbands and that workplaces are the province of men -- are so sexist and outmoded that they will likely alarm American women who have long become accustomed to inappropriate treatment from their commander in chief.
  • His sexism isn't even the most jaw-dropping of the implications made by these offensive remarks
  • Trump says he's looking out for the husbands, but it's women themselves who need help getting back to work: over 800,000 of the 1.1 million people who left the workforce between August and September were women, according to the National Women's Law Center
  • This is unsurprising, since job losses have been especially concentrated in sectors where there are more women
  • moms have also been disproportionately taking on the impossible burdens of trying to juggle work, childcare, and home schooling while their kids have been home during the pandemic.
  • But the exodus of this many women from the workplace will also be terrible for the country overall, because it will deprive many organizations of the well-established benefits of women's leadership and influence.
  • Companies with more women and cultural diversity have significantly better financial outcomes, according to the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. But it usually isn't enough to have just one or two women. Studies consistently find that women must make up at least 20-30% of an institution before they actually shape outcomes.
  • They suggest that he thinks that it is men who belong in the workplace and that women all are or should be married. I suspect that women will respond on Tuesday by putting Trump in his own rightful place -- and voting him out of office.
Javier E

An Election Is Not a Suicide Mission - The New York Times - 0 views

  • the church does not allow nations to take up arms and go to war merely when they have a high moral cause on their side. Justice is necessary, but it is not sufficient:
  • Peaceful means of ending the evil in question need to have been exhausted, there must be serious prospects of military success, and (crucially) “the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.”
  • What this teaching suggests is that we should have a strong bias in favor of peaceful deliberation so long as deliberation remains possible.
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  • So long as your polity offers mechanisms for eventually changing unjust laws, it’s better to accept the system’s basic legitimacy and work within it for change than to take steps, violent or otherwise, that risk blowing the entire apparatus up.
  • A vote for Trump is not a vote for insurrection or terrorism or secession. But it is a vote for a man who stands well outside the norms of American presidential politics, who has displayed a naked contempt for republican institutions and constitutional constraints, who deliberately injects noxious conspiracy theories into political conversation, who has tiptoed closer to the incitement of political violence than any major politician in my lifetime, whose admiration for authoritarian rulers is longstanding, who has endorsed war crimes and indulged racists and so on
  • It is a vote, in other words, for a far more chaotic and unstable form of political leadership (on the global stage as well as on the domestic) than we have heretofore experienced
  • what is striking is how many conservatives seem to have internalized that reality and justified their support for Trump anyway, on grounds that are similar to ones that the mainstream pro-life movement has rejected for four decades: Namely, that Hillary Clinton would usher in some particular evil so severe and irreversible that it’s better to risk burning things down, crashing the plane of state,
  • the deepest conservative insight is that justice depends on order as much as order depends on justice
  • It is immigration restrictionists arguing that Clinton’s favored amnesty for illegal immigrants would complete America’s transformation into Venezuela, so better to roll the dice with a right-wing Chávez.
  • It is a long list of conservatives treating an inevitable feature of democratic politics — the election of a politician of the other party to the presidency — as an evil so grave that it’s worth risking all the disorders that Trump obviously promises.
  • the Trump alternative is like a feckless war of choice in the service of some just-seeming end, with a commanding general who likes war crimes. It’s a ticket on a widening gyre, promising political catastrophe and moral corruption both, no matter what ideals seem to justify it.
  • today’s conservatism has far more to gain from the defeat of Donald Trump, and the chance to oppose Clintonian progressivism unencumbered by his authoritarianism, bigotry, misogyny and incompetence, than it does from answering the progressive drift toward Caesarism with a populist Elagabalus.
  • It is constitutional conservatives arguing that permitting another progressive president would make the Constitution completely irrecoverable, so better to roll the dice with a Peronist like Trump.
  • when Loki or the Joker or some still-darker Person promises the righting of some grave wrong, the defeat of your hated enemies, if you will only take a chance on chaos and misrule, the wise and courageous response is to tell them to go to hell.
Javier E

I thought I was just scared of Trump - but it's his America I fear | Jessica Valenti | ... - 0 views

  • This isn’t a political divide between left and right, Democrats and Republicans; it’s an immeasurable moral chasm.
  • This election has uncovered something vile about America. That so many people would support a despicable candidate is not news to those hurt every day by racism, sexism and xenophobia; we know it’s alive and well in our country. We’ve been dealing with it our whole lives. But to see this hatred on such flagrant, unapologetic display is something else entirely.
  • A common refrain I’ve heard from Clinton supporters is that we’re better than this – the hatred, the harassment. But if this race has shown us anything, it’s that we’re not better than this. The bigotry and misogyny – that’s who we are. That’s what this country was built on. And even if Clinton wins next week, that’s who we will remain.
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  • So I suppose my panic wasn’t about the possibility of a Trump win, after all. It’s about the reality of the moment we’re in, win or lose. It’s about the slime that’s risen to the top, the stink we can’t wash off with one election or one president. We don’t need to panic about the future, because the present already contains more horror than we can handle.
Javier E

If Donald Trump has done anything, he has snuffed out the Religious Right - The Washing... - 1 views

  • evangelical leaders have said that, for the sake of the “lesser of two evils,” one should stand with someone who not only characterizes sexual decadence and misogyny, brokers in cruelty and nativism, and displays a crazed public and private temperament — but who glories in these things.
  • Some of the very people who warned us about moral relativism and situational ethics now ask us to become moral relativists for the sake of an election.
  • And when some dissent, they are labeled as liberals or accused of moral preening or sitting comfortably on the sidelines. The cynicism and nihilism is horrifying to behold. It is not new, but it is clearer to see than ever.
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  • The old-school political Religious Right establishment wonders why the evangelical next generation rejects their way.
  • The evangelical movement is filled with younger, multiethnic, gospel-centered Christians. They are defined by a clear theology and a clear mission — not by the doctrinally vacuous resentment over a lost regime of nominal, cultural “Christian America.”
  • The next generation knows that our witness is counter to the culture, not just on the sanctity of life and the stability of the family but, most importantly, on the core of the gospel itself: Christ and him crucified.
rachelramirez

A-List's Trump Snub Hits Him Where It Hurts - The Daily Beast - 0 views

  • NOT NORMALA-List’s Trump Snub Hits Him Where It Hurts
  • Rockettes and now even a member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, who are refusing to raise their microphones, kick up their bare-legged heels or otherwise perform for Donald Trump at his inaugural
  • America is, in many ways, as much an idea as it is a country. And Americans have long marketed that idea around the world through our popular culture
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  • Our love of Hollywood-style glamour helped elect two presidents: JFK and Reagan, who fulfilled the prophecy that a country so enamored of actors would eventually make one their president. “All in the Family” chronicled the racial and cultural upheavals of the Nixon era. Bill Clinton captured the zeitgeist of young voters in the early 1990s by playing his saxophone on the “Arsenio Hall” show
  • Obama, though, has taken celebrity association to another level. He has been a darling of Hollywood, the music industry and popular culture from the time he declared for president in 2007
  • onservatives rail at Hollywood movies that make them feel alienated by presenting capitalists, corporations and moral traditionalists as the villains, and sexual libertines, iconoclasts and the godless (or godlike, in the form of superheroes, witches and warlocks) as the heroes.
  • the 80 percent of white self-professed evangelicals who voted for Trump purportedly did so to lay claim to the courts, where they believe they can yet win out on banning abortion and birth control, forcing women back into traditional roles, and undoing gay marriage
  • owes his election in large part to the sense of familiarity that being a reality TV star afforded him. That status allowed many of his voters to put aside his misogyny and vulgarity
  • which dined out on vows to discriminate against Mexicans and Muslims while unleashing a resurgence of racist hate groups and just plain haters is reaping the cultural opprobrium it sowed. And it’s making The Donald miserable.
lenaurick

It's time for GOP to reinvent itself - CNN.com - 0 views

  • The 2016 presidential election should have been an opportunity to improve the party's relationship with these constituencies, but now the party's entire identity has now been hijacked by Donald Trump's brand of misogyny.
  • Unfortunately, instead of debating big ideas, the most vocal leaders in today's Republican Party spend more time talking about punishing women for exercising their legally protected rights and deporting everyone else.
  • As a result, I look around today and don't see a real place in the GOP for anyone who is pro-choice, supports gay marriage and women's rights, is fine with anyone using a bathroom, believes in climate change (aka science) but also believes in a limited government, a strong national defense and in the power of free enterprise.
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  • That's why I believe the time has come for the Republican Party and its leaders to stop operating from a place of fear. To stop bending to the will of the angriest among us who are impossible to please and instead embrace a policy agenda that will create more equality, fairness and prosperity for all.
  • The frustration with the political establishment in Washington is visceral and real. "Average" Americans feel as though Washington has abandoned them and sold them out to protect or further their own personal political aspirations.
  • he effect of that fear has been a political system that now rewards gridlock and extreme rhetoric and locks out new voices who might re-animate the party. I know we can be so much more than just the party of the loudest and angriest. And in fact, if we don't evolve beyond being just that, there won't much of a party left by the presidential election of 2020.
Javier E

The Coming Gendered Armageddon - 0 views

  • looking just at Trump's case, it is not hatred of women per se but hatred of powerful women or female power itself that is the defining trait. In a society where women have become more powerful in all aspects of life for decades and where gender equality is a defining political issue, the distinction may be rather semantic. But this is about power and being out of place in the proper hierarchy of power which has Trump at the top at all times.
  • t the intensity of 'racism' has always been precisely related to the degree to which white supremacy was contested. Trump's misogyny is of a piece with this.
  • Trump's personality and political traction is one rooted in dominance - indeed, assertions and demonstrations of dominance.
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  • how this relates to the on-going issue of violence at Trump rallies. These aren't just stern reactions to hippie-loser protesters. These have evolved into campaign rituals where Trump and his followers play out the centerpieces of his campaign: authority, domination and violence - and Trump's ability to reassert the proper hierarchies his followers crave.
  • , this tells us why many evangelicals and other traditionalist, right-wing Christians are so supportive of Trump, notwithstanding his fairly open life as a sexual braggart and libertine: because he stands - quite convincingly - for authority, hierarchy and patriarchy.
  • For many of his supporters, whether they use the phrase or not, he stands for white supremacy.
cjlee29

Donald Trump's Gender-Based Attacks on Hillary Clinton Have Calculated Risk - The New Y... - 0 views

  • With the nation on the verge of a presidential election between the first woman to lead a major party and an opponent accused of misogyny, Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump are digging in for a fight in which he is likely to attack her precisely because she is a woman.
  • “woman’s card”
  • Mrs. Clinton’s advisers say they are confident that such comments will galvanize Democrats
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  • But they also recognize that Mr. Trump has proved adept at reading the electorate and at dominating news coverage — and that Mrs. Clinton must parry his attacks without overplaying her hand or further eroding her standing with male voter
  • “He’s going to have to deconstruct Hillary Clinton if he’s going to run against her,
  • Aides to Mr. Trump, three of whom insisted on anonymity to discuss the campaign’s internal deliberations, suggested he would likely return to that line of attack as his campaign prepares for a fall contest with Mrs. Clinton.
  • By taking gender head-on, Trump refuses to cede women voters and so-called women’s issues to Hillary just because she is a woman,”
  • With the Democratic primary winding down, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers say they have been analyzing why Mr. Trump’s attacks were so damaging to Republican rivals like Jeb Bush and Senator Marco Rubio to determine how Mrs. Clinton can avoid the same pitfalls.
  • On the debate stage, Mrs. Clinton will not respond in kind to personal attacks: No jokes about Mr. Trump’s hair or the size of his hands
  • Some Republicans, similarly, cringed. “When people rally around her are when people bring things up about her husband’s infidelities and when it appears as though she’s being attacked by the boys’ club,” said Katie Packer, who runs an anti-Trump group and co-founded a consulting firm that helps Republicans communicate to women.
  • In a sign of how closely Mrs. Clinton’s aides are watching Mr. Trump’s every step, after his advisers signaled last week that Mr. Trump would start behaving more “presidentially,”
  • But by Tuesday night, after Mr. Trump had appeared to shift course again, Clinton aides adjusted. In her victory speech in Philadelphia, Mrs. Clinton’s prepared remarks included a line meant to rev up female voters at Mr. Trump’s expense: “If fighting for women’s health care and paid family leave and equal pay is playing the ‘woman card,’ then deal me in,” she said.
  • That may yet come. On Thursday, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign appealed for donations by offering supporters their “very own official Hillary for America woman card” — a hot pink credit card with the words “Congratulations: You’re in the majority!”
Javier E

Donald Trump, the master of unreality, must be resisted at every turn | Joseph Stiglitz... - 0 views

  • Trump sees the world in terms of a zero-sum game. In reality, globalisation, if well managed, is a positive-sum force: America gains if its friends and allies – whether Australia, the EU, or Mexico – are stronger.
  • But Trump’s approach threatens to turn it into a negative-sum game: America will lose, too.
  • Previous administrations have always taken seriously their responsibility to advance US interests. But the policies they pursued usually were framed in terms of an enlightened understanding of national interest. Americans, they believed, benefited from a more prosperous global economy and a web of alliances among countries committed to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.
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  • If there is a silver lining in the Trump cloud, it is a new sense of solidarity over core values such as tolerance and equality, sustained by awareness of the bigotry and misogyny, whether hidden or open, that Trump and his team embody. And this unity has gone global, with Trump and his allies facing rejection and protests throughout the democratic world.
  • US corporate leaders and investors have collectively become Trump’s enablers. At this year’s World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, many salivated over his promises of tax cuts and deregulation, while eagerly ignoring his bigotry – not mentioning it in a single meeting that I attended – and protectionism.
  • lack of courage: it was clear that many of those who were concerned about Trump were afraid to raise their voices, lest they and their companies’ share price be targeted by a tweet. Pervasive fear is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes, and we are seeing it in the US for the first time in my adult life.
Javier E

The Masculine Mistake - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Brit Hume, the Fox senior political analyst, said in Christie’s defense: “I would have to say that in this sort of feminized atmosphere in which we exist today, guys who are masculine and muscular like that in their private conduct, kind of old-fashioned tough guys, run some risks.”
  • The problem with having your message powered by machismo is that it reveals what undergirds such a stance: misogyny and chauvinism. The masculinity for which they yearn draws its meaning and its value from juxtaposition with a lesser, vulnerable, narrowly drawn femininity.
Javier E

What To Make Of Ferguson? Ctd « The Dish - 0 views

  • How can you say Wilson had “no need” to shoot Brown that many times? The reason law enforcement went to high-capacity handguns and dumped the six shooters is because of the ability of people to withstand multiple gunshot wounds and continue fighting (or shooting.) The catalyst for this approach was the 1986 Miami shooting in which to FBI officers were killed AFTER they had shot two bank robbers multiple times. The robbers eventually died of their wounds, but in the meantime, they kept firing and killed the agents. Officer Wilson adhered to his training: shoot until the suspect is on the ground.
  • Mike Brown is to the Left what Benghazi is to the Right. Preconceptions are everything. Facts don’t matter. Logic doesn’t matter. There’s a narrative of racist-white-cop-kills-harmless-black-kid, and no matter what uncomfortable fact intrudes, like that so many “witnesses” admitted they didn’t actually see what they told the media they saw, the narrative must go on. Because racism.
  • Balko’s article makes clear that this is not an environment where the police are protecting and serving but instead harassing and self-serving. I am in no way justifying assailing a police officer (or anyone for that matter), verbally or physically, but you are not a young Black man living in what is still ostensibly the South and facing harassment for just being. I challenge you to invite Black males to tell you their stories of police harassment. How many times they have been detained, cuffed, kicked and threatened with death because they fit a profile, looked suspicious or were just somewhere some cop didn’t think they belonged? Yes, this is in America.
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  • I agree entirely that this should have gone to trial and realize that, statistically, nearly everything reviewed by a grand jury does. I agree that the fact Wilson will never even face charges is a mark of shame on the legal system. But I don’t get the sense that the people who are furious about this, whatever their race, are clamoring for a trial they’ll never see; it seems to me they’re clamoring for a conviction they feel they’ve been cheated out of.
  • Maybe lethal force wasn’t necessary, but science has proven that Brown turned and moved back toward Wilson (at least 20 feet) and was not shot from behind. There was undeniably an altercation at/inside the police cruiser. Does the fact that one man is alive and one is dead skew the way those facts are interpreted? Absolutely. But there exist certain physical certainties that strongly suggest this was not cold-blooded murder.
  • there is an interminable, sometimes slight, sometimes massive burden that comes with Blackness that you seem wholly oblivious to. That 12 year old that was shot in Cleveland was sitting on a swing playing with a fake gun. Two things happened due purely to his Blackness: police were called and he was murdered. Full stop. The Black man shot in the stairwell of his building in NYC for just existing while Black because a cop got scared. And that’s just since Monday.
  • Clive Bundy assails and threatens federal officers and gets invited on Fox News. Eric Frein plans and carries out an attack on state trooper barracks, killing one and seriously wounding another – again brought in alive. Ted Nugent scares the shit out of me with his racism, misogyny, anti-government and gun-humping ways, but yet he’s a hero to many White people and no one seems to have shot him yet either. White people have feared, reviled and vilified Blackness since they first laid eyes upon us. The codification and justification of our enslavement, disenfranchisement and murder is beyond primordial; it is part and parcel of what has made America and the Western world. Ferguson is just another eruption in this racist legacy and reality.
  • on of your readers claimed that, at most, Brown was guilty of petit theft, which is a misdemeanor. This is incorrect. Brown not only stole from the convenience store, he assaulted the business owner who tried to stop him from stealing. This assault escalated Brown’s theft to a strong-arm robbery, which is a second-degree felony in the State of Missouri. And it was Brown’s commission of this felony that began the chain of events that led to his death. He had nobody but himself to blame for that – not Officer Wilson, not the prosecutor, and not racism.
Javier E

Carson Endorses the Demagogue - The New York Times - 0 views

  • These are folks who view discussions about reducing racial inequity and increasing queer equality as divisive. They are people who see efforts to protect women’s health, in particular their full range of reproductive options, including abortion, and to reverse our staggering income inequality as divisive. Indeed, the very words white supremacy, privilege, racism, bias, sexism, misogyny, patriarchy, homophobia, and poverty are seen as divisive.
  • Somehow, they think, these very real oppressive forces will simply die if only deprived of conversational oxygen. In fact, the opposite is true. By not naming these forces and continuously confronting, they strengthen and spread.
  • This is the same Ben Carson who called President Obama a psychopath who is possibly guilty of treason and was, oh my, “raised white.” He has accused President Obama of working to “destroy this nation” and compared Obama’s supporters to Nazi sympathizers.
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  • Carson and the real estate developer are not so different from one another in this predilection for outrageous utterances, it’s just that one smiles and the other scowls.
  • This is the same Ben Carson who on a radio show in 2013 said of white liberals:“Well, they’re the most racist people there are because, you know, they put you in a little category, a little box — you have to think this way. How could you dare come off the plantation?”
  • he and the front-runner are two sides of the same coin: they are both dangerous, but one is a narcissist who just might win the nomination and the other is a near-narcoleptic who never had a chance.
Javier E

A French Novelist Imagined Sexual Dystopia. Now It's Arrived. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • he has turned out to be a writer of unusual prescience. At a time when literature is increasingly marginalized in public life, he offers a striking reminder that novelists can provide insights about society that pundits and experts miss
  • Houellebecq, whose work is saturated with brutality, resentment and sentimentality, understood what it meant to be an incel long before the term became common.
  • Houellebecq’s theory of sexuality (he is typically French in his love of abstraction and theory). The sexual revolution of the 1960s, widely seen as a liberation movement, is better understood as the intrusion of capitalist values into the previously sacrosanct realm of intimate life. “Just like unrestrained economic liberalism … sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization,” he writes. “Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never.”
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  • Houellebecq is able to give such a convincing portrait of incel-thinking because at some level he seems to share its core assumption, representing sex as something that women owe men. This misogyny can make reading Houellebecq an ordeal, and he ought to be read with the suspicion and resistance that his ideas deserve. But all the same, he ought to be read.
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: The Nature of Sex - 0 views

  • it’s true that trans-exclusionary radical feminists or TERFs, as they are known, are one minority that is actively not tolerated by the LGBTQ establishment, and often demonized by the gay community. It’s also true that they can be inflammatory, offensive, and obsessive
  • what interests me is their underlying argument, which deserves to be thought through, regardless of our political allegiances, sexual identities, or tribal attachments. Because it’s an argument that seems to me to contain a seed of truth.
  • the proposed Equality Act — with 201 co-sponsors in the last Congress — isn’t simply a ban on discriminating against trans people in employment, housing, and public accommodations (an idea with a lot of support in the American public)
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  • It includes and rests upon a critical redefinition of what is known as “sex.” We usually think of this as simply male or female, on biological grounds (as opposed to a more cultural notion of gender). But the Equality Act would define “sex” as including “gender identity,” and defines “gender identity” thus: “gender-related identity, appearance, mannerisms, or characteristics, regardless of the individual’s designated sex at birth.”
  • What the radical feminists are arguing is that the act doesn’t only blur the distinction between men and women (thereby minimizing what they see as the oppression of patriarchy and misogyny), but that its definition of gender identity must rely on stereotypical ideas of what gender expression means. What, after all, is a “gender-related characteristic”? It implies that a tomboy who loves sports is not a girl interested in stereotypically boyish things, but possibly a boy trapped in a female body
  • So instead of enlarging our understanding of gender expression — and allowing maximal freedom and variety within both sexes — the concept of “gender identity” actually narrows it, in more traditional and even regressive ways. What does “gender-related mannerisms” mean, if not stereotypes?
  • it bans single-sex facilities like changing, dressing, or locker rooms, if sex is not redefined to include “gender identity.” This could put all single-sex institutions, events, or groups in legal jeopardy. It could deny lesbians their own unique safe space, free from any trace of men
  • This is the deeply confusing and incoherent aspect of the entire debate. If you abandon biology in the matter of sex and gender altogether, you may help trans people live fuller, less conflicted lives; but you also undermine the very meaning of homosexuality.
  • If you follow the current ideology of gender as entirely fluid, you actually subvert and undermine core arguments in defense of gay rights. “A gay man loves and desires other men, and a lesbian desires and loves other women,” explains Sky Gilbert, a drag queen. “This defines the existential state of being gay. If there is no such thing as ‘male’ or ‘female,’ the entire self-definition of gay identity, which we have spent generations seeking to validate and protect from bigots, collapses.”
  • Boot argues that the U.S. should literally be the world’s policeman: “U.S. troops are … policing the frontiers of the Pax Americana. Just as the police aren’t trying to eliminate crime, so troops are not trying to eliminate terrorism but, instead, to keep it below a critical threshold that threatens the United States and our allies.”
  • We can respect the right of certain people to be identified as the gender they believe they are, and to remove any discrimination against them, while also seeing biology as a difference that requires a distinction.
  • We can believe in nature and the immense complexity of the human mind and sexuality. We can see a way to accommodate everyone to the extent possible, without denying biological reality. Equality need not mean sameness.
  • We just have to abandon the faddish notion that sex is socially constructed or entirely in the brain, that sex and gender are unconnected, that biology is irrelevant, and that there is something called an LGBTQ identity, when, in fact, the acronym contains extreme internal tensions and even outright contradictions.
  • What we may not be able to do for much longer is work profitably. If a universal basic income emerges, or if technology renders our bodies and minds unnecessary for the success of our societies, we will still need to work, to do things. But we will almost certainly have to to reimagine what work is like, what work outside of the motives of profit or efficiency can mean, what value we attach to what we do each day, and how we do it.
  • The world we live in is a product of a capitalism that has made us all immeasurably better off, even as it has made us more and more unequal. But that world is clearly beginning to repeal itself, to render unnecessary the vast bulk of humanity’s labor, and the vast capitalist system has only existed for a blink of an eye in humanity’s long history. We are fools if we think it will go on forever. We will have to generate a new culture of work
  • In fact, Boot deserves great kudos for his honesty. Richard Haass, the Pope of the Blob, deserves credit too for recognizing that “the situation on the ground is something of a slowly deteriorating stalemate … Although the U.S. and its European partners cannot expect to win the war or broker a lasting peace, it should be possible to keep the government alive and carry on the fight against terrorists.” How’s that for a pep talk!
  • There is a solution to this knotted paradox. We can treat different things differently. We can accept that the homosexual experience and the transgender experience are very different, and cannot be easily conflated. We can center the debate not on “gender identity” which insists on no difference between the trans and the cis, the male and the female, and instead focus on the very real experience of “gender dysphoria,” which deserves treatment and support and total acceptance for the individuals involved.
  • My guess is that this ever-extending police project is unstoppable in the foreseeable future. And that is true of most empires: They never unwind voluntarily. They devolve into stalemates, and collapse only when the imperial power has so bankrupted itself morally, politically, and financially that the only choice is defeat at a time not of our choosing.
Javier E

Why it's shocking to look back at med school yearbooks from decades ago - The Washingto... - 0 views

  • Yearbooks provide a window into how students created professional identities as they moved from school to work. For decades in medical schools, this creative process emboldened pervasive misogyny and racism. In turn, this shaped the treatment of patients, namely systemic pain bias against women, especially African American women.
  • Apologists too often resort to bad cliches to explain these examples away: They can be a case of “a few bad apples” or “boys being boys” or the byproduct of “a different time.”
  • But these excuses minimize the significance of the hostility that women and people of color navigated every day in these student cultures. Editors’ commemorative work on yearbooks was part of a system that subordinated women and people of color within the highly stratified and hierarchical structures of universities and hospitals that promoted discrimination and harassment
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