Right, because making fun of other people’s beliefs has done so much — throughout history — to promote peace and understanding.
How about “Choose Mutual Respect: It Will Be Better for All of Us.”
Why are some atheists such a**holes?
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Shit Walkies Say
Having thoroughly enjoyed Shit Sighted People Say to Blind People, Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls, and Shit White Girls Say to Arab Girls, I decided it would be hilarious to make a video out of some of the stupid shit people have said to Tim* over the years. Only problem, of course: I have no video production skills, not to mention equipment. So — as with a couple of previous posts — I relied on the cartoon people over at xtranormal and created this. I’m sure it doesn’t measure up to the videos that inspired it, but on the upside, I only wasted three hours on it.
* Yes, it’s weird that it’s me (a walkie) and not Tim who made this little video, but he’s busy actually practicing law, or possibly (we can only hope!) drafting his first guest blog post. Stay tuned!!
In which my friend Susie does good things for my brain.
Expand & protect.
Lunch yesterday with my awesome friend Susie Greene, who has just produced/published this multimedia investigation into solitary confinement. Extra bonus awesomeness, it features ass-kicking DU clinical professor Laura Rovner. The video will expand your brain into the toxic arena of solitary confinement. You thought it was just a few days “in the hole” for bad behavior. Think again.
And, um, protect. After lunch — at the (perfectly appropriate) prodding of Susie and Tim — Susie took me ski-helmet shopping. I have been trying to convince myself that having skied for 40ish years without a helmet, I was somehow grandfathered (grandmothered?) in. But even I had to admit, finally, that this made no damn sense. So now I’ll look like this when I ski:
Or more realistically:
It shouldn’t be about choice; it should be about respect.
Cynthia Nixon has spurred an interesting dialog by embracing the concept that being gay or lesbian can be a choice. In the civil rights world,the it’s-not-a-choice-it’s-an-inborn-trait position is an attempt to connect being gay with other protected classes defined by immutable characteristics, such as race, gender, and disability. It’s also embraced as a counter to the common homophobic position* that if you can choose to love people of your own gender, you can equally easily — like choosing a different flavor of ice cream — choose to love people of the other gender. Or perhaps choose to live a celibate life.
But Nixon makes I think the precise right point:
I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not. . . . It seems we’re just ceding this point to bigots who are demanding it, and I don’t think that they should define the terms of the debate.
It has always seemed bizarre to me that religious folks stress that this protected class — gays and lesbians — is based on choice, when the most mutable, chosen-not-born protected class is religion. You don’t choose your race, disability, or national origin, and most people don’t choose their gender. But if you can choose to be Christian, you can just as easily choose to be Jewish or Muslim, right? Why on earth should we protect Christians against all that discrimination** they face when they could simply elect to be Jewish or Muslim and get away scot-free?***
Seriously, we shouldn’t be discussing choice vs. innate; we should be discussing respect. And in the discrimination context, relevance. What on earth relevance does it have to someone’s ability to do their job who they sleep with? What faith they practice? Their gender? Their race?
***********
* Did you know there is something called Conservapedia? Me neither. It’s precisely as informative as the name suggests. For example, this is the only substantive information it provides on the ADA:
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a broad federal law that requires places of public accommodation to comply with numerous regulations relating to access by persons having disabilities. The Act encourages lawsuits against restaurants, schools, retail stores, hospitals and other small businesses by providing for the recovery of attorneys fees by successful plaintiffs.
Go forth and be informed, young conservatives with homework projects!
** Clearly Conservapedia is going to be my go-to source for links to straw-man conservative arguments. They make it so easy!
*** Can I say that? Does that discriminate against Scottish people? Or is it OK because I’m a Jewish-Scottish-American?
Yes, we have a voting problem.
Republicans spend a lot of time these days trying to protect the vote against nonexistent threats and potential non-Republican voters, like students and poor people. But if you gave Michael Moore psychedelic drugs he couldn’t have parodied the GOP’s voting problems better than they have on their own.
For example, you thought Romney won Iowa, right? At least that’s what Fox News announced the next day.
Hold on!
The certified numbers: 29,839 for Santorum and 29,805 for Romney.
Oh, then Santorum won by 34 votes, right? Um . . .
THE RESULTS: Santorum finished ahead by 34 votes
MISSING DATA: 8 precincts’ numbers will never be certified
PARTY VERDICT: GOP official says, ‘It’s a split decision’
Except the 8 precincts’ votes that the GOP regards as “missing” are online for non-Republicans with ordinary math skills to analyze.
If those results are added to the certified results, Santorum’s 29,839 votes would become 29,920, and Romney’ 29,805 would become 29,851 — for a “final” result of Santorum winning the caucuses, by a margin of 69 votes.
And then there’s the very democratic process by which a bunch of evangelicals got together and decided to endorse Santorum.
It was not until the third ballot, after some of Gingrich’s supporters left, that Santorum cleared the three-quarters threshold, receiving 85 votes, to Gingrich’s 29. . . . [A]ll the participants had been bound by an agreement not to speak for 24 hours. . . . “It wasn’t a consensus and it wasn’t an endorsement,” added former representative J.C. Watts (R-Okla.), who was also at the session and also expressed concern at how the outcome was being portrayed.
And these guys are asking us to trust them to run the country?
File under “o” for occasionally we make some progress
One of the (many many) things I love about legal research is that you can get swept up in the interesting stories that cases tell, many of them totally irrelevant to the point you’re researching. This is also a happy by-product of ADD. I think of it as the legal research scenic route, and have no fear, I don’t bill for it.
Today’s scenic route was not so scenic, but was instead a startling history lesson. I’ll let it speak for itself:
The Court notes that until 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) counseled its members to maintain segregated neighborhoods in the interest of maintaining property values. The Code of Ethics of the NAREB provided until then that: ‘A REALTOR SHOULD NEVER BE INSTRUMENTAL IN INTRODUCING INTO A NEIGHBORHOOD A CHARACTER OF PROPERTY OR OCCUPANCY, MEMBERS OF ANY RACE OR NATIONALITY, OR ANY INDIVIDUALS WHOSE PRESENCE WILL CLEARLY BE DETRIMENTAL TO PROPERTY VALUES IN THAT NEIGHBORHOOD.’
Zuch v. Hussey, 394 F. Supp. 1028, 1054 n.12 (E.D. Mich. 1975).
So, yeah, we’ve made some progress.
Gratuitous political comment: and this is what Ron Paul would take us back to.
Public service: talking to your politically-deluded family members.
If you have a relative who is completely deluded politically with whom you graciously disagree on various political matters, you may have trouble from time to time coming up with something to talk about at family gatherings. As regular readers of both of our blogs have discerned, my brother is completely deluded politically a Republican and I am correct in all things a Democrat. Yet we have many fascinating, non-political things to talk about. Herewith, as a public service at these family-oriented holidays, a working list of the things that can completely occupy our conversation in the absence of politics:
- the awesomeness of my niece and nephew.
- our weird extended family.
- nasal allergies.
- solutions to nasal allergies.
- things his kids have puked up compared with things my dogs have puked up (I win — neither of his kids ever puked up a tennis ball).
- food (generally not immediately following item #5).
- decades old in-jokes involving pointless things our grandfather said.
- sports.
- hilarious things our father used to do, for example, applying lotion to his face while driving by pouring a big puddle of lotion on the dashboard and dabbing it on his face.
- Fart jokes.
Your mileage may vary.
Weather: right and wrong
Wrong:
Right:
Have I mentioned recently how much I love Michael Bérubé?
A new Bérubé post! Just in time for Christmas! Let there be joy throughout the land! (As we’ve previously established, I’m a HUGE FAN.) And he’s writing on one of my favorite topics: universal design. Let’s face it, the world is full of accommodations . . . for people with physically and psychologically typical bodies. But they’re only really called “accommodations” when someone with a disability requests them. Though try attending a meeting where you’re the only hearing person or the only person who doesn’t ride in her own chair, and it will be brought home to you that the typical are accommodated all the damn time.
Future post: why our lack of wings requires the accommodation of stairs, elevators, escalators, and other ways of accessing upper stories without having to fly.
Anyway, Bérubé’s insight into how this worked in academic accommodations was wonderful:
So in response to my student with CP, I decided to distribute a take-home exam on the final day of class, and then give students 72 or 96 hours to write two essays. That way, the exam itself would be turned in (and graded) during finals week, and students could devote as much (or as little) time to the exam as they desired. I’ve done this ever since. . . .
Lastly, for even more extra extra upside, the students who need accommodations . . . get to work at their own pace, like everybody else. It’s like universal design … for final exams.
I don’t think those words mean what you think they mean.
Newt Gingrich asks: “Do you want to move towards American exceptionalism, reassert the Constitution, reassert the nature of America, or do you, in fact, want to become a secular, European, sort of bureaucratic socialist society?”
Evidently his own answer is, “neither, thanks; I prefer a dictatorship.”
How do we know this? Because he has decided to abandon the rule of law, one of the key things that makes America exceptional.
On “Face the Nation,” Gingrich announced not only that court decisions that are out of step with popular opinion should be ignored, but that as president he might have judges arrested by the Capitol Police or the U.S. Marshals.
Ignoring court decisions and having judges arrested is what dictatorships do.
He was referring to a decision to keep a public high school graduation secular, something required by the Constitution. But ignoring unpopular opinions would not only let us establish government-ordained religion and reinstitute racial segregation, it would let undermine one of the pillars of our economy. I’m thinking foreclosures are fairly unpopular decisions these days — shall we be allowed to ignore them? How about evictions? Don’t want to pay a judgment for breach of contract? Form a mob and show how unpopular it is!
In my field, decisions tossing ADA cases based on procedural grounds such as standing or mootness are unpopular. Shall we ignore them and bring our sledgehammers with us when we visit inaccessible facilities? (Do NOT tempt me!)
Or are we only allowed to ignore decisions that are unpopular with conservatives?
And this guy is supposed to be the brain trust of the Republican party?
What’s funny is that Gingrich is smart. He knows how important the rule of law is, which also means that he knows he’s full of shit. But he has apparently decided that the only way to win this time around is graft the arrogance that has always been a side effect of his intelligence to some sort of random right wing slogan generator to create a FrankenCandidate who would be immensely entertaining if he weren’t so frightening.
And finally we have the Republican party 2011: proclaiming conservative values while embracing a someone with three marriages and multiple affairs; decrying elitism while embracing a pompous windbag with a $500,000 line of credit at Tiffany’s; and proclaiming American exceptionalism while rejecting the rule of law.
Thought Snax 