eruthros

So I was following various feedreeder links and I ended up at a post that was talking about a Rick Barber for Congress ad that's so awful that I can't get past ".. what?" Warning for images of American slavery, the Holocaust, other situations involving slavery, and amazingly offensive and insensitive comparisons of those to taxation.



( transcript/paraphrase )

It's the sort of thing that I wouldn't have found out about in the days before the internet -- he's a Tea Party republican running for representative in Alabama, so not a giant name, before blogs I probably wouldn't have heard of him until after the election. But, just, seriously? Seriously taxation is slavery? Seriously comparable to the Holocaust? I mean, I know the tea party has pulled that comparison before, and will again, but there's something about the smugness of this ad, the defense of excise taxes while calling income taxes slavery, and the use of Abraham Lincoln as an anti-government mouthpiece that make me particularly "... what?" and it.

1. This may be the most hilarious thing I've read in the news today:

The line of protesters spread across Pennsylvania Avenue for blocks, all the way to the capitol, according to the D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency. People were chanting "enough, enough" and "We the People." Others yelled "You lie, you lie!" and "Pelosi has to go," referring to California congresswoman Nancy Pelosi.

I read that and then went, "what, seriously? Your chant was 'you lie, you lie?'"

So thingswithwings and I tried to do some in-living-room chanting, and determined that it's really hard to stay in unison on "you lie, you lie" because it has no rhythm, and also because it's all vowels. Both of which would make it impossible to hear from a distance. Then we tried to figure out how you'd possibly chant "enough, enough" for ten blocks; I tried doing a bunch of different inflections: "enough! enoooough. enough? ENOUGH!" but that was more hilarious than successful.

Then we tried to parse the chants: where, we asked, are the objects of these chants? Enough what? You lie about what? We, the people ... in order to form a more perfect union?

thingswithwings: They should really just hire the left for their chants.

2. I went to the state fair last week! I saw horses and bunnies and went on many rides and ate extremely unhealthy food. (We started the day with frozen bananas, because thingswithwings was like, "wait, I thought that was just on Arrested Development!" And then the day went nutritionally downhill from there.) The one problem with our state fair was a lack of horticultural stuff -- I wanted giant zucchinis, competitive butter sculpture, and berry preserve competitions! That's totally one of the fun parts!

3. You probably haven't seen me around much on dw lately. This is because I slid my thumb out of joint* while in the Middle of Nowhere about five weeks ago, and it didn't heal right -- usually it just pops back in, but noooo. I'm about one week into three weeks of a really irritating hand brace that makes it difficult to type**. Also I have yet more physical therapy, but at least I get to play with non-Newtonian solids for resistance training.

Anyway, that is just to say that you likely won't see me commenting as much or at any length, and if you talk to me on IM you will find me slow and mostly lowercased.

*This is normal for me; I have congenital hypermobility.

** And also impossible to use a can opener -- I'm lucky that I'm not a different kind of person, or that could be a real problem. As it is, I can chop vegetables decently using two fingers to support the knife, so I'm okay.

The Department of Education has finally ruled that university gag orders on rape victims -- if you want us to investigate, you can't talk to anyone, even your parents -- are, who would have thought, violations of federal law. UVA said this was about protecting student privacy, and necessary to comply with FERPA, but fortunately the Department of Education finally saw through that. (Don't read the comments on the article; it will hurt.)

The case was based on a University of Virginia rule, but UVA is hardly the only place that has had such a requirement -- several American universities have attempted to protect their reputation as "safe" at the expense of rape victims, who are sometimes told by boards of inquiry that they can be expelled for talking about their cases. If protecting the reputation of the university involves harming rape victims, so be it.¹

Other relevant links:
A story at the SAFER blog in which an Adelphi University alum talks about the obstacles to reporting rape, and her university's gag order.
Abyss2Hope's discussion of some of the social consequences of the gag order.

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¹ At my undergraduate university, in fact, various administrators frequently tried to keep women from reporting sexual assault -- one administrator tried to get rid of the anonymous sexual assault help line; she said that the rape counselor had to get the student's name and make her name her assailant or she couldn't take the call. This might've been legally true, I dunno, but there was no excuse for this: When this drove down the number of calls significantly, she then tried to use it as evidence of a reduced rate of sexual assault on campus, claiming that my university was one of the safest in the state.

Then, why is Obama favored by an average four to one margin in twenty-two countries surveyed by the BBC? I'm so confused!

On a new proposed US Health and Human Services Department regulation:

The administration drafted the proposal to implement laws prohibiting recipients of federal funds from penalizing health practitioners who refuse to perform abortions or provide abortion referrals.

The draft proposal covers Catholic Charities and other employers who object to abortion, by defining their insurers as health practitioners. It would define abortion as any procedure or drug that terminates a human life after conception, "whether before or after implantation."

This means, of course, that health insurance plans could choose not to cover contraception because it's against their religious beliefs -- it's basically a regulation drafted to keep California and New York (and a few other states) from enforcing their laws requiring insurance companies that cover viagra to also cover various forms of contraceptives. AND IT"S DEFINING CONTRACEPTION AS ABORTION TO DO IT. ON A FEDERAL LEVEL. YOU GUYS.

More here.

Apparently this has been open to public comment since August 7th; was there some big hoopla about it that I didn't notice 'cause of being out of the country?