• Journalist Gregory Palast posts a follow-up to his Cynthia McKinney article, Relynching Cynthia McKinney. Thanks to Alas reader Dan Sallari for pointing this out to me.

• Trish Wilson discusses the issues surrounding no-fault divorce.
• The blogger behind I know this is probably bad for me knows a hell of a lot about Head Start, and she (he?) is writing a series of posts on the subject.
• An entertaining post on Julian’s Lounge in defense of PETA.
• Janine Garafalo fans take note: The radio show Take Back the Media has the first ten minutes of a long interview with her. (If you’re not interested in reading the non-Janine stuff, listen to the first minute or so and then skip ahead to 15:20.) Via The Sideshow.
• In the Times, Nicholas Kristof does a good job summing up the arguments in favor of the US intervening in Liberia. Via Unmedia.
• Speaking of the Times, Magpie quotes a joyful anecdote from the Times dining section, about learning to read Cantonese.
• This Woman’s Work critiques NOW - and “institutional feminism” in general - for insufficient support and consideration of stay-at-home moms.
• Oh. My. God. Go to this Ornicus post about Mel Gibson and scroll down to read the quotes from Gibson’s 1995 Playboy interview. I knew he was a right-winger, but I had no idea he was such a barker. Via The Sideshow.
• And again from the Times, this interesting Emily Nussbaum article reconsidering the final episode of the sit-com Roseanne. Via Ms Musings, of course.
• Just reading this essay by neo-Marxist Norm Geras made me tired - I wanted to reply to it, but responding to mean-spirited ad hominines is so exhausting. Now I don’t have to respond, because Pandagon has said it all. Thanks, Pandagon!
• Kip at Long story; short pier makes fun of Bush’s timing.
• New to the blogroll: Muslim WakeUp!, the wonderfully-designed Feministe, and the non-political blog Nature is Profligate. Go check ‘em out.
• I don’t remember where I came across this link to the AFL-CIO’s presidential candidates page, but it’s a good place to see most of the candidates answer questions about labor issues.
• Last but very, very far from least, this Electric Venom rant about “what do women want” is getting links from all over the blogoverse, and with good reason. Awesome stuff.

I unfortunately wasn’t paying attention when Prometheus 6 did a brilliant series of posts discussing reparations. But now he’s sort of collected them all (or collected the links to them all, anyhow), and it’s highly recommended reading. From P6’s introduction:

My feeling is that most discussions of reparations - or of affirmative action - are marred by a lack of clarity about the alternatives. Opponents of these plans always talk as if the alternative reparations needs to be compared to is an alternative of justice and fairness. In reality, the alternative is a continuation of the status quo - a status quo in which the US has and continues to have a racial underclass. Compared to continuing with that reality, I think almost any plan is more just and fair; in fact, my real thought about reparations and AA is that neither one of them go nearly far enough.

I’ve heard a lot of liberals object to supporting Kucinich because he switched on abortion - he used to be pro-life, now he’s pro-choice. We must not reward such behavior by voting for it, we are told.

Pardon me, but isn’t switching to pro-choice exactly the sort of behavior we want to encourage? “Don’t bother switching, because we’ll never support you” isn’t a good message to send pro-life Democrats, in my view.

I remain puzzled by how many of my fellow progressives are supporting Howard Dean - a centrist Democrat - in the primary. Some of them natter on about “electability” - but the way a candidate proves himself electable is by proving he can win the primary. That’s what the primary is for.

Instead, progressives are simply giving up without a fight, refusing to support a genuinely left candidate like Kucinich. But if Dean wins because the opposition gives up, how meaningful is that? It’s not like George Bush is going to give up, too.

A Christopher Caldwell article (via Dale Franks) about Dean in the Weekly Standard explains why, I think:

Dean may be a centrist - but he’s a pissed-off centrist, and to many lefties that seems to matter more than his substantive positions.

As for myself, I’ll probably vote for the Democratic candidate (regardless of who it is - I don’t understand lefties who say “I’ll vote for a centrist democrat like Dean, but never for a centrist like Lieberman!”) if the outcome looks at all close come November 2004, because I’m hoping (perhaps unrealistically) that Justices Stevens and Ginsburg will retire if a Democrat is in office. Otherwise I’ll vote for the Green candidate (who I hope will not be Nader).

But it’s not November 2004 yet. What’s at stake in the democratic primary isn’t if Bush serves a second term; it’s which views in the Democrats will have a voice in the party for the next few years, and which views will be even more marginalized. Most progressive democrats are, in effect, voting to keep progressives like Kucinich as marginal as possible. I don’t understand their decision; but it certainly adds to my suspicion that there’s no longer a place for progressives in the Democratic party.

Related link: Check out this interesting debate at The New Republic over if Dean is electable or not. And also this appeal from Kucinich to Green Party members to support his candidacy - a bit of outreach that I’m not expecting to see from any other Democratic candidate. (Via Blargblog and Body & Soul).

Regarding Illinois’ new rape law (see the post before this one for details on that), several folks, like Don of Anger Management, seem to be objecting based on a serious misunderstanding of the California case that inspired this law. The problem is that instead of reading real news, Don is relying on Foxnew’s report:

But the facts of the case (pdf file) are nothing like what Don (or Fox) describes. (Note: what follows is the court’s description of the rape victim’s testimony; please don’t read on unless you’re prepared to read a description of rape.)
Read the rest of this entry »

A new law - or, more accurately, a new addedum to an old law - in Illinois declares:

(Here’s a Foxnews article on the law, which only gets one or two things wrong that I noticed, so that’s good for them).

To me, this seems like a pretty obvious thing: Consent, once given, is not forever. If I’m having sex with John Ashcroft, it doesn’t matter how much Ashcroft begged me to screw him, or how much he’s been enjoying it up to this moment; once Ashcroft says “stop, Amp, you’re just too much man for me,” it’s my responsibility to stop. Sure, it might take me a few seconds to absorb what Ashy’s telling me and say “are you serious?”; but once I absorb it, if I keep on fuckin’ despite Ashcroft’s objections, that’s rape.

Who could disagree with that?

It turns out a lot of people on the right of the blogoverse, that’s who.

I think the objections, however, are weak at best. For instance, Susanna of Cut on the bias (whose blog was the first to cover this story, that I saw) writes:

But not all men are “screwed” (Susanna’s pun was intentional, she wants us to know) - only those who would refuse to stop having sex just because they don’t have consent. That is, the rapists. And who cares if rapists are screwed?

Lurking behind Susanna’s comment is a belief - shared by many in our culture - that us men are brainless animals, whose tiny little brains are unable to overpower our almighty dicks. But I think that’s a myth. Yes, in the heat of going bump in the night, many of us (male or female) are slower thinkers than we are normally; it might take a few moments to absorb that our partner has just cried out “get off me please!” But once we’ve reached that point, every man is perfectly capable of stopping if he really wants to. To say that we can’t expect men to stop once consent is withdrawn is an insult to men.

Allison of Ain’t that a kick in the head? writes:

Allison also complained that “you can’t legislate morality.” Why not? Murder laws are legislating morality. So are rape laws, for that matter.

Which is a major reason I object to Allison’s logic - if you accept her premises, not just this rape law but all rape laws are wrong and should be done away with.

The answer to Allison’s question is, yes, this law is necessary - in response to the minority of guys who do rape women, and to help protect unlucky women who date those guys. Just like all the other rape laws are necessary, for the exact same reason.

The existence of laws against rape is no more of an insult to non-rapist men (and non-rapist women, for that matter) than laws against car theft are an insult to those of us who buy our cars legally.

Dale at The Review has an interesting proposition:

I’ll take that bet, Dale. Shall we say $1000?

Dale also clearly thinks that once having consented, no woman can be raped:

But why should initial consent mean that one has lost the right to change one’s mind?

In the California case that inspired the Illinois law, the girl was involved in some semi-consensual petting which she said she enjoyed, but during the sex act itself physically struggled, attempted to push her rapist off, and attempted to talk him out of continuing. In other words, she was “actually raped by force” - just like the imaginary women Dale supposes will be insulted by her example.

Dale’s black-and-white construction of sexuality is too simplistic for the real world. Just because a woman (or man) initially consents to sex doesn’t mean that she can’t change her mind; or that, once having changed her mind, she can’t be forced.

Dale also complains about feminists who yammer on about “delicate flower of femininity” - without, of course, linking to an actual feminist saying anything of the sort. (It must be fun to be a right-winger - if you want to make a charge against feminists, you don’t have to actually provide any evidence; you just make up whatever lie you like, as Dale did, and the other right-wingers will take your word for it.) He then goes on to say:

Of course, Dale’s logic here is nonsense. Once a woman initially consents to have sex, if a woman changes her mind that’s “taking no responsibility”? How about a women who allows a date to buy her dinner and then consents to make out with him - is she taking no responsibility, too, if she chooses not to have sex with him, or objects if he forces the issue?

In fact, all the law requires is that men and women take responsibility for their own actions. If your partner (whatever their sex) asks you to stop, you stop. If you choose to “persist in nonconsensual intercourse,” then you’re breaking the law and you can be held responsible in court.

And that, really, is what Dale and too many of his fellow-travelers are objecting to here - the idea that men who freely choose to continue after being told to stop might be held responsible for their own actions. The horror! The horror!

If the allegations are true, this is pretty appalling:

Goldsmith claims art department chairman Jim Craft told him on June 20 that he could no longer work at the college because he was a member of the League of the South.

The college, a Christian liberal arts college with about 1,500 students in Tigerville, had no comment Tuesday on the lawsuit filed in Greenville County.

The League of the South seeks to “advance the cultural, social, economic and political well-being and independence of the Southern people by all honourable means,” according to its Web site. It has been labeled a neo-Confederate hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

I don’t care if a professor chairs his local Klan and bakes cookies for the mafia when he’s not too busy organizing bowling night for NAMBLA; what he does outside the classroom ought be his own business, and no grounds for firing. In particular, firing someone for his political opinions outside of class is reprehensible, and goes against the spirit of free expression.

UPDATE: Prometheus 6 comments.

That’s quoted from Colorado public defender Eric Vanatta’s legal brief defending a high school student who was charged with disorderly conduct for swearing at the principal (via Calpundit). Despite the fact that five months remain in the year, The Smoking Gun has given this brief the 2003 legal document of the year award. Go ahead and read the whole brief - it’s a very rewarding and somewhat silly examination of the F-word.

That said, I do have a quibble with the passage quoted above. Like so many people, Mr. Vanatta gets the cliche wrong: it’s perfectly legal to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theatre. What’s illegal is falsely yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theatre (Justice Holmes’ exact quote is, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”). The distinction is, as Mr. Vanatta says, constitutionally significant.

Incidentally, Schenck - the case the “falsely yelling fire in a theatre” quote comes from - is one of the most appalling attacks on free speech in Supreme Court history, in which the Court turned logic on its head to argue that arresting people for peacefully distributing anti-war pamphlets did not violate the first amendment. It’s ironic, and annoying, that the Supreme Court case most often quoted in defense of free speech was actually defending the opposite principle.

From CNN -

Story found via Crescat Sententia.

UPDATE: The Fifty Minute Hour is discussing this.

UPDATE 2: Peter Northup of Crescat Sententia has posted an excellent defense of the idea of HMHS. (Link may not work in Opera).

Every once in a while, I’ll read a discussion of David Hume and think “that’s exactly right, I agree entirely. I should really make some time to read this Hume fellow.” Of course, I never do.

Which brings me to Will Baude’s ” Magnum Opus on Moral Relativism” over at Crescat Sententia (if you’re in Opera, you may have to switch to another browser to get the link to work):

I thought the quote at the bottom from A.J. Ayer - arguing that we never really argue about moral standards, but instead argue about facts - was particualrly interesting.

Go ahead and read the whole post.

I think Friends is the best bland sit-com on TV right now. It’s got a funny cast, and good writers. But fundamentally, it is a bland show; it has no ambition beyond being a slightly naughty sit-com full of pretty people. There are dozens more just like Friends, except not as well-done.

The best thing about Friends, I think, is that it’s a possible topic of conversation with almost any TV-owning American - even folks who despise Friends have inevitably caught an episode (or a hundred). What else is that true of nowadays? Even the best-selling books haven’t been read by that many people, and many folks consider discussing religion, politics, sex and money (the four things we all have in common) rude or even distressing.

I was once stuck in a raft with a Christian sport hunter from rural Oregon; since he preferred not to debate politics or religion, and (beyond both of us being carbon-based life forms) we had absolutely nothing in common, conversation could have been a tad on the dead side. But instead, we discussed Friends. It’s the common narrative all Americans share.

This post is shamelessly swiped from Pacific Views (formerly known as The Watch, which itself was formerly known as Mars or Bust).

I’m sponsering three bloggers for Blogathon 2003.

• Pen-Elayne, who is raising funds for the Global Fund for Women.

• Wampum, who is raising funds for Cure Autism Now.
• And Eszter’s Blog, who is raising funds for Planned Parenthood.

And here’s a special offer - any reader of this blog who’d like an original drawing from me, go ahead and sponsor any of the above bloggers, and then let me know via email or the comments. If you sponsor (singly or in combination) for at least $15, I’ll send you an original bighead pencil sketch (like the ones in the sidebar here) or a high-quality, signed print of any of my political cartoons - your choice. (These are the same prints that I charge $40 for in galleries, so this is a good buy!)

If you sponsor for at least $40, I’ll send you the original artwork to one of my political cartoons (your choice which one). Or, if you prefer, I’ll mail you an original, pen-and-ink bighead drawing.

Go ahead and make a pledge (or three!), but please do it soon - as I understand it, they’ll each be blogging for 24 hours straight starting Saturday morning, so there’s not much time left to make a pledge.

Hey, the new Dollars and Sense is out - which means I’m allowed to show y’all my cartoon from this issue!

Via Calpundit, this interesting article from the Florida Sun-Sentinal.

As Kevin says, “legislatures ought to make testifying under oath standard practice.”

Bean and I weren’t invited to participate in the Right Wing News “20 greatest Americans” survey (see my previous post for more info on that).

If I had been, I definitely would have included Alice Paul on my list. Alice Paul was a suffragist - possibly the most famous suffragist in the world in her heyday, although today she’s not remembered very much compared to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. But Paul was probably the single most important activist working for the 19th Amendment; while Stanton and Anthony concentrated on getting women the vote at the state level, Paul focused unerringly on the grand prize of a constitutional amendment emancipating all women, nationwide.

Paul is also a hero of mine because of her considerable courage. To shame President Wilson and other Democrats into supporting suffrage, she staged protest after protest, including hunger strikes - actions that might seem extreme, but that kept the issue in the front pages and on the minds of American voters. She was arrested three times, held without any contact to friends, family or even a lawyer; she was isolated, force-fed rancid, worm-ridden food, sometimes beaten. But she was never deterred.

Intellectually, Paul is also an important foremother to modern feminist thought. While other suffragists argued that women deserved the vote because of women’s special feminine nature - women were inherently more honest, would vote unselfishly and thus clean up government, etc etc - Paul insisted that women deserved the vote because women were equal as human beings, not better or worse.

My second choice would probably have been Ella Baker - a woman who, despite being virtually unknown to the larger American public, may have the most important person in the civil rights movement. While Martin Luther King Jr. was out being a spokesman for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Baker stayed out of the limelight and organized the SCLC - despite the sexism that made many male civil rights leaders object to a woman in charge.

Although her backstage work was essential to the SCLC’s success, Baker objected to the “top-down” approach to activism the SCLC practiced; Baker felt that grass-roots organizing to build stronger communities was a better long-term strategy. Baker went on to be a vital organizer of the SNCC.

A few other women I would have had to consider including on my list (in no particular order):

• Betty Friedan. I’m not sure that it’s possible to point to any single figure and say “she was the most responsible for starting the modern feminist movement” - but if there is such a figure, it would be Betty Friedan. Friedan not only wrote the book that kick-started the second wave, The Feminine Mystique, she co-founded NOW and NARAL.

• Charlotte Perkins Gilman. There’s been a recent wave of feminist books pointing out that economic equality between men and women is probably impossible until the institution of motherhood is re-examined. What few of those books point out is that it was all said by Gilman over a century ago - and that’s just a tiny portion of Gilman’s work. Most famous now for her short story The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman - as a suffragist, lecturer, novelist, and social scientist - may have been the most important female intellectual in American history.
• Do you personally know anyone who died in childbirth? A century ago, most Americans would have answered “yes”; now, most say “no.” That’s an astonishing change - and the person most responsible for it was Margaret Sanger. Every American who has ever had heterosexual sex should thank Margaret Sanger - her work in favor of birth control made sex safer, enabling women to control their reproductive health more than ever before. Sanger was involved on every level - health policy, political campaigning, lawsuits, even securing funding to help develop the pill - and her work revolutionized American reproductive life. Towards the end of her life, Sanger concentrated more on international reproductive health, and continuing her work remains vital today.
• Kate Mullaney, who organized the first women’s labor union in US history.
• Jane Addams What can you say about someone for whom helping to found the ACLU was the least of her accomplishments? In the first third of the 20th century, there was virtually no progressive movement that Addams didn’t play an important role in.
• Harriet Tubman. Anti-slavery activist, women’s rights activist, smuggler of slaves to freedom, spy for the North during the civil war, builder of housing for the elderly… It’s hard to believe how much Tubman did in only a single lifetime.
• Victoria Woodhull - one of the nation’s first female stock brokers, the very first female candidate for the US Presidency (she ran in 1872; her vice-presidential candidate was Frederick Douglass), and an important suffragist.
• Frances Wright was at least a century ahead of her time. While other white anti-slavery activists were too-often arguing that blacks were of course not equal but should be freed anyway, Wright argued for absolute equality - including sexual equality and mixing between the races, a position that made her widely hated. Wright was also involved in the Workingman’s movement of the 19th century and the women’s movement.
• And some better-known folks who would honor any list: Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Of course, there are many, many more notable women in American history… (and much more to be said about the few women listed here), but these are the women who came to mind first for me.

There’s a bit of a scuffle going on in conservative neighborhoods of blogtopia. It seems the blog Right Wing News surveyed 40 (mostly conservative) bloggers regarding “the twenty greatest figures from American History.” (Aside: Right Wing News uses Superman’s old catchphrase “truth, justice and the American way” as its motto; I wonder if the blogger realizes that Superman was a leftist in his original appearances?).

But when the survey results came out, Meryl Yourish commented, “…There is definitely a boys’ club in the blogosphere, and this list is entered into evidence as Exhibit A. There are a lot of bloggers on that list who have some pretty thoughtful, well-researched posts. But they couldn’t see fit to include a single woman?” Meryl’s criticism of blogotopian sexism led to something of a firestorm, with people posting both in support of and opposed to (but mostly opposed to) Meryl’s comments. My favorite was this supportive post from Electric Venom, a right-wing blogger:

That’s just a sample; do go read the whole thing, it’s totally kick-ass.

Since I know not everyone has time to read 26-page pdf files, I thought I’d save Alas readers a bit of time.

Shorter Judge Alex Kozinski reviews Bjørn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist.

1. Our world’s environment is the best world environment in the best of all possible worlds.

2. Lomberg’s opinion on the environment is unconventional. You can tell it’s unconventional because it is shared by myself and tens of thousands of other libertarians.
3. Environmentalists are dweebs.

If I could read Russian, maybe I’d understand why this web page features 33 images that look like bar codes. Then again, why ask why? As points of departure says, it’s fun anyway.

Yeah, yeah, it’s another damned quiz (via Madame Fabulous). But it gave me a chuckle. Although actually it’s kinda embarassing, since I’m a Green, not a Democrat.

Threat rating: High. The Bush administration is
concerned that it may not get a second term.
Therefore, we are going to change the rules so
that each Democrat vote only counts as 0.2
votes because Democrat is a shorter word than
Republican

What threat to the Bush administration are you?
brought to you by Quizilla