I understand why Americans respond with a certain level of skepticism to folks (politicians and outspoken pundits) whose philosophy seems to include pacifism-at-all-costs.

I mean, the problem with that sort of philosophy is twofold. First, of course, is that there are certainly times when going to war is merited, but the second, and to my mind more important reason, is that if your philosophy has one answer no matter what the question or circumstances surrounding it are, then you’re basically unnecessary as a thinker.

Plug In Question A. Get Response B.
Plug In Question Z? Get Response B.
Human input unnecessary.

So yeah, I do understand the skepticism that greets most reflexive doves, though I lean that way myself.

What I do not understand is why these folks opposite number, the ‘war is always the answer’ folks, the reflexive hawks, are taken the least bit seriously. Their philosophy has all of the problems of the previous philosophy, as well as the added problem that, in order to go to war, we ought to actually pass a somewhat more stringent test than in order not to go to war.

Clearly, a Very Serious Person.

They have the burden of proof, in other words, and judging by recent history, they’ve seemed both unwilling and unable to meet that burden without Making Shit Up.

Somehow, however, these folks are not given the scorn they so richly deserve, but are instead treated as very serious thinkers, foreign policy analysts of the highest caliber. I suspect that a lot of this is because something in the American psyche seems to automatically offer more credence to macho thuggery than it does to caution, viewing caution as a sign of weakness, rather than the sign of intellect it actually is. Which, yeah, this is also why there’s so much railing against ‘intellectuals’ … because thinking before you act is for wusses!

In any case, all of this is by way of saying that Bill Kristol is a big stupid monkey.

UPDATE:

Back in 2007, Kevin Drum put it like so:

The Bill Kristol phenomenon is a stellar example of what a nice suit and a sober tone of voice can do for you. When Curtis LeMay suggested bombing North Vietnam into the Stone Age and getting over our fear of using nuclear weapons, everyone saw him for what he was: a bellicose nutcase. Kristol is barely any less bloodthirsty, but he’s smart enough to talk in more soothing tones. As a result, he gets columns in Time magazine, edits his own widely-read magazine, and shows up constantly on television.

Underneath it, though, he’s every bit the bellicose nutcase that LeMay was. His answer to every foreign policy problem is exactly the same: a proposal to use the maximum amount of force that he thinks elite opinion can tolerate. But Kristol is well dressed, soft spoken, and a lively dinner companion. So everyone just sort of shrugs their shoulders at the fact that he basically wants to go to war with the whole world. It’s a nice gig.

My point here is that, yes, Kristol and his ilk are bellicose nutcases, and should be treated as such. The fact that Russ Feingold was right about Iraq (opposing invasion) has been, recently, enough to convince many pundits that he would be an inappropriate pick to chair the Senate Foreign Relations Committee . . . but those who were gung ho to invade would be perfectly appropriate, of course.

There’s this perception that those who oppose a war, even if they are later proved 100% right, are crazy far-left hippies, and I don’t see a similar stigma on the other side.

Don’t comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people.

So it’s Black Friday! How are you celebrating? In Long Island, they’re celebrating by killing Wal-Mart workers:

A Wal-Mart worker has died after being trampled by a throng of unruly shoppers shortly after the Long Island store opened Friday, police said. Unconfirmed reports said a pregnant woman also miscarried as the crowd rushed in.

Nassau County police said the 34-year-old Wal-Mart worker was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead at about 6 a.m. ET, an hour after the store opened.

A police statement said a throng of shoppers “physically broke down the doors, knocking him to the ground.” The exact cause of death “will be determined by the medical examiner’s office,” the police stated.

A 28-year-old pregnant woman was also taken to the hospital, after evidently miscarrying.

UPDATE: Thanks to Charles Brubaker in comments for alerting us that the inital reports of a miscarriage were false.

Glenn Reynolds writes the stupidest thing he’s ever written, even dumber than his Iraq War touchdown dance on his own 20-yard-line. It turns out, you see, that There Can Be Only One.

Am I talking of the Highlander? The Fifth Cylon? No, I’m talking out the one important black person that can exist for all of American history:

I feel a little sorry for Martin Luther King — his enormous accomplishments got less attention than they deserved because of the cult of Malcolm X, and now he’s being eclipsed by Barack Obama. Though I suppose he’d be perfectly okay with that.

Yeah, that Martin Luther Whatever guy, who’s ever heard anything about him? It’s not like the guy has a national holiday or anything.

Now, we can go on and on about the utter stupidity of Reynolds pretending that W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman are now totally unimportant thanks to Obama’s victory; indeed, we can go further and note how insane it is that Reynolds would think Du Bois, Douglas, King, Malcolm X, Tubman, and the several million other African-Americans who worked for equality through our nation’s long and bitter racial history would see Obama’s victory as anything other than a positive outcome of their work. And certainly, I think everyone, including Barack Obama, would view Martin Luther King, Jr., as one of the three or four most influential Americans of the twentieth century, and one of the ten most influential in our nation’s history. He got his holiday for a reason — not that Reynolds’ allies wanted him to.

But Reynolds’ world view is of a piece with the dribblings of Mark “The Human” Steyn, who just doesn’t like that his kid is learning about the darkies:

A few months back, my little boy came home from Second Grade and said to me, “Guess what we learned today?” I said: “Rosa Parks.” He said: “How did you know that?” I said: “Because it’s always Rosa Parks.” And, if you don’t learn it in the context of any broader historical narrative, it’s just a story about municipal transit seating arrangements.

Teaching only the warts is a terrible thing to do to young children. At its extreme it leads to those British Taliban captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan: Subjects of the Crown who’d been raised in English schools and taught only that the country to which they owed their nominal allegiance was the source of all the racism, oppression, colonialism, and imperialism in the world. Why be surprised that a proportion of the alumni of such a system would look elsewhere for their sense of identity?

But, even in its more benign form, warts-only education leaves a big hole where one’s cultural inheritance should be.

Wow. So much to unpack. First off, let me remind Mark that he’s a Canadian; whose cultural heritage are we talking about? But the hoser’s point would be dumb even if he could trace his roots back to the Mayflower.

My daughter, who’s in first grade, learned about Rosa Parks. She didn’t learn about Parks absent context; she learned that she defied a rule that said she couldn’t go where she wanted because of the color of her skin. When my daughter mentioned learning about Parks, I amplified the lesson, telling her how in some places in that time, the color of your skin dictated which schools you went to, which restaurants you could patronize, even what bathrooms you used. I told her that this was horribly wrong, and that American heroes like Parks stood up to that system, and that they made our country a better place.

This is, of course, what Steyn misses in this — Rosa Parks’ story is told precisely because it is heroic. Martin Luther King, Jr. is revered precisely because he was a national hero. We learn about our country’s sins — slavery, the genocide of native peoples, the long period where women were denied the vote — and we learn that even in the face of the worst our country could do, that ordinary Americans still stood up and fought for justice.

Our country has done great things. Among them are the great things we did to heal our own self-inflicted wounds. I’m grateful for all the men and women of all races who have worked to make ours what the founders called A More Perfect Union. Far from being beside the point, they are the point of this endeavor, the people who were empowered by the ideals of the Founding Fathers to speak out against our nation’s failings and by opposing, end them. That is the greatness of America, and it is a greatness that is belittled by ignoring it in favor of bland triumphalism.

Joe Clark argues that the only way we’re going to get good captioning of online videos is if government steps in and regulates. Agree or disagree, it’s an interesting essay about a problem that — frankly — I haven’t thought about before.

Via Clark’s essay, I came across captioningsucks.com. I’ve never thought about how much captions suck, but they really do. Why aren’t they done in a decent font? It doesn’t seem like it should be that difficult to accomplish.

I’d tentatively favor government-mandated standards for captioning. I’d certainly favor legislation requiring videos produced by large companies to include good-quality captioning; for more garage-band productions, I don’t think I’d favor a mandate, but I would favor the government funding some resources to make captioning easy to accomplish even for folks with limited budgets and skills.

I don’t know if this is just posturing, but whether it is or isn’t, it’s wrong:

Democrat Al Franken suffered a setback Wednesday when the state Canvassing Board unanimously turned down his campaign’s request to include rejected absentee ballots in the U.S. Senate recount, prompting a Franken attorney to threaten to go all the way to Washington if necessary to get them considered.

“Whether it is at the county level, before the Canvassing Board, before the courts or before the United States Senate, we don’t know yet. But we remain confident these votes will be counted,” said Marc Elias, the campaign’s lead recount attorney, who added that he won’t appeal the board’s decision.

Court? Fine. This was always going to end up in Minnesota’s courts, no matter who won. But the Senate? Sorry, Marc, but you’ve lost me.

The U.S. Senate does have the power to overturn the decision of the state government, and seat the “losing” candidate. But such power should be excercised only in extreme circumstances, such as obvious fraud that a state is willfully ignoring. If Norm Coleman had shown up at Ramsey County with 1500 ballots that all happened to be for him, and it was all caught on tape, and the GOP machine managed to keep it out of the courts, it would be a legitimate use of the Senate’s power to deny Coleman his seat, and seat Al Franken instead.

But that’s not what’s happening here. The process has thus far been pretty transparent; on philosophical grounds I disagree with the Canvassing Board’s decision not to look at absentee ballots, but the board’s decision was based on their not having authority to do so, which is certainly a fair reading of the law, even if it’s one I disagree with. Franken can now appeal to Minnesota’s courts and even to the Federal courts to adjudicate the matter, and that’s exactly what he should do. Indeed, had the Canvassing Board made the opposite decision, it would be entirely right for Coleman to seek redress through the courts; that’s what courts are there for.

But while courts and the Canvassing Board will have to adjudicate the rules and the ballot challenges, there’s nothing indicating that the process has been anything but absolutely and totally fair to this point. Yes, both sides are filing frivolous challenges, but that’s an artifact of the system that’s unlikely to change. But frivolous challenges will, presumably, be ignored once things get to the Canvassing Board. The challenges are being made fairly and openly, however, and the process has been transparent.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: I’m backing the process here. So far, the process has functioned as it was designed to, and while I hope that when all is said and done, Al Franken wins, I hope he does so legitimately. It will do the DFL and the national Democratic Party no good to ram Franken through the Senate. It will appear to be what it is — a naked power grab, one that will do far more harm to Democrats’ ability to lead than merely having 58 senators will. I urge the Franken camp and the Majority Leader to back off — now. Let the system work. And when it’s done working, respect the outcome. Because while the system isn’t perfect, Minnesota’s is better than most. And as a Minnesotan, I’ll accept Norm Coleman winning by four of my fellow citizens’ votes long before I’ll accept Franken being seated on a 58-41 party-line vote. The former is democracy; the latter is anything but.

July 31st

We took Tehran’s nearly brand new subway into the city to experience the bazaar. (If you want to see a video overview of the bazaar–though the quality is not so great–go here.) The cars are remarkably clean and roomy, especially if you are, as I am, used to the subway in New York City, though the size of the crowd during rush hour seems not so different. Oddly, subway cars are not segregated by sex the way buses are. If you take a bus in Tehran, there are sections reserved for men and women. At least this is what I have heard; we did not actually take a bus within the city. On the buses we took between cities, the sexes were not required to sit separately. In the subway, while there are cars reserved exclusively for women, women are not required to use those cars. The man sitting next to my wife heard us speaking English and asked her where I was from. When she told him New York, he asked her if she thought the stress there was greater than in Iran. I don’t remember what she told him, but he started talking about the tension boiling beneath the surface in Iran, how people move through their lives “normally,” so that on the surface everything appears calm, but that they have no real hope for the future. He was talking specifically, if I remember correctly, about the young people in Iran, though his words did seem to capture something I felt throughout my visit in the mood of the people as a whole, to the degree that one can get anything resembling a sense of the mood of a people on a two week visit.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, the Christmas Variety Special. Once a staple of the holiday season, it’s largely gone the way of the Dodo. And that’s too bad; while they’re goofy and overly-earnest, they’re also campy and hilarious. Of course, that usually goes hand-in-hand. And really, it’s hard to do them truly campy and hilarious on purpose.

Thank the Gods for Stephen Colbert, then, whose Christmas special — with an emphasis on “Christmas” — hits exactly the right notes. It has a sense of humor about itself, whether having Toby Keith singing an over-the-top-even-for-Toby-Keith song about Santa dropping nuclear bombs on non-Christians, Willie Nelson talking about the fourth wise man’s gift of pot to the baby Jesus, or Feith singing about your prayer being important to angels, and how they’ll deal with your prayer in the order it was received, the special has all the hallmarks of the worst/best holiday specials. Of course John Legend happens to also be a forest ranger who just happens to drop by Colbert’s cabin to sing about nutmeg, if you know what I’m saying. Of course John Stewart drops by to offer Colbert the opportunity to celebrate Chanukah. Of course seemingly every guest ends up under the mistletoe, with Colbert saying, “well, this is awkward.” Of course Elvis Costello ends up singing “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding” in a bear suit. Why? They just do.

And the show features perhaps the best holiday song since “The Chanukah Song,” in Colbert’s “Another Christmas Song”:

That’s good stuff right there.

So thanks, Stephen, for your instant classic; I’m looking forward to seeing how you top it next year. Or perhaps we could have John Stewart instead,with his Chanukah special. Either way, congratulations: you’ve produced a Christmas special that does not suck.

From Box Turtle Bulletin, some great news:

Miami-Date Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman has declared Florida’s gay adoption ban unconstitutional, saying, ”It is clear that sexual orientation is not a predictor of a person’s ability to parent.” This ruling grants Frank Gill, a gay foster father in North Miami, the go-ahead to adopt two foster children he has been raising since 2004. The two children are ages 4 and 8, making Frank virtually the only parent the younger child has ever known.

Lawyers for the state of Florida immediately said they would appeal the ruling. During the hearings, attorneys for the state brought in so-called “experts” George Rekers and Walter Schumm, both of whom are closely associated with Paul Cameron. Rekers used his own particular brand of junk science to support the state’s position that gays should be barred from adopting, adding that he believed the ban should extend to Native Americans for the same reasons.

From the Orlando Sentinel:

“These children are thriving. These words we don’t often hear within these walls. That’s uncontroverted,” said Circuit Judge Cindy S. Lederman. “They’re a good family. They’re a family in every way except in the eyes of the law. These children have a right to permanency,” the judge said. “The only real permanency is adoption in the home where they are thriving. … There is no rational basis to preclude homosexuals from adopting.”

Some good news, via Bean:

SILVERTON, Ore. (AP) - Four protesters from the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas were in Silverton yesterday to protest the election of the nation’s first openly transgender mayor.

They were overmatched by a large group of counter-protesters who rallied in support of the Mayor Stu Rasmussen.

Rasmussen has twice before been mayor of the small city. But he served those terms before his breast implants and before he started wearing dresses and 3-inch heels openly in public.

The protesters arrived with an assortment of signs, such as “God Hates You,” and “Barack Obama = Antichrist.”

But the town greeted the protesters with a festive counter-protest. More than 100 people paraded in the street and some men wore women’s clothing in a show of support for Rasmussen.

MRA Robert Franklin writes:

New Teen Violence Report is 468 Pages Long–but the Word ‘Father’ Is Nowhere to be Found

[...] The report is 468 pages long, and as far as I can tell, the word “father” is nowhere to be found in it.

Wow, that is pretty surprising. Especially since it took me under a minute to find this in the report:

Absent Fathers

The vast majority of single parents in Canada are women, and there has been much speculation about the propensity of youth from lone-parent homes led by women to be involved in violence. Although the research and literature points to a strong correlation between violence involving youth and teenage parents, the findings are equivocal on the correlation between violence involving youth and the absence of a father generally.

Despite the lack of solid evidence, an increased presence of fathers, and particularly Black fathers, is often cited as a force….

While it is logical to work to have fathers be responsible parents, we cannot conclude that their absence from the home is, on its own, a source of the immediate risk factors for violence involving youth.

Apparently “as far as I can tell” doesn’t include a simple text search. Or skimming the headers.

UPDATE: Not long after I posted this, Robert’s post disappeared.

UPDATE 2 (Nov. 28): The post has reappeared, updated and corrected. For the record, I actually have no objection to people editing and revising their posts, as long as significant changes are noted (as they are in this case).

It’s 33 multiple-choice questions, mostly about basic US civics, but straying a bit into economics. You can take the quiz yourself by going here.

They gave the quiz to a representative sample of Americans (or at least, of Americans with phone service). 7!% of Americans got a failing grade (that is, answered fewer than 60% of the questions correctly). The average score was 49%.

A few quick points:

1) Although the report emphasizes that college doesn’t make much difference, the opposite seems to be true. Going by the numbers, the single factor most clearly associated with higher scores was education (Average score of people with doctorates: 72%. Average for those without a high school degree: 35%.)

2) Amusingly, people who told the surveyor that they had been elected to public office at some point, did slightly worse on the test than those who had never been elected to public office.

3) These sort of quizzes are often used to argue that the young people are stupid, but they rarely give the same test to all age groups. This one did, and found that age made very little difference; baby boomers (the highest average scorers) did only a few points better, on average, than the youngest group.

4) Talking about politics a lot is associated with higher scores, as is using the internet, so I’m sure “Alas” readers will kick ass on the test. Watching lots of TV is associated with lower scores. So is talking on the phone a lot.

Weirdly, the report’s discussion refers to phones as “passive electronic media.” How is talking on the phone passive?

5) Race had a noticible association with test scores; whites and multiracial respondents scored about 50%, while Asians, Latin@s and Blacks scored about 40%. Men scored a little better than women. My guess is that this reflects a mixture of education & school quality effects, language barriers for some respondents, and stereotype threat.

6) Disappointingly, there’s no relationship between knowing this stuff and politics (conservatives and liberals both got about the same scores).¹ If every American could pass this test, would anything change?

7) 32/33, in case you’re wondering.²

I guess I’m supposed to be frightened or appalled or something by the low scores on this test, but really it just makes me feel sort of alienated from my culture. It’s a reminder that knowing stuff like this is a hobby, and one I don’t happen to share with most Americans.

1. Although the report doesn’t give much detail, so maybe there is some relationship that’s not reported here. (back)
2. I missed the one about the anti-Federalists. Darn it. (back)

Kevin Moore criticizes a slew of hacktacular cartoons about obesity and health. Needless to say, I agree with Kevin — and would even if he hadn’t quoted me extensively. (ahem).

(You should go read the whole post, if only to check out the incredibly awful Batman cartoon. Base-jumping? What the heck does that mean? And how long did it take most readers to recognize that the thing he’s standing on is a scale?)

But I do have one minor objection — a nit-pick, really, nothing more. Kevin writes:

As my friend and political cartoonist Barry Deutsch has pointed out many times, fat people are easy targets, perhaps the last “safe” target (along with the mentally ill and poor Southern whites) for comedians and other humorists to treat as an “other”, that slightly less-than-human category of people who deviate from The Norm and thus deserve mockery and marginalization.

I’m pretty sure I’ve never said that fat people are “the last safe target,” because I loathe that phrase.

Everyone thinks they’re the last safe target.

Just last week, I read MRA Glenn Sacks saying that “males are the only politically acceptable target.”¹ This right-wing blogger claims that white people are the last “safe target.” That one² thinks Sarah Palin, as a white conservative woman, was the “safe target.” No, wait — “the only safe target is the straight male”!

Of course, it’s not just anti-feminists and right-wingers who use the phrase — plenty of my allies use it too. Fat people are safe targets; the poor are safe targets; trans women are safe targets; undocumented immigrants are safe targets; black women are safe targets; and so on.

And let’s not forget the “last acceptable prejudice” — a distinction shared by Mormons, suburbanites, children with Down syndrome, Catholics, women, homosexuals, elderly people, rednecks, and probably a hundred others.

I completely agree with the general points made by many of these folks (pretty much all the ones on the left), but can we please stop using the “only safe target” and “last acceptable prejudice” framings? Taken literally, these phrases positively scream “oppression olympics!”, and they’re virtually never accurate.

1. By the way, referring to men and boys as “males” is something that, according to some MRAs, is a sign of misandry, when feminists do it. (back)
2. Phrase (c) 2008 John McCain. (back)

Governor Schwarzenegger (after five years, it still gives me the jibblies to write that) has proposed a 9% tax on veterinary services. Here’s some info from the fact sheet I received when we took Petey in for an eye infection:

In this weak economy, animal owners are already making tough choices. Adding sales tax to veterinary services will force owners to make difficult choices about the health and welfare of their pets.

• Pets are members of the family and an important source of companionship. This proposed tax could add approximately 9% to the cost of veterinary care. The result will be that many animals won’t get the medical care they need and they will be abandoned or euthanized.

• Shelter populations are increasing beyond capacity as many Californians lose their homes to foreclosure. If people can’t afford to take care of their pets, they may be forced to abandon them to shelters, adding to the overcrowding and financial strain.

• More than 800,000 cats and dogs enter California shelters every year at a cost to taxpayers of $275 million. As shelters become filled beyond capacity, more healthy animals will be euthanized adding to the emotional strain of shelter workers.

There’s more on the sheet, including information about food production animals.

I know there are more pressing issues out there right now, and I’ll admit that I feel a little guilty posting an action alert about the well-being of pets when the well-being of other animals (and, you know, humans) is under more severe attack. And a 9% tax, although high, isn’t the end of the world (says the middle-classer with a single, healthy cat).

But a tax like this says a lot about how people view both health care and animal welfare. We still seem to insist that a trip to the hospital is a product, akin to a new purse or car or TV, and a patient is a customer who can simply choose to forgo care if they don’t have the money. Animals are considered luxuries; if you want a pet, go for it, but it really should be a low priority. Even if everyone grants that animals like seeing eye dogs are necessary, it’s actually pretty revolutionary to think of animal companionship as a right instead of a privilege. What if you need a companion animal for your emotional health? What if you view animals as friends and family members with unique personalities? (Filthy hippie! Go back to Berkeley!) Is that dog still a frivolous luxury? Should that bird’s well-being be contingent on paying a tax? If humans shouldn’t be taxed on vital medical care, why should animals? Because humans are just better? Because humans can speak out against it?

So while this tax is a relatively small injustice, it has much broader implications for how we view the health of our animals.

Also, while these two situations are in no way on the same level, I think that if you take this mentality to its logical extreme, you end up in the camp that claims that basic rights like having children should be reserved for the middle class and up. If your job doesn’t pay you enough to take care of your dependent, then the problem doesn’t lie with your job - it lies with your stupid, selfish decision to care for a dependent. And there seems to be an arbitrary and invisible income line below which people simply lose the right to have families (whatever those families might consist of).

The official action alert is here.

**

Also, a mural on the face of the former Valley Cities JCC building is facing sandblasting. Here’s a photo from the Jewish Journal:

Image description: a building with a lively and detailed mural depicting children dancing, reproductions of old photographs, and human hands touching. The words “VALLEY CITIES JEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER” are written across the top.

My grandmother died two years ago, and we held her memorial in this building. Sherman Oaks isn’t exactly the most happening city on earth, and when I approached the building on the day of the memorial, I was struck by the little oasis of art on a street that housed mainly strip malls and unadorned housing.

Again, it’s not the end of the world if this mural is destroyed. And the new owners of the building are certainly within their rights to change its appearance. Except, wait - don’t they have a responsibility to the larger community? If the residents of Sherman Oaks value the mural, if they derive pleasure from viewing it, if it’s a historical artifact (Yiddishkayt points out that it contains one of the view remaining public displays of written Yiddish in L.A.), then shouldn’t they have a say in whether it stays or goes? If residents of, say, gated communities have to comply with their neighbors’ aesthetic preferences by keeping their houses uniform, why doesn’t that logic apply here? Why are “tidy” adornments like lawns more desirable than “messy” adornments like art? Does it really all boil down to money and power, or are there deeper cultural forces at work here?

This is kind of a tangent, but this situation makes me think of public space. Who does public space (parks, medians, sidewalks, etc) belong to? The easy answer is a city - but who does a city belong to, if not its citizens? How many of you view public space as forbidden areas - places that you can look at and sometimes walk on, but aren’t allowed to alter? I’ve been reading up on the guerrilla gardening movement, which targets public space and uses it to grow food and other beneficial plants. Who gets to choose what grows on public land? Why do we feel like we have no right to the space in our own communities? Why does planting food alongside a sidewalk feel so subversive that guerrilla gardeners regularly do it in the middle of the night? (Interesting note: many gardeners report that city officials visit the sites - not to arrest them, but to thank them for their work.)

One possible argument is that, if everyone felt we had the right to use and alter public space, there’d be anarchy - people pulling up each other’s crops all over the place. And I’m sure some theft and vandalism would happen, but why is the fear of chaos so overwhelming that we don’t want to risk it? Why not tackle the underlying causes of crime instead of living in fear of it? And why tax my kitten for the misfortune of having a clogged tear duct?

(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)

[trigger warning]

Can rape jokes be funny? Megan at Jezebel argues they can be:

If we take sexual assault off the table of things we can laugh about or joke about, it’s just another way of saying: this is a different crime than any other crime, and so we can and must treat its victims differently than any other crime.

And, you know, fuck that. I got treated differently than any other crime victim once because of the kind of crime that I was the victim of. If I had been mugged, would the cops have been calling my friends and asking them how much I’d been drinking that night? If I had been only robbed, would it have mattered to the cops whether I’d told the guys I was out with that night that I was dating someone? If I had been shot walking out of the bar, would it have been anyone’s business if my friend thought that I was flirting or not? And if any of those crimes had been committed instead, would everyone be so horribly offended by me making jokes about it? It’s all part of the way in which society wants to treat me differently because of how I was victimized. Let’s treat sexual assaults like any other crime and tell some rape jokes. Cool?

In the course of her post, Megan talks about this Wanda Sykes routine:

…she’s making light of Kobe Bryant’s victim, who was raped after she went up to his hotel room at the ungodly hour of 2 in the morning. In fact, you could argue — and I am — that Wanda Sykes is poking fun of that victim for being, you know, stupid enough to get raped.

I didn’t even consider that interpretation until Megan suggested it. To me, Sykes’ joke seemed to be playing with how tragic/ludicrous it is that visiting a celebrity’s hotel room isn’t safe for a woman. (Men can visit a celebrity’s room to discuss his jump shot without worrying about being raped — and without being blamed for it if they are raped).

Disagreeing with Megan’s approach, Liss writes:

Except, here’s the thing: Public rape jokes have fuck-all to do with sexual assault survivors using humor to deal with their own sexual assaults.

Megan’s argument lacks some critical distinctions and exceptions: Public jokes and private jokes are not equivalent. Jokes for laughs and jokes for catharsis are very different animals. Jokes about rape made by men, who have a significantly lower chance of being raped, are not the same as jokes made by women, whose lives are qualitatively different from men’s because of their heightened chance of being raped. Jokes that minimize the severity and ubiquity of rape (e.g. prison rape jokes) perpetuate the rape culture; jokes that underline the severity and ubiquity of rape (e.g. Wanda Sykes’ detachable vagina bit) challenge the rape culture.

And even still, all rape jokes run the very real risk of triggering survivors who aren’t expecting rape jokes in their escapist entertainment. (Go figure.) Which underscores the inherent deficiency of the question “Is a rape joke ever funny?” It’s incomplete without a discussion of audience, intended or otherwise—and the audience for any rape joke potentially includes survivors who may not only find the joke decidedly unfunny, but also triggering.

I think Lissa interpreted the Sykes routine pretty much as I did (although she put it better than me, typically).

Asking if a rape joke is “funny” is besides the point, because “is this funny” and “is this problematic” are not the same question. As I’m pretty sure bell hooks points out somewhere, some jokes are offensive and funny. I think a better question for feminist analysis is the one Liss asks: does a rape joke (funny or not) perpetuate rape culture, or does it question rape culture?

And, finally, I think people should be careful to avoid turning discussions of humor into the politics of personal purity (just to be clear, Melissa didn’t do this, but it’s a mistake I’ve seen other feminists make in similar discussions). It’s worthwhile to subject humor to the kind of feminist analysis Melissa uses. But we shouldn’t give ourselves demerits for having laughed at the “wrong” joke, because the point of these discussion isn’t for each of us to gauge our own (or other people’s) level of feminist purity.

This is a feminist-only thread.