I don’t have anything to say right now. Awful is awful, and we’ll have time to dissect which particular flavor of awful this is soon enough. For now, keep the dead and wounded in your thoughts.
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Mike Doughty.
One of the more bizarre sub-plots from the bizarre story that is the faked balloon voyage of Falcon Heene is the YouTube video in which Falcon and his brothers claimed to be “not pussified.”
It’s a lovely video about how three young boys aren’t being “pussified,” and also, how they hate gay people. Hard to see how a family where dad has his children opine about how much they don’t want to be girls could go wrong, and so surprising that there have been, at the very least, allegations of domestic abuse against Richard Heene, the boys’ father.
Now obviously, this video is all about hating on the soi disant “feminizing” of American men, but it was the title of it — “Not Pussified” — that caught my eye. Because that links Heene back to one of the great moments in blog history.
Those of you who are newer denizens of the blogosphere may not be familiar with what is perhaps the ur-Men’s Rights screed, Kim duToit’s “The Pussification of the Western Male.” It is glorious in its awfulness, and I still hold to my initial response that it is the worst thing I have ever read, an opinion shared by many.
I don’t know that Heene read du Toit’s screed, but it seems pretty likely. At the very least, he picked up the word pussified from one du Toit’s readers, and then cheerfully passed it along to his sons. And that says something — for du Toit’s ideals are, to be blunt, awful.
The essay really should be read by anyone seeking to understand the mind of someone like Richard Heene, although I caution that it should not be read without a vomit bag by one’s side. It can’t be summarized, but here are a few choice passages:
We have become a nation of women.
It wasn’t always this way, of course. There was a time when men put their signatures to a document, knowing full well that this single act would result in their execution if captured, and in the forfeiture of their property to the State. Their wives and children would be turned out by the soldiers, and their farms and businesses most probably given to someone who didn’t sign the document.
[Several other examples of manly manliness deleted]
There was even a time when a President of the United States threatened to punch a man in the face and kick him in the balls, because the man had the temerity to say bad things about the President’s daughter’s singing.
We’re not like that anymore.
Quick interjection — du Toit is from South Africa. Yes, he now lives in America; still, I can’t help reading this and thinking, “who are you calling ‘we?’”
Now, little boys in grade school are suspended for playing cowboys and Indians, cops and crooks, and all the other familiar variations of “good guy vs. bad guy” that helped them learn, at an early age, what it was like to have decent men hunt you down, because you were a lawbreaker.
Now, men are taught that violence is bad—that when a thief breaks into your house, or threatens you in the street, that the proper way to deal with this is to “give him what he wants”, instead of taking a horsewhip to the rascal or shooting him dead where he stands.
[Several paragraphs of "proof" that modern men are weaklings deleted]
And finally, our President, who happens to have been a qualified fighter pilot, lands on an aircraft carrier wearing a flight suit, and is immediately dismissed with words like “swaggering”, “macho” and the favorite epithet of Euro girly-men, “cowboy”. Of course he was bound to get that reaction—and most especially from the Press in Europe, because the process of male pussification Over There is almost complete.
How did we get to this?
Remember, this was back in 2003, when our President was at his apex of manliness. Still, it says something that du Toit was swooning at the Mission Accomplished landing, doesn’t it?
In the first instance, what we have to understand is that America is first and foremost, a culture dominated by one figure: Mother. It wasn’t always so: there was a time when it was Father who ruled the home, worked at his job, and voted.
But in the twentieth century, women became more and more involved in the body politic, and in industry, and in the media—and mostly, this has not been a good thing. When women got the vote, it was inevitable that government was going to become more powerful, more intrusive, and more “protective” (ie. more coddling), because women are hard-wired to treasure security more than uncertainty and danger. It was therefore inevitable that their feminine influence on politics was going to emphasize (lowercase “s”) social security.
Yes, ladies — it’s your fault! Your fault that men no longer fight duels! Your fault that we no longer engage in fisticuffs, or drink until our livers explode! Blast you, and your belief that maybe it’s okay if drunken bar fights are not a daily occurrence in one’s life!
Kim du Toit whines for several more paragraphs about how television commercials show men as big doofuses, and therefore women are castrating bitches who deserve to be lonely (no, seriously: “What this guy is going to do is smile ruefully, finish his cereal, and then go and fuck his secretary, who doesn’t try to cut his balls off on a daily basis. Then, when the affair is discovered, people are going to rally around the castrating bitch called his wife, and call him all sorts of names. He’ll lose custody of his kids, and they will be brought up by our ultimate modern-day figure of sympathy: The Single Mom. You know what? Some women deserve to be single moms.”) and ranting about Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (”A bunch of homosexuals trying to “improve” ordinary men into something “better” [ie. more acceptable to women]: changing the guy’s clothes, his home decor, his music—for fuck’s sake, what kind of girly-man would allow these simpering butt-bandits to change his life around?”) and embracing misandry (”Yes, the men are, by and large, slobs. Big fucking deal. Last time I looked, that’s normal. Men are slobs, and that only changes when women try to civilize them by marriage. That’s the natural order of things.”) Oh, and also supporting sports like dog- and cock-fighting. And claiming that George W. Bush is a real man who doesn’t have to prove it. And making racist statements. And then comes perhaps the most asinine four paragraphs ever written in the English language.
Speaking of rap music, do you want to know why more White boys buy that crap than Black boys do? You know why rape is such a problem on college campuses? Why binge drinking is a problem among college freshmen?
It’s a reaction: a reaction against being pussified. And I understand it, completely. Young males are aggressive, they do fight amongst themselves, they are destructive, and all this does happen for a purpose.
Because only the strong men propagate.
And women know it. You want to know why I know this to be true? Because powerful men still attract women. Women, even liberal women, swooned over George Bush in a naval aviator’s uniform. Donald Trump still gets access to some of the most beautiful pussy available, despite looking like a medieval gargoyle. Donald Rumsfeld, if he wanted to, could fuck 90% of all women over 50 if he wanted to, and a goodly portion of younger ones too.
This is what Kim du Toit called for: the manliness of Donald Rumsfeld, and the condoning of rape — for rape is understandable, given how mean women are. And only the strong propagate — those strong enough to take by force what is not given.
That is what manhood is to men like this. Compare with the “pussification” seen by sneering troglodytes like Heene and du Toit: men taking responsibility for themselves. Choosing to think before acting, talk before fighting. Picking up the floor, maybe washing the dishes. Cleaning ourselves. Not putting our children heedlessly into harm’s way. Behaving, in short, like civilized human beings are supposed to.
It does not surprise me that a man who would raise his sons to declare that they weren’t going to be pussified would be the same kind of man who would beat his wife. Would be the same kind of man who would use his children to get ahead. Would be the same kind of man who would commit several felonies, and lie to the police, in a vain effort to get on television. It doesn’t surprise me at all, because the kind of man du Toit praised, and the kind of man Heene claimed to be, is at heart a narcissist, far more interested in himself than anyone else in the world, far more willing to risk himself and his family than to change course and admit fault. If the pussification of the Western male means fewer men like Heene and du Toit, then all I can say is that we can’t get pussified fast enough.
I wanted to point out this excellent remembrance of Ted Kennedy, which is particularly relevant to some of the discussion that’s been going on here at “Alas” recently. Melissa writes:
Senator Edward Kennedy was a tough guy. He was smart, tenacious, opinionated, strong in body, mind, and spirit. And I think because he was such a tough guy, he won’t mind if I don’t share my real and uncensored thoughts on the occasion of his passing.
Teddy, as he was known, was privileged, in every sense of the word. And he made liberal use of his privilege, in ways I admired and ways I did not. The terrible bargain we all seem to have made with Teddy is that we overlooked the occasions when he invoked his privilege as a powerful and well-connected man from a prominent family, because of the career he made using that same privilege to try to make the world a better place for the people dealt a different lot.
Twice, Teddy did despicable things with his privilege, very publicly.
In many ways, Ted Kennedy was the most consequential of all the Kennedy brothers. His older brother Jack was president, of course, and his older brother Bobby was Attorney General, and perhaps would have been president had he not been assassinated. And both men have been far more celebrated through the years since their deaths. Jack’s death was lamented as the cutting short of a life that could have been great; Bobby’s is part of the low point of the 1960s, the 1968 spring and summer that cost the lives of both he and Martin Luther King, Jr., a year that ended with the election of a man who was morally unsuited to be president.
Ted Kennedy was in the Senate in 1963 when Jack was shot and killed in Texas. He had been there for a year, having won the seat his brother left in a 1962 special election. He would serve there for 47 years, building a political legacy that, in the end, outshone what his brothers had accomplished.
Kennedy was a driving force behind repeated hikes in minimum wage, creating the S-CHIP program (which provides health insurance for children), the existence of Title IX, and the preservation of the Voting Rights Act during the Reagan administration. Kennedy was instrumental in preventing Robert Bork’s confirmation, an act that literally saved Roe v. Wade. He was a strong anti-Apartheid activist, defying South Africa’s racist government by staying with Archbishop Desmond Tutu on a 1985 trip. He also worked with the Reagan administration as an envoy to the Soviet Union, negotiating for arms reductions with Premier Mikhail Gorbachev. In recent years he led the effort to liberalize immigration laws. And when health insurance reform is passed — and it will be passed — it will because of the hard work Kennedy has put into its creation.
Kennedy also played an outsized role in presidential politics, despite only seeking the office once, in 1980. Kennedy’s challenge to Jimmy Carter arguably fatally wounded Carter’s political career, but it also set in motion the realignment of both Democrats and Republicans in the South. And it’s arguable that the man who holds the office today is there because of a well-timed endorsement from Kennedy during last year’s primary; Barack Obama gained badly needed momentum going into Super Tuesday thanks to the Kennedy blessing. Given the whisker-thin margin he won by, it’s hard to imagine that Obama could have won had Kennedy even merely stayed neutral.
Kennedy was not perfect, of course. He battled alcohol addiction, and was for many years a serial womanizer, known for carousing in Washington with Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn. Kennedy’s personal history, and the history of Kennedy womanizing and infidelity, kept Kennedy from coming out strongly against Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearings.
But Kennedy appeared to have beaten those demons in his later life. He was married to his last wife, Vicki, in 1992, and by all accounts, she was a positive, stabilizing force in his life. By the time he fell ill last summer with a brain tumor, the paparazi had long stopped following Kennedy around; he’d become too boring in his old age.
People will view Kennedy’s passing at 77 as a tragedy, but Ted knew what tragedy was. He died an old man, at home with his family. He alone among the Kennedy brothers avoided a violent death (the eldest Kennedy brother, Joe Jr., died in World War II). Kennedy’s death is not a tragedy, just a part of life. It is sad only that he could not have lived another year, to see his hard work on health care come to fruition.
Kennedy was always a passionate defender of progressive ideals, and through almost five decades in public service he was a powerful voice in favor of equality, justice, and economic assistance. Few men or women in American history have had such a consequential political career. It is a grand legacy, and as an American, I’m grateful for it.
It’s not even midnight and everyone at my sister’s house (where I’m visiting this week) is asleep. Guess I’ll post some links.
Professor Gates’ version of the story. This is a must-read if you’re interested in this story.
I guess I ought to link to the police report, too. (Pdf link.)
Charles Ogletree, Professor Gate’s lawyer, gives his version of events.
“…black men, no matter who they are or what their status, aren’t allowed to challenge white police officers, which I suppose is similar to saying black people aren’t allowed to have titles, authority, or clout.”
John McWhorter, a writer whose politics are somewhat to the right of “Alas,” has an interesting take.
I haven’t found a transcript of Obama’s comments on Gatesgate, but you can get the gist from this news story, or watch the video:
Shark-fu at AngryBlackBitch weighs in, discussing her own experiences in Cambridge.
Roy Edroso surveys right-wing blogospheric reactions. Unsurprisingly, most of them are on government’s side.
On white people saying “I wouldn’t have acted like that, if it had been me.”
“This is what happens to black men in America” Kate Harding’s take; too long to sum up, well worth reading.
Police Discretion and Arrest Power
Racism Review: “The irony, for those that have followed Gates’ scholarship closely, is that he has tended to downplay the significance of institutional racism in the contemporary U.S.”
* * *
I’m sure there are about a zillion more… feel free to leave more links in comments. Or, you know, just comment there.
In a ruling of interest to educators, parents and students across the country, the Supreme Court ruled, 8 to 1, on Thursday that the strip search of a 13-year-old Arizona girl by school officials who were looking for prescription-strength drugs violated her constitutional rights.
The officials in Safford, Ariz., would have been justified in 2003 had they limited their search to the backpack and outer clothing of Savana Redding, who was in the eighth grade at the time, the court ruled. But in searching her undergarments, they went too far and violated her Fourth Amendment privacy rights, the justices said.
Had Savana been suspected of having illegal drugs that could have posed a far greater danger to herself and other students, the strip search, too, might have been justified, the majority said, in an opinion by Justice David H. Souter.
“In sum, what was missing from the suspected facts that pointed to Savana was any indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear,” the court said. “We think that the combination of these deficiencies was fatal to finding the search reasonable.”
The dissent was written by Thomas.
The court also ruled that the vice-principal could not personally be held liable for his actions in this case. Dissenting from that decision were Ginsburg and Stevens. However, lower courts can still decide to hold the school district liable.
(Curtsy to Sailorman in comments.)
The AP has a story about the New York City school system’s “rubber rooms” — the places where hundreds of teachers facing disciplinary hearings wait, doing no work but drawing full salaries. Sometimes this can go on for years.
Because the teachers collect their full salaries of $70,000 or more, the city Department of Education estimates the practice costs the taxpayers $65 million a year. The department blames union rules.
“It is extremely difficult to fire a tenured teacher because of the protections afforded to them in their contract,” spokeswoman Ann Forte said. [...]
Many teachers say they are being punished because they ran afoul of a vindictive boss or because they blew the whistle when somebody fudged test scores.
So the teachers blame the schools, the schools blame the teachers. Buried deep in the article, however, the real culprit is briefly mentioned:
Once their hearings are over, they are either sent back to the classroom or fired. But because their cases are heard by 23 arbitrators who work only five days a month, stints of two or three years in a rubber room are common, and some teachers have been there for five or six.
So why don’t they just hire a bunch of full-time arbitrators? Given the millions of dollars of potential savings, it seems silly not to hire the needed personnel.
There’s an compelling episode of “This American Life” focusing on life inside teacher purgatory.
(Via.)
So the Obama Department of Justice decided to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Stonewall — and the 42nd anniversary of Loving vs. Virginia — by filing a brief in a same-sex marriage case that repeats a slew of anti-gay canards, and invents a couple of new ones.
Although some have argued otherwise, I believe (as one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers argues) the DOJ has a duty to defend current federal law in all but a few rare cases. I don’t object to them defending the Defense Of Marriage Act.1 But there are a hundred ways they could have done this that wouldn’t have been an insult to everyone who, unlike Barack Obama and his administration, gives a fuck about equal rights.
As Law Geek writes:
Even if one argues, as I often have, that a government lawyer — from the Department of Justice to state attorneys general — must defend even those laws with which one disagrees, such a lawyer needn’t overstate his or her case. The government lawyer defending a statute with which she disagrees needn’t add gratuitous demeaning statements into the legal brief she files.
Unlike the Obama Administration’s brief filed in the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell case turned away by the Supreme Court this week, last night’s filing in Smelt v. United States goes too far (pdf). It’s offensive, it’s dismissive, it’s demeaning and — most importantly — it’s unnecessary. Even if one accepts that DOJ should have filed a brief opposing this case (and the facts do suggest some legitimate questions about standing), the gratuitous language used throughout the filing goes much further than was necessary to make its case.
See also this post from Americablog.
This is really bad. For the next decade, expect to see homophobic talking heads on TV support their most wretched arguments by saying “even the liberal Obama administration says….” Some of the worse, most dehumanizing arguments — like the argument that if gays want equal rights, they should just marry someone of the opposite sex — are now an official position of the Obama DOJ. Worse, they’ve created brand-new, stupid arguments, like the argument that for the Federal government to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages in states where they are legal represents Federal “neutrality.” (Hint: If there is literally no difference between the policy you espouse, and the policy Maggie Galligher prefers, then you are not being “neutral.”)
I think we can summarize: the brief is (just about) defensible; its full contents are way over the line; someone in the DOJ must have understood that and decided to file it anyway - without even consulting anyone in the gay community. The deployment of arguments that refer to our relationships as equivalent to incest, that demand that we simply marry someone of the opposite sex if we want our civil rights, that implies federal recognition of our civil marriages would mean taxing some Americans to pay for something they abhor: this is simply salt in the wound, and it will be deployed and used by every far right gay-hater in the future, and cited as endorsed by the Obama administration. In the context of Obama’s failure to fulfill any of his pledges to the gay community since he took office, this is terribly deflating.
We are asked to be patient, and that is fair enough. But we should not be asked to be attacked in this gratuitous manner, shut out of dialogue beforehand, and applaud. We did that for eight years under Clinton. Never again.
David Link has some plausible speculations on how the hell this happened:
But how could this derision not have been noticed by the President’s men? First, and most obviously, I can only imagine that no lesbian or gay men ever set eyes on this brief. Perhaps I am wrong, but I honestly can’t see how any self-respecting homosexual in 2009 could possibly think this brief was acceptable. While California’s Attorney General Jerry Brown has had to both defend and challenge anti-gay laws, his office has the grace and simple common sense to make sure the briefs are reviewed, if not drafted in the first place, by openly gay attorneys.
There is something deeper here, though. Obama is comfortable with the cliché political rhetoric of gay equality, but this brief shows his understanding doesn’t go a centimeter deeper. Or (most generously) that his Attorney General knows only the words and not the tune. To someone who understands gay equality as little more than a set of slogans and bromides, this brief might not have looked particularly offensive.
That, at least, is the most generous understanding I am willing to indulge – that the brief was written and/or edited by civil servants with an anti-gay inclination, and reviewed by political staff who know no more about gay equality than what they read on the President’s website.
The ball is now in the President’s court. He owes us an apology – and not one of words, but one of action.
Box Turtle Bulletin has a roundup of blogospheric reactions, and a telling comparison to a brief written by an attorney general who really is an advocate for queer rights; Dale Carpenter’s post on the quality of the arguments made in Obama’s brief is worth your while; and I’ll close with another quote from Law Dork.
President Obama, if he intends to regain any credibility with the LGBT community this Pride Month, needs to get an answer from A.G. Holder about how such a brief was allowed to be filed under his rule. And he needs to start speaking up about LGBT issues and taking action to make his campaign promises a reality. Obama needs to show that he truly is “a president who supports our cause.”
When he was running for president and needed votes and money, Obama made a lot of promises to LBGTQ voters, but he hasn’t fufilled a single one of those promises. And now his DOJ is actively working against equality with the same enthusiasm and bad faith arguments we would have expected from the Bush administration.
Unless there is a very rapid about-face from the Obama administration, I hope that when Joe Biden shows up to a gay DNC fundraiser in a couple of weeks, he’s greeted by hundreds of angry queer and queer-allied protestors. I hope he’s booed off the stage; I hope he’s pelted with rotton eggs. I hope that lesbians, gays and allies make it clear to Obama that he won’t get a fucking cent for his re-election until he starts keeping his promises. As of yesterday, however, the time when anyone could give Obama the benefit of the doubt on LGBTQ issues has ended.
…but Moussavi is protesting and charging fraud, the NY Times reports. I don’t have much to say about this right now, except the obvious, and that my heart goes out to those, inside Iran and out, who were hoping this election would bring change.
Check out this photo essay on The Boston Globe’s website. Great pictures. It’s an exciting time over there, and a tense one. A lot hangs on this election.
So the guy who shot up the Holocaust Museum is James W. von Brunn, Holocaust denier, neo-Nazi, and generally swell guy:
James W. von Brunn holds a BachSci Journalism degree from a mid-Western university where he was president of SAE and played varsity football.
During WWII he served as PT-Boat captain, Lt. USNR, receiving a Commendation and four battle stars. For twenty years he was an advertising executive and film-producer in New York City. He is a member of Mensa, the high-IQ society.
In 1981 Von Brunn attempted to place the treasonous Federal Reserve Board of Governors under legal, non-violent, citizens arrest. He was tried in a Washington, D.C. Superior Court; convicted by a Negro jury, Jew/Negro attorneys, and sentenced to prison for eleven years by a Jew judge. A Jew/Negro/White Court of Appeals denied his appeal. He served 6.5 years in federal prison. (Read about von Brunn’s “Federal Reserve Caper” HERE.) He is now an artist and author and lives on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Swell fellow. Lovely that he’s part of Mensa; really, that’s become almost a badge of douchebaggery.
Von Brun’s web site features a few quotes, including this one from Cicero: “A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within.” Obviously, in von Brun’s mind, the treason was on the part of white people who weren’t willing to put down the Jewish menace. His website boasts of his book, Kill the Best Gentiles, which is said to be “A new, hard-hitting exposé of the JEW CONSPIRACY to destroy the White gene-pool.” The book includes:
350pp of FACTS condensing libraries of information about the Talmud, Democracy, Marx, Genetics, Money, Aryans, Negroes, Khazars, The Holy Bible, Treason, Mass-media, Mendelism, Race, the “Holocaust” and a host of suppressed “bigoted” subjects, all supported by quotations from many of history’s greatest personages. Learn who is responsible for the millions of Aryan crosses covering the world’s battlefields. Why our sons and daughters died bravely but in vain.
[...]
This carefully documented treatise exposes the JEWS and explains what you must do to protect your White family. Kill the Best Gentiles! Is a must for every concerned parent and a manual for every student of World History.
So yeah, he completely sucks. But he sucks in a consistent way. I don’t see it as accidental that this is yet another in a series of shootings by conservative white males, striking out violently against the forces of multiculturalism. Whether it’s Scott Roeder killing a doctor providing medical care for women, or Richard Poplawski killing police because of his fear of the “Obama gun ban” and the influence of Jews, or this attack on Jews by a neo-Nazi, we’re seeing exactly the sort of desperate, searing, homicidal anger from the extreme right that we expected we’d see, once an African-American had the temerity to actually win the presidency. I fear that we’ve reached our tipping point, that we are getting close to a point where political violence, and especially right-wing violence, is going to become the norm. I hope not. But hope is awfully hard to find on a day like this.
Just reported by the San Francisco Chronicle. This is exactly the decision that everyone expected them to make, but it’s still a little disappointing.
UPDATE: But on the bright side, it’s wonderful that the same-sex marriages that have already happened in California have not been dissolved or downgraded. Wonderful for the couples, and — I think — wonderful in terms of helping to “normalize” the idea of marriage equality, which will help in a future ballot fight to overturn prop 8.
UPDATE 2:
The Courage Campaign has about 700,000 names on it’s petition, and would like to reach a million. Go here to put your name on the list, if you like.
UPDATE 3: A pdf copy of the decision has been posted on Pam’s House Blend, here.
UPDATE 4: At The Faculty Lounge, Calvin Massey argues that this decision “represents a victory for gay rights advocates”: (via)
The Court also ruled that the measure was not retroactive, so the 18000 or so same-sex unions that occurred between June and November of 2008 will still be called marriages. This represents a victory for gay rights advocates, though it will not likely be so portrayed or acknowledged. After the dust has settled same-sex unions will receive absolutely the same legal status and protection as marriages, and state discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation will continue to be presumed to be invalid and subject to the most stringent test for justification of such discrimination. Protests about the decision are misguided; it has absolutely nothing to do with the question of whether it is right or wrong to withhold the label of “marriage” from same-sex couples, but is a faithful application of a large body of California constitutional law finding such “rifle-shot” changes to the state constitution to be amendments rather than revisions.
TPM: Arkansas state Sen. Kim Hendren, who is currently the only announced Republican candidate for U.S. Senator against Democratic incumbent Blanche Lincoln in 2010, has apologized for referring to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) as “that Jew,” at a county Republican meeting last week.
“I don’t use a teleprompter and occasionally I put my foot in my month,” Hendren told Arkansas blogger Jason Tolbert.
Demonstrating his point, Hendren explained that when he referred to Schumer as “that Jew,” he was drawing a contrast between his own “traditional values” and those of Senator Schumer.
Still later, Hendren added “When I referred to him as Jewish, it wasn’t because I don’t like Jewish people.” Phew, what a relief!
Via David, who entitled his post “That One.” Interesting observation from PG in David’s comments, too, but you have to go there to read it because I’m a tease.
Via Rad Geek, the transcript of the first of a few 911 calls, made by a 17-year-old girl attempting to get an ambulance for her father, who had suffered a bad fall. McFarlan did eventually send help, but lied about the content of the calls. When the girl showed up at the police station, she was arrested on a trumped-up charge.
I suspect that if a man of McFarlan’s age had called and said “I need a fucking ambulance,” McFarlan would have kept his fucking asshat opinions to himself and just done his fucking job.
Adrianne Ledesma [while 911 is recording but handset is still ringing]: What the fuck?
Sergeant Robert McFarlan: 911.
Adrianne: I need an ambulance at [REDACTED]
Sergeant Robert McFarlan: Well, OK, first of all, you don’t need to swear over 911—
Adrianne: OK
Sergeant Robert McFarlan: —and slow down.
Adrianne: Send me a fucking ambulance!
[McFarlan hangs up on her]
And it just gets worse from there.
McFarlan was suspended without pay for two weeks. I can see an argument for not firing him — if this really was one single bad incident in an otherwise spotless record extending decades. I believe that everyone has more to them than their worst moment, and maybe McFarlan’s behavior here was his worse moment.
(It’s more likely, however, that McFarlan has always been an asshat, a bully, and a lousy cop, but has never messed up so publicly before. He was once sued for tasering a 14 year old boy (via), although the court dismissed the lawsuit.)
Two weeks without pay is a slap on the wrist, and suggests the police administration isn’t taking this seriously. Six months would have been better. In addition, McFarlan should be required, if Ms. Ledesma and her father are willing, to undergo a restorative justice process to try and make up to them for his assault on their safety and dignity.
From an Associated Press story, reporting on the widespread objections among mom-bloggers to the “new Dora” doll planned for October:
Mattel and Nickelodeon both say there are two major misconceptions about the new Dora, which is not replacing the “Dora the Explorer” cartoon, but will be a new interactive doll aimed at the five-to eight-year-old, or tween market.
“People care so deeply about this brand and this character,” Leigh Anne Brodsky, president of Nickelodeon Viacom Consumer Products, says. “The Dora that we all know and love is not going away.”
“I think there was just a misconception in terms of where we were going with this,” Gina Sirard, vice president of marketing at Mattel, says. “Pretty much the moms who are petitioning aging Dora up certainly don’t understand. . . . I think they’re going to be pleasantly happy once this is available in October, and once they understand this certainly isn’t what they are conjuring up.”
Part of the confusion stemmed from the silhouette that was released, which made Dora look more like a Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan than a young girl. For the record, the doll does not wear a short dress, but a tunic and leggings. And while she looks older (she’s supposed to be about 10), with longer jewelry and longer hair, she doesn’t have makeup and seems pretty much like a 10-year-old girl.
Nickelodeon and Mattel say that as part of unrelated research, they found parents wanted a way to keep Dora in their children’s lives and have their daughters move on to a toy that was age appropriate.
“The idea is Dora for more girls,” Brodsky says. “The whole point was this was created because moms said help us.”
Oh, those silly, silly moms! When will they realize that Nickelodeon and Mattel only want to help?
But then again… compare and contrast:
(Also, it looks to me like maybe the image on the left is wearing a dress, which cuts off at knee-level, as opposed to the tunic on the right which cuts off much higher and is worn with leggings. Silhouette found here and here.)
Confusingly, there’s another silhouette illustration of the New Dora I’ve seen, which is just the non-silhouette illustration with the details blacked out. As far as I can tell, Mattel released two different teaser silhouette drawings, but I’m not sure of the timing.
Honestly, assuming the newer illustration reflects what the doll will look like, things could be much worse. The original Dora will still be on TV. Dora’s new outfit is funky and fashionable, without being overly sexualized as the Bratz outfits are. And I’m always happy to see a mainstream doll that’s not white. There’s still a ton wrong, but there are way worse dolls on the market.
But still — the original Dora was ever so much cooler.
More blogging about “New Dora”:
Womanist Musings: Dora The Explorer Matters To Boys
Sociological Images: Seeing Is Believing
Viva La Feminista: Why Mattel and Nick Have It Wrong (Highly recommended. Check out her Dora tag as well, for more Dora-themed posts.)
The Hand Mirror: Dora’s new silhouette announced
Embrace Your Age: Keep Dora Exploring!
The Mommy Files: Dora The New Sexy Explorer
Feministing: The New Dora
Shakesville: Sooo
Finally, let me link to my own post from 2007, to make the point that this isn’t the first time Dora’s owners have thought “boy, if we could only sell a thinner, more girly Dora doll, we’d make a killing!”
When asked on CNN about whether or not the Republicans regret taking out the pandemic money in the stimulus, Michael Steele said “we didn’t know there was going to be a flu pandemic! You can’t make that link!”
Okay, there’s no need to panic, but the H1N1 outbreak in Mexico may well be cause for concern. But hopefully not too much of one:
So swine flu has come out of nowhere. It has unfortunately killed some people, and analysis shows it’s a brand-new virus with unknown potential to kill many more.
That doesn’t mean we can kiss civilization good-bye, or damn and blast the World Health Organization for not doing what we think it should. This strain of H1N1 is an interesting, and probably serious, new virus. The Mexicans seem to be doing the best they can, with limited resources and in a bad recession. We may end up thanking them for courageous decisions that cost them dearly.
But thanks or blame are both premature. We have only a handful of cases, and an even smaller number of deaths. In tracking H5N1, I’ve always thought: As long as we can count the dead, we’re OK. We can still count the dead, and mourn them.
We can also count the living, including eight kids in New York City. Every one of them is a promise that this may be less than a catastrophe…maybe even a wonderful anticlimax, where we all, around May 30, ask ourselves: “What were we so upset about?”
That’s the hope. And it’s important to keep things in perspective. So far, 81 people are dead, and roughly 1500 people are infected worldwide. Those numbers aren’t remotely close to pandemic levels. The fact that we’ve identified this outbreak this early gives us a chance to get it locked down and keep it from becoming a serious health concern. We hope.
Of course, because the outbreak started in Mexico, Michelle Malkin is sprinkling her bile into the discussion:
I’ve blogged for years about the spread of contagious diseases from around the world into the U.S. as a result of uncontrolled immigration. We’ve heard for years from reckless open-borders ideologues who continue to insist there’s nothing to worry about. And we’ve heard for years that calling any attention to the dangers of allowing untold numbers of people to pass across our borders and through our other ports of entry without proper medical screening — as required of every legal visitor/immigrant to this country — is RAAAACIST.
Sigh. As Crawford Kilian notes, “Cases outside Mexico have all been brought home by legitimate tourists who could afford travel to Mexico from places as remote as New Zealand and Israel.” This has absolutely nothing to do with immigration. I suppose we can quarantine Mexico completely — though frankly, the train’s out of the station here — but to what end?
It’s remarkably hateful that someone can look at what is, at best, a catastrophe that has killed dozens, and see only a tool to use against Mexican immigrants. There is a word for that kind of worldview, and yes, Michelle, it is racist, a word that describes you to a T.
As for those of us who view this public health crisis as a public health crisis, the smart things to do right now are the smart things to do all the time. Wash your hands, use a hand sanitizer, be conscious of illness and go to the doctor if you’re sick (unless, of course, you don’t have insurance — then feel free to spread it willy-nilly to everyone and their twin sister). And take a deep breath, because this probably is not the long-feared flu pandemic. Or so we hope.
Found this good report on Al Jazeera English.
Oh, Blogger Formerly Known as Hindrocket, why can’t I quit you? You say the wingnuttiest stuff imaginable — it’s so precious! And you’re able to get worked up so easily — it’s adorable!
Take today, for example. You got really, really upset when you were in an airport and were evidently forced at gunpoint to watch CNN:
That’s where I spent an hour or more at a gate this afternoon, listening unwillingly to CNN’s coverage of the “torture” issue. That’s pretty much all they talked about; they were nearly rubbing their hands together with glee. The premise of CNN’s coverage was that those nasty Bush officials surely ought to be prosecuted and imprisoned for waterboarding poor Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; the only question is whether they will somehow wriggle out of it.
Yeah! Stupid CNN, thinking that it was bad of the Bush Administration to commit war crimes. After all, KSM is a bad guy! And we got such great information from it — why, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confessed to pretty much everything imaginable! Okay, some of it was probably stuff he didn’t actually do, but that’s the purpose of torture: to get people to confess to things they didn’t do, so there, morans!
Not that we torture, of course. Except, of course, for Barack Obama, who is torturing U.S. troops zOMG11!!!!!!onethousandonehundredeleven!!
As I listened to an hour of almost non-stop wailing about waterboarding, I couldn’t help wondering how many people have been waterboarded by U.S. authorities during the first three months of the Obama administration. Some hundreds, I would think–surely far more than the three terrorists over whom such tears are now being shed. Those “victims” don’t count, apparently, inasmuch as they are only U.S. military personnel.
Yes, folks, Barack HUSSEIN Obama is torturing our troops, probably personally. It’s all part of his secret plot to sell us to the Swedes who will come in and make us all drive Volvos and eat lutefisk and shop at IKEA and then they’ll surrender to the Muslims! Will nobody stop this monster? Why won’t someone think of the troops?
And, hey, they volunteered.
Well, that’s no reason to — wait, what?
But if waterboarding is “torture,” then it’s illegal. So why is the U.S. military still using it as a training device, last we knew? If we’re going to start prosecuting people, don’t we have to prosecute the many civilian and military leaders who have for decades inflicted waterboarding, or condoned the use of waterboarding, on our servicemen?
Uh…huh.
Let me draw an analogy. If I walk up to some unsuspecting person and poke a hole in their ear with a sharp object, that would be illegal. I’d be guilty of assault (at the very least). I’d go to jail. If, however, a person comes to my jewelry shop and asks me to pierce their ears, and I do so, I am not, in fact, guilty of a crime.
Or if I lie down on a bed, and suddenly someone knocks me out and cuts me open and starts pulling parts of me out, they’re obviously a very sick criminal. Unless I’m in a hospital and they’re removing my gall bladder — then they’re trained medical professionals doing their job.
Or if I meet a girl at a bar, and shove her into my car and force myself on her, then I’m a rapist and I’m going away to prison. But if I invite her to my house and she says yes, and we have a night of consenual sex, then nobody’s guilty of a damn thing, other than getting some good lovin’.
You see, John, the fact that soldiers volunteer for SERE is not beside the point — it is the point. There are all sorts of activities that are perfectly legal when people consent to them them, and completely illegal when they don’t.
Waterboarding? That’s in that category. When our soldiers experience waterboarding in order to learn how to deal with it should they be captured — that’s a learning experience, one that is useful, if frightening. (Indeed, very useful — no doubt, U.S. soldiers are today more at risk of torture than they were in 2001. Thanks, Dubya.)
But if we waterboard a prisoner, one we have in custody — if we inflict pain and trauma on a person against that person’s will — that is a war crime. That is illegal, and deeply immoral. If the U.S. government is still engaged in waterboarding prisoners, then Barack Obama will be no less guilty than George W. Bush — and I would support his impeachment if that turned out to be so.
But if the Obama administration is guilty of teaching soldiers how to deal with torture, then that just proves they understand the world America lives in. Unlike you, John Hinderaker. Unlike you.
Dahlia Lithwick reports on the oral arguments at the Supreme Court, involving a 13 year old girl stripped-searched because she had been falsely accused of giving ibuprofen to other students:
Adam Wolf, the ACLU lawyer who represents Redding, explains that “the Fourth Amendment does not countenance the rummaging on or around a 13-year-old girl’s naked body.” Wolf explains that he is arguing for a “two-step framework,” wherein schools can use a lower standard to search “backpacks, pencil cases, bookbags” but a higher standard when you “require a 13-year-old girl to take off her pants, her shirt, move around her bra so she reveals her breasts, and the same thing with her underpants to reveal her pelvic area.” This leads Justice Stephen Breyer to query whether this is all that different from asking Redding to “change into a swimming suit or your gym clothes,” because, “why is this a major thing to say strip down to your underclothes, which children do when they change for gym?”
This leads Ginsburg to sputter—in what I have come to think of as her Lilly Ledbetter voice—”what was done in the case … it wasn’t just that they were stripped to their underwear! They were asked to shake their bra out, to stretch the top of their pants and shake that out!” Nobody but Ginsburg seems to comprehend that the only locker rooms in which teenage girls strut around, bored but fabulous in their underwear, are to be found in porno movies. For the rest of us, the middle-school locker room was a place for hastily removing our bras without taking off our T-shirts.
But Breyer just isn’t letting go. “In my experience when I was 8 or 10 or 12 years old, you know, we did take our clothes off once a day, we changed for gym, OK? And in my experience, too, people did sometimes stick things in my underwear.”
Shocked silence, followed by explosive laughter. In fact, I have never seen Justice Clarence Thomas laugh harder. Breyer tries to recover: “Or not my underwear. Whatever. Whatever. I was the one who did it? I don’t know. I mean, I don’t think it’s beyond human experience.” [...]
You see, we now have school districts all around the country finding naked photos of teens and immediately calling in the police for possession of kiddie porn. Yet schools see nothing wrong with stripping these same kids naked to search for drugs. Evidently teenage nakedness is only a problem when the children choose to be naked.
Scott at Lawyers Guns and Money breaks down how the vote is likely to go (Scalia is likely to vote for student’s privacy rights, incidentally, while this will probably be the second time Alito has favored the state strip-searching little girls).
Three points:
1) Yet anther example of how the drug war has eroded sanity.
2) Yet another example of why a Court with only one woman on it is a court that’s unable to fairly administrate justice.1
3) Yet another example of why Democratic presidents appointing “centrist: judges while Republicans appoint far-right judges creates right-wing outcomes, not balance.
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