It's Like Good, But Evil
Walmart launches a Craigslist competitor. It's exactly the same, except harder to use, poorly organized, and for some reason, has two different communities for the greater Steubenville area.
Pandagon
I tripped and fell and whoops was a mother
The beauty of blogging is when you get a chance to make those connections that you'd otherwise forget right after they occur to you. Just such a connection happened for me this week. On this week's podcast (listen today! subscribe!), I interviewed Sharon Camp, the CEO of the Guttmacher Institute, about recent research showing that a huge percentage (half) of women who are trying to avoid pregnancy in any given year because of inconsistent contraception use. A lot of the findings were pretty predictable stuff, like how women forget to take pills when they have life changes, or how problems with the method discourages use, such as when you hate condoms and find ways to justify skipping them. But what I found intriguing was that women's ambivalence was cited as a major reason that women might have inconsistent contraception use.
Ambivalence: Nearly one in four women who are not trying to become pregnant say that they would be very pleased if they found out they were pregnant. Women who are the least motivated to avoid pregnancy are also the least likely to be using oral contraceptives or to be using the method consistently.
Listen to the interview; I press Sharon on this because I'm honestly confused. It's not that some women are ambivalent and act out their ambivalence by screwing around with contraception, but that 25% of women are in this area. That's a huge number, in my opinion, considering that ambivalence is such a strange thing to feel. I just thought people were more self-aware, and that the people who can't make up their minds and screw around hoping that nature decides for them would be a small percentage. But nope, it's a ton of people, women at least.
Luckily, there is an interview at Broadsheet now with a woman who, in my opinion, fits directly into this category of ambivalent contraception avoiders, and the interview is pretty enlightening as to her thought processes. As you can guess, my conclusion was that feminism has a lot of work to do in this area. It's a matter of just common sense, but also a health issue, because planning to get pregnant and adjusting your habits with that plan in mind is healthier for the baby than just half-assing it and hoping that nature decides for you.
Basically, the writer's name is Mary Pols, and she has a book out called Accidentally on Purpose, and this interview is an exercise in passive, well not aggression, but passive assertiveness at least. I kept thinking, reading about it, how anti-choicers really relish not motherhood exactly, but the old-fashioned idea that motherhood just happens to a woman, that the passivity of it is part of it. They've got to know that most women who use birth control or have abortions do become mothers at other points in time, and that's part of the offense---the unfeminine decisiveness, the unwomanly exerting of control. Pols seems to have well-absorbed the idea that it's more seemly that she became a single mother on accident, so she retains the idea that it was an accident even though it seems pretty well plotted.
Well, it truly was an accident. I was clueless about the fact that I was ovulating. But my body knew that, clearly, and something -- maybe biology -- drove me there that night. Or maybe it was a touch of destiny. Either way, it feels now as though it was all on purpose.
And that's the expression my father used early in my pregnancy, when he was quizzing me about how I'd gotten into this mess. He thought maybe I'd done it on purpose, presumably subconsciously.
Okay, I'm sorry, but at 40 years old you have to know there's better methods of birth control than, "I don't think I'm ovulating." Maybe she didn't know she was ovulating, but she knew that she was going out and having unprotected sex with a stranger when she wanted to be pregnant. Calling that an accident is like me getting in the car with the idea that I'm going to drive to a certain location across town, but only deciding my route after I started the car, and assuming that I got there at all was an accident.
Pols makes it very clear that she wants her baby cake while eating her feminine passivity too later in the interview.
Do you feel like there would be more (or less) stigma about your being a single mother if you had just gone to a sperm bank?
It's hard to say.
I think when you go to a sperm bank you're making a strong, proud statement, and in a sense, you then have a built-in defense that comes with making a bold choice: This is who I am, take it or leave it. That is bound to scare some people -- weenies, mostly -- off.
In contrast I feel as though I slipped sideways into single motherhood, limping a little, as if it were something I'd always have to be apologizing for. So in a sense, maybe I get sort of a "sympathy vote" because of that. But now that I'm here, I feel no need to apologize.
So, she gets the same results---sort of---as someone who went to a sperm bank, but she doesn't have to scare anyone with her boldness. I'm not really blaming her or angry at her. It's understandable. If it's irritating, it's for the same reason that it's irritating to hear women? Who make declarative? Sentences? With a bunch of question marks? It's just irritating because you know that they're making declarative statements and there's a deceit going on there, but it's also understandable, because they've been bullied into their position. They're trying to escape what is essentially a no-win situation. You have to communicate your desires, but in order to do so honestly, you run the risk of being called a bitch. So you retreat into this passive aggression of framing statements like sentences so you can escape that judgment, but then you only end up irritating people. At some point in time, you have to pick your poison---refrain from making declarations or just accept that some people will think you're a bitch.
Pols appears to have gotten the sperm? While totally meaning to do that? But without taking responsibility? Because there's something just scary about that? I found myself short with her, and then feeling bad because I know why she did it. But it definitely goes a long way to explaining why women can officially be trying not to get pregnant while still kind of trying to get pregnant, hoping that it's an oops. But bad idea, seriously. That way lies the demons of recriminations and possibly lawsuits.
I still have to wonder why there's so many men out there who never stop to think that they should be taking responsibility not to knock someone up on accident, particularly the ones that will be bitter about paying child support. Of course, some of the men who just run around with their dicks flapping around sans condom probably are thinking like Pols here, sort of hoping that nature takes its course and makes their decisions for them. I'm sure that works out for some people, but I still can't help but think you have better odds actually taking more control over your life.
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The Washington Post Wants To Hear From You
Just visit their groups, and you can talk about politics and faith with the white moderate liberal, race with the one black dude...or conservatism with Ramesh Ponnuru.
You should never have to ask yourself why these people hire Anne Applebaum.
(By the way, thanks to the fine folks at the Apple Store at Briarwood Mall in Ann Arbor, MI for fixing my laptop!)
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But...But!
I'm not sure why conservatives keep bringing up the "but this woulda been a senior moment for McCain!" specter when it comes to what they perceive are Barack Obama gaffes (and what actually appear to be some guy behind him continually talking through his speech). The most famous version of the media harping on "senior moments" is Fox News' 64-year-old Brit Hume attempting to excuse a McCain flub, which would seem to sort of counteract the idea of McCain's base going after him.
I remember when Marc Ambinder did this a couple of months back, too. It's one thing to declare that something McCain did shouldn't be declared a senior moment (I'm of the full belief that he has the ability to fuck up just as well as a man half his age), but the idea that you can simply create a press corps ravenously scouring for any hint of McCain's age peeking through and triumphantly bumping genocides and floods off the front page to blare out "This Motherfucker Is OLD! O-L-D!" is beyond ridiculous.
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Taser International loses first liability lawsuit
The winning streak for the arrogant stun-gun manufacturer is over.
A San Jose, California, jury yesterday said Taser had failed to warn police in Salinas, California, that prolonged exposure to electric shock from the device could cause a risk of cardiac arrest. The jury awarded $1 million in compensatory damages and $5.2 million in punitive damages to the estate of Robert Heston, 40, and his parents. The jury cleared the police officers of any liability....``I think Taser's going to have to rethink its litigation strategy and its warning policies,'' Burton said. The jury awarded $5 million in punitive damages to Heston's parents and $200,000 in punitives to his estate.
Heston died on Feb. 20, 2005, after his father had called Salinas police because his son was ``acting strangely,'' and seemed to be on drugs, according to the lawsuit complaint. Salinas police shot Heston multiple times with the stun-gun, continuing to discharge their Tasers into him until he stopped moving, the lawsuit claims.
Heston went into cardiac arrest and died, his family said.
Taser International had boasted that it had never lost a lawsuit. This verdict may be a change in that tide. More after the jump. However, it's not as if the device has fallen out of favor with law enforcement agencies; it was just announced that the NYPD (with 36K officers is the nation's largest police force) will .
Starting Wednesday, thousands of police sergeants will begin carrying electronic stun guns on their belts. The NYPD has used Tasers since 1984, but policy called for sergeants to store the stun guns in their trunks while patrolling, rather than strapping the weapons to their hips."They were a little too cumbersome," Browne explained. He said older Tasers were about the size and weight of a large flashlight and were less essential than other items police carry.
About 3,500 uniformed sergeants and other supervisors on patrol duty will be issued Tasers, costing about $500 each.
Related:
* Taser of the Day blog
* Tasered While Black blog
H/t, Laurel.
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Passing the denial stage
While higher gas prices are no fun for any of us, the good news is that the crisis is starting to drift into no-longer-a-crisis-just-a-problem-to-be-solved mode. People are beginning to accept that high gas prices are here to stay. The nation is getting over the denial stage, which is the first big step towards rearranging our infrastructure so that we're less reliant on oil.
After more than five years of petroleum price increases, American consumers appear to be expecting the worst. A CNN poll taken last week showed that 59 percent of Americans believe it is very likely that they will pay $5 a gallon for gasoline before the end of the year and that an additional 27 percent say it is somewhat likely.
Economists say these expectations make it more probable that people will change behavior rather than simply wait for a turn in the traditional up-and-down cycle of commodity prices. "People now realize that prices may come back down, but they're not going down to where they were," said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Economy.com. "We're going to have to live with higher energy prices for a while. And that's affecting their behavior and what they buy and don't buy."
Like Atrios, I'm surprised and impressed at how quickly the nation is coming to terms with this. There's so many excuses people could come up with to tell themselves that oil prices will come down, but people are facing up to reality. And the sooner the better, because until you're past denial, you can't start making changes.
Some friends informed me the other night that Lance Armstrong has opened a bicycle shop in Austin, and they're dedicating themselves to encouraging Austinites to commute by bicycle by building a storage facility downtown that has showers and lockers. It's shockingly logical---most people who don't exercise cite lack of time as the main reason, so it stands to reason that if you can multitask by combining your commute with exercise time, then you'd jump on that opportunity. And some will. But bad habits like driving everywhere are hard to break. Ideally, to encourage an entire society to change a behavior, you either introduce immediate rewards (not long term ones like weight loss or better cardiovascular health) or introduce obstacles and frustrations to the bad habit.
Obstacles and frustrations---not punishments. If you've ever trained an animal, you'll know what I'm talking about. Spanking a pet after a misdeed is like the worst way to train an animal. If there's a undesired behavior, you frustrate the behavior and offer alternatives. If your dog likes to sleep on the sofa, you put laundry baskets or cooking pots on it so that he can't get up there easily, and then put the dog bed nearby. Sticky tape on beloved furniture and a nearby scratching post that the cats actually like (in my house, that's unfortunately Marc's desk chair that's been sacrificed) will train them away from scratching your favorite stuff. As I've noted before, driving just seemed like a drag to me because I hate how much of it is sitting around doing nothing. Training myself to feeling rewarded by the bicycle took a couple of weeks, but now I like just the general rush you get from the shot of exercise. Still, cars have all these incentives to them over bicycles, like they're faster and they go farther and they have air conditioning. The key to getting people to bicycle instead of drive was always increase the immediate rewards of bicycling or taking public transportation while increasing the obstacles to driving. But the latter has problems, because people resist you if you increase driving obstacles, like reducing parking opportunities. People aren't dumb animals, and so it was pretty easy to single out the culprits behind the newly introduced obstacles and give them hell.
Unfortunately, that privileged higher gas prices as an obstacle that people really had to face up to, instead of casting around looking for culprits and pressuring them to change things back. I mean, that was tried, but now it's beginning to sink in that gas prices are, for reasons fair and unfair, shielded from bending to public will. The laundry baskets on the sofa are there whether we throw puppy dogs eyes at our politicians or not. What's frustrating to me about this it that it's bigger than transportation of human beings, which could easily be addressed with alternatives like bicycling, remaking cities so they're walking cities, and public transportation. It affects the prices of produce and other things that will present a much bigger problem in terms of restructuring society to make these things more affordable. Compared to moving closer into the city and taking the bus more, figuring out how to make apples not cost $2 a pound is going to be rocket science.
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The Cascade
Perhaps the reason that we're in such a debt crunch these days isn't because we're all weak-minded simpletons who look at the national debt and say, "I want me some of that!", but instead a system which is designed at virtually every corner to maximize the burden on debtor to the benefit of the lender?
Modern debt falls into what I call the cascade of ratfucking. Debt often begins or amasses because of bad decisions, but is then amplified by a system which makes every bad decision exponentially worse. You miss one payment, you then pay fees and a higher interest rate on both the fees and the debt you already had (and which you amassed at a lower rate). You pay the increased payment, but because your bank takes out deposits before crediting withdrawals, you get overdraft fees because even though the money came out on payday, the deposit went in at close of business. If you have overdraft protection, you paid the fee from your savings account or the finance charges on your card to save yourself from paying the other fee if it was simply a regular overdraft.
This, of course, is if you even have a checking account, and don't have to pay to cash your check, pay for the money orders necessary to pay your bills (because nobody takes cash), pay the extra fees to process your payment in person, and deal with the late fees from juggling bills month-to-month.
As much as David Brooks would like to think we've turned debt into some sort of perverse, socially rewarded virtue, we haven't. Granted, we did have the great APR-Off of 2004, but when we tried to hold it the next year, nobody had the room on their card to put down the deposit at Rent-A-Center for the TV.
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Faux News' E.D. Hill's asinine 'fist bump' terror alert
Fox News' America's Pulse host E.D. Hill must have gotten an associate-Obama-with-terrorism-at-all-costs memo from upstairs, as she desperately tried to interpret the "fist bump" between Michelle and Barack Obama in a unique segment featuring a "body language expert."
Now I don't know why the fist bump is worth dissecting, but if it's some sort of secret signal to fellow terrorists, then I guess my governor, Mike "Pansy" Easley (who received one yesterday when Obama swung through Raleigh), should be on some sort of watchlist:
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Chatting about feminism and Hillary Clinton
I'll be on KFPA out of Berkeley this morning with Kim Gandy of NOW and Shireen Mitchell, Founder of Digital Sisters to discuss Clinton's feminist legacy and the future of women in politics, starting at 7AM Pacific Time, 10AM Eastern Time. You can listen to it here.
I've Heard Rumors You Smell Like Poo
Via Whiskey Fire, the National Review is proposing an innocent, simple solution that should help Barack Obama - showing us his papers, please:
Having done some Obama-rumor debunking that got praise from Daily Kos (a sign of the apocalypse, no doubt), perhaps the Obama campaign could return the favor and help debunk a bunch of others with a simple step: Could they release a copy of his birth certificate?
What are the rumors that demand debunking?
Rumor one: Obama was born in Kenya. Rather unlikely, as it would require everyone in his family to lie about this in every interview and discussion with those outside the family since young Obama appeared on the scene. However, if it were true, it would probably raise a major question of “does he qualify as a natural-born citizen”?
If it were true, it would require a bigger coverup than the moon landing, JFK and the Pop Rocks/Pepsi connection combined, if for no other reason than that it would presume a kid and his mom living in Kansas managed to falsify birth records well enough to fool, in no particular order:
- Harvard Law
- The Illinois State Bar
- The State Legislature of Illinois
- The United States Senate
- The State Department
- The Defense Department
- The Build-A-Bear Rewards Program
Next rumor?
Rumor Two: Obama’s middle name is not “Hussein” but “Muhammad.”
As Politifact notes, all available public records going back to 1991 refer to the candidate as “Barack H. Obama.”
For the people that this would actually matter to, isn't this akin to saying that Rapefist is hiding the sordid secret of his real name, Murderface?
Rumor Three: His mother did not want to name him after his father, and his birth certificate says “Barry.” Perhaps the most plausible of the rumors, as Obama was known by that name through much of his childhood and young adulthood. If true, this would spur a new round of “When Barry Became Barack” stories – a minor headache for the campaign, but hardly a major scandal.
"You know, my entire life, I've identified as Barry, because it was my birth name. Now that I'm ready to take the next step into public life, I should really do something about that. What's something close enough to my actual name, but still foreign-sounding and scary to ignorant white people? There's Baraka, but that movie's coming out soon...I know, Barack!"
Obama's the perfect nexus of smear rumors - a liberalish Democrat with a weird name, dark skin and foreign roots that tangentially go back to the Muslim/Arab world. At some point, the responsibility for the dissemination of these smears falls on the people disseminating them, and not the person being smeared.
That point, incidentally, is the day after Obama's second term ends, and not a moment sooner.
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Bishop to impotent paraplegic: no church wedding for you
Imagine being a devoted churchgoer and being told that you cannot marry in the church because you're impotent because of a car accident.
An Italian bishop has reportedly told a young paraplegic he cannot have a church wedding because he is impotent, despite his fiancee being aware of the problem.Salvatore de Ciuco, spokesman for Bishop Lorenzo Chiarinelli of Viterbo in central Italy, told SkyTG24 television: "No bishop, no priest can celebrate a wedding when he knows of admitted impotence as it is a motive for annulment" of the marriage.
Has God in the church's eyes, forsaken all those couples who cannot consummate their marriage in the old penis-in-vagina manner? This is unimaginably cruel.
I recently attended a wedding (w/Roman Catholic Mass), and while the whole event was joyous, it was difficult to sit there and listen to a homily rife with heterosupremacy and mandated procreation. It really brings it home that for many sitting there listening, the message of invalidation of same-sex unions (and relationships like the one above), is something they simply don't think about. That they pray to what is interpreted as a discriminating God is not something they can see, when it's beautifully wrapped up and tied with a bow. It also underscores the reasons why the word "marriage" is so loaded for people who have been raised in faiths that see a couple's love and commitment to one another in very narrow terms. It's not only a matter of separating the civil and religious, but undoing the social invalidation that is produced by a worldview that may not openly demonize gay couples, but makes it clear our relationships simply don't exist, and if even if they did, they don't qualify for any recognition as a social bond.
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Well, what do you know about that?
Obama's speech in Raleigh launching his economy tour is underway, and towards the end, during a discussion of health care, he drops a surprise aside that wasn't in the speech's prepared remarks:
"By the way, I'm going to be partnering with Elizabeth Edwards, we're going to be figuring all this out."
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Worst. Job. Ever.
Although I liked this article's focus on fairness as the main reason for burnout, I wish this hadn't been in there:
Burnout has been long associated with being overworked and underpaid, but psychologists Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter found that these were not the crucial factors. The single biggest difference between employees who suffered burnout and those who did not was the whether they thought that they were being treated unfairly or fairly.
It's not that being overworked and underpaid aren't crucial factors in burnout - it's just that they're the most common and definable manifestations of the fairness gap.
The worst job I ever had was with the administrative side of a union's pension fund. It wasn't the job itself - it was that I came in the same day the daughter of one of the administrators came in, and we were both starting in what was supposed to be the same position. Our first task was certificates for years of service to be given out at the yearly meeting. Each certificate required printing, stamping a seal and putting the seal on. The way the work was doled out was as follows:
Daughter of the administrator: Make sure the paper doesn't run out, and grab the certificates from the printer tray.
Me: Hand stamp each of the seals and put them on each of the certificates, then put them each in a folder matching the certificate's recipient, then put the package in a sealable mylar bag.
At the end of the day, me exhausted from hand stamping a couple thousand seals and her decidedly not, we got word of our assignments for the next day. I'd be working on "dead mail" - calling the survivors of members who'd recently died and making sure all the contact information was up to date for the administration of remaining funds and benefits. She'd be working with the head administrator on a Powerpoint presentation.
Suffice to say, I quit at the end of the day.
What was your worst job, and why?
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