links
QUEER
Trans woman murdered and another stabbed in D.C. (Last I checked) the police were avoiding the "trans" aspect of the crime victims despite the fact that the attack took place just two blocks from Transgender Health Empowerment.
Recently there's been a string of homophobic attacks in Rome. Most recently two letter bombs were thrown at a bar on Rome's "newly inducted gay HQ".
A new campaign is being launched to issue a posthumous official apology to famous mathematician Alan Turing. In 1952 he was prosecuted for gross indecency for having sex with a man and as a result was put on an experimental hormone treatment to reduce sex drive. The conviction ended his career and both that and the drugs being forced on him most likely contributed to his suicide in 1954. To quote eumelia's post on the subject, " An international treasure was lost due to bigotry and homophobia. These two blights of humanity are not gone, they still affect our lives and they have affected history. We do not know what Turing could have done in the years he did not live, we can only mourn the life of a man who was persecuted because he did not fit the cultural and societal norms and mores. As long as some people are considered more human than others, simply because they do not fit the little boxes deemed "appropriate", noise must be made about this".
When a Welsh trans woman was told she had to wait two years for gender reassignment surgery she decided she had no option but to do the job herself (note that some aspects of the article, like the male pronouns and the quote from the wife, are...not particularly respectful of this person's gender identity and by extension that of trans women generally).
A few weeks ago I mentioned a surprisingly inclusive dance group competing on America's Best Dance Crew. Unfortunately, the most recent week's episode features some seriously disrespectful commentary by the judges and editing by the producers. From what I can tell, the trans woman in the group is homesick and so isn't giving her all in rehearsal, and the other members of the group are upset. Unfortunately, in a minute and a half segment about that drama, the producers only include 3 clips of the woman in question and one of them is her walking out of rehearsal and another is her whining about her arms being tired. Can we say "perpetuating misogynistic stereotypes"?
Much more striking however, is one of the judges saying, "Your behavior is unacceptable...You have to remember your truth. You were born a man and you're becoming a woman. If you're going to become a woman act like a lady. Don't be a bird....It gets too crazy and it gets confusing. You're doing this for America. Even though you're the face for transgenders, you're the face for America right now with this group, and it's not about anybody else, it's about y'all. So, do it for the team. Do it for the team."
The judges are justified in calling any dancer out for acting like a brat in rehearsal. A comment about, "I get that you're homesick, but keep working hard for the team" would have been totally appropriate. Blaming bratiness on the dancer's gender identity, however, is seriously messed up. This judge's comment suggests that being transgendered is somehow not truthful, that gender nonconformity is "confusing" to others and therefore to exist in a mainstream environment trans people should, what, pretend to be genders they aren't? In the context of the rest of this comment choosing the word "crazy" is also messed up, but since it could theoretically refer to the effects of a performer's bratiness I'm going to let that one lie. Using "transgender" as a noun, however, definitely does add another layer to the dehumanization...Incidentally, I was also put off by some of the race/class dynamic going on with this group as a whole (both in how people are responding to them and in how they're presenting themselves), but because with those it's not a clear-cut case of one party harming another, I feel like it's a touchier subject.
While another judge's comment calling the dancer in question a queen made me want to pull out the Peter Outerbridge, given that he went on to refer to another team member as a prince I think he actually didn't intend it that way. Also, he started his comment (which came right after the one quoted above) by saying, "Everyone has a bad day. I get that. But what you do, you turn it on. And right there, that group turned it on." Of course, his bit about, "You can't be what you want to be, but you can be everything you can be." could easily be read as having some problematic subtext...
On another note, holy guacamole, how can anyone possibly dance in those heels?!
HEALTH CARE REFORM
Sometimes it's nice when other people do research that vindicates positions I'd already been advocating: "In customer satisfaction surveys, the Postal Service already scores higher than health insurers."
A small committee of doctors set the rates at which doctors are paid by insurance companies and Medicare throughout the U.S. The vast majority of those doctors are specialists, and unsurprisingly procedures with a high ratio of required-technical-skill to face-time are valued much more highly than those for which the reverse is true. For obvious reasons, this discourages new doctors from becoming internists/GPs, leading to the growing shortage of said doctors which in turn makes it harder for people to get preventive care and means that health care winds up being more expensive on average.
Here is a well-argued op-ed for government-run health care.
And here's an interesting piece that argues for a libertarian-with-socialist-supplements approach to health care. To give you a taste:
"The use of insurance to fund virtually all care is itself a major cause of health care’s high expense. Insurance is probably the most complex, costly, and distortional method of financing any activity; that’s why it is otherwise used to fund only rare, unexpected, and large costs. Imagine sending your weekly grocery bill to an insurance clerk for review, and having the grocer reimbursed by the insurer to whom you’ve paid your share... For every two doctors in the U.S., there is now one health-insurance employee-more than 470,000 in total. In 2006, it cost almost $500 per person just to administer health insurance....If the government took on the goal of better supporting consumers-by bringing greater transparency and competition to the health-care industry, and by directly subsidizing those who can’t afford care-we’d find that consumers could buy much more of their care directly than we might initially think, and that over time we’d see better care and better service, at lower cost, as a result."
OTHER
One prime example of what I was referring to when I said I don't want to have to deal with the Virginia legislature is now running for governor: his masters thesis (from Pat Robertson's Regent University) include such gems as:
Candidate for Idaho governor continues joke about shooting Obama. I think my favorite part is that his defense was, "Anyone who understands the law, knows I was just joking, because Idaho has no jurisdiction to issue hunting tags in Washington, D.C." Because CLEARLY suggesting that the president of the United States is an animal (and therefore having a hunting license would make it ok to shoot him) make everything better...
U.S. low wage workers, including the two-thirds who have documents to be in the country, are often cheated out of their promised pay (people of color overwhelming more so than whites).
Disney bought Marvel.
One Texas man created a business to build low-income housing from recycled materials. I don't really know enough about the efficacy of Habitat-for-Humanity-esque programs compared to other means of funding low-income housing to comment on that aspect, but I love the fact that he's been able to make construction with recycled materials commercially successful. As much as a 3rd of landfill waste is from construction/development, so programs like these are really a step in the right direction.
A (freaking spiffy!) new molecular imaging method shows the chemical bonds in a carbon nanotube.
Facelifts seem to help with debilitating chronic migraines.
* I think I've ranted before about how much I hate that term....
Trans woman murdered and another stabbed in D.C. (Last I checked) the police were avoiding the "trans" aspect of the crime victims despite the fact that the attack took place just two blocks from Transgender Health Empowerment.
Recently there's been a string of homophobic attacks in Rome. Most recently two letter bombs were thrown at a bar on Rome's "newly inducted gay HQ".
A new campaign is being launched to issue a posthumous official apology to famous mathematician Alan Turing. In 1952 he was prosecuted for gross indecency for having sex with a man and as a result was put on an experimental hormone treatment to reduce sex drive. The conviction ended his career and both that and the drugs being forced on him most likely contributed to his suicide in 1954. To quote eumelia's post on the subject, " An international treasure was lost due to bigotry and homophobia. These two blights of humanity are not gone, they still affect our lives and they have affected history. We do not know what Turing could have done in the years he did not live, we can only mourn the life of a man who was persecuted because he did not fit the cultural and societal norms and mores. As long as some people are considered more human than others, simply because they do not fit the little boxes deemed "appropriate", noise must be made about this".
When a Welsh trans woman was told she had to wait two years for gender reassignment surgery she decided she had no option but to do the job herself (note that some aspects of the article, like the male pronouns and the quote from the wife, are...not particularly respectful of this person's gender identity and by extension that of trans women generally).
A few weeks ago I mentioned a surprisingly inclusive dance group competing on America's Best Dance Crew. Unfortunately, the most recent week's episode features some seriously disrespectful commentary by the judges and editing by the producers. From what I can tell, the trans woman in the group is homesick and so isn't giving her all in rehearsal, and the other members of the group are upset. Unfortunately, in a minute and a half segment about that drama, the producers only include 3 clips of the woman in question and one of them is her walking out of rehearsal and another is her whining about her arms being tired. Can we say "perpetuating misogynistic stereotypes"?
Much more striking however, is one of the judges saying, "Your behavior is unacceptable...You have to remember your truth. You were born a man and you're becoming a woman. If you're going to become a woman act like a lady. Don't be a bird....It gets too crazy and it gets confusing. You're doing this for America. Even though you're the face for transgenders, you're the face for America right now with this group, and it's not about anybody else, it's about y'all. So, do it for the team. Do it for the team."
The judges are justified in calling any dancer out for acting like a brat in rehearsal. A comment about, "I get that you're homesick, but keep working hard for the team" would have been totally appropriate. Blaming bratiness on the dancer's gender identity, however, is seriously messed up. This judge's comment suggests that being transgendered is somehow not truthful, that gender nonconformity is "confusing" to others and therefore to exist in a mainstream environment trans people should, what, pretend to be genders they aren't? In the context of the rest of this comment choosing the word "crazy" is also messed up, but since it could theoretically refer to the effects of a performer's bratiness I'm going to let that one lie. Using "transgender" as a noun, however, definitely does add another layer to the dehumanization...Incidentally, I was also put off by some of the race/class dynamic going on with this group as a whole (both in how people are responding to them and in how they're presenting themselves), but because with those it's not a clear-cut case of one party harming another, I feel like it's a touchier subject.
While another judge's comment calling the dancer in question a queen made me want to pull out the Peter Outerbridge, given that he went on to refer to another team member as a prince I think he actually didn't intend it that way. Also, he started his comment (which came right after the one quoted above) by saying, "Everyone has a bad day. I get that. But what you do, you turn it on. And right there, that group turned it on." Of course, his bit about, "You can't be what you want to be, but you can be everything you can be." could easily be read as having some problematic subtext...
On another note, holy guacamole, how can anyone possibly dance in those heels?!
HEALTH CARE REFORM
Sometimes it's nice when other people do research that vindicates positions I'd already been advocating: "In customer satisfaction surveys, the Postal Service already scores higher than health insurers."
A small committee of doctors set the rates at which doctors are paid by insurance companies and Medicare throughout the U.S. The vast majority of those doctors are specialists, and unsurprisingly procedures with a high ratio of required-technical-skill to face-time are valued much more highly than those for which the reverse is true. For obvious reasons, this discourages new doctors from becoming internists/GPs, leading to the growing shortage of said doctors which in turn makes it harder for people to get preventive care and means that health care winds up being more expensive on average.
Here is a well-argued op-ed for government-run health care.
And here's an interesting piece that argues for a libertarian-with-socialist-supplements approach to health care. To give you a taste:
"The use of insurance to fund virtually all care is itself a major cause of health care’s high expense. Insurance is probably the most complex, costly, and distortional method of financing any activity; that’s why it is otherwise used to fund only rare, unexpected, and large costs. Imagine sending your weekly grocery bill to an insurance clerk for review, and having the grocer reimbursed by the insurer to whom you’ve paid your share... For every two doctors in the U.S., there is now one health-insurance employee-more than 470,000 in total. In 2006, it cost almost $500 per person just to administer health insurance....If the government took on the goal of better supporting consumers-by bringing greater transparency and competition to the health-care industry, and by directly subsidizing those who can’t afford care-we’d find that consumers could buy much more of their care directly than we might initially think, and that over time we’d see better care and better service, at lower cost, as a result."
OTHER
One prime example of what I was referring to when I said I don't want to have to deal with the Virginia legislature is now running for governor: his masters thesis (from Pat Robertson's Regent University) include such gems as:
- Advocating character education programs in public schools to teach "traditional Judeo-Christian* values"
- Saying that government policy should favor married couples over "cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators"
- Calling the legality of birth control for unmarried couples "illogical"
- Criticizing federal tax credits for child care expenditures because they encouraged women to enter the workforce and saying that feminism is among the "real enemies of the traditional family"
- Advocating adoption of a modified flat tax to replace the graduated income tax because having deductions and distributions based on need "is socialist"
Candidate for Idaho governor continues joke about shooting Obama. I think my favorite part is that his defense was, "Anyone who understands the law, knows I was just joking, because Idaho has no jurisdiction to issue hunting tags in Washington, D.C." Because CLEARLY suggesting that the president of the United States is an animal (and therefore having a hunting license would make it ok to shoot him) make everything better...
U.S. low wage workers, including the two-thirds who have documents to be in the country, are often cheated out of their promised pay (people of color overwhelming more so than whites).
Disney bought Marvel.
One Texas man created a business to build low-income housing from recycled materials. I don't really know enough about the efficacy of Habitat-for-Humanity-esque programs compared to other means of funding low-income housing to comment on that aspect, but I love the fact that he's been able to make construction with recycled materials commercially successful. As much as a 3rd of landfill waste is from construction/development, so programs like these are really a step in the right direction.
A (freaking spiffy!) new molecular imaging method shows the chemical bonds in a carbon nanotube.
Facelifts seem to help with debilitating chronic migraines.
* I think I've ranted before about how much I hate that term....