Silly wingnuts are silly.

Ah, wingnuts. You never get tired of proving the point you’re trying to argue against, do you?

Oh, and one more thing – Marxism actually means something as an idea. Throwing it around as a catch-all insult for stuff you dislike just make you look like even more of an idiot.

A new Mike’s Law

In the spirit of Poe’s Law, Mike’s Law of Internet Radfems:

Without an obvious smiley or graphic, it is impossible to determine whether an expressed opinion, article or comment by a radical feminist should be taken as a serious statement of her views.

Or to give you the shorter:

With radfems, never sure if trolling or just expression of views

Exhibit A, Julie Bindel:

If men like a particular brand of feminism, it means it is not working.

That’s right, Julie, because a) all men hate all women, and b) no men are feminists, and c) you decide what constitutes “real” feminism.

Cretin.

ETA: Shorter Cathy Brennan, proving the law to be true:

Look, ma! I’m funny because I’m a disgusting bigot!

But seriously, not only is she running a hate site, she is also proving the point that radfems of her stripe are indistinguishable from parody; I don’t think I could come up with a more unpleasant caricature of her political position than she already has. And the most ironic point is not that she thinks her leaden misunderstandings of memes are funny, but that she thinks she’s actually somehow defending and supporting her position.

The stupidity of wingnuts – abortion edition

The stupidity of wingnuts never ceases to amaze me — for a group of people who seem so ready to castigate centrists and leftists as emotionally-led, over-empathetic, bleeding hearts, they do love to push some idiotic and lookatthefoetushowcute laws when it comes to abortion, not a single one of which has any foundation but emotion, whether it’s misplaced paternalism or jesus-pleasin’.

It just so profoundly illustrates something I’ve mentioned before — the American Right has elevated idiocy to an art form and an article of veneration. Even worse, though, is that they have also somehow managed to convince themselves that their particular brand of stupid is actually wise and clever; remember how the Palinistas tried to market her as some kind of canny operator, full of homespun wisdom? Yeah, exactly, and just like with Palin, they will fail every time.

The ERA: Dead In The Water?

I was browsing around WordPress in the tag listings when I came across this post, and felt I had to add my own commentary. Mainly because I’m a smartarse, and because I like to show up people who are wrong. It’s called Schadenfreude, and I love it.

There’s a certain amount of political interest there, too, mind. I just am a smartarse first and foremost.

The thing is, while the ERA is probably a great thing to support in principle (although more on that later), the last incarnation of it is dead in the water, being gnawed upon by hungry Constitutional sharks.

Not Pumas, But Weasels

I was feeling fairly well-disposed towards the world lately, but I’ve recently seem some things which have made me rather angry generally.

Specifically, PUMAs. Not the big cats, although I have my own beef with enormous felines (to whit: they want to eat me alive), but the disgruntled supporters of Hillary Clinton; the acronym is variously said to stand for People United Means Action or Party Unity My Ass.

Their initial claim was that because of the various electoral shenanigans and irregularities taking place in the Florida and Michigan primaries, HC had been done out of what was rightfully hers, and that she was unfairly robbed of the nomination. Robbed, I tells ya!

Saudi cleric favours one-eye veil

BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Saudi cleric favours one-eye veil.

A Muslim cleric in Saudi Arabia has called on women to wear a full veil, or niqab, that reveals only one eye.

Sheikh Muhammad al-Habadan said showing both eyes encouraged women to use eye make-up to look seductive.

The question of how much of her face a woman should cover is a controversial topic in many Muslim societies.

The niqab is more common in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, but women in much of the Muslim Middle East wear a headscarf which covers only their hair.

Sheikh Habadan, an ultra-conservative cleric who is said to have wide influence among religious Saudis, was answering questions on the Muslim satellite channel al-Majd.

Just… what? For fuck’s sake! So much for religious morality.

I can’t wait for the Christian Right to jump all over this. You know, the same people who say that a woman’s place is in the home, that only men should be in charge. All that good stuff.

When will things turn around in Saudi Arabia and indeed the whole religious world?

Women are not wicked temptresses who are out to destroy the righteousness of innocent and virtuous men. They’re not the source of original sin or lust or whatever. They’re people.

I’m not usually one to advocate invading countries left, right and centre, but this pushes me towards it. And yet, we see no action by any Western governments in this regard.

And you know why? It’s black, stinky and powers cars.

Hotbuttons

There are some topics on the internet which arouse a lot of ferocious argument. They tend to be pretty obvious – people’s hot buttons are pretty consistent in most cases, whether on the net or off.

The subject of politics figures pretty highly, of course, as does religion, in all its aspects. As an example, the consistently-busiest tag categories on WordPress seem to be on politics, religion, atheism and similar.

To all incoming Feministe readers…

You people ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Lottie made a post about the way that your routinely erase and negate the experiences and agency of domestic violence survivors by refusing to hear the whole story because it doesn’t fit your agenda.

Marcella Chester then replied to the post on her blog and at Feministe. Lottie replied in comments at both places, and we both noted that the passive-aggressive behaviour started with playing with her name.

And then comments along the lines of “Why are you blaming DV victims?” started. The 4th comment in the thread, in fact. Given that the first 3 were by Lottie and Marcella, it might as well be said to be the first.

Lottie’s response was to post about her own decades of suffering from DV, which was promptly ignored by everyone else involved in the thread, who were too intent on saying “Don’t blame the victim!” to notice an actual victim.

The worst thing about your behaviour today, though, is something else entirely

On the Shameless Self-Promotion Sunday thread. Lottie linked to three posts there: the domestic violence post, one about a boycott of McDonald’s and one about Internet trolling. She had made a post earlier about feminist language, but didn’t link to it in that thread.

It has received three times as many hits so far as the domestic violence post. It is not the top post on her blog and it was not linked to on Feministe.

Do you know what you’ve shown us today, Feministe readers? You’ve shown us that the issue of whether feminists use language to suppress dissent is more important to you than the story of a survivor of thirty years of domestic violence.

Way to show where your priorities are; way to show seriously you take your “advocacy” for DV victims, and yes, I did choose that word because Kyle Payne used it, and yes, I do hope it stings.

You should be ashamed of yourselves.

It may not have escaped your notice…

… that I have not blogged about I Am Legend. And you’d be entirely right to think so. Basically, I’ve not been in a mood to do fiction stuff this week. I know, deplorable lapse. I’ve kind of been busy, both with the move to our spanky new offices at work, and with other stuff.

In the meantime, ladies and gentlemen, Mr Conway Twitty:

Actually, while this is sometimes used as a joke on Family Guy to distract from when a plot point has become a little sticky, Conway Twitty actually had a long and well-respected career as a rock ‘n’ roll musician (in the late 50s and early 60s) and then country musician.

I think the above video really speaks more to his rock roots, but he was definitely a big player in the country scene – he made many appearances on Hee Haw, for example, sold a butt load of albums as a country musician and he dueted with Loretta Lynn. It doesn’t get much more country than that. I’ll probably obtain *coughillegaldownloadcough* an album or two this weekend.

In other non-news, I have also spent a disproportionate amount of time this week becoming addicted to the Order of The Stick, the link to which can now be found in my blogroll, under Toons. Anyone who’s ever played a tabletop RPG will recognise a lot of what’s in it, especially D&Ders, and it made me laugh like a big fool. Go and read it immediately, or fear my +1 mace!

Idiosyncratica. We will be announcing the new topic on the 15th July, for publication on the 1st August, with my choice of topic. No doubt Gary has already written his, using his prophetic magic. Wait, too much time spent reading OoTS. Anyway, that’s the date for the next exercise. All announcements will be done over there, although this week we’ve discussed who’ll be next and inaugurating new members. Anyone wishing to join the hippest, coolest, bestest and most interesting new group for readers and writers on the whole damn interwebs should come on over and join.

This week has also seen some shitflinging in the femisphere: Feministe has been allowing bullying in its comment threads when certain people (OK, me and Lottie) have said some things which were reasonable but unpopular. Many of the commenters over there seem to be suffering a raging case of the passive-aggressives, and apparently the administrators are far too in love with their blog popularity to do anything about it.

That may be a harsh assessment, but I think it’s a fair one. Passive-aggressive behaviour annoys me, mainly because it’s the kind of tactic my parents used on me for years as a vehicle for their emotional and mental abuse. It’s dishonest – if you have a problem, name it. Don’t hint around it.

Another shit storm has also been brewing over Kyle Payne, a self-described radical feminist blogger whose own self-penned biography describes him in glowing terms as an activist against pornography and advocate for women’s issues. You’d think, reading the page, that he was Jesus crossed with Andrea Dworkin.

He’s just been sentenced in the matter of sexually assaulting an unconscious female student, and apparently the State police are investigating him in regards to some child pornography found on his laptop. This has been shaping into a shitstorm of epic proportions; while the story has been around for some time (I first copped to it on Eleanor’s Trousers earlier in the year), it’s only become big following his sentencing, when a bunch of the bigger names in the feminist blog community have started to blog heavily about it, although notably the BIG names, such as Feministing, Pandagon and Alas have rather disgracefully failed to mention it at the time of writing. That being said, that it took the medium-sized bloggers a fair amount of time to notice, too; not exactly on the ball, either.

There’s been some juvenile shitslinging towards male feminists, particularly Hugo Schwyzer, and frankly, it’s bullshit (even as much as I dislike him). The effect that this has on us is relevant too; nobody’s saying that we should ignore the fact that an innocent student was assaulted, and I’d call anyone out that even suggested it.

That said, we’re more or less all in possession of more than a handful of functioning brain cells, and we can discuss things in more than one dimension. None of us are stupid, we’re all adults, and we can bring up the fact that it fucks over a demographic within the feminist community without detracting from the main issue or turning it into a pissing contest. That being said, some people have maintained an admirable and inclusive stance, and they need to be saluted for that.

Yeesh. That was a long old post. I bet you wish I’d stuck to the original plan and finished it after Conway Twitty, don’t you?

BWO

I think anyone who visits this blog regularly has by now realised that I am not a frequent blogger. It doesn’t come particularly easy for me, most of the time, and I often just don’t feel like I can be bothered to do it, if I’m honest.

And that leads me to feel a little guilty – which is ridiculous! I know that the Odd Blog isn’t XKCD or Feministing or Alas, A Blog. People aren’t waiting with bated breath for my latest pronouncements on whatever happens to interest me lately; I know some of you turn up whenever I post something (mainly because I have secret cameras installed in your houses), but I also know that you probably aren’t going to be riddled with sorrow if I don’t post anything for a week or two.