The Withdrawing Room
Harald Hanche-Olsen wisely reminded me to add a new Withdrawing Room, so here it is.
The Withdrawing Room, for new readers who don’t already know, is where you can talk about any random thing you feel like talking about. Nothing is off-topic because there is no topic. Nothing is a derail because there is no rail.
We have this whole big rambling website, with lots of rooms, to play with, so I might move it somewhere else later, but for now it’s here.
Have a slice of the view from my window:
Interesting concept and beautiful view.
Why hello there, possible Bainbridge Island Ferry. And Hi, Olympic Mountains!
Beautiful view. I was wondering about it since you mentioned it. I wouldn’t give that up willingly either.
Mind you, the mountains don’t look that massive from here – that photo seems to be taken from the water itself, while I’m 500 feet up. But I get all those items – the ferries, the water, the opposite shore, the mountains – as well as a bit of a neighborhood about 2 miles west, and a marina below it, and part of the piers where cruise ships and fishing boats and tug boats dock, and a big copper beech tree, and a little Japanese maple, and some odds and ends…
It is a fantastic view.
Is there a way, other than subscribing via email, to see recently posted comments? That’s one FTB feature I miss.
Beautiful view, Ophelia. I can understand enjoying a view so much that you never want to leave it.
We have a view of mountains (not as spectacular as your ones) only when we are leaving the village to go to town (the top of the hill we live on is between us and them) but we do have a view of the bay and of ships either entering or leaving Cork harbour; sometimes they are moored for days, awaiting a berth. Sometimes they are spectacularly huge cruise ships calling at Cobh, like whole towns on the move.
We are also surrounded by farmland on all sides, and so see plenty of cattle (plus our own lambs). There is a lot of wildlife, such as hares, foxes and badgers, as well as smaller mammals like rabbits and hedgehogs; also lots of birds.
We keep binoculars by the sun room door; they get used a lot.
Screechy Monkey, I used the RSS feed for comments athttp://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/comments/feed/ and it is working splendidly in my RSS reader.
That sounds like a wonderful view, tigger.
The cruise ships I see from here are also huge. When they chug past the neighborhood 2 miles to the west that I mentioned, they seem to dwarf it, even though it’s on a high bluff. They look completely out of scale.
On the other hand I kind of like it when I wake up early at this time of year and I can see one coming in, all lit up as dawn approaches. They get here about 5 a.m.
No great view from our house but it’s a 2 minute walk to a nature reserve jam packed with newts no housing developers (or Fortran) have been allowed to kill yet and a 3 minute walk to an outstanding view of the North Yorks Moors. It’s 15 minutes drive to get there or to the sea, half an hour to the Dales, an hour to the Lakes or to the Northumbria coast.
We really don’t make the most of where we live.
You’re spoiled, that’s what it is. My two minute walk is down to an unimpeded wide-screen version of the view from my windows – a street along the edge of the hill, with the edge side going along a waist-high wall where you can lean and gape at the view. A few hundred yards along there’s a tiny viewpoint-park, with benches and an apple tree.
I miss that view.
Mind you, *My* view of the water had the Olympics at my back, but still…
Also, those mountains looked a lot more naked this year.
No mountains on the little island where we now live, but the views are pretty spectacular. It looks like the sun is out this morning, so maybe I’ll get to take some pictures on my walk.
Those mountains are SO naked this year.
Mind you that photo has to have been taken in spring, if not winter. The Olympics never look like that in August, even in a wet year.
This is the place we – for some reason – hardly ever go to. It is clear that we are idiots: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=north+yorks+moors&espv=2&biw=1632&bih=985&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAmoVChMIn-f91c2fxwIVBT0aCh1KDg9X&dpr=0.9
I would say so.
I mean if it were even half an hour I could maybe understand it, but FIFTEEN MINUTES?? I’d be there every damn day.
Yeah, I was brought up in those hills and know them like the back of my hand. I only have to close my eyes to feel like I’m there. The joy in actually going there recently has been in showing other people: LOOK! Look at that! Look at THAT!
I think that might be wrong. I probably need to revisit the joy through my own eyes, rather than other people’s. I know the best places to temporarily dam streams to make pools to lie in for an afternoon. Why I’m not all the time doing that is a good question. I know where to look for sticklebacks and caddis flies and diving beetles and snakes and other fun things. I forget that other people didn’t grow up in such places and don’t know how to find snakes or how much fun it is to watch them going about their business.
Speaking of joy, here’s another thing I don’t do any more: lie in heather. On the top of a hill. Where all I can see is sky.
There are reasons, of course. I’m not as mobile as I used to be, for example, and I catch on fire when I go out in the daytime. And a grown man lying in someone’s property today isn’t the same as a kid doing it 30-odd years ago. Reasons aren’t excuses, though. At least I know what I’m doing this weekend.
Well then my day has not been wasted.
I know what you mean, but my visual memory is so bad that it’s never superfluous to revisit a place I’ve been no matter how many times. And then places like moors are always changing, so…
To be fair, latsot, you serve (and exist) at the pleasure of Fortran. You’re lucky you are allowed to even ponder enjoying those views.
That is a very lovely view.
In light of the posting at the slymepit by someone declaring to be me, I wish to make a formal statement.
(ahem)
(puts on reading glasses)
(picks up prepared statement from podium)
“Yes, it is true, I am a POE/sockpuppet/whatever from the slymepit, my sole purpose in posting at B&W being to maintain Deep Cover™ until such time as I can finally triumph over Ophelia. It is crucially important that nobody know my true identity, name, address, phone number, or email address, and I have guarded that information to the best of my ability. Sadly, I have roundly borked that, because Ophelia actually does know my true identity, name, address, phone number, and email address because I have shared all that info with her, and I even made the fundamental mistake of having lunch with her recently. Broken bread, if you will!
Moreover, I have failed in my mission to unsupport Ophelia and ruin her blog, in that I have somehow contributed to her Patreon not once, but twice, to the point that my current contribution is now four times what my initial Paypal monthly contribution via FtB was. I have failed the slymepit miserably, and for that, I have little to say other than: welp, I guess I’ll go open a beer.”
(turns and walks out)
“I’m sorry, but MrFancyPants will not be taking any questions.”
22 comments and no one’s done the “surf and terf” thing yet?
Nope, nobody. But why are people talking about an ancient programming language killing newts?
Oh, and since this is Butterflies and Wheels, I just have to share this google+ post on why butterfly wings look the way they do.
It soon moves on to talk about other things, but it’s all nicely nerdy. Perhaps a bit too nerdy, at the end.
Wait, Fortran is a programming language too?
Yes. Yes, it is
Oh, and on the topic of programming, I never thought I’d be linking to such a geeky site as Codeless Code here, but this recent post – The Boolean – is quite relevant to this blog, methinks.
The moral of the piece: It’s not all black and white.
Harold,
Yeah, I know. I was joking. Fortran is also the name of my cat, who is quite famous in these parts.
We had a power outage today, so I took the opportunity to re-read the Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and Seneca’s letters.
(The rivalry between the Stoics and the Epicureans amuses me)
I think that the programming language was named after your cat, Latsot, in a weird inversion of timey time stuff.
Felicia Day’s memoir looks good: http://boingboing.net/2015/08/11/felicia-days-youre-never.html
Rob @ 29 – pssst – it’s HarAld – you know, the Viking one. Harald is Norsk.
I like both Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. I should re-read them too.
I’ve been re-reading The Young Visiters at odd moments.
There’s a posting at the slime pit claiming to be MrFancyPants?
That’s funny. I did get a sock comment yesterday saying slimers were claiming MrFP is a sock. I did laugh at it, and consider approving it for the sake of pointing out that I know he isn’t ‘coz I’ve met him…but not worth mucking up the place with sock activity, so I didn’t.
@Ophelia, 29: I know that. Plainly my fingers do not. Apologies, Harald.
@FancyPants,
I don’t know if anyone has ever sock-puppeted me (seems unlikely), but I’m quite often accused of being a sock myself. Sometimes – confusingly – OF myself.
The latest one I noticed was from oh, Shermatron, I expect, or someone like him. It pointed out similarities in my and someone else’s writing style (I didn’t bother to check whose). Things like using z instead of s sometimes and spelling “color” with a u.
I don’t know whether I have more than 64 million people sock-puppeting me or whether I’m one of 64 million sock-puppeting someone else. Who may or may not also be me.
Um… I mean s instead of z, of course.
See how confusing this is? It’s inconsistencies like those that PROVE I’m a sock puppet. Of… myself.
Of course there’s the inconvenience that I’ve met you too, and so have several other people we both know.
You met someone… :)
True. We are, when it comes down to it, sock puppets of ourselves.
Deeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.
Deeeeeep cover. The deepiest of deep! So deep that I’ve popped out the other side. Which of you jokers moved China?? I was led to believe that China was on the other side.
@latsot “Things like using z instead of s sometimes and spelling “color” with a u”
er, colour *is* spelled with a u. And aluminium is spelled as so, and Christmas happens in summer time and, honestly…
@latsot That’s okay; I am used to it. My wife did the same thing back when we hardly knew each other. She became my wife none the less, which I assume proves it does not upset me greatly.
You should see how my last name gets mangled occasionally. Back in 1994, I flew from Newark back to Norway with a ticket claiming to be for someone named HAMCHEOMSEH. I kid you not! Post 9/11, I would never have been allowed to board with such a ticket.
Hamcheomseh sounds like a delicious Korean side dish.
Everyone spells my last name the same boring wrong way instead of coming up with some freestyle jazz like that.
Tracy @44. I know! They just don’t get it do they?
Ophelia, it’s unfortunate that the Gutenberg online version of the Meditations is the Casaubon translation, which is nigh unreadable. Luckily, I’ve got the Staniforth translation.
Compare, for example, the respective portions of Book 4 §7:
vs
George Eliot lifted the name for a reason.
It was decades ago that I realised writers using initials and a surname were very often women.
Currer Bell, Ellis Bell.
Ah. Rev. Edward Casaubon, the pedantic scholar.
Then there are the androgynous* names, e.g. Andre Norton.
—
* Not gynandrous, for some reason. :)
Ack. Julian May is a proper example.
Earlier this year, I wrote a (mixed) review of Joe Romm’s Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero.
If I recall correctly, Romm argues that Seneca would have been a valued adviser to Marcus Aurelius – he had the bad fortune of being born a century too soon.
When put so simply, it’s highly debatable. :)
SC, “Don’t worry, be happy”.
Yes, Stoicism is much easier if one is rich and powerful, as both those writers were, so that their philosophy is an indulgence — and only somewhat easier if one is poor and powerless, so that their philosophy is a consolation. Most of us are somewhere in between.
SC, just read your entry. Regarding the misogyny of the culture, Book 4 §28 (in reference to Nero, my emphasis): “A black character, a womanish character, a stubborn character, bestial, childish, animal, stupid, counterfeit, scurrilous, fraudulent, tyrannical.”
I was just making a quip, but your response reminds me of a part of Romm’s argument, and the most interesting aspect of the book for me: the ways in which the political meaning of Stoicism in Seneca’s time was in a sense coopted to serve the authoritarian regime. For example:
As I note in my post, I see this as an enduring issue: how ideas and philosophies can become instruments of inequality and oppression when set or developed in oppressive contexts.
And such speciesism that the point has to be made twice – not just “bestial” but “animal”!
All this talk of socks has reminded me of the assortment at You’re Not Helping and the Intersection. Wouldn’t it be…interesting if that puppeteer were involved in this latest episode?
Gerard Biard, chief editor of Charlie Hebdo, is present at a meeting on freedom of speech in Arendal, Southern Norway today (too far from my location, alas). He has given a speech which you can read here, if you read Norwegian. If not, perhaps google translate can make some sense out of it for you.
I don’t know if he spoke in French or English, nor do I know of any transcript in any language other than Norwegian. I understand this is his first public appearance after the massacre.
Wasn’t he at the PEN Award? I’m pretty sure he was. I’ll look it up in a bit.
Oui, Biard was at the PEN awards ceremony.
Ah, of course, I remember that now. Well, I had the wrong info from the newspaper article, then. Or was it the news last night? Perhaps. There was a brief interview with him, and perhaps he was only saying that he hadn’t felt like coming out in public until recently. Which is understandable.
Thanks for the information, Hamcheomseh. I’m still not finding anything in English or in French. I’d expected to be perplexed and amused by the Google translation, but it was pretty clear. (Still not getting: “Let me explain a little bit, so you see the tank.” :))
It was a very good speech.
Yes, Biard was at the PEN award ceremony and also a speaker at the forum I went to earlier that day and reported from. (This might explain why that post is suddenly getting attention again, and why I’ve had a small surge of visitors from Norway.) If he hasn’t made an appearance since facing the ridiculous spectacle of the PEN protest/boycott, it would be totally understandable. In fact, I wouldn’t blame him if he never wanted to return to the US.
Opheliagate as reported on Slate.
(Personally, I find the article to be evenhanded.)
Salty: Re “Let me explain a little bit, so you see the tank” … The final word should be “thought”. It comes from Norwegian “tanken” which can mean either “the tank” or “the thought”. (The words are actually pronounced using different tones. Also, “a tank” is “en tank” while “a thought” is “en tanke”.)
Silentbob: I think words ending in -gate are overused. In many cases, including this one, the analogy with the original is very inaccurate, too, unless you consider the recent clusterfuck to be evidence that Ophelia has done (or thought, heaven forbid) terrible things.
I thought the article was reasonable too, though I have no idea if it portrayed Ophelia’s feminism accurately. And I think it went too far at the end about how some things are better left unsaid. It seemed a bit preachy and fingerpointy for my tastes, anyway.
Oh, and Ophelia, as the withdrawing room has rolled off the first page, a link somewhere on the front page would be useful, would it not? Perhaps along with the RSS links in the margin.
Thanks! I went back to look and discovered that there’s now a video at the site. His speech was in French, which I just watched. The interview/Q&A afterwards is in English, which I’m watching now. (Still no English or French transcript.)
Internet interaction is real interaction, and dogpiling can really hurt.
In Australian news: Cyber bullying: Father crusades to stop bullies after daughter’s suicide following Facebook tirade.
Hi Ophelia, could you put a PayPal button in the Tip Jar section of the site?
HappyOccy, yes, that’s on my list.
This is the comment I just tried to post at the other thread, which you’ve closed. I don’t know if you’ll delete it from here, but this is what it said:
It wasn’t a derail. Several people were responding to your post, in which you characterized and linked to the FB group. While I understand your anger given the context of the pile-on, I was hurt by your responses.
Yes, but the post wasn’t about the Facebook group. The group was an afterthought; the guts of it was what came before, and I wanted to talk about that.
And since you haven’t even seen the damn group, blaming me for reading it was a bit much.
I’m sure it’s on the ’round-to-it list, but a +1 on a permalink for this thread. Could we also have a ‘latest comments’ link list? Somewhere between a list of 10-20 would be good. I often forget (ok, nearly always) to subscribe to threads that do interest me and don’t want to subscribe to all threads by default.
@ 76 Rob
In the right-hand column you should see a link to “All Comments (RSS)”. If you click that in a browser you’ll see a linked list of the last twenty comments in reverse chronological order.
Ah! Many thanks Silentbob
Some interesting posts recently at Charlie’s Diary, which readers here may appreciate.
What happens when we don’t talk about race: here. It makes me wonder if there are similar effects from not talking about gender / gender identities.
And as people seem prejudiced against sock puppets, these are just right for a Sunday Afternoon.
Now here is something weird to ponder:
I read this blog in Firefox. When I load the blog page, the newest post I see is from today, with the title “Just four and no more”.
But if I load it in Safari, the newest post is from yesterday: “Thought leadering again.” The same happens in Chrome, and in Vivaldi (a new browser I am testing). And if I get all nerdy and load it from the command line using curl.
I wonder if anybody else sees this? (I am on a Mac, in case it’s not blindingly obvious.)
Harald, others do see that, yes. It’s on my list of things to get fixed.
I’m getting various weirdnesses in my browsers, too. Sounds like stuff you’re already on the case of, tho’.
Anyway. In news of the… odd?
Okay. I don’t even know quite what to call it. But anyway:
In a kinda amusing crossover between my various worlds (I’m sorta on the cryptographic periphery of computer security, tho’, not really in this area), the always … erm… interesting? John McAfee (seriously, I dunno how well known this is outside said worlds… Google him if you’re curious, I guess; it’s always entertaining, at least*) has now declared the Ashley Madison data breach thing you may have heard about in the news was an inside job by a woman employee. See this thing.
I’m bringing it up here because, yep, I think you can assume the ‘it was a woman’ (his word, I think, people wanting precision in terms, as it looks like ‘female’ probably happened at the editorial level, as it only turns up in headlines and decks) assumption is very much about gender and culture. He’s concluding this from what he considers tells in statements made by the alleged hacking group. Things like a particular disgust expressed for an outed client signing up the day after Valentine’s Day, the use of the terms/phrases ‘scumbags’ and ‘cheating dirtbags’ to refer to men using the site…
… and does it make me a bad person that I feel like I’m reading the script of a bad romcon (or is that phrase redundant) reading all this?
Anyway, McAfee’s been saying it was a single person involved a while. Since at least July 27, so far as I can see. As of then, tho’, you’ll note he’s using the pronoun ‘he’ and still assuming it’s a hack, not an inside job. I’m not really following this thing so closely that I know the timeline of the statements he’s using, tho’, so it may be about that.
I haven’t a particular position on any of this, real strong conclusions about which bits of this are or aren’t likely to be right. Like I said, not really my area, though this stuff does tend to pop up in feeds I follow. But the ‘must be a woman’ thing almost cracked me up, given the context of the past few weeks. Like, oh, right, outside the more technical and fascinating discussions you may be having on this stuff, somewhere, in a world beyond, it’s still one big sitcom, and the dialogue really hasn’t changed much since somewhere in the Palaeozoic.
… or, actually, okay, I do have this, what with the whole ‘bad romcom’ vibe I keep getting: that is, oddly enough, the part of this whole conjecture that bothers me. Like, seriously, is anyone actually that cliché without deliberately trying to be? I mean, were I an actual hacker who’d acquired the stuff (or were I the presumed insider), if I wanted to put people off the track of who I was, I certainly could crib the lines from Spurned Woman A from whichever generic script, to point toward someone else, it seems to me…
I wouldn’t, mind. I have pride. I’d write better dialogue. But this might defeat the purpose, as possibly it would go right over John McAfee’s head, and he’d just come out with ‘lone hacker who clearly doesn’t write much like any movies I’ve ever watched…’
This is probably why I’d be lousy at this stuff, actually. It’s not just that I’d overthink it. It’s that I’d actually refuse to touch this one, until the hackers had written me back with something a little less derivative. How do you send a hacker a rejection slip, anyway?
(*I always feel so boring, reading about this guy. Like I’m in this business, I should be fleeing to Guatemala more frequently, or something… On the other hand, I also feel like maybe I’m not the weirdest alien in the room. Which is nice. I think.)
@AJ: McAfee’s ‘analysis’ is certainly beyond “odd”. His certainty that various files could only possibly exist in particular places is especially foolish. Networks are strangely organic things, aren’t they? As they grow, they accumulate spandrels and spandrels are exactly the sort of things I – with my white hat on – would be interested in. Network users very often do things that nobody expected, usually because they found out by accident that they could. Maybe the CEO stores files on the live server because that’s what happened back when the company had four people in it and nobody ever got round to fixing it. The server and workstations have all changed but that anomaly faithfully replicated. That happened to me once; my filespace ended up on a machine that was used to run delicate timing experiments, presumably playing havoc with the results. Nobody noticed until I pointed it out, months later. Why would they? Hardly anyone checks that sort of thing.
I once had a client who had some inconsistency problems in their database. It turned out that the MD had bullied a programmer into circumventing the normal procedures for adding stuff to the database because there was a big rush job on. The programmer wrote a tool for this immediate problem without telling anyone else in the dev team. The people running the database found the tool really convenient (since it bypassed data verification) and continued to use it for months afterwards. I only tracked it down because
What I’m saying is that this kind of thing is the norm for networks and McAfee of all people ought to know this. You know where you’ll find – without the slightest doubt – the various files McAfee says would be impossible to get at if it weren’t an inside job? Email. People who are otherwise security-conscious often have strange assumptions about the security of email accounts.
So I just don’t buy any of that. The simplest assumption is that McAfee is right and it was an inside job, but McAfee’s ‘evidence’ is bullshit and his certainty cannot be justified. Which brings me to his certainty that “a woman did it”. From the article you linked to:
Um… really? I’m a speaker of British English, but I’ve been known to call men scumbags from time to time. Are Americans and Canadians really so different?
McAfee reveals himself. No, I think I’ve used similar language to refer to men and women who have hurt their partners. My judgemental piety knows no discrimination. But the real evidence is yet to come:
Must! This is going to be good, right?
There’s no need to pick that apart for this audience. Just bask in the glory of its cluelessness. It kind of looks, though, as if McAfee equates “anyone” with “any man”. Or perhaps I need to get out of the house more often.
Where can I get a new irony meter, cheap? I saw this fact-free demand to look at the facts about the Tim Hunt business, and my nice heavy-duty one broke down irreparably. Not sure where else to post this.
Friendly Atheist
@sackbut
You’re going to need the most expensive irony meter money can buy. Dawkins is outraged on Twitter because people have been telling him that one thing might be more important than another thing and he should stop talking about the less important one. He’s outraged. He says that he can care about more than one thing at a time and people should stop telling him that he should only care about the more horrible one.
His unthinking supporters have been telling me all day that Dear Muslima was totally not telling anyone that they should care about one thing and not another. Their rationale for this has mostly involved telling me how elevatorgate was all about Rebecca having her feelings hurt and (somehow) PZ accusing either Dawkins or elevator guy (it’s not clear) of being a rapist and that these are first world problems not worth worrying about anyway. Unlike… their first world feelings-hurting complaints, presumably.
Dawkins is not a bit of an old hypocrite, they insist, because learning to treat women as if they’re not fuck toys is a first world problem so Dawkins is justified in telling people to care about other things instead, while simultaneously defending his right to care about things other than The Most Important Thing.
So does that have you all scrabbling for your irony meter receipts or what?
I need an irony meter 10 to deal with that one.
Wow, that really ups the required specs for irony meters big time. Was this just today? Damn.
Oh, for goodness sake. It’s a simple wiring problem. Allow me to
mansexplain:You’re supposed to have your irony meters set-up so there’s an automatic cut-off when the badometer reads “zero bad”. You know, for silly ladies’ problems like “being inappropriately touched by the water cooler or invited for coffee or something which I think is, by comparison, relatively trivial”.
;-)
Logarithmic gain on our irony meters is definitely the way ahead.
An uppity, non-compliant guide to feminist language.
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/i_could_care_less.png
Rob @92, I don’t get whatever point you intended to make by linking to that silly comic.
(It is indisputable that “I could care less” literally means “I care somewhat”)
John @93, I’ll quote from explainxkcd.com to save some time…
I thought it had sufficient parallel to happenings around the place over the last while to produce at least an uh huh, maybe a smile.
And as for ‘that silly comic’ – I’ll see you at dawn, bring your pistol and a second.
In Australian news: Frontbencher Kelly O’Dwyer asked by Chief Whip Scott Buchholz’s office to express more milk to avoid missing Parliament.
—
Thanks, Rob. No duelling required!
Merit vs. being handed something on a plate, also with music.
John, no worries.
Delft, great find.
SC, you were right, Chicago is a great place to visit.
So… I started reading “Does God Hate Women?”, by our esteemed host, co-authored by Jeremy Stangroom. I use Goodreads, and a make a habit of marking book progress on Facebook via that service. I have had a few FB conversations recently about the pope, and why I don’t like him, despite him saying some nice things that get right-wingers into a tizzy. Among the many reasons I give are various policies about reproductive rights. It will be interesting to see if I get any commentary on this (excellent so far) book with a provocative title, particularly from the pope-pologists. Recently I read Faith vs Fact, by Jerry Coyne, and got no comments.
Is this something we can see on Facebook?
In Australian news (via the national broadcaster): Fact check: Do big companies run by a Peter, a Michael, a David or an Andrew outnumber those run by women four to one?
[Spoiler: “The verdict: […] Ms Broderick’s claim is close to the mark.”]
*sigh* These people.
Dana Hunter has a new post telling the story of a trans man who was raped by gang of men, fell pregnant, and had an abortion. Who do you suppose is the villian of the piece?
Could it be… the gang of rapists? Nope. Anti-abortion activists? Uh-uh.
It’s… Ophelia Benson!!!! (boo! hiss!)
@Silentbob:
Yeah, I saw that. The unwillingness to see the actual argument instead of the straw one starts to look deliberate eventually, doesn’t it? I like to quote Ben Goldacre (often over and over again, in my head, like a mantra) when I see arguments like those:
Huh. A trans man is raped, and that’s somehow a reason to attack me for saying that abortion is a women’s rights issue. Huh.
Yep, it’s the perfect time to attack you. Since there is no amount of trans bigotry and violence that they can’t now lay at your feet — rather than, you know, actually doing anything substantial to stop trans bigotry and violence — any opening is a good opening to attack you while also maintaining an air or superiority and righteousness. By remaining outraged by you for fictionally relevant reasons, they can feel as though they are actually contributing something worthwhile while doing precisely nothing. It’s the lazy activists way to feel like they are actually good activist while also feeling like they’re part of something big and worthwhile.
What, a trans man was group raped? With just a little twist here and there in the narrative we tell, we can direct the inherent outrage at Ophelia. Group hugs, everyone!
It would be comical if it weren’t so disgusting.
Look, gang rape is one thing. A war on women’s bodily autonomy is another. But this feminist pro-choicer over here is using insufficiently inclusive language! Crank the outrage to eleventy!!
I don’t know why they particularly needed to bring rape into it anyway. Suppose a trans man happens to enjoy occasional PIV with penis-havers and gets pregnant that way. He should still have the same abortion rights as a raped trans man, a cis woman whose condom broke, or anybody else. “OPHELIA CAUSES TRANS RAPE” is not only inaccurate (to understate), it’s also as irrelevant to abortion rights as could possibly be.
In Australian news (via the national broadcaster): Pregnant Somali asylum seeker to return to detention, advocates say.
Ah well, so I already know the results of our (Polish) today’s general election. How many left-wing MPs are we going to have for the next four years? Here is the answer: none at all. Zero. Nada. All the parties on the left lost the election. The winner, holding the absolute majority, is… alright, I don’t want to swear on Ophelia’s blog. The winner is one of the worst possible. (Not that it’s a surprise, no way.)
The party I voted for took the last place in the competition – they received the smallest percentage of all votes. I expected this; I was just very tired and fed up with choosing all these “lesser evils”.
So many topics discussed on this blog would be alien/unrecognizable/laughable to most of the people in my country. I rarely feel it as strongly as today.
Well that’s deeply depressing.
For some reason, the Withdrawing Room only just appeared on my RSS feed. Probably due to the fact that (1) I’m still using RSS, (2) Patreon may have been slow in approving permissions (hope you enjoyed the coffee money after the move!), or (3) my RSS reader sucks.
Anyways, just wanted to comment on the Dana Hunter piece. WARNING: Rant incoming.
You know what’s most frustrating and infuriating? The article Dana Hunter links to is actually really good. It emphasizes barriers, references how abortion should not be stigmatized, advocates for increased access and support for impoverished and marginalized groups. It’s a great article, and makes a powerful argument for advocacy on behalf of access to abortion services for anyone who needs it.
Hunter, however, decides to ignore all of that to attack Ophelia Benson, by focusing (bolding no less!) on this:
That is the harm that deserves redress. That’s the launching point. That. No Second Wave Feminists (hereafter SWFs) picketing the clinic. No SWFs saying she couldn’t get an abortion. No SWFs showing up with a checklist of requirements from “counseling” to ultrasounds before allowing abortions. Someone doesn’t feel comfortable going on Twitter. Twitter, apparently, is the medium by which discourse is measured. Well, that and those irksome feminists being irritated about What About The Men arguments. Those reason justify saying (my emphasis):
Sure, they can blog about it, be referenced, be quoted, and the like, but they couldn’t tweet and feel safe. Because SWFs use the term “pregnant women” instead of “pregnant people”. No no, let’s be specific, because Ophelia Benson objects to that term, and hounds people on Twitter*.
Not because organizations like Operation Rescue exist. Not because the Hyde Amendment is still in full force. Not because the religious right has co-opted state government. Not because the US Congress is defunding health services left and right. Not because people are literally setting clinics on fire. (Sorry for US-centrism here, it’s what I know.)
The most important issue is that Ophelia Benson — and all SWFs — want to defend the selfishness of cis women.
And yes yes, of course, “it’s just an example” and “I’m just calling out harm” and “I have to effect change where I can, and I can’t affect the Right”. Bullshit. When confronted with this argument I’m just going to walk away, and continue my advocacy and support of access to reproductive rights for, yes, all people who need abortions. Because despite the awful TERF, transphobe, and general all-around awful human being she is (/sarcasm), I firmly believe that Ophelia Benson wants that too.
Sorry for the rant. Well, not really, but still sorry, kind of.
* As I recall, OB admitted being too persistent. IIRC, she describing her repeated Tweets as “bordering on harassment” (possible paraphrase), but once blocked, she let it go. As one should do in that situation!
** Yes yes, “I have trans friends”, go ahead and say it. I’m damn well going to listen to them before I listen to Dana Hunter, thanks.
And of course, re-reading, I realize I misgendered the pronouns in several cases. I blame my frustration and inability to copy-paste correctly. Blargh.
@PatrickG
According to best estimates, about .3% of the US population is trans. Let’s be generous and round up to .5%.
One half of one percent of the US population is trans. Approximately half of them–.25%–might at some point need an abortion (realistically, less than that: some will be post-menopausal, some will be on hormones and/or will have had hysterectomies, some will not be sleeping with men [though still vulnerable to rape.])
But Dana Hunter feels so bad about trans people being “left out of discussions about reproduction” she doesn’t want to participate in #ShoutYourAbortion. And we’re not supposed to frame abortion as a women’s issue.
Meanwhile, as you point out, abortion rights are everywhere under attack, and many poor women (and trans men, and genderqueer people) are unable to obtain safe and legal abortions.
*tears hair*
A compelling argument for not being a feminist.
(Relax, it’s the Onion.)
@ ^
Now, if only we can get Ophelia to stop massacring trans people…
(/sarcasm)
@ ^
I decided I should an explanatory note for people who don’t get the joke.
Heh.
In the news: another article about another female first. Perhaps one day those stories will run out…
Melbourne Cup: Michelle Payne rides Prince Of Penzance to victory to become first female jockey to win the great race
Addendum: Melbourne Cup: Michelle Payne rises from nasty falls to pinnacle of horse racing
Pullquote:
From our press: a guy imprisoned, raped and blinded his 23 year old neighbour. (I don’t provide the link – it’s in Polish).
One thing only: the woman decided to go to the police only after she found out that she will never recover her sight. Being ‘merely’ raped and imprisoned.. ah, that’s not enough. This happens, this is life, and think of the price you are going to pay!
Fuck. Just fuck.
Just a note to other Patreon users. I received an attempted blackmail email from someone claiming to have info hacked from Patreon recently. I’ve been in touch with Patreon, who assure me that with the info the hackers did get they cannot actually access card details, tax details etc. they are working with Federal agencies to try and track the hackers and those using the data.
Thank you Rob. I have an email from Patreon saying it’s a scam, they can’t get tax numbers or credit card ones, don’t reply to the scam email.
Comments got turned off again. Sorry. They’re now ON as you can see.