(no subject)
Dec. 28th, 2011 08:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwydion* The Syrian government murdered seventeen people today, including a seven months pregnant woman an a five year old. I'm sure those heavily armed soldiers saw an unarmed kindergartener as a major threat, right? Bet their mothers are proud. There are not much in the way of hopes for the Arab league delegation doing anything much as the leader has close ties to the bastards running Sudan.
* Rick Perry has changed his mind and is now demanding survivors of rape and incest should be forced to bear the fetuses against their will, presumably because they had not already been punished enough for being born female. He refuses to say whether or not he believes that women with (nonviable and invariably fatal) ectopic pregnancies should be required to die, as is the current mainstream Republican opinion.
* Ron Paul is now being endorsed by and is bragging about a man who is out campaigning for the death penalty for homosexuals here in America. So much for libertarians being live and let live. Fuck you Ron Paul and the homophobic, racist, and anti-semetic horse you rode in on!
* Speaking of Republican candidate homophobia, a Newt Gingrich antigay rant footage has surfaced as well, as well as anecdotal stories of him doing things like refusing to use the bathroom in the house of a gay couple. He seriously creeps me out.
* "Santorum surge" sounds even more disgusting than "Santorum bubble." Just saying.
* Last night, I was worn out from the night hike, and it was time for retrenching, which here means moving things about that were already unpacked to spots that turned out to work better, working through a swap box, and more catching up on the internet. I've pretty much caught up on what i missed during the great emergency. Today, I had a whole stack of errands I didn't run because there is no car. I got shit for sleep between the door and the auto-dialer, so hiking around and dealing with the assholes running the Bellingham bus system wasn't anything I was up too. Instead I read half a Tanya Huff book (second in the Gale series), pet cats, and made pancakes. Now I'm working through more accumulated swaps. In a bit there will be more retrenching. I did most of the last couple things with hector constantly badgering me to go back to bed and as a result, burnt some pancakes and squirted myself in the eye with atmosphere spray. Sigh.
You know that auto-dialer that stole my sleep? It's been calling at least once every half an hour all evening as well as the occasional morning and afternoon call. it's never any content, so I can't tell them to stop.
* Speaking of Wild Ways, I've got seriously mixed emotions about the Gale series. The plots are interesting, the writing style amusing, the women strong and skilled, and I genuinely like the matter of fact handling of the LGB content. At the same time, I find the schema for the fantastic elements one I'd want nothing to do with in real life despite it being perfectly believable and internally logical, and it's so binary on gender roles and linking them to biological sex that there is no room anywhere for trans folk, to the point where it's not merely a matter of no trans folk in the story, but I do not see how their magic system allows them to exist at all. That's some serious erasure, and yes, it makes me squirm. There are some POC in this second book, all in supporting roles. I suppose this is better than none, but it feels problematic to me. The result is uncomfortable, even here where the main character is so sympathetic. It makes me itch.
EDITED to clarify: I could be wrong. I'm halfway through the second book. theoretically there could be a trans character that completely shatters the paradigm at some future point, but I'm not holding my breath.
* Greenwick is rescuing my meds tomorrow, which is a huge relief and may be helping with the library issue. We'll see. This doesn't solve the other two or three things needing doing that I can't figure out how to solve without a whole lot of painful walking and a couple of bus odysseys.
* I've been watching movies, luckily for free. The best of them was a B-movie zombie flick from Australia called Undead. By best I don't mean good, just watchable. It's got a lot of homage to previous zombie films, and most of the fun came from picking out which movies they were ripping off in a given seen. The acting was bad, but bearable bad. Then I saw the Adjustment Bureau as I was led to believe it was like that Twilight zone episode, but it turned out not only to be a romantic comedy, but a Christian romantic comedy to boot. Blech! (I realized two days later, I'd gotten it confused with Source Code I'm now attempting to watch Clash of the Titans, which appears to be a terrible waste of acting talent larded with long boring action sequences. Seriously, they had Liam Neison and Ray Fiennes in the same film and couldn't think of anything more interesting for them to do? Really? And the main characters were so boringly, willfully stupid it made my head hurt. I am so glad I didn't pay for it. I am even gladder I quit midway through.
* I can not vouch for the quality of this LGBT book list, but I'm tossing it here in case folks were interested: http://megwrites.dreamwidth.org/210641.html
* Forced Sterilization is a big issue out here as along with kidnapping kids to beat the language and culture out of them at boarding schools, forced sterilization of native Women at hospitals, often without telling them it had happened, let alone getting consent, was part of the government's program of genocide all the way into the 1970's. It's why a lot of folks are scared of doctors and hospitals.
Anderson Cooper 360 did a piece on the forced sterilization in North Carolina. There, it was African American women instead of native women high on the list of people having this invasive thing done to them, along with the disabled, the poor, and the sick. It's wrong and horrific wherever it happened and to whomever it happened, and it's a national shame that there is no real attempt to compensate the victims: http://cnn.com/video/?/video/bestoftv/2011/12/28/cohen-forced-sterilization-in-america.cnn
* Rick Perry has changed his mind and is now demanding survivors of rape and incest should be forced to bear the fetuses against their will, presumably because they had not already been punished enough for being born female. He refuses to say whether or not he believes that women with (nonviable and invariably fatal) ectopic pregnancies should be required to die, as is the current mainstream Republican opinion.
* Ron Paul is now being endorsed by and is bragging about a man who is out campaigning for the death penalty for homosexuals here in America. So much for libertarians being live and let live. Fuck you Ron Paul and the homophobic, racist, and anti-semetic horse you rode in on!
* Speaking of Republican candidate homophobia, a Newt Gingrich antigay rant footage has surfaced as well, as well as anecdotal stories of him doing things like refusing to use the bathroom in the house of a gay couple. He seriously creeps me out.
* "Santorum surge" sounds even more disgusting than "Santorum bubble." Just saying.
* Last night, I was worn out from the night hike, and it was time for retrenching, which here means moving things about that were already unpacked to spots that turned out to work better, working through a swap box, and more catching up on the internet. I've pretty much caught up on what i missed during the great emergency. Today, I had a whole stack of errands I didn't run because there is no car. I got shit for sleep between the door and the auto-dialer, so hiking around and dealing with the assholes running the Bellingham bus system wasn't anything I was up too. Instead I read half a Tanya Huff book (second in the Gale series), pet cats, and made pancakes. Now I'm working through more accumulated swaps. In a bit there will be more retrenching. I did most of the last couple things with hector constantly badgering me to go back to bed and as a result, burnt some pancakes and squirted myself in the eye with atmosphere spray. Sigh.
You know that auto-dialer that stole my sleep? It's been calling at least once every half an hour all evening as well as the occasional morning and afternoon call. it's never any content, so I can't tell them to stop.
* Speaking of Wild Ways, I've got seriously mixed emotions about the Gale series. The plots are interesting, the writing style amusing, the women strong and skilled, and I genuinely like the matter of fact handling of the LGB content. At the same time, I find the schema for the fantastic elements one I'd want nothing to do with in real life despite it being perfectly believable and internally logical, and it's so binary on gender roles and linking them to biological sex that there is no room anywhere for trans folk, to the point where it's not merely a matter of no trans folk in the story, but I do not see how their magic system allows them to exist at all. That's some serious erasure, and yes, it makes me squirm. There are some POC in this second book, all in supporting roles. I suppose this is better than none, but it feels problematic to me. The result is uncomfortable, even here where the main character is so sympathetic. It makes me itch.
EDITED to clarify: I could be wrong. I'm halfway through the second book. theoretically there could be a trans character that completely shatters the paradigm at some future point, but I'm not holding my breath.
* Greenwick is rescuing my meds tomorrow, which is a huge relief and may be helping with the library issue. We'll see. This doesn't solve the other two or three things needing doing that I can't figure out how to solve without a whole lot of painful walking and a couple of bus odysseys.
* I've been watching movies, luckily for free. The best of them was a B-movie zombie flick from Australia called Undead. By best I don't mean good, just watchable. It's got a lot of homage to previous zombie films, and most of the fun came from picking out which movies they were ripping off in a given seen. The acting was bad, but bearable bad. Then I saw the Adjustment Bureau as I was led to believe it was like that Twilight zone episode, but it turned out not only to be a romantic comedy, but a Christian romantic comedy to boot. Blech! (I realized two days later, I'd gotten it confused with Source Code I'm now attempting to watch Clash of the Titans, which appears to be a terrible waste of acting talent larded with long boring action sequences. Seriously, they had Liam Neison and Ray Fiennes in the same film and couldn't think of anything more interesting for them to do? Really? And the main characters were so boringly, willfully stupid it made my head hurt. I am so glad I didn't pay for it. I am even gladder I quit midway through.
* I can not vouch for the quality of this LGBT book list, but I'm tossing it here in case folks were interested: http://megwrites.dreamwidth.org/210641.html
* Forced Sterilization is a big issue out here as along with kidnapping kids to beat the language and culture out of them at boarding schools, forced sterilization of native Women at hospitals, often without telling them it had happened, let alone getting consent, was part of the government's program of genocide all the way into the 1970's. It's why a lot of folks are scared of doctors and hospitals.
Anderson Cooper 360 did a piece on the forced sterilization in North Carolina. There, it was African American women instead of native women high on the list of people having this invasive thing done to them, along with the disabled, the poor, and the sick. It's wrong and horrific wherever it happened and to whomever it happened, and it's a national shame that there is no real attempt to compensate the victims: http://cnn.com/video/?/video/bestoftv/2011/12/28/cohen-forced-sterilization-in-america.cnn