None of this Nonsense, Please

Arguing on Facebook

2015-12-02T12:23:11Z

So, sometimes when I'm arguing on the book of faces I get a bit passionate. And, well, this happens. For context, the guy I was replying to was first replying with already disproved arguments about helping Syrians, then asked why they weren't just staying in their country and standing their ground. He finished by asking what would America even get out of helping them, aside from "diversity" as if he wasn't sure diversity was even a good thing for us.

I ranted a bit in response:( Read more... )

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mari4212 @ 2013-05-01T01:16:00

2013-05-01T05:25:42Z

I got annoyed with some of the comments I've been seeing about Jason Collins coming out as an openly gay athlete. More specifically, the men talking about how they're creeped out by the thought of a gay man being in the locker room with them. Especially when they simultaneously dismiss women pointing out that it's not like handling unwanted attention from men is something strange and new. I decided not to even bother engaging with this particular man, as he was handwaving away every other point everyone else in the comment thread was making in favor of talking about how this branch of gay panic was absolutely correct and should be the main point of discussion about openly gay athletes.

Instead, I'll rant here, and on my own facebook page:

You know, when I see (mostly) men freaking out about gay men being out around them, with the implication that the gay guy will not be able to control himself and not rape everyone he finds even moderately attractive, I really start to wonder about them. Because hello, you are also men who are sometimes around people you are attracted to. Are you not capable of controlling your actions? If you don't think men can handle being around people they think are hot without raping them, remind me never to be alone near you again.

If someone's comments or actions are creeping you out or feel threatening, absolutely call them out. But if you're just worried that a man is going to find you attractive when you're not into him, welcome to my half of the species, we've been dealing with that for centuries. Whine at me when you've been made to feel unsafe walking down the street in broad daylight, like I have on more than one occasion.

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Guestblogging 30 Days of Gay

2011-07-23T16:39:58Z

A close friend of mine, reenchantress, has been blogging about gay issues and life growing up and not being straight. She's heard me give "The Rant", my name for the discussion of why we can't say that the Christian Bible explicitly condemns homosexuality, several times, and asked me if I'd be willing to type it up as a guest blog for her. This is a shortened form of the vocal rant, I've been timed at over forty-five minutes once delivering the full rant.

( cut for discussions of religion, and mentions of rape in some of the biblical passages )

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In defense of big government

2011-04-12T19:35:27Z

Dear Kasich and Boehner

In all likelihood, you will never read this letter. But I am one of your constituents, a person you claim to represent.

I wanted to tell you what having the liberal's idea of big government has done for my family, because you don't seem to understand how vital it has been to my family existing like it does now.

Let's start with Medicare and Medicaid, since you seem to particularly hate those programs. Yet, it's because of those programs that my family is able to stay together at all. You see, I have a sister who was born with profound disabilities. Her brain didn't form correctly in uetero, for reasons no medical science has yet been able to identify. Parts of it simply did not grow. As a result, she has cerebral palsy, profound mental retardation, and seizure disorder. Or, to put it into layman's terms for you, she has little fine motor control, she is mentally a one-year-old-child, and she has seizures on a regular basis if not controlled by proper medication.

Currently, she's on five different medications to control her seizures and minimize the side effects of the other medications. The list of medications includes one method of birth control, a hormone shot which effectively shuts down her menstrual cycle. It's absolutely a necessary medication for her, even though she will never have sex voluntarily, because without that birth control, the hormone fluctuations from her menstrual cycle interfere with her seizure medications. Before we put her on this birth control, there would be one day a month where she would have grand mal seizures every two hours.

As for her seizure medications, well, those alone are incredibly expensive. One of her seizure meds costs over 800 dollars a month. That's one medication out of five. None of the others are quite as expensive, but none of them are cheap, either. And she's been on one form or another of anti-convulsant since she was 18 months old.

Government assistance pays for most of her medications. We certainly can't afford to pay for them, even if we paid absolutely nothing in taxes and kept all of that money to pay for my sister's medications. Government assistance also helped us pay for the three times in the past two years when my sister has been hospitalized for something that results from her disabilities. Governmental assistance pays for the programming and physical therapy my sister has received her entire life. Governmental assistance paid for the modifications we needed to make to our house in order to keep my sister living in it, things like a wheelchair ramp to get her into and out of the house, or a stairlift to transfer her between the main floor and the upstairs, which is where the only bathroom in the house can be found. Governmental assistance has paid for the variety of wheelchairs, walkers, and strollers we've used to transport my sister and to let her see the world. And, when my mother is no longer able to take care of my sister in our home, it's the government funded long-term care facilities that will be providing for my sister.

That's just one way that the big government has provided something for my family that we could not have done on our own. Without governmental assistance, we could not have taken care of my sister. We would have had to send her to a state-run care facility to take care of her, instead of having her home with family, able to participate in the community. And the state would have ended up paying even more, taking care of her with the kind of 24-hour supervision she absolutely requires. If there had been no government assistance, and no state-run medical facilities? I don't know what would have happened to my sister. I don't think she'd have lived to be the age she is now. Because we would have been absolutely unable to provide for her without outside help.

That's not the only thing big government has given in the way of direct assistance to my family. When my parents had all of us children, my father was in grad school, living on grants, student loans, and the tiny salary he received as a TA bringing in about $500 a month, and my mother was running an in-home day care with about eight children, four of them her own, and also bringing in about $500. They were also on food stamps, to pay to feed all of us. Governmental assistance kept all of us fed when even both of my parents working wasn't enough to pay for everything.

My father now works for an environmental consulting company. They go to various different sites, preform assessments on the surrounding ground and landwater to make sure that a company hasn't caused too much pollution, and help them clean up contaminated areas up to EPA standards. Their first contract? Was cleaning up the government's Miamisburg Mound compound, after decades of military R&D being preformed on site. He has a job because of government regulations. Moreover, this generation's children will live in a less-polluted area if the government regulations are enforced and my father's company does its job well.

And he's not the only one I care about who earns their living from the government. One of my closest friends in high school has her dream job now, working for a company that contracts with NASA and the space program. She wants to get people to Mars, and she has a decent chance of it, as long as the government continues to provide for the space program.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time elaborating on the twenty thousand other things that the government provides for everyone, like safe drinking water, testing and regulations to make sure that food and drugs are safe, maintained streets and highways, clearing snow in winter, public schools, government backed loans to get through college, et cetera. Those are things that everyone needs and uses. What I've listed are just the specific ways in which the government has come through and helped my family. Ways we couldn't have done on our own, even if we had just kept all the money we pay in taxes. And yes, if it matters, everyone in this family who can, does work. And we've all paid taxes on it.

I needed the government, and it was there for me. I don't want to take that government away from the next family that needs it.

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"Strong" female characters

2010-10-13T17:14:03Z

For those somehow fortunate enough to have missed it, the context for this rant is this flowchart, on Jezebel, that purports to be a critique of the stereotypes female characters fall into when they are not written strongly. But when you look at the chart, and see characters like Zoe from Firefly, Ripley from Alien, Sailor Moon coded as only the adorable clutz, Nyoto Uhura coded as "Useless Girl", among others, including putting on two real life women (minority women, of course) as examples of fictional tropes, it's hard to consider it a valid critique of stereotypes. It reads more like a straightforward bashing of all female characters because they don't meet an invisible, unstated standard of what it means to be strong.

There are people out there who are already doing a fantastic job of picking apart all the ways this fails on gender and race issues. Here are a couple good links to get you started.

What I'm going to talk about for a bit here, is that weasel-word, strong. Because when it comes to bashing female characters in media, it seems to be the best excuse ever for saying you don't like any female characters. They're not strong enough. Never mind that a lot of fandom's favorite male characters are written with the exact same levels of "strength" or depth.

When I talk about a strong female character, I mean a character with goals and interests which are not just about the male characters' goals. And I mean a character with agency, who acts in some way for herself and her stated goals in the process.

So Zoe, who fought in the war against Unification because she believed it was wrong, who is loyal, but questioning, towards Mal, who loves her husband, but still lives her own life, who will go on after losses, she's a strong character.

Tuskino Usagi, the clumsy crybaby who hates fighting and isn't good at school, but who still gets up every day, who still fights to save others, the girl who is the protagonist for her series and who saves the universe with the power of love, unironically, is a strong character. As are all of her teammates and friends. The weakest character, development-wise, is her boyfriend, Mamoru.

Kathryn Janeway, the scientist turned Captain, who stands off against the Kazon and the Borg through the power of coffee, the pool shark who turns around and embroiders a blanket for the newborn Naomi Wildman, the warm compassionate woman who suffered from bouts of depression and guilt, who made some brilliant decisions, and some bone-headed mistakes, she's a strong character. Not always the most consistently written one, but still strong and engaging.

B'Elanna Torres, the woman struggling to accept all of who she was, the brilliant engineer with some raging insecurity issues, who learned how to lead on the fly, but apparently does an excellent job of it, who gradually learns how to trust others and accept herself, she's a strong character.

Nyoto Uhura, the character who could have been so much more had the networks and producers allowed it, still sat there every day doing her job competently. She had interests in music and art, pursued her career, and in the books and later movies got more and more of a chance to shine. In the new movie, it's overshadowed by the other, action-oriented, crowning moments of awesome, but she pulls off some fantastic bits of translation on the go with no problems. Anyone who's ever tried to learn more than one language can tell you how hard that can be, and she does it with grace.

Marguerite Krux, from The Lost World, a woman who doesn't know anything about where she came from, who wants so much to know who she is. Who doesn't hesitate to lie or seduce someone to achieve her goals, who spends most of the first two seasons of the show getting used to the idea that people might help her with no hidden agenda. Who is a hero, even when she keeps it secret. She's a strong character, even as a character they added in just to make it not be all a bunch of guys.

Joan Girardi, from Joan of Arcadia, who has enough going on in her life without adding "talks to God" to her resume. She's occasionally thoughtless and self-obsessed, she'd far prefer to just be a normal popular girl, but she grows so much, and she keeps trying when it's hard. She's a strong character.

And there's dozens more I could be listing, like Kate, Ziva, and Abby from NCIS, Susan Ivonova and Delenn from Babylon 5, 95% of the female characters in Harry Potter that get more than one line, Kaylee, Inara, and River from Firefly, Buffy, Willow, Tara, Dawn, Anya and Joyce from Buffy, and so on and so forth down the line.

So you know what, makers of that flowchart?

Fuck you, she's awesome. They all are.

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mari4212 @ 2010-06-16T19:06:00

2010-06-16T23:43:28Z

By now, I imagine that a large chunk of my flist has seen the latest bit of race-fail, in the form of asteroidbuckle's J2 story set in Haiti, immediately post earthquake. If not, I first suggest you go to bossymarmalade's excerpts post here, and then to amazonziti's link list here.

( Read more... )

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