Items of interest found recently in my RSS feed. What did I miss? Please share what you've been reading (and writing!) in the comments.
- Accidental haiku
- Aware of what exactly?
- Opinion writing without stating an opinion
- They could always turn themselves in
- Cyberbullying and the law
- Liminal and Loving It – A lesson in good vs. bad irony thanks to Amanda Palmer
- Happy Ada Lovelace Day: Telling Our Stories
- “None of this is about healthcare at all. It’s about extending a basic fundamental right to people who are less powerful.”
- Let’s Call A Moratorium On Articles on the State of Feminism For A While, OK?
– “A person can safely go through their whole lives without accidentally uttering a limerick. Ninety nine per cent of the time, they can avoid the possibility of saying something that just happens to be a rhyming couplet. Spontaneous outbursts of completely new epic verse and odes are well-nigh impossible. But what about accidental haiku? We’re probably doing them all the time.”
– “This is a narrative that erases Ms Schelstraete’s individual situation, whatever that might be, in favour of conveying disability as something the poor dears must overcome! in their tear-inducing (to abled people) efforts! to live a normal life! which includes paid work!”
– “It’s been revealing watching the way prominent conservative Australian News Ltd opinion writers have been responding this week to the passing of the US health care legislation. On the one hand, they want to sink the boot into progressives on the issue – in the case of those with a significant audience of rightwing Americans they’d quite like to keep happy, like Daily Telegraph blogger tim Blair, they kind of need to – but, on the other hand, their Australian audience knows full well that a much more “socialist” healthcare system, like ours, did not cause us to descend into tyranny and granny-murdering “death panels”.”
– ” The victim IS NOT the only person who can go to the police. There is absolutely nothing to prevent a priest who has admitted abusing children from going to the police himself, confessing his crimes, and asking for the judgement of the court. All of this can be done without revealing the victim’s name, at all, and without even needing to put a victim on a stand. After all, if a priest confesses to his crimes, then there is no need to cross-examine the other witness(es), to determine the truth of the matter. Simple affidavits would do.
And that’s what the Catholic church tells other perpetrators they should do.”
– Legal Eagle looks at laws in Australia and around the world wrt cyberbullying and sexting
TRIGGER WARNING: graphic images of violence (lynchings) in linked post
– “Amanda Palmer of the “Dresden Dolls” and “Evelyn/Evelyn” fame decided to talk about her dislike of Lady Gaga last night on twitter. Among other things, Gaga is a sell out, is just like Justin Bieber, and Palmer really dislikes the product placement in “Telephone”.
Then Amanda Palmer shared this:
ironic product placement is only ok if you take no money & beyond that give all the income to something ironic. like the Klan."
– “I took all of the math and science my high school offered and then some (I ran out of AP calculus and took a course at Berkeley my senior year). Still, when I got to college my assigned advisor said at our first meeting, “What are you going to do with a degree in neuroscience—teach high school biology?” At the end of the meeting he asked me if I was a ballet dancer, adding that I “looked like one”. My next advisor was better. I questioned one of my male classmates who stayed with that first guy: “What did he ask at your first meeting?” “Oh, you know: ‘where do you see yourself in five years? Ten?’” Ah. No, I don’t know.”
– “And we aren’t just talking about right-wingers calling openly gay congressman Barney Frank a faggot or civil rights leader turned congressman John Lewis a nigger (although they did do that). We’re talking about crowds who yell at a black congressman, “Kill the bill, then the n-word.” We’re aren’t just talking about people who vandalize congressional offices (although they did do that), we’re talking about people who threaten to assassinate (their word) the children of congresswomen who voted “yes” on the bill. We’re talking about a major political party that does nothing to deter that kind of behavior, and instead quietly encourages it.”
– “I mean, interestingly, in another response, the Newsweek writers mention that the lawyer who took up the original Newsweek case was actually Eleanor Holmes Norton – a black woman. Again, I feel for these writers, because they’ve now invoked the “my best friend/lawyer (ha!) is black” argument, and apparently without regard to substance, because there are no quotes or anything from Holmes Norton herself in the article. She got written out of what sounds like probably is her own damn story, and the reasons why, sadly, can’t be explained without reference to the erasure of women of colour in feminism.”
Oy! Amanda Palmer. Just WAY less intelligent than she thinks she is.
First comment accidental haiku :-)
Well spotted, Lady Grey!
I have to say I find the post from Liminal and Loving It on misplaced irony guilty of exactly what it accuses Amanda Palmer of doing and that is trivialising the horrors of the Klan.
Juxtaposing graphic photographs of some of the worst misery, terror and degradation inflicted on black Americans against stills from a pop singer’s video clip in order to defend one particular pop singer from an idiotic tweet by another pop singer seems like an innappropriate use of those photographs to me.
I see how you could read it that way, but it wasn’t how I read it. I saw the juxtaposition as less of a defence of Gaga per se and more simple outrage at Palmer taking anything as trivial as pop performances by anybody and invoking the KKK as part of her critique.
The juxtaposition of the triviality of Gaga’s costumes etc is meant to contrast the trivial explicitly with the brutal, not to make the atrocious trivial, but to make the trivial atrocious, in order to emphasise just how many degrees of fucked up was folded into what Palmer said. That’s how I saw it, anyway.
I appreciate your analysis tigtog and I understand what the author is attempting to do in that post, but even so in my humble opinion, the use of those particular photographs in this fashion was exploitative.
Though, don’t mean to sound as snippy as I sound in that comment either. As you were, dear tigtog.
No worries, blue milk. We can agree to disagree!
Plus I’m open to persuasion from POC who do find the post affronting/exploitative, and confess that I haven’t read all 570+ comments on that post to see if any did. In the first 50 comments I did read back when I linked to it, though, there seemed to be only support from bloggers of colour.*
[edited to add] * Not that calling out perceived exploitation is a numbers/authenticity competition of any sort, just that sometimes/often persons who identify more closely to the putatively exploited group can articulate exploitation in a way that cuts through outsider intellectualisations.
Okay, I’m not Japanese, I’m white with Japanophile tendencies so I’m a bit reluctant to speak out but: there’s rather more to haiku than “has 17 syllables” and I think it’s an offensive oversimplification of a foreign culture to pretend that any set of 17 syllables constitutes haiku.
(Because, you know, there couldn’t possibly be any sophisticated Japanese concepts in there that don’t translate well and so are missed by English readers.)