Items of interest found recently in my RSS feed. Please share what you've been reading (and writing!) in the comments.
- One of us
- Annotated Digital Culture Links: July 5th 2009
- Sexual Abuse of Female Inmates in Oklahoma
- Drop It Like It’s Hot
- Migration Trends in Selected Countries
- Women of Bletchley Park
- What, no baby?
- Google and News Ltd are in the same business.
- Feminists and the mystery of Sarah Palin
– Will Daniel Radcliffe’s profession of atheism help fight superstitionists, or reinforce their arguments against Harry Potter?
– Facebook & MI6, Twitter & Flickr, gamers & gold farming in China
– more institutional abuse
– Renee’s weekly linkfest
– interesting
– cool
– Yet anotehr panicmongering about how women just don’t understand why they should be miserable if they’ve chosen not to reproduce
– Ignore the shiny frontage, look under the hood.
– Violet Socks asks why so many feminists not only lobby against Palin but also virulently denigrate her in a fully sexist way.
Categories: linkfest
The 109th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
The 105th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
Hoyden About Town 
I must admit that I am one who has a visceral antipathy towards Sarah Palin, and my main reason is this: even is she herself is not a Christian Dominionist, she is very very willing to court their votes to gain office, and I find the risk to social cohesiveness posed in Dominionists perhaps having favours owed to them by someone with executive power in a superpower a highly disturbing thought. There’s several much more minor things about her that also disturb me, but that’s the main one, and her achievements and seemingly relatively egalitarian marriage are not enoughfeminist counterweight to make me admire her.
http://www.badscience.net/2009/07/asking-for-it/#more-1250
One of the Hoydens (lauredhel?) tweeted about the original Telegraph story, so I thought you might like this follow-up from Ben Goldacre.
Thanks! Ben as usual is awesome.
Just a warning, that there is a bit of hubba hubba over Emma Watson’s fuckability ranking in comments thread for the Daniel Radcliffe link.
There’s no shame in a bit of healthy political hate, TT, and I’m certainly not going to judge if you indulge. Rational or irrational, political antipathy’s what victory’s made of.
Remember that Palin’s selection was itself an attempt to make a radically right-wing version of feminism into campaign fodder, as if standing for the sentiment that people like Sarah Palin should succeed in life were the same thing as voting for her as an administrator and political leader. Palin’s appeal was and is explicitly anti-political.
Over to Ta-Nehisi Coates:
How can one be “radically right wing”?
One can be radically anything. The word just means “from the root”, refusing to compromise on fundamental beliefs, so it is entirely possible to be a radical traditionalist just as one can be a radical revolutionary (one can also be a reactionary revolutionary).
Yeah, what TT said (though reactionary revolutionaries are generally better identified as counter-revolutionists, if only because that’s when they tend to emerge). Palin’s appeal was certainly one of uncompromising, aggressive, opposition to social institutions, even if they were incoherent appeals. “Drill! Drill! Drill!”, for instance.
Or, to quote the musical;
Yes I know what radical means, thankyou tig tog. It sounded like Liam was trying to say extremely right wing, and since radical is a term that’s so often demonised as it is, I don’t think it’s helpful to associate it with the hard right or any other form of extremism. It’s difficult enough constantly having to explain to people that radical, as in radical feminist, doesn’t mean one is some kind of terrorist, but rather just that one recognises the heart of the problem.
@ Linda Radfem:
Both Liam and I tend to be rather meticulous, verging on hyperpedantic, in how we use words, if you haven’t picked up on that yet.
I think your tactic of refusing to use it to describe other groups because it has been used to demonise radfems is totally arseabout wrongheaded – using the word “radical” accurately to describe ALL the political/ideological groups to which it pertains is the only way to strip it of the acquired “pop” meaning of “some kind of terrorist”.
e.g.
Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Dick Cheney – radical “economic rationalists” aka radical Friedmanites
Franklin D Roosevelt – radical Keynesian
Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins – radical atheists
Quakers & Amish – radical pacifists
The parents of Pop in Sweden – radical gender-egalitarians
Dominionists – radical right-wing Christians
Universal Unitarians – radical religious-tolerationists
Wahabists – radical right-wing Muslims
Alaska Independence Party, Texas National Movement – radical secessionists
Obviously I’m living a sheltered life, since I’ve never had to explain to anyone that a radical feminist is not a terrorist.
I also think using the “extremism” to describe the right wing that Sarah Palin is a part of is not really accurate. I disagree vehemently with her politics, but I think if we’re going to talk about the extreme bit of the right then it’s fascists and Nazis and and people like the BNP, not Repbulicans, who though repugnant in many ways are still part of the democratic process. It’s like equating the right wing of the ALP with Stalinism.
Having thought about it more, I think we might be getting hung up on words a bit. There’s radicalism which denotes strict adherence to an ideal, and radicalism which denotes extremist, fringe politics, and radicalisms which are specific political movements (radical feminism, obviously, but also Radical organised movements in the English, French and Spanish 19th century). They don’t necessarily overlap. I think what really was what I meant was that the feminism Palin claims is both very right wing and very uncompromising.
On feminist-terrorists: Valerie Solanas is be the closest I can think of, Rebekka.
What I’d give to be a reviewer in the position to write a sentence like that.
[Disclaimer: I’ve always seen the appeal, in Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto of being one of the “few remaining men” eking out my life drugged in a machine economy, riding the wave to my demise—but that perhaps is just me.]
“Both Liam and I tend to be rather meticulous, verging on hyperpedantic, in how we use words, if you haven’t picked up on that yet.”
I hadn’t.
“I think your tactic of refusing to use it to describe other groups because it has been used to demonise radfems is totally arseabout wrongheaded – using the word “radical” accurately to describe ALL the political/ideological groups to which it pertains is the only way to strip it of the acquired “pop” meaning of “some kind of terrorist”.”
Maybe that’s true here in such highbrow internet spaces.
“Obviously I’m living a sheltered life, since I’ve never had to explain to anyone that a radical feminist is not a terrorist.”
Obviously you are.