This weekend’s open thread is hosted by these little snuggling otters.
Please feel free to use this thread to natter about anything your heart desires. Is there anything great happening in your life? Anything you want to get off your chest? Reading a good book (or a bad one)? Anything in the news that you’d like to discuss? What have you created lately? Commiserations, felicitations, temptations, contemplations, speculations?
Categories: Life
Soggy here, innit? 
In memoriam: Diana Rigg 
Getting out the ‘yes’ 
100 books by women in 2016 
Hoyden About Town 
https://www.change.org/petitions/roseanne-is-facing-a-lifetime-in-prison-because-of-her-disability-stop-the-neglect#share
[excerpt for context added by mods]
Here’s how the NT govt is responding to the incarceration of Ms. Fulton.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-03-15/research-groups-oppose-nt-prosecuting-pregnant-women-drinking/5322814
I wonder will they make the law retroactive so they can incarcerate her mother as well.
Some advice please:
We seem to have fallen victim to some malware. Something came up, offline, that seemed to be from our Anti-virus program saying that x file is causing problems click OK to delete (or something I didn’t see what it actually said). Having done that now whenever that computer is on the internet pop-ups are incessant although all the brower and computer security settings are set to no-popups. Is this a thing we can fix ourselves or should we seek proper help?
thanks
Mindy
I hope you can find a fix to your internet problem Mindy – I find that I can get rid of most Malware by googling fixes. It’s usually not too difficult, but I can’t give any specific advice.
While we’re on the advice-asking topic, anyone know how to install a new car radio? The two connector pin things with all the wires are different and I’m not sure whether I’m meant to pull them apart and connect the wires up or what.
No advice on either Mindy’s or Jo’s technical difficulties, but just wanting to note one of those grunch moments – reading the credits for a Midsomer Murders episode, where the Police characters get credited as DCI and DS so and so, the Clergy characters get credited as Reverend this and that, the Academic character got credited as Professor, but the Forensic Pathologist character (who is also a regular cast member in every episode) didn’t get credited as Dr.
Guess the sex of the Forensic Pathologist character. Go on.
And in this particular episode one of the clergy was a woman, and she was credited as Reverend X, so the sheer degree of not paying attention to listing the Forensic Pathologist who’s on every week with the proper title is especially galling.
Gender-specific books demean all our children. So the Independent on Sunday will no longer review anything marketed to exclude either sex.
Don’t want to boast or anything *okay I totally do* but John Scalzi just replied to my tweet. (yes okay he’s probably just a really nice guy who does respond to tweets but hey this is my moment okay)
Eeee, that is exciting Mindy! My housemate and I once got a tweet back from Bill Bailey, so I know the feeling! 😀
People who made the March in March today – was there any word on Sydney numbers? I heard 50,000 for Melbourne.
I hope the Independent can convince a few other booksellers/reviewers to get on board.
I have been thinking about “Oppressed Majority” by Eleonore Pourriat. How would it be if there was nothing on TV but similar style movies/shows? Just for a week. Everything would show that men are secondary; that violence towards them was accepted if they were seen to be transgressing against norms; that violence towards them was the main story, and they were only background/props? All of the main characters on TV would be women, only women would appear on the news except for a story about meerkats which would be fronted by Grant McIlrath. (You would have to google all the men to find out who the hell they were.) Only women politicians would be quoted and we would have stories about the glass ceiling men are facing in the boardroom.(Because we don’t even want to think about the barriers they are facing everywhere else.)Mary Beard would front about a dozen shows about anything she was faintly interested in. All the news readers and presenters would be women in their 50’s and 60’s.
Just for a week.
Would that be long enough to make the point?
Interesting idea, eilish. I’m going to have to look around for some Pourriat.
In other news, Heidegger was anti-semitic as fuck.
Eilish that would be amazing. I think we would be lucky to get through half a day before the complaints overwhelmed the switchboard. Imagine sports segments about netball, the Matildas, etc. Brilliant idea.
I wonder if something like the Abbott to Kittens app could be done for web browsers at least, just to change the pictures we see in the news, so that all the articles illustrated by pictures of men change to pictures of women, and vice versa.
Oooh I like that idea too. I guess it depends how the picture is identified.
I noticed Tig was interviewed by Cristan Williams on having jointly with Lauredhel coined the acronym TERF back in 2008, and so has clocked up 5 years of successful memetic propagation, as well as mutating to describe other subsets of radfems (SWERFs, BERFs). Up till now I’d seen as incorporating the word Exclusive as the word the letter E stands for, however it seems the initial minting of the term used Exclusionary, which is a far better word on account of disambiguating who is being excluded.
However, of late I’ve been re-adapting the E to explicitly target the radfems who wish the extermination of trans* people — Raymond, Brennan, Hungerford, et al — who’ve attempted (to some degree) to change public policy to deny human rights to trans* people. (Raymond famously advocated denying transition as a medical treatment and succeeded in hardening the attitudes of the Reagan administration in the US during the 1980s; Brennan and Hungerford would love to have had that level of influence, so merely malign trans women on the Internet.)
Would a list of links to previous and current articles, starting of course with the link to the 2008 Carnivalia thread that started it all off, be useful? The 2008 thread was remarkable for the comments; it included several very patient and articulate transgender people, as well as spectacular goalpost shifting, avoidance of answering hard questions, and terminological blunders by mAndrea.
Thanks for letting me know Cristan had published the interview, Xanthe – it seems like ages ago that she emailed me about it.
Sure, sounds like a very useful idea.
I’m probably coming into this conversation really late, but we just saw Frozen and it was surprisingly good. Passed the Bechdel test. Also, I loved the fleurons in the credits.
I had a bit of good news: we’ve got the next year’s lease to sign, and our rent hasn’t gone up. That’s a very pleasant surprise.
A vital communication aid for these modern times: the LOLcat translator
BERF = Baby Exclusionary Rad Fem?
I’m sorry, google was no help. I know I’m going to be embarrassed I had to ask.
I’ve seen it on Twitter once or twice as Black-Exclusionary — excluding or erasing the voices of women of colour. SWERF is used much more frequently since a lot of the radical second wave and their followers treat sex work as an always inherently oppressive structure of patriarchy.
@kittehserf – that’s wonderful news about the rent!
Thanks, Lauredhel – it was really welcome news!
I’m baffled about what a BERF or SWERF is too. One sounds like it’s got something to do with hurking up furballs and the other sounds like someone’s swerving to avoid being a serf.
Forgot to say – whoot, lolcat translator!
That will be very useful for those of us wot’re trying to start the Church of the Furrinati.
kittehserf, Sex Worker-Exclusionary Radical Feminism is fairly well-defined, as a lot of the second wave simply declares all sex work as patriarchal oppression and the women who work in it exploited (and while I believe quite a segment of it fits that criticism, it doesn’t imply all of it is irredeemable or that the feminists who identify as sex workers should be disentitled from their voices being heard). Here’s a quotable quote from the British radical feminist and sometime UK newspaper hack, Julie Burchill (content warning!):
[** CONTENT WARNING: VICIOUS VIOLENCE AGAINST SEX WORKERS ** …mod]
Plenty of SWERFy anti-porn, anti-prostitution rants also call for the elimination of sex workers from feminist discourse by silencing them altogether, if not going so far as to suggest shooting them ‘as collaborators’.
Also on Twitter, there are many articulate women of colour who don’t get regular writing slots with The Guardian, or New Statesman, or any other number of media outlets that are are happy to give over column inches to the likes of Burchill, Julie Bindel, Helen Lewis, Suzanne Moore etc. who are to various degrees notorious for bashing sex workers; or for outrageous transphobia usually directed at trans women; or for appropriating and distorting the best ideas from women of colour without giving due attribution, otherwise naming and trashing them as they see fit. It’s a very noticeable trend in the UK feminist circles I follow.
I’ve rewired stuff like that before (or else made up a patch cord for the same effect), and it’s impossible to do until you figure out what wire does what. A VOM (volt-ohm-milliammeter) might tell you about what the car is supplying, but you’d need a schematic or tech reference for the radio to figure out that side (maybe something is on line.) A local (or on-line) electronic parts supplier might have the plugs.
Or, since there’s probably more than one person with your make of car that has bought that radio, there might be instructions on-line — or even a patch cord for sale.
— AMM.
Gender: techie (male & female is for plugs…)
@21
begin{semi-snark}
What isn’t?
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As Twisty Faster likes to point out, women don’t really have a choice as to whether to participate in oppressive structures of patriarchy. Any woman who wants to stay alive has to make compromises and accommodate herself to Teh Patriarchy, the only question is which compromises she chooses (and which choices are available to her.)
To go off on a tangent: why should sex work (and sex workers) be singled out for special condemnation by feminists, as opposed to, say, child care or practical nursing (both of which are also intimate services and are often set up in ways that oppress and demean the women who do them.)? My take on it is that it’s the same old Patriarchal attitude that women having sex or a sexuality is sinful. Cf.: the “fallen woman” trope.