Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Simple rules when using the Internet

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I know, I’m probably biting off more than I can chew here, but what the hell.

1. Don’t say anything you wouldn’t say to someone’s face.

This goes double if you’re going to post as “Anonymous.”

The only possible exception to this: you are whistle-blowing on some egregious, illegal practice that you can’t possibly own up to in real life. In that case: run for the hills, because tracing where a posting originated is as simple as asking Google, “Hey, where did this originate?” (You know Google saves every search made from every IP ever, right?)

2. If you link to it, you own it.

If you offer up a link to something on your blog, on your Twitter feed, or as a Facebook status, you are advertising that you agree with the opinions found therein, unless you very specifically call out that you are disagreeing with it. (NB: if you are a professional comedian — i.e., someone would recognize that you are funny consistently and over a long period of time, not necessarily that you’re getting paid — you can get away with “sarcastic agreement” as your disagreement mode. Only professional comedians.)

Way back in the early days of the Web (when this blog had already been around for several years, nyuk, nyuk) there was a political blogger named Instapundit. I haven’t heard about him so much any more; don’t know what he’s doing, don’t care. But his shtick was to link to something foul, infantile, or race-baiting and then say

Interesting.

When called on how he was clearly promoting these things, he would say, “Oh no no, I just thought it was an interesting point of view.”

In a word: bullshit.

He wanted to link to inflammatory crap without putting his name on it.

If you link to it without commentary, you own it.

The only possible exception to this: you link to a major media site, such as the New York Times. In which case, we probably know why you’re linking. Be a good Internet citizen and add a little commentary so we know where you are with this, okay?

3. Don’t read comments.

Seriously. There’s nothing to be gained from this. There are people who have nothing better to do than sit around all day and argue nonsense from behind a fake name. There are people who are paid to sit around and post garbage. Don’t participate.

There are two exceptions to this:

  1. Horace Dediu’s blog Asymco. That blog has one of the most respectful and curious set of commenters I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t hurt that Horace is bringing his A-game with every post. You can disagree with him…but the usual Internet set up of “My ignorance is as good as your knowledge!” just looks like the lameness it is on Asymco.
  2. My blog.

Women as chattel

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Honestly, this stuff isn’t hard to figure out. We have all seen this photo:

All male birth control panel

An all-male panel testifying before Congress on birth control. An all-male panel that doesn’t include one doctor. When Democrats proposed women to be on the panel, they were told the women weren’t “qualified.”

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Rick Santorum’s biggest financial backer — and in the world of big-money politics, this means this guy has bucks, which in the US means he has power — “joked” that women should use aspirin as birth control.

“You know, back in my days, they’d use Bayer aspirin for contraceptives,” Friess said on MSNBC. “The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.”

Women, mind you, need to be the ones to say no. And if they don’t, well…it’s all their fault, isn’t it?

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The Virginia state legislature passed a bill that would require women to have an ultrasound before they may have an abortion. From the article: “There is no evidence at all that the ultrasound is a medical necessity, and nobody attempted to defend it on those grounds.” No, this is all about women being forcibly penetrated for no medical reason — under Virginia state law, the very definition of rape.

During the floor debate on Tuesday, Del. C. Todd Gilbert announced that “in the vast majority of these cases, these [abortions] are matters of lifestyle convenience.” (He has since apologized.) Virginia Democrat Del. David Englin, who opposes the bill, has said Gilbert’s statement “is in line with previous Republican comments on the issue,” recalling one conversation with a GOP lawmaker who told him that women had already made the decision to be “vaginally penetrated when they got pregnant.” (I confirmed with Englin that this quote was accurate.)*

They had already made the decision.

They made the decision once, and so therefore their bodies are now fair game. Women should only be allowed to make one decision in their entire lives, and then men will tell them what to do from then on.

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Senator Scott Brown, apparently trying to prove he’s not really from Massachusetts, cosponsored a bill “would allow employers and insurers to limit specific health care coverage, including contraception, based on religious or moral objections.” And yeah, Obama let the conservatives go to town on that one for a while before knifing it to death, because this election year kabuki is stupid. Lots of people have made jokes about “What happens when an employer decides on Sharia law for their employees?”

How about a much easier scenario than that, guys? How about when an employer decides that an unmarried woman who gets pregnant is clearly a whore and refuses to cover her medical bills unless she gets married?

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An entry on Alternet asked, “Do Conservatives understand how the female body works?” What the hell? Why are you even bothering to ask? The Republican/conservative mindset is that women are things that exist only to serve male needs. They’re not intelligent enough to know what they are, or what they want, or what’s good for them. Only men know enough about this stuff to testify, right?

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Twenty years ago I read that the entire war on abortion was no such thing — it was a war on Griswold v. Connecticut. For those of you who don’t know what that is, that’s the Supreme Court decision legalizing contraceptives. You know, because there was a time they weren’t legal.

And damn if that analysis hasn’t been proved to be correct over and over and over again.

We know that conservatives could give a flying fuck about actual pregnancies. They don’t want access to birth control (which, let’s face it, is framed solely as a woman’s problem here), they don’t want to fund medical care for the mothers, they don’t care about the psychological care of mothers who are pregnant unwillingly, they sure as hell don’t care about those kids once they show up in the world. So, if they don’t care about the pregnancies, the mothers, or the kids, why on Earth are they putting so much time and energy into making sure women get pregnant and stay pregnant?

Because if women don’t have control over their own bodies, they have no control over their own destinies. Yes, it is that simple.

Their actions and words are very clear: They want women to be second-class citizens, dependent on whatever help and ministrations men decide to bestow upon them.

Why do they want this? Well, it’s fun to have power over people, I guess. It’s reassuring to know that you’re superior simply because you happened to be born with a penis instead of a vagina. There’s no surprise that religion is strongly featured in a lot of these stories: Christianity and Islam have extremely strong anti-woman components to their theology, and regarding half the human race as, well, subhuman isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

We live in a scary time where nothing is assured, and having control over another person is kind of like having control over your own life, I guess.

Who knows where this shit comes from. But this is what they want, and they are saying it OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN.

Listen up.

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All of these political moves by conservatives are a lot easier to understand if you follow this simple rule:

Whenever you hear the phrase “family values,” substitute the word “patriarchy.”

There’s an even better quote I am reminded of when I hear these Republican proposals

“The first time someone shows you who they are, believe them.”

— Maya Angelou

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One of the main reasons we’re getting this deluge of bullshit now, of course, is that the economy is looking up. The Republicans have nothing — they can’t even wave the banner of gay marriage anymore. So they’re going straight to their book of greatest hits.

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And by the way, can we stop making jokes about all-female panels debating men’s health insurance access to Viagra? Women being pregnant and men getting erections are not equivalent. Let’s stop pretending they are.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter: the review

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I had the best history teacher in high school. Her name was Jean Murphy (actually, her name was Mary Jean, but she only ever went by Jean) and she loved teaching European history and music and choir. And the way she taught history was simple: she taught us the version that concentrated on sex. Abelard and Heloise! Henry II! Henry VIII! Christ, most of the Wars of the Roses and the Thirty Years’ War and the Hundred Years’ War and do not even get me started on the House of Habsburgs!

Yes. She taught European history-as-sexfest to a bunch of freshman girls at a private all-girls Catholic high school.

I have no idea how much of it was true, but man oh man, do I remember a lot of it.

There is something to teaching the fun stuff, because you just might interest people enough to find out the other stuff.

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A couple of days ago I saw this incredibly hot movie trailer:

I remembered seeing the book in the bookstores. (You know, when I still went into them.) It seemed to be the ultimate expression of what Terry Rossio calls “Mental Real Estate” — concepts we all know and are familiar with, turned on their heads just enough to intrigue us. Lincoln! Vampires! Lincoln being fearsome when it comes to vampires!

But I liked the trailer (because I am a nut for over-the-top action movies, always hoping they will have a coherent plot line), so I got the book and read it.

(Yes, I bought this book and immediately read it. I have hundreds of unread books on my Kindle and iPad that have sat there unread for a long time. Hundreds. I’m not saying that pricing your book at free guarantees I’m not going to pay much attention to it; I’m just saying there’s a strong damn correlation along that way of thinking.)

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith is what I call an “all-in” book — the author took his premise (that Abraham Lincoln was a secret vampire hunter, and that a major force behind American slavery was the needs of vampires) and Grahame-Smith went all-in on it. There is no winking to the audience, there is no “I know this sounds kind of stupid, but just go with it” passages. World War Z by Max Brooks is another “all-in” book — you are either along for that ride, or you give up early on. The conceit is that the author of the book in the present comes across Abraham Lincoln’s secret diaries and decides to write the definitive biography of Lincoln in regards to vampires.

That is how the book reads: a deadly serious biography of Lincoln, with descriptions of the time period and excerpts from the diaries, that describe everything from life on Indiana to floating down the Mississippi to butchering the horrible vampires that are preying on the people. No sparkly bits here, people, no really-cute-vampires-with-a-soul. No, these are monsters and Lincoln is going to put them down.

There are a couple of serious missteps: I read three passages relatively close together (I read fast) that were all dream sequences. (And that was before we get to the famous “the President has been assassinated” dream Lincoln had.)

The difficult thing about this book is the obvious slavery/vampirism metaphor. The obvious way of looking at this is that the entire concept of slavery gets cheapened by making it a vehicle for vampires to thrive. And, I guess that’s true.

However.

I was reminded of Jean Murphy while reading this book. Two reasons why:

1) It’s not Seth Grahame-Smith’s job to teach you history. I’m really sorry if you didn’t know this stuff ahead of time. He wanted to write a fun, crazy novel, and he succeeded, and he managed to get lots of info about the real Abraham Lincoln’s life in there. He does a very good job of making all of the details about the time period feel true (hey, how ’bout that Presidential bodyguard, eh?). So, as a readable history novel: good job, Grahame-Smith.

2) If this book gets one person interested in that time period, whereupon they discover that all this shit is true, it just didn’t involve any fucking vampires, it involved real flesh-and-blood humans doing this to one another then, you know, WINNING.

Because that’s actually where the real sense of dread comes in. Yeah, all of the over-the-top let’s-kill-these-fiends stuff is a lot of fun. The bad Photoshop jobs (sorry, they looked terrible on the iPad) are fun. But the descriptions of slave auctions and slave quarters and that half of the country was willing to fight the other half so that they could own people are all true, and you realize: this shit actually happened. And it doesn’t take a book like Uncle Tom’s Cabin (the very name of which makes readers groan) — you can sucker readers in with Vampires! and bitch-slap them across the face with Not Really! LOL!

If they don’t get to the point where they realize, OMG, this is all real (except for the vampire parts), well… that’s not going to be fixed by one pop novel.

I wonder how many student term papers have talked about the vampire influence on the Confederacy.

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You want to know the tidbit that’s really stuck with me from this book?

Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas dated the same chick.

Okay, it was called “courting” and wasn’t the same thing at all, but…

I’m still that high school freshman, apparently.