Displaying comments 1100 to 1150 of 1307
Reading as Therapy
I'm agnostic on the whole fiction-as-therapy thing, but I'm definitely against the "writers and critics police how others - figured as ignorant, bad, self-indulgent readers - read a text". Oh, the terrible, awful middle class novel, middle-classily depicting a region or a subculture! Oh, the readers who read books and naively identify with the characters! (I always wonder why Henry James and Toni Morrison don't count as middle-class-novel writers.) Nope, that's... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 8:50 PM on July 14, 2011
Central Park, adventure playgrounds and Katamari Damacy
Oh, I miss the dangerous playgrounds of my youth - the really tall climbing structures, the merry-go-rounds, the giant geodesic dome made out of pipe, the really big swings that went up high....Oddly, I don't remember too many kids getting seriously hurt. We all fell from time to time - and my friends and I jumped off the swings onto the gravel, which was really fun - but in general we were relatively risk-aware. Also, these playgrounds tended to have adults or older kids around.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 7:47 AM on July 13, 2011
Is Sex Passe?
This sort of article is terrible.
1. It treats a large, disparate group of women as a monolith. There are certainly norms and trends about sex, but they're very different among classes, religious denominations (conservative Lutherans versus Unitarians, etc), immigrant groups from different places, etc etc etc etc. It would be interesting to say something confined like "college-educated women of color tend to think [THING] now while they... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 8:45 AM on July 11, 2011
"We've built inactivity into our lifestyles. We've designed communities around cars,"
Aren't veggies pretty much already dirt cheap?
Not around here. A bundle of spinach cooks down to very little and it's $2; tomatoes are a once-a-week treat and berries or grapes once a month. I ate mustard greens until I couldn't face them anymore because they're $1.50 a bunch. If you're trying to minimize carbs and you don't eat animal products, well, you eat a lot of peanut butter and tofu, and you're always wishing you could afford more vegetable... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 4:56 PM on July 7, 2011
Cheap fresh good produce. I really miss being able to afford the co-op. Even if I could swing it, half the vegetables at the store aren't worth buying. Next year I'm going to start gardening, if only so that for once I can have as much spinach as I want.
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 5:01 PM on July 7, 2011
"Neither political party offered genuine solutions."
Wake me when one house in the Hamptons has been burned by a mob, or a banker thrown out the window by his own employees. Or, in fact, when anything happens at all aside from some nice stencil work on the sidewalk, maybe a newspaper box set on fire, or a couple of slogan stickers placed on a vacant storefront. Days of rage my ass.
When those things happen, liberals and progressives will be first in line to denounce them, trust me. Don't you know that... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 1:59 PM on July 7, 2011
Obama goes to China
How do we affect positive change when the very people who explicitly said they'd do X then turn around and do anti-X? At this point I'm pretty sure that if we somehow got Sanders, or Kucinich into the Presidency they'd start trying to destroy social security and start a few dozen wars themselves. My faith in the system was never strong, but I think Obama has managed to completely destroy what little I had.
I used to believe that there was a meaningful... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 11:44 AM on July 7, 2011
In Defense of Prudes
1. The author's experience is obviously rather particular; different social groups experience this rather differently.
2. Women are encouraged to be enforcers of "good" behavior - to say "oh you're terrible!" when somone makes a pun or an off-color remark. It's difficult for me personally to simply not react - I'm fairly modest about sexual and body stuff and prefer neither to endorse nor to censure, but I sometimes find myself... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 11:27 AM on July 7, 2011
Mao's Great Famine
So, which one of those (other than the facile Olympics thing) is incorrect? Believe it or not, the CCP has done lots of fucking evil shit. My nanny was from Anhui. Every single member of her family including her parents, her husband, and her children died in the famine. My grandparents were beaten during the Cultural Revolution, and other relatives committed suicide. I saw the Tiananmen square protests with my own eyes. Would you prefer we covered all that shit up?... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 9:04 AM on July 7, 2011
No true Scotsman alert. Sound exactly like Hitchens' arguments that Soviet and Chinese state atheism wasn't truly atheistic because of the "backwardness" of their cultures.
Okay, obviously I wasn't clear enough.
1. I'm talking about how Chinese history gets narrated in the West for a series of dubious Western purposes - Western purposes which, amusingly, cause many of the same evils for which the CCP gets denounced.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 10:07 AM on July 7, 2011
Oh, and I add - lots of people made choices against state authoritarianism during the Qing, Nationalist and Communist periods. But their choices are mobilized in the West as endorsements of Western-led democracy - witness the persistent bad analysis of Tiananmen Square.
It's precisely this monolithic view of history - where ideology is a puppetmaster and where the rhetoric of an authoritarian state are used as a explanations for what of ordinary... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 10:12 AM on July 7, 2011
And I'll triple post!!!
Imagine that I am talking about the disaster that overtook New Orleans. I could say that the Bush administration was a mere puppet of neo-liberal ideology and that this is a sufficient explanation for what happened - obviously they were all intentionally enacting neo-liberal democracy step by step, as they learned from the Trilateral Commission or Bretton Woods or whatever. Or I could unpack the things that brought the Bush administration to... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 10:19 AM on July 7, 2011
IRA Vs Al Qaeda
I have no idea about Al Qaeda's strategy, but didn't they basically win? The US is in much, much worse shape than we were in 2001; we're fighting two expensive wars which we basically can't win even if we haven't exactly lost either; our already sharply-limited international prestige is shot; we can't take care of our own soldiers when they come home; our government basically lacks legitimacy and people's confidence in the democratic process is low. Most of these things, I think, are... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 8:35 AM on July 7, 2011
"You can't think your way out of a paper bag. You've got to act your way out."
The purposes of these articles: to blame social problems on "childish" young men; to subtly complain about how women are just achieving too much (they're putting off having kids, so men don't have to man up!); to elide class differences that make living at home, delaying marriage, etc more sensible for low-income folks; and to scold everyone for not buying into the stupid, fragmented, immiserating nuclear-family-with-house-and-two-cars-and-lots-of-debt dream.
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 12:24 PM on July 6, 2011
One thing I always notice in these threads - the way it's so easy to identify yourself with your suffering, or to identify with your abuser/the system that abused you. This is something I have struggled with a lot myself in terms of bad-stuff-from-childhood.
What I mean is that there's always a sub-theme of "I suffered a lot, so everyone else should suffer too; a system without the suffering I endured is impossible; if other people get through... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 12:39 PM on July 6, 2011
On women and degrees:
(Background comment - all of this "school isn't friendly for boys because boys are inherently THING" is pretty silly - girls were "inherently" unfit for education for quite a while because their wombs interfered with the function of their brains and/or overdeveloping the brain would sap the womb, etc etc.)
One Dimensional Woman has an interesting section on the "feminization" of labor through... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 1:10 PM on July 6, 2011
Accent and diction? How will that lead to a career?
I always wonder about this "bighearted Americans" trope. Not that I haven't met generous Americans...but 1. generosity everywhere is situational; 2. we do not actually have one of those peasanty, being-a-host-is-an-ethical-responsibility cultures, we have a "hard work and virtue will get you ahead; if you're poor it's because you're lazy" culture; and 3. we have one of the most punitive and unequal legal systems possible in the developed world, plus no social safety net. If... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 10:10 AM on July 6, 2011
Girl questions.
Having worked with programmers, I wouldn't blame women for not wanting to. It's definitely a macho boys club. What few women I saw working as programmers were regularly pigeonholed and treated like secretaries. And the constant sexist banter and jokes between the boys would be, I think, pretty toxic to have to listen to day-after-day.
It's absolutely hi-LAR-ious to me that there's this field, see, where you have to have tons and tons of uninterrupted... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 7:15 AM on July 5, 2011
Explore Minnesota... some other time
If anything, they probably see it as a form of tough love. They're weaning your sickly body off the teat of government. Any pain you experience will be short term and in the end, for your own good.
I'm Minnesotan, and I don't believe this for a minute. That's the line for the proles in the suburbs who can be persuaded to vote against their class interests. Every politician, banker and corporate asshole in this state has their hand out to the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 6:20 AM on July 1, 2011
Agree, but is there any reason why this wouldn't create a mass exodus of capital, investment, and jobs to other overseas locations? It seems the race to the bottom is unavoidable either way.
Because not everything is immediately outsource-able. Minnesota has a fantastic medical research corridor (or had...it's getting trashed) with a great deal of state, corporate, federal and foundation investment; researchers from all over the world who worked... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 6:44 AM on July 1, 2011
Effective tax rates for State and Local Taxes - Minnesota:
All Households: 11.4%
Bottom 10% incomes - 22.1%
Top 5% incomes - 9.7%
Top 1% incomes - 8.8%
Decile 2011 (est.)
First ($11,201 & Under) 22.1%
Second ($11,202 - $18,454) 11.2%
Third ($18,455 - $26,461)11.1%
Fourth ($26,462 - $35,169) 11.7%
Fifth ($35,170 -... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 10:38 AM on July 1, 2011
but just killing some diabetics who can't afford their care any more plus shortening the lives of any number of people who skip routine care...no one will even notice.
Just in case that's sarcasm - I have a friend who is a type 1 diabetic and who is on some kind of medical assistance that's been under steady threat for the past couple of years - he's a younger single guy and those are the folks whose benefits are politically the easiest to axe. He... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 11:16 AM on July 1, 2011
That means that citizens have just been shutting their eyes for years, getting accustomed to the state of things, so there's no will nor structure to do anything.
I am a diabetic. I have been paying attention
I was thinking more that people have been focusing on individual solutions - belt-tightening, second jobs, etc - because if you're slowly losing ground it's easy to think "oh, I'll pick up an extra shift" and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 11:22 AM on July 1, 2011
Married, With Infidelities
“You assume as a younger person that all relationships are monogamous and between two people, that love means nothing can come between you,” said Miller, who met Savage at a club in 1995, when he was 23 and Savage was 30. “Dan has taught me to be more realistic about that kind of stuff."
I think Dan Savage really essentializes gay male sexuality as much as anything else - I mean, I know lots of guys who get around a lot, but I... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 1:38 PM on June 30, 2011
There's also what I think of as kink-slippage in Savage-land...what folks would have called preferences ten years ago are now kinks that must be indulged; what used to be kinks ten years ago are now serious fetishes that require the intervention of a pro before your relationship implodes. And the assumption that my casual interest in [random thing] is obviously a fetish rather than a casual interest....It's like sexual marketing. It's more the self-obsessed sexual narcissism... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 1:48 PM on June 30, 2011
Oh, and Savage writes about male versus female sexuality as if there were no social cost to women in having casual sex with men. I personally would have had a lot more casual sex with men back in the day without 1. concern about pregnancy from a casual encounter and 2. a sense that many men view sex as a "conquest", some kind of victory they win over me if I sleep with them without emotional entanglement; and 3. the fact that I know guys talk a lot of shit about... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 1:54 PM on June 30, 2011
I think Dan Savage really essentializes gay male sexuality as much as anything else - I mean, I know lots of guys who get around a lot, but I also know lots of guys who prioritize monogamy; I know guys who go out clubbing and guys who go to coffee shops; etc etc.
To elaborate, although it's really not that exciting a point: I've been reading Savage's main column for....jeez, since the nineties. Plus I've read a couple of his books, though not very... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 2:08 PM on June 30, 2011
You'd think that - if what most straight guys really wanted was lots of casual sex with women - straight guys would be all like "hey, I had casual sex with this girl! Awesome! It was super nice that she was into it!" But it's a lot more like "I picked up this stupid girl at the bar, and she was a real butterface, but she blew me so it was great - how was your night, bro?"
Okay, I exaggerate, but I've seen a lot of really bad sexual... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 2:15 PM on June 30, 2011
- things I don't even want to share that were basically about how he didn't want to end up past-it and [unattractive].
...didn't want to end up LIKE ME, past-it and unattractive. Only with some specifics about the things that were wrong with me that he was striving to avoid himself.
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 2:16 PM on June 30, 2011
Yeah ... not buying it. Thing about kinks, "preferences", and fetishes is that people didn't used to talk about it. At all. And a lot of relationships suffered because of it. And a lot of them did implode. I think the new thing -- which Savage is very much a part of -- is actually talking about it for a change and internalizing it and finding a place for it in your relationship -- even if that place happens to involve some solo exploration. That way, partners can stay happy... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 2:34 PM on June 30, 2011
(In fact, I'll clarify - my experience has been on what you might call the para-queer left - activists, anarchists, etc, lots of heteroflexibility, an environment where it is deeply, deeply uncool to say anything popularly considered to be overtly homophobic or transphobic. This does not keep people from saying homophobic or transphobic things - but people don't say the obvious ones. I much preferred the critical rhetoric about sexual practice that seemed way more common in this crowd in the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 2:39 PM on June 30, 2011
In any case, I wouldn't say it's inherently cruel, dehumanizing and immoral that I not be indulged in them to the very top of my bent. They're just things I feel like doing, after all. They're not who I am.
As I think about this more, I feel like my problem with Savage is precisely that he pretends that there's a clear and bright line between what gets named sick and what gets named healthy, what gets named important and what gets named trivial. He... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 2:48 PM on June 30, 2011
I think this foolish twaddle is driven by a burning and inextinguishable frustration that, no matter how he dresses or acts, he cannot make himself into a woman. But he's discovered he can temporarily assuage his consuming envy by getting women to dance to his tune. Not too surprisingly, he generally calls out that they should do whatever he's doing, because if he wants to do it, women must want to too, and ain't he a woman?
Oh sigh. I do not think... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 2:52 PM on June 30, 2011
It's also very easy to say that kink is on the same level as, say, eating chocolate if you're perfectly happy with vanilla sex. I find vanilla sex not just physically unsatisfying, but completely void of intimacy. I find that to be true for a lot of people who have non-mainstream sexual practices.
I thoroughly resent the idea that vanilla sex is emotionally intimate whereas kinky sex is just soulless, casual getting off.
I... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 2:58 PM on June 30, 2011
Funny you mention it! In Savage's book The Kid, he says that if Miller gained a lot of weight, Savage would dump him.
Ew.
In my secret heart of hearts - and despite the fact that I hate his advice - I had what was obviously a sentimental, idealized picture of the guy's relationship.
So odd to be always beating the drum about "I will totally dump you if X thing happens".
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 3:04 PM on June 30, 2011
(This is all leading me to wonder how Terry Miller feels about his relationship. That seems to be rather important if we're going to talk about how awful DS is being. There's a substantial possibility that Miller could be all "Oh, Dan suggested that I was being old-fashioned and then we did thing and it was fine" and maybe it just isn't that big a deal for him....even though it would be a big deal for some folks. That would mean that DS wasn't actually asking for anything crazy out... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 3:10 PM on June 30, 2011
IME, some partners are people you can do non-monogamy with and some aren't. Unless your relationship is totally, totally casual, you need some trust between you that you like each other, that the relationship is important, that neither of you is just out there playing the field and hoping to trade up. For me, I never even considered a non-monogamous relationship prior to the one I'm in, because I never clicked with anyone this way. I know - as well as I know anything - that... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 8:51 PM on June 30, 2011
(Oh, I don't mean that there is no trust in monogamous relationships - more that different relationships work different ways - different kinds of trust, different atmosphere, etc.)
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 8:53 PM on June 30, 2011
America's Next Great Civil Rights Struggle
I'd love to see a study on this, but it would probably never happen. People are so good at recognizing subtle gender cues that I think it's more likely that people are just being polite.
"People" do not include me, then. I know I'm just going to provide more anecdata, here,but I was thinking about this the other night - I was at a benefit dinner and I saw this cute, slightly nerdy-looking girl. "Hey, she's cute!" I... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 10:57 AM on June 29, 2011
I mean, personally I don't really even fully understand what the word implies (is a "trans man" someone who is a man now? Who used to be a man? Either? Something else?) and I'm hardly the kind of crazy homophobe who beats people to death for entering the wring bathroom.
I fully admit that it's a culture that I am not particularly familiar with and do not understand.
And yet there are so many resources - on the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 11:21 AM on June 29, 2011
(So I apologize for being bitey, which I am being.)
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 11:24 AM on June 29, 2011
You do care if I know about your gender identity issues, though.
Not my gender identity issues, however. The issues of people I care about a lot.
Please read this in a sincere tone of voice - I am really, truly not trying to be a jerk here.
I apologize for being sarcastic in my previous comment. That wasn't very polite or helpful to you.
I do sincerely... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 11:53 AM on June 29, 2011
(I actually like the "google it" norm - I've found that it helps me to ask more sophisticated questions because I become more aware of what google can't tell me, what requires some expertise, etc etc.)
That doesn't make it any clearer. Trans-aware people are used to referring to someone who's transitioned to male as a "man", where non-trans-aware people aren't sure what term they're supposed to use. Your definition assumes that... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 12:02 PM on June 29, 2011
I remember watching some MTV True Life puff-doc on trans folk, and thinking that while these folks were obviously going through something incredibly painful, the trans man who was struggling with how to present really was engaging in a lot of really douchebag behavior (talking about "banging bitches" and shit like that) under the ostensible aegis of being a man. Part of that could be the accumulated fear and danger of being caught out as trans — the prejudice and danger are... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 12:21 PM on June 29, 2011
That's a delightfully idealist and not at all practical idea.
But it's especially non-practical when people who have the skills and time to become educated, and who have the sophistication to understand why it's kind and polite to do so none the less emphasize that no one could be expected to do that.
Yes, I get that Joe Vaguely-Transphobic and Jill Unsophisticated-Internet-User probably won't do this. But... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 12:29 PM on June 29, 2011
Sure, I don't think anyone is disagreeing with that. But ignorance abounds in the world, so that very worthy goal doesn't seem attainable at this point.
Remember during the last presidential election when lots of white people would say "but those other white people will never vote for a black man!" That always confused me. Sure, there's lots of bias in the world, but the best way to make sure that the bias stays in the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 12:56 PM on June 29, 2011
(As I was biking home, I realized that I'd said (at least one) kind of fucked up thing on this thread, and I wanted to pop back in and apologize...Far upthread, I was all "and there was this cute girl at a dinner! And I didn't know she was trans, except I'd met her at this event talking about trans issues!" What I meant to convey was "trans people are everywhere, regardless of whether cis people realize it" and "I met a cute girl! A cute activist girl!!!" What... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 3:55 PM on June 29, 2011
Also, I was thinking about how cis women (almost always women, and including me) have this weird anxiety about trans people supporting patriarchy through gender performance - trans women who are "too girlie" or trans men who are "too macho".
You're kidding. People still think like this? I thought the whole "real feminists aren't all girly" thing was half second-wave radicalism and half overblown... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 6:44 AM on June 30, 2011
Oh, and I wanted to clarify that "really femme-y transwomen are reinscribing patriarchal norms" was a line of thought I actually kind of believed for a while, until I ended up in a social circle with a lot more trans folks and realized that this didn't even remotely approximate reality.
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner
at 6:46 AM on June 30, 2011
