Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Morning Roundup

Was going to be "evening roundup", but I fell asleep instead.

Gay marriage in Texas? Transgender people make it so difficult to enforce traditional gender norms!

Conservatives are almost as bad at talking to Black people as xkcd is at boomerangs.

Jonah Goldberg endorses tokenism.

What is Anti-Semitism?, asks in the LA Times.

Greens Engage explain why the "you're just like Nazis" argument is so offensive and wrong-headed.

Hilzoy on why some women don't report sexual assault. Like her, I agree that "you're reacting wrong to your rape" (outside extreme scenarios like killing sprees or self-mutilation) is an unbelievably churlish and small-hearted thing to say.

Eric Posner's read of the data indicates that Judge Sotomayor is a roughly average appellate court judge. It also seems to imply that now-Justice Alito was towards the bottom of the pack. And he overcame the horrible prejudice we direct towards White people to boot!

The RNC seems poised to officially start calling the Democratic Party the "Democrat Socialist Party". I imagine the only people more annoyed than the Democratic Socialists of America are Republicans waiting for their party to extract itself from the depths of crazy.

Julie has a great post up entitled "erasing Jewish women".

1 comment:

PG said...

I think the TAPPED post about Goldberg misses his point: Goldberg cares less about using GOP tokens to recruit significant numbers of minority voters than about using the tokens to indicate to white people that such-and-such policy can't be racist. Connerly is the perfect example: white people who are on the fence about affirmative action see a black man leading the charge against it in their state (as he has done in California, Michigan, etc.) and they feel OK about voting to ban aff. action. "A black man is against it and says it causes his real accomplishments to be underrated! That must be true for all black people and therefore we don't have to worry about perpetuating racism if we take Connerly's position as our own."

Similarly, Goldberg wants a "Hispanic" (I assume he really means Latino) token for the immigration issue, so on-the-fence whites will be reassured that their imprisoning undocumented workers and sending vigilantes to shoot them at the border is a sound policy with no racism to it at all.

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Re: hilzoy, I think she's right and Hirshmann is, as Megan suggests, just getting back at the Jezebels for having criticized her. However, this statement -- "my audacity to suggest that haranguing victims of violence to leave their abusive partners might not be helpful" -- is itself rather audacious, given Megan's refusal to take down a post about a rape victim that the victim asked her to remove or at least allow the victim to say on it that commenters shouldn't harangue her to leave her partner.