Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 934
December 3, 2015
James Cromwell crashes and heckles energy company party over new power plant
Veteran actor and activist James Cromwell was one of two people escorted from an upstate New York business celebration for protesting an award given to an energy company planning to build a brand new power plant in the region, according to The Times Herald-Record of Middletown. Cromwell, a resident of Warwick, New York, according to The Wrap, was protesting the CPV Valley Energy Center’s new gas-fueled power plant located in New Windsor, New York. Cromwell and his partner, Pramilla Malick said CPV's natural gas-fired electricity plant is a dangerous polluter threatening the environment and the people living there. “The last thing CPV should be doing is getting an award for polluting our Hudson Valley,” Malick said after being escorted out of the banquet hall, according to the Times Herald-Record. The event Cromwell and Malick crashed was reportedly a gathering of 650 New York state business people for a celebratory soirée. The pair interrupted with heckles during CPV's award presentation. For their part, the business group Cromwell crashed shrugs off the incident of celebrity activism as "laughable." "I thought it was laughable,” Orange County Partnership CEO Maureen Halahan said. “I thought it was funny and had nothing to do with the event.” Cromwell was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor for 1995's "Babe," and has notably been featured in "American Horror Story" and "L.A. Confidential." The veteran actor also has a long history of progressive activism. In 2013, Cromwell was arrested after disrupting a University of Wisconsin board meeting with a large picture of a tortured cat as part of a PETA campaign to protest the university's research on animals. 
Veteran actor and activist James Cromwell was one of two people escorted from an upstate New York business celebration for protesting an award given to an energy company planning to build a brand new power plant in the region, according to The Times Herald-Record of Middletown. Cromwell, a resident of Warwick, New York, according to The Wrap, was protesting the CPV Valley Energy Center’s new gas-fueled power plant located in New Windsor, New York. Cromwell and his partner, Pramilla Malick said CPV's natural gas-fired electricity plant is a dangerous polluter threatening the environment and the people living there. “The last thing CPV should be doing is getting an award for polluting our Hudson Valley,” Malick said after being escorted out of the banquet hall, according to the Times Herald-Record. The event Cromwell and Malick crashed was reportedly a gathering of 650 New York state business people for a celebratory soirée. The pair interrupted with heckles during CPV's award presentation. For their part, the business group Cromwell crashed shrugs off the incident of celebrity activism as "laughable." "I thought it was laughable,” Orange County Partnership CEO Maureen Halahan said. “I thought it was funny and had nothing to do with the event.” Cromwell was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor for 1995's "Babe," and has notably been featured in "American Horror Story" and "L.A. Confidential." The veteran actor also has a long history of progressive activism. In 2013, Cromwell was arrested after disrupting a University of Wisconsin board meeting with a large picture of a tortured cat as part of a PETA campaign to protest the university's research on animals. Veteran actor and activist James Cromwell was one of two people escorted from an upstate New York business celebration for protesting an award given to an energy company planning to build a brand new power plant in the region, according to The Times Herald-Record of Middletown. Cromwell, a resident of Warwick, New York, according to The Wrap, was protesting the CPV Valley Energy Center’s new gas-fueled power plant located in New Windsor, New York. Cromwell and his partner, Pramilla Malick said CPV's natural gas-fired electricity plant is a dangerous polluter threatening the environment and the people living there. “The last thing CPV should be doing is getting an award for polluting our Hudson Valley,” Malick said after being escorted out of the banquet hall, according to the Times Herald-Record. The event Cromwell and Malick crashed was reportedly a gathering of 650 New York state business people for a celebratory soirée. The pair interrupted with heckles during CPV's award presentation. For their part, the business group Cromwell crashed shrugs off the incident of celebrity activism as "laughable." "I thought it was laughable,” Orange County Partnership CEO Maureen Halahan said. “I thought it was funny and had nothing to do with the event.” Cromwell was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor for 1995's "Babe," and has notably been featured in "American Horror Story" and "L.A. Confidential." The veteran actor also has a long history of progressive activism. In 2013, Cromwell was arrested after disrupting a University of Wisconsin board meeting with a large picture of a tortured cat as part of a PETA campaign to protest the university's research on animals.
Veteran actor and activist James Cromwell was one of two people escorted from an upstate New York business celebration for protesting an award given to an energy company planning to build a brand new power plant in the region, according to The Times Herald-Record of Middletown. Cromwell, a resident of Warwick, New York, according to The Wrap, was protesting the CPV Valley Energy Center’s new gas-fueled power plant located in New Windsor, New York. Cromwell and his partner, Pramilla Malick said CPV's natural gas-fired electricity plant is a dangerous polluter threatening the environment and the people living there. “The last thing CPV should be doing is getting an award for polluting our Hudson Valley,” Malick said after being escorted out of the banquet hall, according to the Times Herald-Record. The event Cromwell and Malick crashed was reportedly a gathering of 650 New York state business people for a celebratory soirée. The pair interrupted with heckles during CPV's award presentation. For their part, the business group Cromwell crashed shrugs off the incident of celebrity activism as "laughable." "I thought it was laughable,” Orange County Partnership CEO Maureen Halahan said. “I thought it was funny and had nothing to do with the event.” Cromwell was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor for 1995's "Babe," and has notably been featured in "American Horror Story" and "L.A. Confidential." The veteran actor also has a long history of progressive activism. In 2013, Cromwell was arrested after disrupting a University of Wisconsin board meeting with a large picture of a tortured cat as part of a PETA campaign to protest the university's research on animals. Veteran actor and activist James Cromwell was one of two people escorted from an upstate New York business celebration for protesting an award given to an energy company planning to build a brand new power plant in the region, according to The Times Herald-Record of Middletown. Cromwell, a resident of Warwick, New York, according to The Wrap, was protesting the CPV Valley Energy Center’s new gas-fueled power plant located in New Windsor, New York. Cromwell and his partner, Pramilla Malick said CPV's natural gas-fired electricity plant is a dangerous polluter threatening the environment and the people living there. “The last thing CPV should be doing is getting an award for polluting our Hudson Valley,” Malick said after being escorted out of the banquet hall, according to the Times Herald-Record. The event Cromwell and Malick crashed was reportedly a gathering of 650 New York state business people for a celebratory soirée. The pair interrupted with heckles during CPV's award presentation. For their part, the business group Cromwell crashed shrugs off the incident of celebrity activism as "laughable." "I thought it was laughable,” Orange County Partnership CEO Maureen Halahan said. “I thought it was funny and had nothing to do with the event.” Cromwell was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor for 1995's "Babe," and has notably been featured in "American Horror Story" and "L.A. Confidential." The veteran actor also has a long history of progressive activism. In 2013, Cromwell was arrested after disrupting a University of Wisconsin board meeting with a large picture of a tortured cat as part of a PETA campaign to protest the university's research on animals.
This is why Trump is winning: “Muslim Killers,” manipulated fear and the other mass shooting we ignored
If you want to understand why Donald Trump is crushing the rest of the Republican field, the explanation is the other mass shooting that happened yesterday. No, not the one in San Bernardino, the tragedy that is dominating the airwaves and prodding "prayerful" tweets from politicians. Not the reality-being-stranger-than-fiction televised news scene bringing together "long guns," "disabled students," "mental illness," and "terrorism," triggering outraged armchair analysts to parse the meaning of each vague yet loaded term in order to shape that fury into sounds that made sense to them. The media trained its sights on San Bernardino, finding its stealthy patience rewarded with cameras shooting live footage of a car chase that ended, carthartically, in more violent deaths. Meanwhile, a man in Savannah, Georgia, shot four people. One died. Apart from the fact that the single fatality was a woman, there is no other information. No names, no details. That shooting barely made the local news. Technically speaking, what happened in Georgia is a "mass shooting." But "mass shooting" is another term that sets people off, as the definition of what is "mass" and what is "shooting" will produce thick threads of insults and counter-insults in comments sections. What those bickering quarrels come down to is this: If the media doesn't pay attention, is it really a mass shooting? Or is it just another quarrel that ended up getting people shot dead? Implicitly, it is understood that the term "mass shooting" invokes unspoken that actually have nothing to do with the number of victims, the randomness of the violence, the ideological claims driving the decision to kill, or even the motives. It has to do with the way society patrols class (and racial) boundaries, narrating roles through attributes as rigid as Gabriel's trumpet or Daniel's lion. Nobody ever asks where the saints get their stuff, but guns are expensive and how can those people afford---I mean where did they-- er, it's wrong for thugs & terrorists to get their hands on them! The violence must not only be horrifying enough to get attention, but the victims must produce a shock of empathy strong enough to perform a psychic rupture that demands to be healed through panaceas or panegyrics so that work can resume. And resume it must. For after every mass shooting, Jeb Lund writes, we tell ourselves that: "we would never undertake such risky behavior; we would never live in such a neighborhood, work for such a company, visit such a fallen or disreputable establishment; we would never befoul ourselves with incautiousness as to almost welcome the violence. We would never be a victim, because we are not the victim sort, the person who courts such tragedies. We see those fleeing a mass shooting and decide, firmly, that we would never be in their place." So when similar levels of violence are visited upon the poor and disenfranchised, as was the case in that particular street in Savannah where the four anonymous victims got themselves shot because that's what happens in that neighborhood, there is no sense of rupture, no threat to the self, nothing but sad confirmation that that is how those people live and so violence is to be expected. There is no story in the grinding downer of despair. And so the media ignores it. It can't compete with spectacular acts of violence screaming for attention. Which is why Trump is leading in the Republican polls. His campaign is the political equivalent of biopic about a mass shooting that the media has fooled itself into thinking is an actual case of political carnage. His excesses allow us to tell ourselves that we would never vote for such a clown, never condone such vitriol, never vote for a party that supports him as a candidate, never live in a country where he was president, never allow ourselves to be so deluded as to applaud him. We will never let ourselves live in Trumpland, for we are better than him. We see those cheering for him at rallies and decide, firmly, that we will never join that crowd. But if Trump is Islamophobic, xenophobic, self-aggrandizing, anti-intellectual, and profoundly invested in shoring up the white male institutional norm that he euphemistically calls "making American great again," so is a good chunk of the media that created him--and he knows it. Blame the culture of capitalism. Something truly fascinating happened when the New York Post changed its headline from "Murder Mission: Shooters Slaughter 14 in Calif" to "Muslim Killers: Terror Eyed as Couple Slaughter 14 in Calif." http://twitter.com/TheAPJournalist/st... The image stayed exactly the same, but the media messaging had changed, becoming more inflammatory, more ideological (no headline for Robert L. Dear ever bleated, "CHRISTIAN KILLER"), and shamelessly racist. Worse, the updated headline was not so much reflective of new details, as it was confirmation that we're already bored with the old "mass shooting" story. On her Facebook page, a friend who lives in California noted yesterday, "At lunch today...this was on the big TV. We should all have been speechless with disbelief and horror, coming together with strangers in our shared humanity, clustered around the screen with hands to our mouths. Instead, it looked as if no one was even watching." In other words, as Jack Mirkinson noted, the New York Post's decision to change the headline but not the photograph, "only works if you think that worrying about the disturbing frequency of mass shootings isn’t itself worthy of commentary." The shooting in Savannah reveals rather starkly that mass shooting in itself has barely worth acknowledging. Ergo, the New York Post's headline gets changed to evoke Islamophobic "terrorism," stoking fears in exactly the same way as does Trump in his speeches, invoking the existential threat that implicates the nation. Suddenly, it gets attention again. When Trump runs an ad in the rural states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, asserting that "politicians are all talk and no action," then adds that he will "brutally and quickly cut off the head of ISIS," the people who believe he means this literally are the ones for whom chopping heads off critters is no big deal, who likely served in the military, for whom ordinary violence is lived and not a reality show on television. Before you snigger at such credulity and bemoan the normalcy of gun deaths, consider these words: "shooting" "sighting the target," "triggering" and "positioning the shot." Am I talking about a mass shooting, or the work of the media sent to cover it? Watch to learn about the correlation between gun sales and mass shootings: [jwplayer file="http://media.salon.com/2015/12/GunSal..." image="http://media.salon.com/2015/12/how-th...] 
If you want to understand why Donald Trump is crushing the rest of the Republican field, the explanation is the other mass shooting that happened yesterday. No, not the one in San Bernardino, the tragedy that is dominating the airwaves and prodding "prayerful" tweets from politicians. Not the reality-being-stranger-than-fiction televised news scene bringing together "long guns," "disabled students," "mental illness," and "terrorism," triggering outraged armchair analysts to parse the meaning of each vague yet loaded term in order to shape that fury into sounds that made sense to them. The media trained its sights on San Bernardino, finding its stealthy patience rewarded with cameras shooting live footage of a car chase that ended, carthartically, in more violent deaths. Meanwhile, a man in Savannah, Georgia, shot four people. One died. Apart from the fact that the single fatality was a woman, there is no other information. No names, no details. That shooting barely made the local news. Technically speaking, what happened in Georgia is a "mass shooting." But "mass shooting" is another term that sets people off, as the definition of what is "mass" and what is "shooting" will produce thick threads of insults and counter-insults in comments sections. What those bickering quarrels come down to is this: If the media doesn't pay attention, is it really a mass shooting? Or is it just another quarrel that ended up getting people shot dead? Implicitly, it is understood that the term "mass shooting" invokes unspoken that actually have nothing to do with the number of victims, the randomness of the violence, the ideological claims driving the decision to kill, or even the motives. It has to do with the way society patrols class (and racial) boundaries, narrating roles through attributes as rigid as Gabriel's trumpet or Daniel's lion. Nobody ever asks where the saints get their stuff, but guns are expensive and how can those people afford---I mean where did they-- er, it's wrong for thugs & terrorists to get their hands on them! The violence must not only be horrifying enough to get attention, but the victims must produce a shock of empathy strong enough to perform a psychic rupture that demands to be healed through panaceas or panegyrics so that work can resume. And resume it must. For after every mass shooting, Jeb Lund writes, we tell ourselves that: "we would never undertake such risky behavior; we would never live in such a neighborhood, work for such a company, visit such a fallen or disreputable establishment; we would never befoul ourselves with incautiousness as to almost welcome the violence. We would never be a victim, because we are not the victim sort, the person who courts such tragedies. We see those fleeing a mass shooting and decide, firmly, that we would never be in their place." So when similar levels of violence are visited upon the poor and disenfranchised, as was the case in that particular street in Savannah where the four anonymous victims got themselves shot because that's what happens in that neighborhood, there is no sense of rupture, no threat to the self, nothing but sad confirmation that that is how those people live and so violence is to be expected. There is no story in the grinding downer of despair. And so the media ignores it. It can't compete with spectacular acts of violence screaming for attention. Which is why Trump is leading in the Republican polls. His campaign is the political equivalent of biopic about a mass shooting that the media has fooled itself into thinking is an actual case of political carnage. His excesses allow us to tell ourselves that we would never vote for such a clown, never condone such vitriol, never vote for a party that supports him as a candidate, never live in a country where he was president, never allow ourselves to be so deluded as to applaud him. We will never let ourselves live in Trumpland, for we are better than him. We see those cheering for him at rallies and decide, firmly, that we will never join that crowd. But if Trump is Islamophobic, xenophobic, self-aggrandizing, anti-intellectual, and profoundly invested in shoring up the white male institutional norm that he euphemistically calls "making American great again," so is a good chunk of the media that created him--and he knows it. Blame the culture of capitalism. Something truly fascinating happened when the New York Post changed its headline from "Murder Mission: Shooters Slaughter 14 in Calif" to "Muslim Killers: Terror Eyed as Couple Slaughter 14 in Calif." http://twitter.com/TheAPJournalist/st... The image stayed exactly the same, but the media messaging had changed, becoming more inflammatory, more ideological (no headline for Robert L. Dear ever bleated, "CHRISTIAN KILLER"), and shamelessly racist. Worse, the updated headline was not so much reflective of new details, as it was confirmation that we're already bored with the old "mass shooting" story. On her Facebook page, a friend who lives in California noted yesterday, "At lunch today...this was on the big TV. We should all have been speechless with disbelief and horror, coming together with strangers in our shared humanity, clustered around the screen with hands to our mouths. Instead, it looked as if no one was even watching." In other words, as Jack Mirkinson noted, the New York Post's decision to change the headline but not the photograph, "only works if you think that worrying about the disturbing frequency of mass shootings isn’t itself worthy of commentary." The shooting in Savannah reveals rather starkly that mass shooting in itself has barely worth acknowledging. Ergo, the New York Post's headline gets changed to evoke Islamophobic "terrorism," stoking fears in exactly the same way as does Trump in his speeches, invoking the existential threat that implicates the nation. Suddenly, it gets attention again. When Trump runs an ad in the rural states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, asserting that "politicians are all talk and no action," then adds that he will "brutally and quickly cut off the head of ISIS," the people who believe he means this literally are the ones for whom chopping heads off critters is no big deal, who likely served in the military, for whom ordinary violence is lived and not a reality show on television. Before you snigger at such credulity and bemoan the normalcy of gun deaths, consider these words: "shooting" "sighting the target," "triggering" and "positioning the shot." Am I talking about a mass shooting, or the work of the media sent to cover it? Watch to learn about the correlation between gun sales and mass shootings: [jwplayer file="http://media.salon.com/2015/12/GunSal..." image="http://media.salon.com/2015/12/how-th...]
If you want to understand why Donald Trump is crushing the rest of the Republican field, the explanation is the other mass shooting that happened yesterday. No, not the one in San Bernardino, the tragedy that is dominating the airwaves and prodding "prayerful" tweets from politicians. Not the reality-being-stranger-than-fiction televised news scene bringing together "long guns," "disabled students," "mental illness," and "terrorism," triggering outraged armchair analysts to parse the meaning of each vague yet loaded term in order to shape that fury into sounds that made sense to them. The media trained its sights on San Bernardino, finding its stealthy patience rewarded with cameras shooting live footage of a car chase that ended, carthartically, in more violent deaths. Meanwhile, a man in Savannah, Georgia, shot four people. One died. Apart from the fact that the single fatality was a woman, there is no other information. No names, no details. That shooting barely made the local news. Technically speaking, what happened in Georgia is a "mass shooting." But "mass shooting" is another term that sets people off, as the definition of what is "mass" and what is "shooting" will produce thick threads of insults and counter-insults in comments sections. What those bickering quarrels come down to is this: If the media doesn't pay attention, is it really a mass shooting? Or is it just another quarrel that ended up getting people shot dead? Implicitly, it is understood that the term "mass shooting" invokes unspoken that actually have nothing to do with the number of victims, the randomness of the violence, the ideological claims driving the decision to kill, or even the motives. It has to do with the way society patrols class (and racial) boundaries, narrating roles through attributes as rigid as Gabriel's trumpet or Daniel's lion. Nobody ever asks where the saints get their stuff, but guns are expensive and how can those people afford---I mean where did they-- er, it's wrong for thugs & terrorists to get their hands on them! The violence must not only be horrifying enough to get attention, but the victims must produce a shock of empathy strong enough to perform a psychic rupture that demands to be healed through panaceas or panegyrics so that work can resume. And resume it must. For after every mass shooting, Jeb Lund writes, we tell ourselves that: "we would never undertake such risky behavior; we would never live in such a neighborhood, work for such a company, visit such a fallen or disreputable establishment; we would never befoul ourselves with incautiousness as to almost welcome the violence. We would never be a victim, because we are not the victim sort, the person who courts such tragedies. We see those fleeing a mass shooting and decide, firmly, that we would never be in their place." So when similar levels of violence are visited upon the poor and disenfranchised, as was the case in that particular street in Savannah where the four anonymous victims got themselves shot because that's what happens in that neighborhood, there is no sense of rupture, no threat to the self, nothing but sad confirmation that that is how those people live and so violence is to be expected. There is no story in the grinding downer of despair. And so the media ignores it. It can't compete with spectacular acts of violence screaming for attention. Which is why Trump is leading in the Republican polls. His campaign is the political equivalent of biopic about a mass shooting that the media has fooled itself into thinking is an actual case of political carnage. His excesses allow us to tell ourselves that we would never vote for such a clown, never condone such vitriol, never vote for a party that supports him as a candidate, never live in a country where he was president, never allow ourselves to be so deluded as to applaud him. We will never let ourselves live in Trumpland, for we are better than him. We see those cheering for him at rallies and decide, firmly, that we will never join that crowd. But if Trump is Islamophobic, xenophobic, self-aggrandizing, anti-intellectual, and profoundly invested in shoring up the white male institutional norm that he euphemistically calls "making American great again," so is a good chunk of the media that created him--and he knows it. Blame the culture of capitalism. Something truly fascinating happened when the New York Post changed its headline from "Murder Mission: Shooters Slaughter 14 in Calif" to "Muslim Killers: Terror Eyed as Couple Slaughter 14 in Calif." http://twitter.com/TheAPJournalist/st... The image stayed exactly the same, but the media messaging had changed, becoming more inflammatory, more ideological (no headline for Robert L. Dear ever bleated, "CHRISTIAN KILLER"), and shamelessly racist. Worse, the updated headline was not so much reflective of new details, as it was confirmation that we're already bored with the old "mass shooting" story. On her Facebook page, a friend who lives in California noted yesterday, "At lunch today...this was on the big TV. We should all have been speechless with disbelief and horror, coming together with strangers in our shared humanity, clustered around the screen with hands to our mouths. Instead, it looked as if no one was even watching." In other words, as Jack Mirkinson noted, the New York Post's decision to change the headline but not the photograph, "only works if you think that worrying about the disturbing frequency of mass shootings isn’t itself worthy of commentary." The shooting in Savannah reveals rather starkly that mass shooting in itself has barely worth acknowledging. Ergo, the New York Post's headline gets changed to evoke Islamophobic "terrorism," stoking fears in exactly the same way as does Trump in his speeches, invoking the existential threat that implicates the nation. Suddenly, it gets attention again. When Trump runs an ad in the rural states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, asserting that "politicians are all talk and no action," then adds that he will "brutally and quickly cut off the head of ISIS," the people who believe he means this literally are the ones for whom chopping heads off critters is no big deal, who likely served in the military, for whom ordinary violence is lived and not a reality show on television. Before you snigger at such credulity and bemoan the normalcy of gun deaths, consider these words: "shooting" "sighting the target," "triggering" and "positioning the shot." Am I talking about a mass shooting, or the work of the media sent to cover it? Watch to learn about the correlation between gun sales and mass shootings: [jwplayer file="http://media.salon.com/2015/12/GunSal..." image="http://media.salon.com/2015/12/how-th...]
Trump’s bloodthirsty boast: “Whenever there’s a tragedy, everything goes up, my numbers go way up”
Donald Trump is on quite a roll today. As Salon's Scott Eric Kaufman reported, the Republican presidential frontrunner added yet another sector of the American population to his ever expanding list of wholesale offense, patronizing a room full of wealthy conservative Jewish activists today with taunts like this one: “I’m a negotiator, like you folks.” And according to CNN, after his speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition, Trump went to perhaps even lower depths to argue that the shootings in San Bernardino, California, on Wednesday will boost his standing in the polls: https://twitter.com/SaraMurray/status... Here is Trump implying as much himself vis-a-vie his infamous retweeting habit Thursday morning: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/s... Trump is, in this case as is often the case, grabbing a kernel of truth to create a most hyperbolic narrative. A series of post-Paris polls of Republican voters showed Trump’s support increasing and his lead over fellow presidential aspirants on the question of who is best suited to fight terrorism widening. Donald Trump is on quite a roll today. As Salon's Scott Eric Kaufman reported, the Republican presidential frontrunner added yet another sector of the American population to his ever expanding list of wholesale offense, patronizing a room full of wealthy conservative Jewish activists today with taunts like this one: “I’m a negotiator, like you folks.” And according to CNN, after his speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition, Trump went to perhaps even lower depths to argue that the shootings in San Bernardino, California, on Wednesday will boost his standing in the polls: https://twitter.com/SaraMurray/status... Here is Trump implying as much himself vis-a-vie his infamous retweeting habit Thursday morning: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/s... Trump is, in this case as is often the case, grabbing a kernel of truth to create a most hyperbolic narrative. A series of post-Paris polls of Republican voters showed Trump’s support increasing and his lead over fellow presidential aspirants on the question of who is best suited to fight terrorism widening.
Donald Trump is on quite a roll today. As Salon's Scott Eric Kaufman reported, the Republican presidential frontrunner added yet another sector of the American population to his ever expanding list of wholesale offense, patronizing a room full of wealthy conservative Jewish activists today with taunts like this one: “I’m a negotiator, like you folks.” And according to CNN, after his speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition, Trump went to perhaps even lower depths to argue that the shootings in San Bernardino, California, on Wednesday will boost his standing in the polls: https://twitter.com/SaraMurray/status... Here is Trump implying as much himself vis-a-vie his infamous retweeting habit Thursday morning: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/s... Trump is, in this case as is often the case, grabbing a kernel of truth to create a most hyperbolic narrative. A series of post-Paris polls of Republican voters showed Trump’s support increasing and his lead over fellow presidential aspirants on the question of who is best suited to fight terrorism widening.
Not so fast, Mark Zuckerberg: 4 reasons to be skeptical of his $45 billion giveaway
On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced plans to donate 99 percent of their Facebook shares to the new philanthropic Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. At a current valuation of $45 billion, that’s no small sum. And while many have already praised the couple’s altruism (including early commenters and “likers” Melinda Gates, Shakira, and Gavin Newsom), the announcement should also raise questions about the problems of philanthropy—and the limits of technology—to solve large-scale social issues with complex political and economic roots. The new parents frame their public note as a letter to their newborn daughter, with a sentimental charm that echoes Google’s infamous “Dear Sophie” video ad and adds a plethora of idealistic buzzwords sure to please search engines and social entrepreneurs alike. Seeking to better the world their child will inherit, they distill CZI’s mission as “advancing human potential and promoting equality.” These are certainly laudable goals, but their approach to three primary focus areas—personalized education, increased connectivity, and healthy communities—leave generous room for skepticism about their plan and the platforms that enable it. 1. Philanthropy’s Problems Philanthropy is a problematic field. At best, it redistributes resources to underserved communities, but at worst it functions as another means for elites to avoid taxes. As activists like INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence argue, philanthropy often enables the wealthy to exert disproportionate influence on social and political issues. At least in theory, taxes can be more equitably distributed across regions or communities, enable issues to be tackled in a systematic manner, and include built-in measures of accountability through democratic processes. In contrast, many foundations act independently and arbitrarily: they distribute funds based on the impulsive or under-informed priorities of their funders, offer small grants and short timelines that don’t allow organizations to scale or sustain themselves, and stay in business by giving away only tiny percentages of their holdings. At the same time, philanthropy offers large tax breaks for the wealthy, shifting social spending decisions from the many hands of the public to an elite few—an unfortunate form of pay-to-play politics. As Forbes points out, by donating shares rather than cash, Zuckerberg greatly reduces his own tax liabilities, and not surprisingly, Facebook is one of those Fortune 500 companies that’s especially good at avoiding paying its fair share of taxes. Facebook takes advantage of tax loopholes such as the Double Irish strategy, which Forbes reports saved the company $700 million in 2014 by moving profits offshore. It has also offered stock options as compensation to reduce tax burdens, with the LA Times noting that in 2013, Zuckerberg alone gained $3.3 billion—more than the $1 billion he plans to give away annually. While Zuckerberg may be a successful entrepreneur, his wealth shouldn’t allow him to single-handedly dictate matters of public policy, any more than it should allow him to influence elections. 2. Tech Troubles Equally troubling, Zuckerberg insists that technology holds the answers to complex social issues, echoing a “there’s an app for that!” mentality that too-often fails to consider the systematic factors at play. Theorist Evgeny Morozov calls this approach “solutionism,” as it tends to suggest answers based on the assumed ease and efficiency of tech tools, rather than considering whether the questions being asked are indeed the most appropriate starting points. In their letter, Chan and Zuckerberg make incredibly broad claims about the issues they’re attempting to tackle, setting the stage for seemingly simple solutions. For example, they suggest that “most people die” from five diseases, which they believe can be cured or managed in the next century. Surely additional funding for research and prevention is useful, but it’s important to remember that disease and death are wrapped up in complex political, economic, and social contexts, ranging from exposure to toxic materials to the high cost and profits of prescription drugs to the miseducation or social stigma attached to conditions like HIV/AIDS. And their framework hardly accounts for other major causes of death—suicide, gun violence, and armed conflict—that often require political will rather than programs. Similarly, Zuckerberg’s recent foray into education reform—a $100 million donation to Newark charter schools—has largely been considered a failure, as documented by journalist Dale Russakoff. Among its major issues were high administrative costs (including exorbitant consulting fees), conflicts with teachers’ unions, and an algorithm that determined school placements without adequately taking into account the social dynamics of local neighborhoods and students’ routes to get there. The donation has dried up, and Zuck has yet to acknowledge how such a failed investment adversely impacts the lives of low-income students in contrast to the benign “fail often and fast” ethos of Silicon Valley startups. Finally, Zuckerberg’s Internet connectivity initiatives are nothing short of dubious. While providing Internet access surely benefits many, Facebook’s Internet.org platform clearly demonstrates that the company has much to gain by connecting people. One of the major critiques of the service comes from communities in India who argue that the service violates the principles of Net Neutrality, enabling access to certain types of content (hint: Facebook’s own) at the expense of others. As the second-most-visited site in the world, Facebook clearly profits from expanding its user base. It certainly raises the question: If the CEO of one of the world’s largest media platforms seeks to expand Internet access, can it ever be truly philanthropic? 3. Anxieties At Home If Zuckerberg wants to “leave the world a better place,” he should begin in his own backyard. Facebook can contribute to a more just society by doing more than donating money: it should also examine the ethics and impacts of its own business practices, its presence in local communities, and its own user policies and procedures. As a company, Facebook has received its share of criticism for dismal racial and gender equity, particularly in its leadership and engineering teams. As The Guardian reported in June, despite yearly critique, Facebook has failed to significantly increase its hiring of African-American employees, resulting in a workforce that is only 2 percent black and lacks any black senior leaders. Similarly, in an interview with the Advocate this week, former engineer Brielle Harrison, who identifies as transgender, describes a persistent “brogrammer” culture that consistently undermines the contributions of women. Located outside San Francisco, Facebook also plays a role in conversations about the region’s rising rents and evictions. Though Silicon Valley’s controversial private shuttles are often collectively labeled “Google buses,” Facebook runs more than 70 shuttles of its own. Within the last year, bus drivers successfully voted to unionize for better wages and scheduling, however they claim that Facebook and its contracted shuttle service engaged in union-busting practices. What’s more, studies have indicated a disproportionate increase in rent prices within blocks of shuttle stops. Rather than addressing economic inequality directly, Zuckerberg made a large donation to San Francisco General Hospital, which has irked residents and nurses for the renaming of this public institution after the CEO and his wife. Lastly, Facebook has come under fire for several policies that undermine the spirit of equity, connectivity, and community health it claims to promote. For example, for more than a year, activists (this writer included) have waged a campaign against the company’s so-called “real names” policy, which has directly impacted tens of thousands of
One yuuuuuge mistake: Donald Trump just delivered an anti-Semitic speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition
On Thursday, Republican front-runner Donald Trump delivered a speech before the Republican Jewish Coalition in which he essentially praised members of the organization for being a bunch of Shylocks. "Stupidly, you want to give me money," he began. But he added that "you're not going to support me because I don't want your money," suggesting that Jews are unwilling to back people whose purse-strings they can't control, a classic anti-Semitic trope. In his humble way, he spoke of how much the Jews love him, especially in Israel. "They look at my wall, and it's loaded up" with awards from Jewish groups, he boasted, before adding that "the Christians are catching up, though, they're catching up." Trump spoke about the infamous $43 million gas station in Afghanistan, asking the crowd, "How many of you think you could have done it for less?" His question was greeted with silence, so he moved on. "I'm a negotiator, like you folks," he said while discussing what he considers to be the failures of the recent nuclear deal struck with Iran. "Is there anyone in this room who doesn't negotiate deals?" he later asked. "Probably more than any room I've ever spoken." You know -- because it's full of Jews. His most powerful misstep, however, occurred when he waffled on the question of whether Jerusalem should remain undivided and the capital of Israel. "I don't know if Israel has the commitment to make it," he said. Time's Zeke Miller said that at that point, "you could hear a pin drop." As he concluded, Trump claimed that "I'm a businessperson, I get along with everyone." Which is an odd claim to make, given that the majority of people before whom he'd just made it would strongly beg to differ. Watch his entire speech below via the Republican Jewish Coalition Forum. On Thursday, Republican front-runner Donald Trump delivered a speech before the Republican Jewish Coalition in which he essentially praised members of the organization for being a bunch of Shylocks. "Stupidly, you want to give me money," he began. But he added that "you're not going to support me because I don't want your money," suggesting that Jews are unwilling to back people whose purse-strings they can't control, a classic anti-Semitic trope. In his humble way, he spoke of how much the Jews love him, especially in Israel. "They look at my wall, and it's loaded up" with awards from Jewish groups, he boasted, before adding that "the Christians are catching up, though, they're catching up." Trump spoke about the infamous $43 million gas station in Afghanistan, asking the crowd, "How many of you think you could have done it for less?" His question was greeted with silence, so he moved on. "I'm a negotiator, like you folks," he said while discussing what he considers to be the failures of the recent nuclear deal struck with Iran. "Is there anyone in this room who doesn't negotiate deals?" he later asked. "Probably more than any room I've ever spoken." You know -- because it's full of Jews. His most powerful misstep, however, occurred when he waffled on the question of whether Jerusalem should remain undivided and the capital of Israel. "I don't know if Israel has the commitment to make it," he said. Time's Zeke Miller said that at that point, "you could hear a pin drop." As he concluded, Trump claimed that "I'm a businessperson, I get along with everyone." Which is an odd claim to make, given that the majority of people before whom he'd just made it would strongly beg to differ. Watch his entire speech below via the Republican Jewish Coalition Forum. On Thursday, Republican front-runner Donald Trump delivered a speech before the Republican Jewish Coalition in which he essentially praised members of the organization for being a bunch of Shylocks. "Stupidly, you want to give me money," he began. But he added that "you're not going to support me because I don't want your money," suggesting that Jews are unwilling to back people whose purse-strings they can't control, a classic anti-Semitic trope. In his humble way, he spoke of how much the Jews love him, especially in Israel. "They look at my wall, and it's loaded up" with awards from Jewish groups, he boasted, before adding that "the Christians are catching up, though, they're catching up." Trump spoke about the infamous $43 million gas station in Afghanistan, asking the crowd, "How many of you think you could have done it for less?" His question was greeted with silence, so he moved on. "I'm a negotiator, like you folks," he said while discussing what he considers to be the failures of the recent nuclear deal struck with Iran. "Is there anyone in this room who doesn't negotiate deals?" he later asked. "Probably more than any room I've ever spoken." You know -- because it's full of Jews. His most powerful misstep, however, occurred when he waffled on the question of whether Jerusalem should remain undivided and the capital of Israel. "I don't know if Israel has the commitment to make it," he said. Time's Zeke Miller said that at that point, "you could hear a pin drop." As he concluded, Trump claimed that "I'm a businessperson, I get along with everyone." Which is an odd claim to make, given that the majority of people before whom he'd just made it would strongly beg to differ. Watch his entire speech below via the Republican Jewish Coalition Forum. On Thursday, Republican front-runner Donald Trump delivered a speech before the Republican Jewish Coalition in which he essentially praised members of the organization for being a bunch of Shylocks. "Stupidly, you want to give me money," he began. But he added that "you're not going to support me because I don't want your money," suggesting that Jews are unwilling to back people whose purse-strings they can't control, a classic anti-Semitic trope. In his humble way, he spoke of how much the Jews love him, especially in Israel. "They look at my wall, and it's loaded up" with awards from Jewish groups, he boasted, before adding that "the Christians are catching up, though, they're catching up." Trump spoke about the infamous $43 million gas station in Afghanistan, asking the crowd, "How many of you think you could have done it for less?" His question was greeted with silence, so he moved on. "I'm a negotiator, like you folks," he said while discussing what he considers to be the failures of the recent nuclear deal struck with Iran. "Is there anyone in this room who doesn't negotiate deals?" he later asked. "Probably more than any room I've ever spoken." You know -- because it's full of Jews. His most powerful misstep, however, occurred when he waffled on the question of whether Jerusalem should remain undivided and the capital of Israel. "I don't know if Israel has the commitment to make it," he said. Time's Zeke Miller said that at that point, "you could hear a pin drop." As he concluded, Trump claimed that "I'm a businessperson, I get along with everyone." Which is an odd claim to make, given that the majority of people before whom he'd just made it would strongly beg to differ. Watch his entire speech below via the Republican Jewish Coalition Forum.
December 2, 2015
Keep coming out, Holland Taylor: The Hollywood trend of “I was never in” sets LGBT visibility back
In a May interview with “Variety,” Cate Blanchett discussed her title role in Todd Haynes’ brilliant “Carol,” in which the Oscar-winning actress plays a 1950s housewife forced to choose between her family and the object of her affections (Rooney Mara). It seems like Blanchett is harboring falsely romantic notions of what the era was like—as if not being able to even speak of your identity is an ideal: “I think there are a lot of people that exist ... who don’t feel the need to shout it from the rafters.” This was back when Blanchett appeared to come out—and then promptly took it back. If Carol couldn’t be out and proud, it wasn’t a matter of choice but overwhelming social and political repression, as I wrote earlier this year. In 1953, when Patricia Highsmith wrote “The Price of Salt” (the book on which “Carol” was based), being gay was a crime. If you were fired from your job, you didn’t have Lambda Legal to turn to. If your family kicked you out, you might have nowhere else to go. If Cate Blanchett is clearly smoking something, she’s been sharing with Holland Taylor. The beloved character actress—known for her work in diverse roles ranging from “The Truman Show” and “Legally Blonde” to “Two and a Half Men”—explained that she never bothered with coming out because she “lives out.” In an interview with WNYC’s “Death, Sex & Money, the 72-year-old actress said that the only reason she’s bothered with it now is because she’s happy in love. (She’s rumored to be dating Blanchett’s “Carol” co-star Sarah Paulson). That’s a sweet sentiment and vaguely reminiscent of “Modern Family” actor Reid Ewing’s own non-coming out in November. Ewing referred to another man as “hot” on in a tweet, which led one of the actor’s followers to ask if Reid just outed himself. His response? “I was never in,” Reid replied. In both of these instances, the idea appears to be that if you’re famous and you’ve come out to your family and friends, living openly but privately as a queer person, that’s the end of it. You’ve come out and you’re totally out now. It is finished. But what we too often fail to recognize is that coming out isn’t a decision you make once—you will be forced to come out to your friends, family, coworkers, and strangers nearly every day. As a queer man who leans on the effeminate side, I come out when I open my mouth to baristas or swish down the sidewalk in my favorite pair of pink pants. Reid himself recognized our many coming outs in a recent Huffington Post op-ed on his struggles with body dysmorphia. “Body dysmorphic disorder is a mental illness in which a person obsesses over the way he or she looks,” he wrote. "In my case, my looks were the only thing that mattered to me. I had just moved to L.A. to become an actor and had very few, if any, friends. I'd sit alone in my apartment and take pictures of myself from every angle, analyzing every feature.” Sharing those experiences helps normalize the experiences of having an eating disorder or a mental illness for gay men—or others—who might be facing similar issues. As a queer person, I’ve likewise come out about my history with anorexia—as well as being bullied in school, having IBS, and being in a open relationship. That honesty matters—because it illustrates the importance of living as our fullest selves. If Slate’s Stephanie Fairyington argued that we do need to shout our identities from the rafters, it’s something that we need to do our entire lives. For Holland Taylor, coming out as a woman in her 70s doesn’t just make our queer elders visible—in a community that too often marginalizes anyone over 40—but also (if the speculation is accurate) can help combat stigma about couples with marked age differences. When 41-year-old “Milk” screenwriter Dustin Lance Black and 21-year-old Olympian Tom Daley announced they were a couple back in 2013, the online backlash illustrated the lingering ageism in the gay community. Whether you’re coming out as a septuagenarian lesbian who is (maybe) dating a much younger woman or a furry, our stories show the multiplicity of our coming out experiences. It’s easy to look at coming out as a canned PR statement or nothing but a formality, but they’re filled with some of the most intimate parts of our unique histories. One of my favorite coming out stories ever is courtesy of Nathan Lane. The “Producers” actor recalls that when he told his mother he’s gay, she got very pale and said, “I would rather you were dead.” With his trademark wit, he responded, “I knew you would understand.” And in a speech for the Human Rights Campaign last February, "Juno" actress Ellen Page publicly discussed her sexuality for the first time and argued the crucial importance of doing so. “I suffered for years because I was scared to be out,” Page said. “My spirit suffered, my mental health suffered, and my relationships suffered. And I’m standing here today, with all of you, on the other side of that pain.” It does our community a grave disservice to treat these moments as irrelevant and dismiss the importance of our lifelong coming out process. I understand why many celebrities might want to keep their private life private (Kristen Stewart is a perfect example), but we have so much to gain from continuing to shout our identities from every rafter possible. It’s good for our community, who benefits from added visibility; it’s good for LGBT youth, who have crucial possibility models; but most of all, it’s good for ourselves. Through the simple act of living as out as possible, we can, thus, do so much. We can make the world safer for people facing body issues. We can tell people that even if your family doesn’t accept you, it doesn’t make you any less of a vibrant, amazing individual. And in doing so, we can heal the pain in others—as well as ourselves. Saying “I am” 50 years after you initially came out might seem passé, but it’s these everyday acts of honesty and bravery that help change the world.In a May interview with “Variety,” Cate Blanchett discussed her title role in Todd Haynes’ brilliant “Carol,” in which the Oscar-winning actress plays a 1950s housewife forced to choose between her family and the object of her affections (Rooney Mara). It seems like Blanchett is harboring falsely romantic notions of what the era was like—as if not being able to even speak of your identity is an ideal: “I think there are a lot of people that exist ... who don’t feel the need to shout it from the rafters.” This was back when Blanchett appeared to come out—and then promptly took it back. If Carol couldn’t be out and proud, it wasn’t a matter of choice but overwhelming social and political repression, as I wrote earlier this year. In 1953, when Patricia Highsmith wrote “The Price of Salt” (the book on which “Carol” was based), being gay was a crime. If you were fired from your job, you didn’t have Lambda Legal to turn to. If your family kicked you out, you might have nowhere else to go. If Cate Blanchett is clearly smoking something, she’s been sharing with Holland Taylor. The beloved character actress—known for her work in diverse roles ranging from “The Truman Show” and “Legally Blonde” to “Two and a Half Men”—explained that she never bothered with coming out because she “lives out.” In an interview with WNYC’s “Death, Sex & Money, the 72-year-old actress said that the only reason she’s bothered with it now is because she’s happy in love. (She’s rumored to be dating Blanchett’s “Carol” co-star Sarah Paulson). That’s a sweet sentiment and vaguely reminiscent of “Modern Family” actor Reid Ewing’s own non-coming out in November. Ewing referred to another man as “hot” on in a tweet, which led one of the actor’s followers to ask if Reid just outed himself. His response? “I was never in,” Reid replied. In both of these instances, the idea appears to be that if you’re famous and you’ve come out to your family and friends, living openly but privately as a queer person, that’s the end of it. You’ve come out and you’re totally out now. It is finished. But what we too often fail to recognize is that coming out isn’t a decision you make once—you will be forced to come out to your friends, family, coworkers, and strangers nearly every day. As a queer man who leans on the effeminate side, I come out when I open my mouth to baristas or swish down the sidewalk in my favorite pair of pink pants. Reid himself recognized our many coming outs in a recent Huffington Post op-ed on his struggles with body dysmorphia. “Body dysmorphic disorder is a mental illness in which a person obsesses over the way he or she looks,” he wrote. "In my case, my looks were the only thing that mattered to me. I had just moved to L.A. to become an actor and had very few, if any, friends. I'd sit alone in my apartment and take pictures of myself from every angle, analyzing every feature.” Sharing those experiences helps normalize the experiences of having an eating disorder or a mental illness for gay men—or others—who might be facing similar issues. As a queer person, I’ve likewise come out about my history with anorexia—as well as being bullied in school, having IBS, and being in a open relationship. That honesty matters—because it illustrates the importance of living as our fullest selves. If Slate’s Stephanie Fairyington argued that we do need to shout our identities from the rafters, it’s something that we need to do our entire lives. For Holland Taylor, coming out as a woman in her 70s doesn’t just make our queer elders visible—in a community that too often marginalizes anyone over 40—but also (if the speculation is accurate) can help combat stigma about couples with marked age differences. When 41-year-old “Milk” screenwriter Dustin Lance Black and 21-year-old Olympian Tom Daley announced they were a couple back in 2013, the online backlash illustrated the lingering ageism in the gay community. Whether you’re coming out as a septuagenarian lesbian who is (maybe) dating a much younger woman or a furry, our stories show the multiplicity of our coming out experiences. It’s easy to look at coming out as a canned PR statement or nothing but a formality, but they’re filled with some of the most intimate parts of our unique histories. One of my favorite coming out stories ever is courtesy of Nathan Lane. The “Producers” actor recalls that when he told his mother he’s gay, she got very pale and said, “I would rather you were dead.” With his trademark wit, he responded, “I knew you would understand.” And in a speech for the Human Rights Campaign last February, "Juno" actress Ellen Page publicly discussed her sexuality for the first time and argued the crucial importance of doing so. “I suffered for years because I was scared to be out,” Page said. “My spirit suffered, my mental health suffered, and my relationships suffered. And I’m standing here today, with all of you, on the other side of that pain.” It does our community a grave disservice to treat these moments as irrelevant and dismiss the importance of our lifelong coming out process. I understand why many celebrities might want to keep their private life private (Kristen Stewart is a perfect example), but we have so much to gain from continuing to shout our identities from every rafter possible. It’s good for our community, who benefits from added visibility; it’s good for LGBT youth, who have crucial possibility models; but most of all, it’s good for ourselves. Through the simple act of living as out as possible, we can, thus, do so much. We can make the world safer for people facing body issues. We can tell people that even if your family doesn’t accept you, it doesn’t make you any less of a vibrant, amazing individual. And in doing so, we can heal the pain in others—as well as ourselves. Saying “I am” 50 years after you initially came out might seem passé, but it’s these everyday acts of honesty and bravery that help change the world.
We need a war on bad sex — and the feminist pushback won’t be changed by James Deen controversy
The story of the porn star James Deen being accused by multiple women of sexual assault isn't just your typical beloved-celebrity-faced-with-multiple-allegations story, of which we have far too many. The story is a huge chatter point in online feminist circles. But this time it's not being driven by outrage at an industry for shielding him---on the contrary, it seems that Deen is being dropped like a hot potato by industry leaders---but because of what all this supposedly says about feminism. You see, Deen had something of a reputation as the "feminist" porn star, or at least the male feminist one. In fact, it was this reputation, unearned by anything Deen himself did, that his ex-girlfriend, Stoya, said caused her to speak out.
So now we're enduring a cycle of navel-gazing about feminism's internal failures and finger-pointing and suspicion aimed especially at male feminists. The whole thing, however, is a pointless exercise because, as Amanda Hess at Slate points out, Deen never actually was the male feminist porn star icon that people made him out to be. He actually seems like he's dim-witted and sexist and always has been. The entire myth about him being a "feminist" started not because of anything he did, but because a bunch of teen girls and young women had, mostly on Tumblr, started a movement of creating short porn gifs and stills of Deen, who was selected because, in a hetero porn world geared strictly towards male viewers, Deen occasionally did something that the ladies like. Deen's fans aren't really fans. They are remix artists who prune away 99% of his movies to capture that one moment of real heat and string those together to create a female-friendly erotic landscape. "As soon as these girls launched Deen to mainstream recognition, however, they were recast into minor supporting roles in Deen’s narrative," Hess writes. "Credit for the community they created was transferred to Deen himself." Clearly, our society has not shed the notion that women are inherently asexual unless they are led astray by lustful men. The idea that women could be the engine of their own sexual empowerment is so hard for some people to wrap their head around that the credit was instead given to this doofus guy who has never, as far as I can tell, said a single thing interesting enough to remember in public. And now he's being accused by multiple women of rape, making the women who were supposedly following him like horny ducklings seem like fools. The truth is that Deen's fame is a symptom of a sign of the keen longing that women, especially young women, feel to have their sexual desires catered to even a fraction as much as men get by birthright. There are a million hack jokes you can tell about how easy it supposedly is to get porn from the Internet these days, and that no doubt seems true, if you are a straight man. For straight women, however, you might as well be a man in the 19th century trying to find some decent smut through an underground network. Going online to look for materials to stimulate the erotic imagination means running a high chance of being demoralized to the point where you just give up and decide to cook something instead. (Perhaps this is a plot against women.) If you're lucky, all that you'll come across is a bunch of women being jackhammered while they try not to look bored. If you're unlucky, you'll come across a bunch of materials that make you wonder if all men really do secretly hate women. The female-driven porn gif community of Twitter are doing a hero's job of combing through all that unsexy stuff and pulling the occasional moment when it stops looking like work for the women and starts looking like they actually enjoy themselves. It's a small piece of what is a larger issue for women in our age of increased sexual freedoms: We're still not as free as we should be from the assumption that sex isn't something we do for fun so much as a service we provide to men to thank them for the graciousness they have shown us in showing up at all. It's not just in the porn world, where women on camera are often treated like extremely large sex toys more than mutual pleasure-seekers. As Rebecca Traister chronicled in her New York piece on campus women and sex, a lot of young women are increasingly vocal about how unsatisfying partnered sex often is. "Students I spoke to talked about 'male sexual entitlement,' the expectation that male sexual needs take priority, with men presumed to take sex and women presumed to give it to them," she writes. "Meanwhile, male climax remains the accepted finish of hetero encounters; a woman’s orgasm is still the elusive, optional bonus round." Women Traister spoke to complained of still having to do all the work of having the perfectly fuckable bodies while men continued to "set the terms." This isn't anything new, to be clear. The idea that men are the buyers and women the product predates the so-called "hook-up culture" and, if anything, permeates the marriage-minded dating markets of the past even more. And while feminist pushback against this is nothing new---consider the way that feminists took the vibrator from a place of shame to the shelves of your local drugstore---there is something to be said about the vibrancy that young women are bringing to the fight to change the way we look at sex. From the show "Girls" to the porn gifs to the popularity of the term "fuckboy" to describe entitled losers, women are growing increasingly bold about pinpointing why sex is so often unsatisfying (male entitlement) and outlining ways women can get more out of it.The story of the porn star James Deen being accused by multiple women of sexual assault isn't just your typical beloved-celebrity-faced-with-multiple-allegations story, of which we have far too many. The story is a huge chatter point in online feminist circles. But this time it's not being driven by outrage at an industry for shielding him---on the contrary, it seems that Deen is being dropped like a hot potato by industry leaders---but because of what all this supposedly says about feminism. You see, Deen had something of a reputation as the "feminist" porn star, or at least the male feminist one. In fact, it was this reputation, unearned by anything Deen himself did, that his ex-girlfriend, Stoya, said caused her to speak out.That thing where you log in to the internet for a second and see people idolizing the guy who raped you as a feminist. That thing sucks.
— Stoya (@stoya) November 28, 2015
So now we're enduring a cycle of navel-gazing about feminism's internal failures and finger-pointing and suspicion aimed especially at male feminists. The whole thing, however, is a pointless exercise because, as Amanda Hess at Slate points out, Deen never actually was the male feminist porn star icon that people made him out to be. He actually seems like he's dim-witted and sexist and always has been. The entire myth about him being a "feminist" started not because of anything he did, but because a bunch of teen girls and young women had, mostly on Tumblr, started a movement of creating short porn gifs and stills of Deen, who was selected because, in a hetero porn world geared strictly towards male viewers, Deen occasionally did something that the ladies like. Deen's fans aren't really fans. They are remix artists who prune away 99% of his movies to capture that one moment of real heat and string those together to create a female-friendly erotic landscape. "As soon as these girls launched Deen to mainstream recognition, however, they were recast into minor supporting roles in Deen’s narrative," Hess writes. "Credit for the community they created was transferred to Deen himself." Clearly, our society has not shed the notion that women are inherently asexual unless they are led astray by lustful men. The idea that women could be the engine of their own sexual empowerment is so hard for some people to wrap their head around that the credit was instead given to this doofus guy who has never, as far as I can tell, said a single thing interesting enough to remember in public. And now he's being accused by multiple women of rape, making the women who were supposedly following him like horny ducklings seem like fools. The truth is that Deen's fame is a symptom of a sign of the keen longing that women, especially young women, feel to have their sexual desires catered to even a fraction as much as men get by birthright. There are a million hack jokes you can tell about how easy it supposedly is to get porn from the Internet these days, and that no doubt seems true, if you are a straight man. For straight women, however, you might as well be a man in the 19th century trying to find some decent smut through an underground network. Going online to look for materials to stimulate the erotic imagination means running a high chance of being demoralized to the point where you just give up and decide to cook something instead. (Perhaps this is a plot against women.) If you're lucky, all that you'll come across is a bunch of women being jackhammered while they try not to look bored. If you're unlucky, you'll come across a bunch of materials that make you wonder if all men really do secretly hate women. The female-driven porn gif community of Twitter are doing a hero's job of combing through all that unsexy stuff and pulling the occasional moment when it stops looking like work for the women and starts looking like they actually enjoy themselves. It's a small piece of what is a larger issue for women in our age of increased sexual freedoms: We're still not as free as we should be from the assumption that sex isn't something we do for fun so much as a service we provide to men to thank them for the graciousness they have shown us in showing up at all. It's not just in the porn world, where women on camera are often treated like extremely large sex toys more than mutual pleasure-seekers. As Rebecca Traister chronicled in her New York piece on campus women and sex, a lot of young women are increasingly vocal about how unsatisfying partnered sex often is. "Students I spoke to talked about 'male sexual entitlement,' the expectation that male sexual needs take priority, with men presumed to take sex and women presumed to give it to them," she writes. "Meanwhile, male climax remains the accepted finish of hetero encounters; a woman’s orgasm is still the elusive, optional bonus round." Women Traister spoke to complained of still having to do all the work of having the perfectly fuckable bodies while men continued to "set the terms." This isn't anything new, to be clear. The idea that men are the buyers and women the product predates the so-called "hook-up culture" and, if anything, permeates the marriage-minded dating markets of the past even more. And while feminist pushback against this is nothing new---consider the way that feminists took the vibrator from a place of shame to the shelves of your local drugstore---there is something to be said about the vibrancy that young women are bringing to the fight to change the way we look at sex. From the show "Girls" to the porn gifs to the popularity of the term "fuckboy" to describe entitled losers, women are growing increasingly bold about pinpointing why sex is so often unsatisfying (male entitlement) and outlining ways women can get more out of it.That thing where you log in to the internet for a second and see people idolizing the guy who raped you as a feminist. That thing sucks.
— Stoya (@stoya) November 28, 2015
“We’re all refugees”: What teaching displaced Syrians taught me about my calling and my country
In my first class on "The Odyssey" at the University of Jordan, my students surprised me with readings far darker than any I’d encountered in my classes in the U.S. I have taught this work in translation perhaps a dozen times. In teaching the work, I like to focus on depictions of terrain: lush Ogygia, rocky Ithaka, the perilous wilderness of the wine-dark sea. And still smoldering on the shore behind them, the ruins of Troy. There are nymphs and witches, seduction and intrigues, gruesome violence and angry gods. There is an awkward adolescent becoming a man, a clever hero taking vengeance on his enemies, and a crafty wife thwarting the designs of boorish suitors. There is the joyful reunion of a loving, long-parted couple, and the restoration of order to a troubled oikos. "The Odyssey" is romance and comedy.
But that’s not how my students in Jordan read it at all. Many of them are Syrian, or Iraqi, or Palestinian refugees. In their written responses to the first three books, much of the class wrote some variation of: “We know this story. We know what it is to be unable to go home, to show up with nothing at the door of strangers and hope they greet us with kindness instead of anger. We know what it’s like to wonder about the fate of family members, caught up in wars that seem to go on forever, and to hope that one day we will see them again.”
In its depiction of Odysseus' journey, "The Odyssey" is a survey of the Ancient Greek practice of xenia—reciprocal hospitality. But for my students, it depicts the exile’s anxiety in a world in which the principle of xenia is threatened, in which the stranger’s welcome is in doubt. Odysseus asks himself many times about the inhabitants of the unknown islands: “Savages are they, strangers to courtesy? Or gentle folk who know and fear the gods?” Today, this set of questions from an ancient work has surfaced again in the political debates in the U.S. and the rest of the world: What is the morally appropriate way to respond to a stranger in need, a person from a distant land who arrives on your shore in need of aid and shelter? What obligations do civilized people owe to the destitute stranger in a world aflame with slaughter and destruction? And how are we to think about those who refuse to acknowledge any such obligations?
Like many residents of Amman, I came to Jordan from elsewhere. But I am no refugee. Instead of Odysseus, I’m more like an aged Telémakhos: unsure of custom, timid about my language, cautious about my actions, fearful of giving offense, but backed by a power that wishes me well (though the Fulbright Commission is perhaps somewhat limited in power compared to Athena). I came to Jordan in search of adventure, wisdom, the opportunity to do my country a service, though I am not a soldier or diplomat. I had grown comfortable in my home state, living on the family farm, teaching at the local university. I wanted a chance to revive and practice my Arabic, which I had studied 10 years ago in an attempt to read the poetry of medieval al-Andalus. I wanted to make friends, meet colleagues and read literature with students in a place that seemed the stable center of a chaotic region. My decision also was, I suppose, part of my ongoing search for perspective on why humanists go on doing what we do: paying close attention to poetry, philosophy, music and art, while others around us do all they can to convince us that such pursuits are pointless frivolities in the face of incontestable economic and political demands.
Of a population of about 8 million, 1 million residents of Jordan are registered refugees or asylum-seekers from Syria and Iraq. Another 2 million are registered refugees from Palestine. And these figures don’t count those Syrians, Iraqis and Palestinians without official refugee status.
My neighborhood is known for its large Iraqi population. They own or work in the shops and restaurants. They live in neighboring buildings. My students are Syrian and Palestinian. They speak English, and they smile indulgently at my clumsy attempts to communicate in Fusha— which sounds to them the way a toddler attempting to declaim Spenserian English might sound to us. I do not blend. Where are you from? they ask me. I tell them that I’m from the U.S., from New Orleans. Some of them say: “Jazz!” and their faces light up. Some remember seeing reports about Hurricane Katrina. "Welcome," they always say. "You are welcome here."
It wasn’t long ago—10 years— that my graduate school apartment in Baton Rouge was a refuge for those fleeing my flooded hometown. I am one of those who happily took “refugees” into my home. Family, then friends, then friends of friends, then people I didn’t know. The possibility of refusing never occurred to me. I was volunteering as a first responder at a shelter. I handed my key to my cousin, a Tulane medical student coordinating emergency healthcare in the storm’s aftermath. I said she should make copies if she needed to, and hand them out to anyone who needed a floor to sleep on and a roof to sleep under. She did. They, too, were welcome. I know and love the ruined city they were fleeing. It was my city once, laid waste by what might have been ascribed 2,800 years ago to Poseidon’s rage. And I remember the stories told at the time about how dangerous—or lazy—or thieving—Katrina refugees were supposed to be—stories that seemed to me then and now as invented as any ancient tale or fable.
Now I live, work and teach among people whose lives have been disrupted—and sometimes all but destroyed—in part by policies my country has adopted in pursuit of its interests. Whether that cause was just or wise or necessary for reasons of state is of secondary concern to people who have had to separate from family, or flee their home, possibly never to return. As policy debates rage and rhetoric flies, it’s easy to forget that for millions of people, statelessness, persecution and displacement are not abstract. They are not issues of political discourse but of life, death, love, family and immeasurable personal loss.
For many of my students, "The Odyssey" is not just a story because Troy still burns on the shore behind them, and home is far away. These are people who have fled the threat of actual daily violence—not in some far-off land, but in the place where they live. They could justifiably hold me at least partially responsible for what has happened to them. I have a vote. I am a citizen. Thanks to my profession, I have a voice. I have some (theoretical and minuscule) effect on my nation's policies abroad. Yet, never have any of them treated me as if their misfortune were my fault, or as if I might be an agent of further violence and destruction. Never have any of them made me feel anything other than warmly welcomed. In that sense, my students grasped the principles of xenia quickly. They are simple: when strangers arrive at the door, the host is to offer them food and drink, and perhaps a wash, before even asking who they are. Only after their needs are met may the host ask questions. In turn, the guest is to behave respectfully, show appreciation and not make demands that cannot be met. These rules, my students said, are a lot like the rules their grandparents follow about guests. The Odyssey presents an array of examples of the treatment of strangers. There is windy Nestor, humble Eumaios, graceful Nausikaa, and anthropophagous Polyphêmos. The expansive (if slightly tacky) Menelaus gives a retainer a tongue-lashing for being too slow to offer hospitality to Telémakhos and his companions. In "The Odyssey," generous hospitality marks the greatness of a ruler.
I remember this when I read the news out of my home country, when I read about how the fear of strangers seeking refuge has come to dominate political discourse. In my home state of Louisiana, both the Democratic and the Republican candidate for governor engaged in a contest to show who feared refugees more. The House of Representatives has passed a bill making refugee status for Syrians all but impossible in practice. Refugees like Odysseus, perhaps, are whom they fear. When Odysseus washes up on foreign shores, he is a dangerous man of military age: a schemer, a steely, wily, proven warrior with a bloodbath behind him and the destruction of a great city at least partially to his credit.
The refugees I have taught could not be more different. My students—overwhelmingly women—are subtle and sharp in their insight and reasoning, polite and enthusiastic. They are elegant in stylish hijab, or rebellious in Nirvana or Ramones T-shirts and jeans.
How many of you, I asked after that first class, know a refugee? Every hand went up. How many have family or friends who are refugees? Every hand stayed up. OK, I said. How many of you— I could barely get the question out before the chorus of responses: "We’re all refugees. I’m a refugee. My whole family are refugees. It’s all of us."
So I can understand why so many of them took special note of Odysseus’ plea to the Phaiákian queen Arêtê in Book VII: “[g]rant me passage to my father land. My home and friends are far. My life is pain.” For many of them the ruins of Troy are still smoldering behind them, their oikos in utter disarray with little hope of putting it right. And now the hope of safe haven vanishes too. There may be no solace for them across the wine-dark sea, which continues to claim victims in many of the same places it did in Homer’s time.
This conversation continued after each class. One afternoon, a discussion with one of my Syrian students led to stories about the home her family fled.
“I wish I had been here 10 years ago,” I told her. “I would have loved to visit Syria.”
She said, “Yes, I would love to go home,” then added, “Insha’allah.” If God wills—a ubiquitous Arabic expression of doubt and hope, a reminder in this region that many people believe their life and fortune to be subject to the will of the divine.
“You would be welcome there,” she adds. “You would be very welcome.”
In that promised welcome to a home she had lost, I heard an echo of our shared experience.
Reading one of the world’s oldest refugee tales with a class full of refugees afforded me one of the great rewards of studying literature: the chance to be astonished, to see a blaze of new light shed on an old story, to be moved by a glimpse into another’s vision and experience of the world. I will never again read "The Odyssey" without thinking of my students in Jordan and their longing for home—or at least refuge—in a dangerous world. Our lives and lots could not be more different, and yet, strangely, I feel as though our fates are intertwined.
New York critics pile the love on “Carol” — but wait, “Mad Max” is now an Oscar contender, too
It will be weeks before even the most avid moviegoers begin to focus on the details of the Oscar race, and several of the supposed leading contenders, including Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “The Revenant,” Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” and David O. Russell’s “Joy,” won’t even reach theaters until Christmas. I have now seen all three of those movies, but I face death or excommunication or a period of indentured servitude to Harvey Weinstein, whichever is worse, if I drop any review-type hints. Here are the facts, however: None of those movies has won any major awards from the people who have watched them so far. You can’t rely on critics’ groups and other early voters to provide any solid information about the ultimate winners, but we can say this: The confusing early returns provided this week by the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review have set the film world atwitter. Like, literally a-Twitter. As a member of the NYFCC, the nation’s oldest and most aggressively self-aggrandizing critics group, I’m sworn not to reveal any details about our deliberations or our voting process. I can promise you that some of the juicy gossip will leak out to some over-eager blogger somehow or other, but that won’t happen here and anyway it wasn’t all that juicy this year. Todd Haynes’ ravishing 1950s love story “Carol,” with Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara as lesbian lovers from different social worlds, was the big winner in our group's vote on Wednesday. Indeed “Carol” was the huge winner, sweeping nearly all the plausible categories: best picture, best director, best screenplay (for Phyllis Nagy’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel “The Price of Salt”) and best cinematography (by the splendiferous Edward Lachman). I trust I am not violating the gag rule by suggesting that Blanchett and Mara ultimately canceled each other out in the best-actress competition, which is a highly plausible outcome in the Oscar race as well. That award went to Irish actress Saoirse Ronan for another film set in the ‘50s, John Crowley’s immigrant drama “Brooklyn.” I am personally delighted with those results, because I think Haynes may be the most talented and original American filmmaker of his generation – he is 54, amazingly enough, much younger than the Spielberg-Scorsese generation but no youthful sprite – and because I think “Carol” is not just a landmark work of “queer cinema” (a term Haynes embraces) but one of the great romances of the American screen ever, period. But I definitely do not forecast a similar sweep for “Carol” come Oscar time, not so much because it’s a love story about two women – that is likely to make the Academy's aging male core membership want to see it, frankly -- but because it will strike Oscar voters as overly arch and mannered and arty. (To be clear, I do not think it is any of those things. I think it’s a masterpiece.) At any rate, combine the “Carol” onslaught with the National Board of Review’s embrace of Hollywood populism, which included naming “Mad Max: Fury Road” as best picture and giving three major prizes to “The Martian,” including best director for Ridley Scott and best actor for Matt Damon, and we can only conclude – well, what? That nobody knows anything, in the famous phrase of screenwriting legend William Goldman. A somewhat mysterious group whose members are not exactly critics and not exactly industry insiders, the NBR has an even worse record as an Oscar predictor than the NYFCC: Its last two best-picture selections were J.C. Chandor’s “A Most Violent Year” and Spike Jonze’s “Her,” which won exactly one Oscar between them. Still, many of the Oscar-centric assumptions that were widely shared in Hollywood on Monday morning look dubious or worse now. We can frame those as a series of questions, whose possible answers will be much discussed this weekend at Beverly Hills restaurants and dinner parties. Is Tom McCarthy’s “Spotlight,” the ensemble drama about the Boston Globe’s investigation of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, still the Academy’s presumptive consensus choice? Because that movie won nothing whatever from the NBR and just one award (Michael Keaton as best actor) from the NYFCC. Are “Carol” and “Mad Max” and “The Martian” all pretty much locked down as best-picture nominees? I would say yeah, absolutely, and a good thing too -- but I am not necessarily more reliable on such matters than throwing the I Ching. In an overcrowded best-actor field, what just happened to Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Revenant” and Eddie Redmayne in “The Danish Girl” and Will Smith in “Concussion” and Michael Fassbender in “Steve Jobs,” big names who gave supremely Oscar-y performances and have been floated as leading contenders? Because those guys won absolutely nothing from these early awards groups, and in fact all four of those movies were ignored altogether. (As were “Joy” and “Truth” and “Sicario,” along with more indie-ish options like “Anomalisa,” “Straight Outta Compton” and “Tangerine.”) The horse-race answer is that those actors’ Oscar odds definitely took a big hit, and Fassbender and Smith are most likely out of the race before it starts. Based on what I saw and heard during the NYFCC vote but can’t tell you about, I suspect that Michael Keaton really might win his Oscar this year despite all the more famous and more handsome men who are likely to be nominated. If you want to say that’s because he should have won last year for “Birdman” but did not, well OK. Now we get to the painful follow-up question about whether there will be any actors of color nominated in any of the four acting categories, and I’m afraid that one comes with a troubling multi-part answer. It won’t be easy to manage, but the Academy really, really hopes the answer turns out to be yes. I would look past Will Smith as a brain doctor, honestly, to the acclaimed performance by Michael B. Jordan in “Creed,” for one possibility. (Samuel L. Jackson, a universally recognized face and one of the best-loved character actors in Hollywood, has the biggest role in Tarantino’s “Hateful Eight,” but, well … like I said, we’ll talk about that some other time.) The underlying problem is not about a lack of prominent nonwhite roles or non-race-specific roles in one particular year, of course – it speaks to deeper issues in the Hollywood production pipeline about concept development and audience perception and marketing, especially when it comes to the adult-oriented “prestige” films rolled out during awards season. Saoirse Ronan was already the leading best-actress contender, and in a field that feels a little short on glamorous names and faces (except for Blanchett, a recent winner) she may now be perceived as a sure thing. Mark Rylance’s unforgettable chilly-cuddly turn as an unrepentant Soviet spy in “Bridge of Spies” probably is a sure thing in the supporting actor category, although you have to love the NBR for picking Sylvester Stallone in “Creed” instead. The NYFCC thrust Kristen Stewart’s indie-film career rebuild into the limelight by giving her the supporting actress award for playing a star’s personal assistant in “Clouds of Sils Maria”; an Oscar nomination (but probably not an actual Oscar) would seal the deal. If you choose to accuse our group of honoring K-Stew because we wanted at least one big celebrity to show up for our schmancy January dinner party, along with Rylance and Lachman and Haynes and 85-year-old documentary legend Frederick Wiseman and a bunch of other people the paparazzi won’t recognize, well, I’m shocked that you would even bring that up. Simply shocked.
