Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Senior Rand Paul aide tells me he will take to the Senate floor tomorrow for an extended speech about the folly of arming the Syrian rebels.
— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) September 16, 2014
What kind of a world is this, where one might have to agree — however fleetingly! (he’ll have a different opinion by tomorrow) — with Senator AquaBuddah?
Diana Prince fans, represent! My heart will always be with the “controversial” womyn’s-libber WW of my teenage years, primed by fuzzy memories of reprints of the 1940s Nazi-fighting WW. But Wonder Woman’s history, and her creator’s, is a lot stranger than I ever knew. Historian Jill LePore, in the New Yorker, on “Wonder Woman’s Secret Past“:
… The much cited difficulties regarding putting Wonder Woman on film—Wonder Woman isn’t big enough, and neither are Gal Gadot’s breasts—aren’t chiefly about Wonder Woman, or comic books, or superheroes, or movies. They’re about politics. Superman owes a debt to science fiction, Batman to the hardboiled detective. Wonder Woman’s debt is to feminism. She’s the missing link in a chain of events that begins with the woman-suffrage campaigns of the nineteen-tens and ends with the troubled place of feminism a century later. Wonder Woman is so hard to put on film because the fight for women’s rights has gone so badly…
Wonder Woman’s origin story comes straight out of feminist utopian fiction. In the nineteenth century, suffragists, following the work of anthropologists, believed that something like the Amazons of Greek myth had once existed, a matriarchy that predated the rise of patriarchy. “The period of woman’s supremacy lasted through many centuries,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote in 1891. In the nineteen-tens, this idea became a staple of feminist thought. The word “feminism,” hardly ever used in the United States before 1910, was everywhere by 1913. The suffrage movement had been founded on a set of ideas about women’s supposed moral superiority. Feminism rested on the principle of equality. Suffrage was a single, elusive political goal. Feminism’s demand for equality was far broader. “All feminists are suffragists, but not all suffragists are feminists,” as one feminist explained. They shared an obsession with Amazons…
In 1917, when motion pictures were still a novelty and the United States had only just entered the First World War, Sanger starred in a silent film called “Birth Control”; it was banned. A century of warfare, feminism, and cinema later, superhero movies—adaptations and updates of mid-twentieth-century comic books whose plots revolve around anxieties about mad scientists, organized crime, tyrannical super-states, alien invaders, misunderstood mutants, and world-ending weapons—are the super-blockbusters of the last superpower left standing. No one knows how Wonder Woman will fare onscreen: there’s hardly ever been a big-budget superhero movie starring a female superhero. But more of the mystery lies in the fact that Wonder Woman’s origins have been, for so long, so unknown. It isn’t only that Wonder Woman’s backstory is taken from feminist utopian fiction. It’s that, in creating Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marston was profoundly influenced by early-twentieth-century suffragists, feminists, and birth-control advocates and that, shockingly, Wonder Woman was inspired by Margaret Sanger, who, hidden from the world, was a member of Marston’s family…
Marston was also what we’d now call a polyamorist:
Ahem. Some awesomely prescient dude wrote this:
Additionally, why the hell did the NFL put in the new six game suspension policy if they aren’t going to follow it? This was Rice’s first incident and Goodell gave him two games sitting before the new policy came out. How do you re-punish? And even then, if you are going to just wing this and you are going to go about and re-punish him, shouldn’t it be either four more games or a lifetime ban? It just makes no sense to me. What is Goodell doing or thinking? Is he just going to wait until the furor dies down and then decide to reinstate him- will that be four, five, ten games? Is he going to string him along for a year and then ban him permanently? Again, Goodell is just making shit up as he goes along, and I have no idea how anyone can think he or the NFL is sincere.
If you take a crime seriously, and domestic abuse is one that really should be taken seriously, you need to address it seriously. You need to set out a clear guideline for what is and what is not acceptable and what the punishment will be. In this case, Goodell has failed in almost every aspect discussed here, and some that were not. The initial punishment was too lenient, the second punishment is not clearly defined, and he still has never addressed the odious tweets that came from the Ravens organization (now deleted):
Janay Rice says she deeply regrets the role that she played the night of the incident.
— Baltimore Ravens (@Ravens) May 23, 2014
Like I said, he’s just making shit up as he goes along, and that’s no way to run a small store let alone a multi-billion high profile business. Not to mention, the Players Union should and probably will have a legal field day with this illogical behavior, which will then be portrayed as the Players Union supporting domestic violence when what they are really doing is defending their union members from arbitrary justice. That will give the NFL another pr disaster and counts, in my book, as “conduct detrimental to the league,” and if you think for one second the owners won’t use that in the long run to further weaken the union, you’re on glue.
ESPN:
The NFL players’ union appealed Ray Rice’s indefinite suspension Tuesday night.
Rice was originally handed a two-game suspension in July under the NFL’s personal conduct policy after he was charged with assault following a Feb. 15 altercation with his then-fiancee in a casino elevator.
The Baltimore running back had already served the first game of that suspension when, on Sept. 8, a video surfaced showing Rice punching Janay Palmer, now his wife, in that elevator.
Within hours, the Ravens released Rice and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell extended the suspension to indefinite based on the “new evidence.”
Goodell and the Ravens say they never saw the video before Sept. 8.
“This action taken by our union is to protect the due process rights of all NFL players,” the NFL Players Association said in a statement. “The NFLPA appeal is based on supporting facts that reveal a lack of a fair and impartial process, including the role of the office of the commissioner of the NFL. We have asked that a neutral and jointly selected arbitrator hear this case as the commissioner and his staff will be essential witnesses in the proceeding and thus cannot serve as impartial arbitrators.”
The NFLPA said that the collective bargaining agreement requires a hearing date be set within 10 days of the appeal notice. It also said the hearing will require a neutral arbitrator to determine what information was available to the NFL and when it was available.
Both the NFL and players’ association agree that Rice will remain suspended indefinitely while the appeal is resolved, league and union sources told ESPN’s Ed Werder.
The union, which had until 11:59 p.m. Tuesday to file the appeal, added that under governing labor law, an employee can’t be punished twice for the same action when all of the relevant facts were available to the employer at the time of the first punishment.
That last line that states “at the time of the first punishment” is just someone at the NFLPA having a jolly good time sticking the shiv in Roger, basically calling him a liar because he states, defying plausibility, that he never saw the elevator video until last week. Again, I have no idea how Goodell is keeping his job. He needs to be fired and sent somewhere where that kind of idiocy is rewarded. Maybe a gig at Fox News or he could run for the House as a Republican.
The Fusion Intelligence Center in Charleston has been on top of classified information coming in daily on ISIS and keeps tabs on how close the terrorist organization’s activities might be to the Mountain State.
While it could not get into specifics about locations or how many people, the Fusion Center said ISIS is training and recruiting members here in the United States; close enough to be concerned. The center has monitored people with terrorist ties passing through here.
“Our role is receiving information,” Director Thomas Kirk said.
Even before it’s made public, the Fusion Center has access to classified information from all over the world.
And if you think Steven Sotloff is the last American to die, brace yourself. Those two brutal killings, James Foley first and then Sotloff, are just the beginning, Kirk said.
When asked if there was anything he could say about the second video, compared to the first one, Kirk smiled and replied, “No,” since all of the information is still classified.
Kirk could not reveal much, but said investigators are comparing the voices on the two ISIS execution videos, the scenery, the hand holding the knife and the eyes of the man wearing the black head covering.
I sure as hell hope they don’t come here and terrorize us, because they could do a lot of damage. They might make large donations to our government officials and even force workers to donate to friendly politicians, basically take over our legislature and weaken or eradicate all our laws protecting us, all while stacking the judiciary with corporate cronies. They then could flatten hills that would lead to deadly flash flooding, poison our water and kill our rivers and streams, pollute the region, drown our citizenry in large amounts of industrial waste, and lead to the premature death of thousands of citizens, all while taking their profits out of state and overseas. We’d probably all suffer from Stockholm Syndrome and do silly things like stick Friends of ISIS stickers on our cars and tell anyone who doesn’t love ISIS that they aren’t a real American and vote against anyone who tries to run for office and help. Wouldn’t want that to happen.
Adam responds to some questions from his recent post. This is a few days old because I forgot to post it, but the info is still relevant:
Answers to Some of the Questions Raised in the Islamic State Post
Adam L. Silverman, PhD*For tonight’s entry in (M)Ad Homonym Theater I wanted to try to answer a couple of the questions that were raised yesterday in the comments to my post on ISIL. The first of these will be BettyCracker’s question on the best way to break the chain of neutralization and drift. I want to approach this one very carefully. I am not applying this empirical theory in a very systematic way. Rather I had been asked, back in 2010, by someone I was providing support for with the Department of Defense (DOD), if I could provide a socio-cultural explanation for why we had a small number of Muslim-American and Anglo-Muslim youth suddenly trying to get to Pakistan and Afghanistan to join al Qaeda (AQ), as well as a small number who actually made it to Somalia to join al Shabab or to Yemen to join up with the AQ affiliate there. When I dug into the news’ reporting on the four or five youth that were stopped from going to Pakistan/Afghanistan – I think they were from the DC suburbs – and the ones that made it to either Somalia or Yemen, what struck me was the similarity to what Sykes and Matza had theorized. The more recent examples with ISIL and the other Syrian rebel groups, such as the one that Anne Laurie wrote about last night, also strike me as good examples of neutralization and drift. Essentially, I’m eyeballing it…
Now that the caveats are out of the way… There have been a number of attempts to incorporate solutions rooted in neutralization and drift into either crime reduction or delinquency diversion over the years. Some of these are built into the concepts of restorative justice, as well as many other programs, which seek to reinforce established norms in order to prevent techniques of neutralization from leading to drift. As one might imagine, and as with a lot of the attempts to translate criminology’s vast empirical explanations for crime, deviance, and delinquency, we are a lot better at diagnosing or explaining the problem than we are at prescribing solutions to them based on our theoretical explanations. Where I see the possibility of utilizing the recognition that we are observing a form of neutralization and drift is to connect it to engagement with communities – leadership, other elites and notables within the communities who could function as role models, and as many other community members that can be reached – to counteract the most likely neutralization techniques. There are five of these, but the three that seem to be most likely in play here are: denial of victim (retribution against perceived injustice/the victim had it coming), condemnation of the condemners (action against perceived hypocrisy), and appeals to higher authority (religious, ideological, etc). According to Sykes and Matza, using these techniques provide one with episodic relief from conformity to norms allowing for drift. As a result the solution is to try to remove the salience and validity of these appeals and provide other, more acceptable, and less negative and destructive outlets for periodic forays away from conformity.
Linnaues asked what I meant by reactionized. When I was in grad school I was exposed to writings on ideology that broke up the spectrum (from Left to Right) as Radical; Liberal with breakouts for Classic, Economic, and Social; Centrist (moderate is often used here); Conservative with breakouts for Economic, Social, and/or Religious; Authoritarian; and Reactionary. Moreover, the best way to graphically display this was to use a horseshoe with the two ends actually closer to each other than they are to the center, rather than as a left right continuum plotted along a line. Since then I have read a lot of other things that provide even better and more nuanced explanations of ideology, such as Professor Robin’s and Professor Altemeyer’s work, but what always stuck with me was how reactionary was defined as the belief in an imagined golden age in the past and the attempt to reconstruct it in the present. This was contrasted with radical, which is the belief in an imagined, better future and the attempt to create it in the present. In both cases one could attempt to achieve one’s utopia, whether of the past or future, violently, non-violently, or as a combination. When you look at the type of Islam that is propagated by the hardcore believers within ISIL, or by bin Laden or Zawahiri, what they are promoting is a return to an imagined, glorious past. The reality of that past is not what they have bought into. However, they think it was how they conceptualize it and believe that they can recreate it. Most problematic – they are willing to use force to get there. I hope that clears the usage question up.
Suffern ACE: Sorry I was unclear, my worry is for the Muslims who have come from Europe, more than for those who have come from the US as 1) there are much more of them and 2) Chechnya is in Eastern Europe, so there is a proximity concern as well.
Villago Delenda Est: Yes, ISIL is one of the negative effects. The only Islamic extremists in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq were in his prisons or those from other states he was sheltering for his own foreign policy purposes. He did not tolerate religious extremists within the Iraqi populace as they were a threat to his dictatorship. He was, like the rulers in many other parts of the Middle East, more than happy to fund them where they would be someone else’s problem, but he was ruthless with them when they were found within Iraq. ISIL grew out of AQI, which developed in the social, political, economic, and security vacuum that we created in Iraq.
Chris: Some of the Awakenings folks were able to form political parties or join Ayyad Allawi’s coalition and get into either provincial government positions or into the Iraqi parliament. A lot of them, however, were rolled up. When I was in Iraq in 2008, as the US was getting manipulated on how the provincial elections were going to be done, PM Maliki was regularly rolling up or trying to roll up Awakenings groups that were involved in fielding candidates for those elections. I remember reporting in Iraqi and regional news on these operations for Awakenings folks in Wassit and Diyala Provinces (My brigade’s operating environment was in between the two). Moreover, because Iraq belonged to the Iraqis and we were beginning to transfer sovereignty by mid 2008, we began to transition control of the Sons of Iraq to the Iraqi government. As many as possible were supposed to be incorporated into the Iraqi Security Forces, this never really/properly happened. At the same time PM Maliki was setting up his own version that would be loyal to him as part of the attempt to coup proof himself. The Awakenings and Sons of Iraq folks are still in Iraq. They are the tribal Sunnis and some of the tribal Shi’a. A good deal of the tribal Sunnis are exploiting ISIL to get back at the Iraqi government, which they perceive as anti-Sunni. Others, such as the ones who won political office in Anbar Province, have made public appeals for US help against ISIL. AQI, ISIL’s progenitor, really mistreated the tribal Sunnis. They attempted to both impose their understanding of Islam and short circuit the kinship relations. This worked in Afghanistan, because kinship dynamics under the Pashtu do not look anything like those among the Iraqis. It also worked because religion and kinship were not blended in Afghanistan as they are in Iraq – many of the sheikhs I did engagements with are also imams. Members of the Anbar tribes have long memories…
Mnemosyne: actually I did type it quickly and did NOT proof it properly before sending it across. I promised John I would get it to him yesterday morning. I had a 1:30 PM meeting that was an hour away and was rushing to meet both the commitments I had made. And as is the case with anything anyone writes: it is always easier to catch other’s errors than one’s own; especially, when one is working in a hurry. You are not incorrect that clean writing or precise writing should have few, if any errors – factual or stylistic. However, the homonym errors that so assaulted your senses are some of the most common ones made when working in haste. As for my dissertation, two theses, and every report, assessment, research note, etc that I do professionally, I usually write them in crayon on construction paper. Actually, I have two or three folks proof them for me to make sure I do not miss anything. That’s just good practice. What always amazes me is when we all manage to miss one little thing. Apparently each of us are not as dumb as all of us combined…
* Adam L. Silverman most recently served as a civilian subject matter expert with the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Security Dialogue and US Army Europe. Prior to that he was the Cultural Advisor at the US Army War College from JUL 2010 through JUN 2014. He was deployed in Iraq as the Cultural Advisor for the 2nd Brigade Combat Team/1st Armored Division in 2008.
Your turn.
Jessica Roy at NYMag reports:
A 10-year-old goldfish was going to die from a brain tumor if it didn’t undergo a complicated operation. Knowing their beloved pet could live for 20 more years if the surgery was successful, George the goldfish’s owners decided to pony up hundreds of dollars to save the little guy….
Pictures at the link. I’ll admit, I was seriously curious as to how a fish could be safely anesthetized!
***********
Apart from secretly feeling a little superior better about one’s own “frivolous” pet-care expenditures, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Happy NewsPost + Comments (106)
Sometimes, Republicans, it’s good to think before speaking. Take former Arizona Senator Russell Pearce who recently had to resign as first vice chairman of the Arizona Republican Party, for instance. Pearce would probably still have a job if he didn’t say this if he was in charge of Arizona’s public assistance programs:
“The first thing I’d do is get Norplant, birth control implants, or tubal ligations…Then we’ll test recipients for drugs and alcohol, and if you want [to reproduce] or use drugs or alcohol, then get a job.”
Let’s just sterilize people. Brilliant idea, buddy.
Team Blackness also discussed Kanye West’s latest gaffe, why someone at Urban Outfitters should read a history book, and we touch on the Adrian Peterson controversy.
Subscribe on iTunes | Subscribe On Stitcher | Direct Download | RSS