renaissance poisson

we thought what happened to peter watts was bad?

this is much, much worse.

ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is holding prisoners in 186 unlisted, unmarked locations, many in suburban office parks or commercial spaces. people are shuttled around without a proper paper trail. their relatives often don't even know that they have been detained. they frequently don't have access to legal advice. they might get deported to wherever ICE thinks they should go, without anyone knowing.

i have no words. whenever i think i must have been too negative about the bush administration's actions, i must have been too paranoid (because some people i respected voted for him twice), something comes out that shows i wasn't even paranoid enough; the people on the daily kos whom i wrote off as mild conspiracy theorists, they were right all along.

and this continues to go on under obama's watch. to say i am disappointed in him would be an understatement. i never expected him to be a truly progressive president. but i expected better from him than allowing this sort of human rights violation to go on. he promised transparency. secret police and people disappearing isn't transparent.

i am mostly immune to it by now, except this one is so very clearly geared towards advertising instead of making people feel welcome and safe:

m/f gender will be a mandatory field at account creation.

LJ has never been terribly good about this; years of gender petition have resulted in no action that might make TG people feel considered. but now they're removing even the piddly "unspecified" option.

if you still care about LJ, synecdochic has good advice on how to give feedback.

if they start enforcing the binary choice for existing account holders, i'll stop reading the friends-locked LJs for which i now still visit the site.

so fictionwise has a new ebook reader for sale. the small print says "Items not shippable to Cuba, Iran, Syria or North Korea."

because... WE DON'T WANT THE AXIS OF EVIL TO READ?

ogi_ogas on September 3rd, 6:24

Apology

We wish to apologize for any offense caused by our survey, which was certainly never our intention. We can clearly understand how strong feelings were evoked by the specific nature of our interactions. We deeply regret this. We appreciate tremendously the invaluable feedback we've received, and certainly hope to improve our work and grow as people as a result of this experience.

this is what we who think deeply about language, its usage, and the thoughts between the lines know as a "fauxpology" or "nopology":

1. the nature of the offense isn't named -- not a word about the sexism, homophobia, transphobia, shoddy science, lies by omission (about the book deal, about university association), not protecting minors from the invasive personal questions in the craptastic survey, manipulating the moderators of fandom communities. did i forget anything?
   
2. the offended party isn't named -- ~2000 people who took the survey, many individuals who at first tried to engage with the speakers positively, then tried to show them the error of their ways, only to be patronized.
   
3. the offended party (once removed) is cast in the passive voice, while the speakers are in the active:
   
   
   
   • offense was caused, feelings were evoked.
     
   • the speakers apologize, understand, appreciate, hope, grow.
   
   
4. the speakers take no actual responsibility for the offense -- it was the poor survey that caused it all. bad, survey, no biscuit.
   
5. no offense was ever intended -- and without naming it, who knows whether it ever really was an offense. maybe those feelings were, you know, overly sensitive.
   
6. those feelings that were invoked -- not scientific objections, no, "feelings". we all know what that's code for, don't we? yeah -- irrational women.
   
7. it's all about "we, we, we", what "we" got out of it. an apology should focus on the wronged party, not on the personal growth of the perpetrators thanks to walking all over the wronged party. what i want to hear from the speakers is what "we" won't do again.

bah, humbug. yeah, i'd like to see some personal growth here. any day now would be fine, "drs" ogas and gaddam.

among other things, she yaps about matthew shepard:

Although I am a supporter of the death penalty in extreme cases, I think there were ambiguities here: The aimless hooligans who beat Shepard and tied him to a fence perhaps didn't necessarily mean to kill him. Despite my abhorrence of the crime, I was a dissenter about the sanctification of Shepard, a charming young man with a troubled family background who had faced many difficulties in life because of his frailty and lack of conventional masculinity.

Only a week before, Shepard had expressed fears about being killed. Given that apprehension, it is still inexplicable -- if the case is examined only through a political lens -- why Shepard would leave a public place in the company of such blatant thugs.

what the fucking fuck? nevermind her complete lack of understanding of hate crime legislation. what has me really upset here is how she is blaming the victim. sanctification? sanctification is not required! all it takes is the recognition that regular folks do not deserve to be brutally killed ('regular' as in, they didn't physically threaten or attack you). perhaps the attackers didn't MEAN it? they PLOTTED it. they PISTOL-WHIPPED him. when your actions kill somebody, and not accidentally because they ran out into the street in front of you, but because you're robbed them and beat the shit out of them, i don't give a fuck whether you MEANT it. why the victim came with you doesn't matter. even if the victim did something stupid. acting carelessly does NOT excuse or justify being robbed and beaten and left to die.

it's especially poignant, because in her little diatribe against hate crime legislation she's showing us right here WHY we need that legislation, because she thinks it's even remotely justified, this inquisition into WHY this gay man did anything "suspicious". i don't often read her column because she's such a pretentious, kettle-calls-pot-black twit, but this one takes the cake. i am writing to salon after i come down from mt fury.

dear salon. i am not going to threaten you with letting my subscription lapse, because you generally offer me good value. but can you not find somebody less patronizingly offensive and more intellectually rigourous in her place? look, the NYT let bill kristol go! surely it's time to cut her loose, because listening to too much talk radio has rotted her brain.

i have alas no chance to boycott bacardi because i so rarely drink alcohol, and bacardi isn't on my list for those times. but if i did, oh man, i'd throw out even unopened bottles now.

i'm mostly used to misogyny in ads directed at men, but this one is directed at women: all you need is an ugly girlfriend. bonus: it comes with a fat phobia chaser.

and of course, my idea of ugly doesn't match bacardi's at all. WTF is wrong with these people? i mean, i know what's wrong, actually, but how come THEY don't see it?

[ETA: the online ad was produced by israeli agency mccann digital. apparently the site has since been pulled, because bermudan-HQed bacardi isn't happy with its israeli affiliate. but, you know? not good enough, if you wait with the pulling until the shit hits the blogosphere.]

and i'm moving away from it because otherwise it will eat my life. i made a comment on tor.com (even though i dislike even going there now); and a couple of posts elsewhere, about why i consider the thirteenth child's premise and world-building a failure. and that's that; i don't need to see more white SFF writers splatter themselves with defensive manure -- they might not be ashamed to hang their hairy white butts out in public, but i am ashamed for them.

juls -- well done. even if LMB didn't seem to get it. jo also rocks, for realizing when she has set foot in a quagmire and instantly shifting to listening and thinking about what she hears instead of lecturing the directly affected people about interrogating the text from the correct perspective.

and here's one post by rushthatspeaks white folks should read, about history in america, and what has been lost, and how creepily disconcerting that is even if one just likes to read a good escapist story. it's a slightly offset mirror from my own impressions when i arrived in north america and felt ungrounded, something i wrote about in my private journal. i never found the right words for it, because at the time i knew even less than i know now about first nations, but rushthatspeaks gives me the words. thank you.

the "national organization for marriage" usually makes me sick, but today it became -- inadvertantly, of course -- the prime hilarity of my day.

a few weeks ago i heard that they were planning to either change their name, or start a major campaign as "two million for marriage". a title/slogan that acronymizes to "2M4M" -- which sounds like an ad on a kinky gay sex site to us perverts. that's almost right up there with "teabagging".

i thought after this came to their ears, they might change their mind about the name. but no, they went right ahead. what they didn't go right ahead with, however, was the acquisition of the appropriate domains.

enter 2m4m.org.

via sara.

by now i imagine everyone has seen the republican budget plan, and i don't think there is anything new i can say. besides, i am still sorta speechless.

but i decided it needed some presentational pizazz to make it more appropriate, a bit more dazzle to cover up the bullshit; a more suitable font, for one, and...


maybe i should throw in a vampire?