A documentary looking at three women in the British National Party, a party with such catchy slogans as ‘rights for whites’ (chanted by skinheads, of course. But don’t worry, they’re not racist. Just patriotic). Be prepared to be thoroughly creeped out. (Do be warned: racial slurs peppered throughout. Not for the faint of heart.)
Iran’s women stand in the vanguard. For days now, I’ve seen them urging less courageous men on. I’ve seen them get beaten and return to the fray. “Why are you sitting there?” one shouted at a couple of men perched on the sidewalk on Saturday. “Get up! Get up!”
And a haunting message from an emailer to the Huffington Post (scrawl down to 8.53 ET), referring to her fallen sister in the struggle, Neda:
I’m here to tell you my sister died while in her father’s hands
I’m here to tell you my sister had big dreams…
I’m here to tell you my sister who died was a decent person… and like me yearned for a day when her hair would be swept by the wind…
There’s been a lot of discussion on the blogshpere about the Barcardi ads. Their idea is that a woman can look better by going around with a less standardly pretty friend. Ha. Ha.
I thought this joke was overdone in grade school! Let’s avoid their product.
This video is from BBC Persia, posted at approximately 1:45 pm on June 20th, London time.
Further links and updates from the NY Times are here. CNN reports that there was a suicide bomb which did lots of damage; the NYT says that that report cannot be confirmed.
Jender adds: I’m finding the Huffington Post really good on this.
And so now there’s MyVibe, available under “health and fitness” in iPhone apps at the iTunes store. It is free. It was developed by the folks at mypleasure.com,** a sex toy store.
The iTunes store has a list of places where you might use it, and I’ve added a couple for a poll. You can click on more than one:
You might like the Independent’s comments on it here.
This must be an advertising joke, but it makes me wish we had a category of “leaves one speechless.”
** I tried to find their most discrete page, but really I wouldn’t open this on a work/university computer.
Not one of his strong points, to put it mildly. Regular readers know that I’m an Obama fan. (I drank the lemonade. Or Kool-Aid. Or whatever the hell that stuff was. Absinthe?) But this record is not good, and not living up to his promises.
On taking office, Obama immediately announced that he was doing away with the Clinton-era concept of special assistants who served as liaisons to various communities like gays and Latinos. He then went ahead and appointed special liaisons to some of those communities anyway, but never to the gays. Around the same time, the White House Web site, once detailing half a page of presidential promises to the gay community, overnight saw those pledges shortened to three simple sentences. Gone were five of the eight previous commitments, including the promises to repeal both Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and DOMA. Adding to a growing sense of angst, senior White House officials kept telling the media that they weren’t sure when, if ever, the president would follow through on his promises to the gay community. Then there were the Cabinet appointees. Three Latino nominees but nary a gay in sight. And finally, last week our president had his Department of Justice file a brief in defense of DOMA, a law he had once called “abhorrent.” In that brief, filed on the 42nd anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia (which outlawed bans on interracial marriage), our own interracial Harvey Milk, not lacking a sense of historical irony, compared our love to incest and pedophilia.
As Aravosis notes,
Sixty-seven percent of Americans now favor granting same-sex couples the right to marry or join in civil unions. Sixty-nine percent support letting openly gay men and lesbian women serve in our military, including a majority of Republicans (58 percent), conservatives (58 percent), and even churchgoers (60 percent). And an overwhelming number of Americans have long since supported passing legislation banning job discrimination against gays.
It may be that Obama thinks he needn’t do anything, as progress on these issues is now inevitable. But in the meantime, people are suffering and rights are being denied.
According to the headline on this article. Apparently the study used a palm pilot device to guarantee anonymity and encourage honesty. I don’t know how different this method is from those used for similar studies elsewhere, but it would be good to know. (By the way, in the body of the article it looks like the rate is 28% for raping women and girls and 3% for raping men and boys. Which gives a rate of 31% unless my brain is more fried than I thought. I wonder if the headline-writer did some wacky subtraction?)
There’s an interesting collection of pieces about Borderline Personality Disorder in the yesterday’s NY Times; see here and here (you might want to look at the questions/answers after this second entry). It raises some questions that might be worth discussing here.
I think of the NYT characterization as falling into two parts. The first is a general description of perhaps the most visible manifestation of BPD:
People with the disorder are said to have a thin emotional skin and often behave like 2-year-olds, throwing tantrums when some innocent word, gesture, facial expression or action by others sets off an emotional storm they cannot control. The attacks can be brutal, pushing away those they care most about. Then, when the storm subsides, they typically revert to being “sweet and wonderful,” as one family member put it.
BPDers (people with the disorder) can seem to be one of natures tragedies, both needing and longing for close relationships while at the same time destroying them. And the other, sometimes less social items in the symptomotology:
Moods can change quickly and unpredictably, behaviors can be impulsive (including abuse of alcohol or drugs, reckless driving, overspending or disordered eating), and relationships with others are often unstable [short, impulsive affairs]. Many patients injure themselves and threaten or attempt suicide to relieve their emotional pain.
The first two questions raised for me are (1) what is it? Is there something like a psychological natural kind here? Or a constructed category? Does the category give rise to Hacking’s “looping effects,” as those so diagnosed are drawn into and changed by a way of life. Why are BPDers largely women? Is there something pathological in women’s current condition, or is the therapeutic talk a way of pathologizing women.
(2) Given the immense amount of pain experienced by and caused by BPDers, what are we to say of disability theorists who tell us to get over our insistance on people being either neurotypical or unacceptedly diseased. An alternative example might be obsessive-compulsives, some of whom live with extremely painful anxiety and who are less than able to respond to the needs of family members. Some OCD suffers have their lives dramatically improved by medications whose side effects are not so bad; should we regard the medication as relief from pain or as a bad “normalizing”?
I don’t have answers to these questions, and I’d love to hear what people think. I’m particularly ill-equipped to answer the second. For the first, I’ve been Googling around and, having found Janet Wirth-Cauchon’s Women and Borderline Personality Disorder and, having gotten a sample of it for my new kindle, I’m on the verge of buying it. W-C looks at BPD as ‘the new female malady,’ with the ironic distance that label suggests, I’d bet.
If you are – or think you are – involved in someway with BPD, you might find the NYT interesting. The questions, with many short takes on life and BPT, is pretty upsetting.
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addition: In comments Bri mentioned Rachel Reiland’s Get Me Out of Here; an extensive and riveting ‘preview’ is available on Google Books. I’m not sure about recommending that resource; like MANY authors I’ve signed onto a claim against them for using books without paying. And if you read it, you might find the first few chapters before the narrator is hospitalized very painful reading. Still, it is absorbing. Thanks, Bri!
