It’s 2019. Women aren’t even three fifths of a person.
“I don’t like the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I think it went too far. I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” Joe Biden, 1974
Compare and contrast, as they used to say on essay exams, with this:
Jennifer Wright.
You can’t take organs from a corpse without the deceased’s written permission, even if it will save lives. When you outlaw abortion, you’re allowing women less bodily autonomy than the dead.
Betty Bowers.
In Alabama is it is now more illegal to be a woman who aborts a child of rape than to be the man who raped her.
Chambliss, responding to the IVF argument from Smitherman, cites a part of the bill that says it applies to a pregnant woman. “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.” (But, but, but, now it’s not about the sacred egg+sperm? All that sacredness is only when there’s a woman to control?)
And then, this good idea:
Daniel Silvermint
We should pass a Woman’s Heartbeat law: if a woman has a heartbeat, you can’t tell her what to do with her goddamn body, ever.
B.e.c.a.u.s.e. t.h.a.t. i.s. t.h.e. p.o.i.n.t.
If your heartbeat counts (or counted!), nobody can take parts of you, even to save someone else. No real human being can be forced to donate life support. If the fetus’s heartbeat counts for more than the woman’s providing life support, then she has to be a non-person.
Hi Quixote!
This is another excellent post! That it even has to be written is beyond enraging.
You said:
re only a transcript of Robert Mueller’s (hopefully soon!) testimony being made available rather than Mueller testifying publicly for all of us to see/hear.
The only downside I can think of to that is the possibility that, like his report, the transcript may have redactions in it. Or would this transcript be released by Congress without the DOJ and Barr getting their grubby little hands on it before release?
Branjor on May 25th, 2019 at 07:28
Quixote – as to Dump’s supposed “elimination of protections” for trans people – he did not eliminate the right of male trans to be in male shelters – which are in fact way more numerous than female shelters. All a TIM (trans identified male) has to do to totally fit into a male shelter is take off the dress, make up and wig and he looks just like any other male. But if he gets a spot in a female shelter he is taking a bed away from a woman who needs shelter and does not have the choice of going to another shelter, this when there are way fewer female shelters to begin with. And males larping as women have attacked females in shelters and prisons. As to “taking away medical care” I am pretty sure this means that doctors do not have to provide hormones and “sex reversal” surgeries, not that they don’t have to treat trans people having heart attacks, broken legs and other legitimate medical conditions!
Branjor on May 25th, 2019 at 15:09
Here’s the new rule about homeless shelters. They don’t eliminate anyone’s right to be in any shelter, saying factors including both sex and gender identity may be considered in deciding who is eligible for a particular shelter. The rule requires that determinations be “consistent with an overall policy.” Anyway here’s the rule. It seems quite reasonable.
https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/eAgendaViewRule?pubId=201904&RIN=2506-AC53
Branjor on May 28th, 2019 at 08:59
Hi Branjor! I’m in slo-mo these days. Hardly anything in the world of ideas seems worth bothering with because the only ideas in power are all horrible. I need to work on channelling Hillary and not going quietly into that good night!
Anyway, on the whole trans / Dump admin thingy. I usually wait for British feminists to weigh in so I can get the straight story without having to read any revolting Dump stuff myself. (Am I lazy? You bet. Also taking care of my blood pressure!) However, haven’t noticed much there. I think they’re getting tired of repeating how much USians have their heads up their asses.
Much as I want trans people to be treated with respect, not at the cost of women being endangered. It’s appalling all by itself that women running risks of trauma is just fine so long as no male-bodied person has their feelings hurt at any point.
Their big point is always that transwomen never hurt a fly. (Wrong right out of the box. Karen White attempting rape in prison, Jonathan/Jessica Yaniv trying to extort money from one-woman beauty salons, etc., etc., etc.) But they refuse to even notice the rate at which male perps dive at any new easy way to get access to victims. So they want to make it easier and call anyone who objects a terf and a bigot.
Like the protest poster says. It’s 2019. I can’t believe I’m still dealing with this shit.
quixote on May 31st, 2019 at 17:30
TOTALLY OT, but Scientific Linux is being discontinued 🙁 🙁 🙁 !
https://lwn.net/Articles/786422/
Dayum, why does everything good go away?
pdxpat on June 25th, 2019 at 00:20
Pdxpat! Hello! How is everything? Did your move go okay? (Or at all??)
Re Scientific Linux, that’s a shame. I wonder, though, if it’s because more standard linuxen, like Debian and derivs, Redhat and relatives, Suse, have all made it more or less easy to install what you need that SciLinux is no longer as necessary as it once was. Maybe it’s actually a sort of good news situation? ?? (What are the chances of that?)
quixote on June 25th, 2019 at 20:16
Hello to you too.
To answer your second comment first, it seems to be more that SciLinux was developed for something called high energy physics, to make it easier for the Fermi and Cern folks to have consistent platforms. Then RedHat ate CentOS & started paying more attention to timely and relevant releases and the FOSS folks at Fermi* breathed a collective sigh of relief (but especially the woman who wrote the initial fork and did over half the upgrade work up to the release before last) and handed off responsibility to CentOS.
*say -that- 3 times fast!
So – given that CentOS is the sole distro that ever made me brick anything, I wouldn’t say it’s easier, but most of us have been using their libraries and install instructions anyway lately, so it isn’t much of a change. I just loved the unearned cachet of having so nerdly named an operating system.
As to the move…
I wasn’t going to post anything anywhere, since I already seem to be the original Hard Luck Charlie, but since you asked:
After I posted that comment here about moving, I notified the Low Income Tax Credit property whose wait list I had been on for two and a half years and had come almost to the top, that I had given notice and would be out in Oregon, ready and waiting with tons of documents and bated breath.
They waited until Thursday of the last frantic weekend of that move out month, knowing exactly that it was that, to demand a whole host of new documents that I had to have to them by the next day or they would go on to the next person on their list. I got them faxed anyway (on two hours sleep/day for that week and weekend) but they claimed they couldn’t read them, and then claimed they couldn’t read the ones I had Kinkos fax them, nor the ones I emailed them. All of these could be read; it was so transparent an excuse to break the law (Section 42 of the IRS code) they never tried to deny later that they had simply removed me for no reason.
Since this stranded me and left me homeless (I couldn’t get back into my own waitlisted apartment) I went out to Oregon anyway, moving heaven, earth and Amtrak freight, to get here at the end of July. I thought there must be *something* I qualified for here in the near future. I also wanted to get the sole enforcement mechanism for LIHTC law, the state’s housing authority, to enforce the law on the company that had done this to me.
Turned out I was wrong on both counts: Oregon Housing And Community Services simply refused to do anything about what had been done to me, finally contradicting their own published rules on their web site and *emailing* me that the law had not been broken in my case because OHCS had decided that wait lists were not required. They were that unafraid of being called to account, and with reason. I contacted every state and federal office that had anything to do with this, including the governor and that Senator that regularly sends me heart wrenching outraged emails about wrongs to other people and was met either with complete silence or a referral back to OHCS. OHCS even broke public records laws with impunity when I sent in requests for records of LIHTC complaints. They said they did not keep these, even though there is a published page from the AG’s office that says they must. The joke that is Legal Aid does not help women for anything not a result of women’s proper place as men’s servants and would not consider this, and lawyers were downright rude when I asked about contingency.
So I went from a fragile but stable financial eqilibrium in NC, debt free and able to have a little left over each month, to being homeless for over a year now, in debt, and spending up to my income each month. Oh, and with no prospect of housing because every single senior housing complex here – the only housing I can afford – all cite their years long wait lists and the certainty of OHCS auditing them if they break the order. I am at the moment in a very temporary Craigslist room, but it was in desperation and the person is already showing psychotic tendencies. I just couldn’t take one more night of being treated as though I deserved to be among “the homeless” that this law breaking state creates so many of and then takes so much credit for ignoring, instead of helping.
My long term goal is to make it to a state that doesn’t break laws and especially, doesn’t consider women acceptable victims, before my car breaks down completely. From my conversations with so many people here, Oregon is not among them. Neither is Washington state – I started my original fall from the middle class from their blacklisting me after I filed a Title VII suit in 1996, after 4 years of undeniable discrimination. There was no question as the facts – the case was in court for four years, but then dismissed on summary judgment as most of these are – but I hadn’t realized at the time just how bad the legal landscape was for women, specifically. When I did, it was too late. The State of Washington realized they could get away with completely blacklisting me, after they got away with reorganizing an entire 500+ person agency to RIF my one position. I lost my house, my car, my beloved two cats, plus it left me open for the Faulkerine thing that happened several years later, at UNC Chapel Hill (boss’s son indicted in gang rape of minor girl, boss & family flee to Cambridge U. in England, UNC goes after his hirelings, since they can’t get at him and I’m blacklisted again).
I limped into early retirement doing manual labor jobs for several years and fought my way to minimal financial security, and then this happened.
So – aren’t you glad you asked :S
My experience is that no one can do anything to help at this point. But given how much was done to me and not one of those brave lawyers or congress critters gave a hoot, I understand why women might vote Republican or simply not care very much about other people’s rights at this point, since women as women seem to have none.
PDXPat on June 25th, 2019 at 22:50
I have the same reaction to CentOS. Never liked it.
But to the main point: I am so sorry to hear about all your trials and tribulations! That is so horrible. In so many ways, the injustice hurts the worst.
I’ve always thought of Oregon as at least somewhat enlightened. So much for that.
I want to have something useful to say, but sympathy is weak tea for existential problems. We need another and better world soooo much.
If you feel like it, stay in touch. My “Contact” page goes to my email. I’m not on twitter or facebook or any of the other social media.
Thinking of you, in spite of the weak tea-ness of it all.
quixote on June 26th, 2019 at 01:34
Thank you for that response.
It was one of the few that didn’t try to blame me so as to keep the white women looking down on me (all those especially in the gender segregated “helping” state agencies here: men at the top, women doing all the work at the bottom – I am white, but this is not supposed to happen to us) feeling safe and in their proper caste.
Not weak tea at all – and thank the FSM, no prayers!
PDXPat on June 26th, 2019 at 08:05
Just to clarify – the “this is not supposed to happen to us” is not my attitude, but that of the women dispensing taxpayer funded aid. I’ve known since college where women’s rights stood in this country relative to any man’s – if, that is, she chose not to make her primary living though a long term sexual contract that gave her some access to a man’s earned wages and cloaked her in his social status.
Worst of all, that patronizing and punishing attitude is overwhelmingly that of the Ladies Bountiful who run the private charities – which they can afford to do and keep their middle and upper class status only due to wages of the men they sleep with. Those, I won’t speak to or deal with at all.
PDXPat on June 26th, 2019 at 10:25
As you said, the BS of blame is to help the blamer feel safe. Less than nothing to do with you. I know I’ve seen at least one research paper on the topic, but can’t find it now of course.
I wouldn’t want to talk to the Ladies Bountiful either. People like that, you can feel them stuffing you into a pigeonhole with every word. Slightly less crass, usually, than guys on the make in a coffee shop but just as revolting.
quixote on June 26th, 2019 at 23:59
Ayup – the ladies are like race car drivers or motorcycle riders dissecting a fatal crash: there has to be some way it’s the driver’s fault, because if they looked at it squarely, most would give up the sport due to the inherent risk.
PDXPat on June 27th, 2019 at 09:52
I posted a followup to your private account, as inferred, but that doesn’t show up here.
I want to ask how you can post, fight for anyone else’s human or legal rights when you ignore the fact that over half of all human beings’ rights are being ignored, especially in the U.S.?
You post on Widdershins and Skydancing. Those two have elected to ignore the largest supremacist government on earth, the Catholic Church. That political organization gives all men the right to govern all women according to a thirteenth century law of divine right. By Catholic Church law, right now, only men make and enforce Catholic law. It’s being enacted in this country, the USA, right now.
I posted here and elsewhere how much women (over half the people in this soi-disant democracy) have had our rights revoked in the past 20+ years. Chief among them is the right to be free from violence from the men we’ve been compelled to sleep with for our living. (USC 2000 and 2005, excepting all other women from black citizen’s rights under the 14th amendment) and the right to earn our own living according to our own capabilities (1992 Civil Rights “restoration” Act, inter alia*) But the fora you post on – and you know this – have turned their heads aside again and again when I’ve cited the laws and the facts there.
What is your own integrity worth that you ignore this?
*(as a famous baseball player said “You could look it up”.
pdxpat on July 23rd, 2019 at 21:46
I wrote this years ago, but it appies today every bit as much:
Back when I was an undergraduate escaping the survey courses in pliosophy and took the senior/graduate course in philosophy of law, that civil libertarian prof assigned us “The Four classical schools of jurisprudence”, the meat of which was that the law exists to preserve the status quo.
Fast forward thirty years, an adult lifetime of fighting to define the world I live in and it seems he was right.
The law never was anything more than a threat of force, unbacked by principle or justice or morality.
Same as the South African pass laws that put a black man even more readily than a black woman (men having so much insurrectionary potential) in jail for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Women in the U.S. cannot protect themselves by law against men, the average sentence for women being life in prison for killing a man even in self defense, but a man who wantonly, frivolously kills a woman? Average sentence seven years.
But you cowards and slaves will stick your fingers in your ears and claim ignorance, until of course some man kills you or you die in the poverty the denial of men’s wages makes pretty much inevitable. Unless you survive the man with whom you made the sexual contract that gave you your status, your home, your car, your kid’s education. Lucky you.
pdxpat on July 23rd, 2019 at 22:02
pdxpat, re “But the fora you post on – and you know this – have turned their heads aside again and again when I’ve cited the laws and the facts there.
What is your own integrity worth that you ignore this?”
(Erm, I haven’t actually seen you commenting at Skydancing or Widdershins, which I think is because they have you blocked? Or possibly I’ve missed something. I miss boatloads of things because I retreat under my rock periodically.)
But to your main point, which is about not putting women at the center of all posts, if I understand it right. My integrity can be a tad situational. I get tired. Mainly tired of the fury at the hideous sex caste system, but also just plain tired. I spend a lot of time hiking, enjoying myself, and trying to ignore what people make of this amazing planet. I can only stand the fury in smallish doses. So although I pretty much agree that the treatment of women is symptomatic of the rot at the heart of social structures, and reaching equality is the biggest and most important job on our hands, I look at other things too. I have to.
I mean, I haven’t even been able to read Caroline Criado-Perez’s brilliant book, Invisible Women even though I want to because I just know it’s going to make me so mad I won’t sleep for a week.
(PS. Not sure what you mean by private account. The Contact page should send me an email, but it doesn’t post anywhere. If you tried that, I didn’t get it, so mention it here. That implies something’s gone wrong with the Contact software.)
quixote on July 24th, 2019 at 23:43
Nope, not blocked.
Just ignored. As in, one of the more frequent commenters or frontpagers posting a comment immediately afterwards my citing sources on legally permissible violence against women, and the legally permissible job discrimination that forces women to submit to this risk. Their comments that followed mine would have nothing to do with what I’d posted.
It’s a very female (as in gender caste imposed norms of aggression, aka “mean girls”) way of silencing females with uncomfortable truths. If you’ve had any experience in this country of middle or high school, you’ll recognize it immediately.
I shouldn’t post here at all, if that’s not obvious, but I had one friend out of all my peers in high school that I valued most of all for her integrity.
I had two lifelong friends from that time, both of whom were outliers in that insular, ignorant small southern town. They came from outside the U.S. as military brats, and had full scholarships to Yale when we all three matriculated at our southern state U. One was everyone’s darling, so socially adept she had my mom plotting to marry her to my eldest brother, her prized first born son in a Catholic family. She married a man who hollowed her from the inside out, a certified genius who thirty years later had professorships in many different universities across the globe, but who so consistently ignored and dismissed her she couldn’t even speak in normal patterns when I caught up with her years later.
The one you reminded me most of blazed a path through U.S, universities, graduating valedictorian from Georgetown, then on to U.Mich, Ann Arbor, then another well know U. for her PHD. She was the one I loved most to try out new ideas on, knowing I could build that most precious of constructs, a new edifice, from our disagreements. She was THE person who defined for me the term “intellectual civility”.
That all ended when I was facing the ice floes of defending women’s rights in the U.S. in the late 1980’s. I was standing on one ground and everyone and everything I knew was drifting away on another. No woman I knew then would stand up to the increasing and pervasive hostility to women. This former friend said at one point “I’m not a feminist, I don’t hate men” and then was outraged that I remembered this. Another time, she (always a defender of black men’s rights, only like all of those double standard aficionados, called it anti-racism) berated me for calling out a man who called me “bitch” because he thought I cut him off in traffic. She said when I asked what if he’d used racist hate speech, that she proudly owned the term bitch, but racist speech remained completely off limits.
When I told her I quit my decades long, by then life threatening task of defending women’s health clinics when the final straw was a woman I knew who dismissed all women’s rights until she thought she needed an abortion but then giggled at me “I almost called you, but it turned out I didn’t need to!”, my friend berated me for “abandoning women”. This, even though she vehemently defended the Catholic and Mormon religions due to freedom of religion and women’s “choice” (but not the Mormons on racism, of course) and never ever once did anything remotely like clinic defense.
It let her keep functioning when, with her track record as, as her ex-husband put it, an academic rock star, she could not get even one full time faculty position in the U.S. She finally landed a tenured position in Germany after years as an adjunct in the U.S. and Canada, but, again, and for nothing she will admit, because a male well connected friend we both knew from our time in Paris knew of this position and recommended her.
She was able to keep her wits and her intellectual lifestyle (she was the least materialistic person I ever knew – like me, the core of her adult identity was her work) solely due to this male’s intervention, but she did keep it. She’s doing work in an esoteric scientific field that may matter to someone, she has the basics of life, a decent salary, living space, a community. She did periodically try to keep in touch with me, but did not seem to understand that the primary value of this friendship to me was her integrity, which she had given up.
TL;DR: I did post multiple times on those two fora (note pedantic plural). They did not block me, they just ignored every comment I posted about women’s increasingly abject place in America. I did send a followup to my posts here as requested via the contacts page but that didn’t go anywhere either.
pdxpat on August 29th, 2019 at 00:53
(Well, sounds like there’s an Issue, as the computer geeks say, with my Contacts page. Aargh. I’ll try to troubleshoot it Real Soon Now.)
The whole set of interlocking actions around integrity are a real Gordian knot. I have mega-admiration for the people who can put their whole lives on the line for what’s right.
I can barely inconvenience myself. I mean, it’s obvious that at the very least I shouldn’t be paying any taxes to this criminal transnational crime syndicate occupying the White House. But, dear god, the inevitable ensuing botheration … I can’t face it.
So much for courage.
One of the things these last couple of decades have taught me is that one of the corrosive consequences of evil things coming from the top is that you find out just how much of a fighter you are.
I wrote this ten years ago: I’d never understood how the Good Germans could stand by while their government went to the devil between the two World Wars. Now I know. I never thought I’d become the sort of person who could understand that.
quixote on August 31st, 2019 at 15:42
Your patience never ceases to amaze me.
I posted these unfair rants after two more peculiarly horrible things happened to me, after everything else that has recently. If it’s not obvious – it’s not you I should be angry at, especially since that is basically sexism, and you are one of the few un-sexist bloggers left standing (Anglachel and Reclusive Leftist from 2008 or so are very much missed).
I apologize for inappropriately directing so much of this anger at you. If you want to leave my comments up, that would serve as a reminder to me to not do this. If you want to delete the comments, that would be fine too.
I may never be able to reconcile fighting for the rights of whatever demographic is fashionable at the moment, and accepting that women’s rights will continue to be ignored by almost everyone. But your blog isn’t the place for me to be fighting that battle, given that it’s one of the few that is honest and consistent about women’s rights.
pdxpat on September 1st, 2019 at 22:03
PDxpat, don’t worry about it. I figured it was something like that, and I know life is throwing way more at you than anyone should have to put up with.
God, I miss good old Violet Socks hugely too. I still have her site bookmarked. I can’t bear to delete that. Anglachel was brilliant too. Well, still is, I’m sure, but not so I can bask in it. Sniff.
I know it’s easy to say and can be too hard to do when you’re swamped in stress, but try to take care of yourself. You’re a fighter and you have a lot to be proud of and screw everything else. Go easy on yourself.
quixote on September 3rd, 2019 at 01:25
Thank you so much for that.
This may be the one place that I can post the fragile hope that Kamila Harris becomes the next leader of this soi disant democracy.
It doesn’t matter that her record outshines the white men’s. It totally has to do with my wanting to hear Barbara Hendricks, with her hammered gold voice, sing: “Je le jure” from that silliest of operas, Perl Fishers, at her inaguration.
Could you imagine the voice of someone that equidistant from anyone in this soi-disant demorcracy broadcast being broadcast at our president’s swearing-in?
pdxpat on September 4th, 2019 at 21:24
BTW, this is what it costs this country to not have anything like a true democracy in place:
Barbara Hendricks graduated from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and chemistry at the age of 20.
This phenomenal woman person had all the brain cells to understand those “masculine” and “white” contructs like math and chemistry. There is no f**ng way she could have skated, not in those times. She chose her irreplacable gift, her voice.
But she had to leave this country to continue being her wonderful self. She gave the world her voice. Also, she sponsers foundations for young people who can’t afford instruments.
pdxpat on September 4th, 2019 at 21:47
I read an alternate history sci fi once whose whole premise was skipping the downstream consequences of WWII and the murder of Jews and millions of others also in Stalin’s camps. All the talented people who lived to contribute in that timeline meant they’d already cured cancer, had antigravity, etc. You get the idea.
All the women who keep getting erased is many more millions than that. The talent and solutions and insights we’re losing are staggering.
Coming back to this earth for a second: big Yes! re Harris. She’s far and away the most viable candidate, plus she’s definitely got what it takes to do the job of Prez. Warren could also do the job, I’m sure, but I’m less sure she’d be as good at campaigning. Well, she’s already shown she isn’t.
I’ll be much surprised though if the Dems don’t manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, as usual.
quixote on September 8th, 2019 at 01:08
I should have included the fact that Barbara Hendricks is African American.
This spectacular woman found other countries far more welcoming than the racist U.S. and, like many black Americans in the 1920’s and 30’s, took her talents elsewhere.
I just can’t get over how sheerly illogical sexism and racism are.
pdxpat on September 14th, 2019 at 00:51