sundries

[rm]

Rape and violence against women in post-earthquake Haiti.

kalmn alerts us to the story of a Ghanaian king who rules from Silver Spring, MD. Also, the king's a woman.

Hey, if a woman has ever had sex and then talks about sex professionally it's apparently perfectly reasonable to call her a hooker (and no, the headline's later change to "good time girl" wasn't actually better):

"Last week the Independent ran a feature with the exciting headline 'I was a hooker who became an agony aunt'. Sounded fascinating. Another tart with a heart story, perhaps?

No, reading the piece indicated the headline was wrong.

The feature described blogger and sex writer Zoe Margolis, better known as the Girl with a One Track Mind. It focused in part on Margolis work as an ambassador for sexual health charity Brook, raising issues about sex and relationships with young people.

Zoe Margolis is not, and has never been, a sex worker."

Question: more earthquakes lately or more coverage of earthquakes? Does a 4.4 in LA really merit coverage on this coast, as an example? Being in a non-earthquake prone region (although we do get them sometimes and are technically on a fault like) I can't tell if it's the coverage or the planet lately. Anyone?

The rules for getting an exit-row seat on an airplane are very specific. Which doesn't stop random people from requesting (and getting) them so they can have more legroom. Now some airlines just want to sell the seats at a premium price. Why that's not the best idea.

We've all heard about the private contractor assassination squad thing, right? Or do we have outrage fatigue again? But seriously: "'While no legitimate intelligence operations got screwed up, it’s generally a bad idea to have freelancers running around a war zone pretending to be James Bond,' one American government official said."

Did we all see Hayworth being horrifically condescending and having trouble with the definitions of things like "facts" and "opinions" on Rachel Maddow last night? Seriously: when you say something says "quote-unquote" whatever, the words you are quoting need to actually BE IN THE THING WHICH YOU ARE QUOTING. When you say something is a quote, and those words aren't in the thing you are quoting you are somewhere between incorrect and lying. It is not a difference of opinion.

I'm sorta on a tear lately about people not grokking the difference between opinions and facts. On the one hand, I don't think people should have to say "in my opinion" before stating an opinion. It's obvious, isn't it, when someone says a piece of art is good or bad that they are expressing an opinion and the way it is expressed provides the viewpoint and how informed a perspective said opinion is coming from? Right? We all get that? Okay. But at the same time, between politicians who tell the people who call them on flat-out lies that they merely have a "difference of opinion" and fandom discussions in which people assume that their emotional response not only should be, but is, in fact, true for everyone else, I'm starting to get a little tetchy.

Apparently, this facts vs. opinions confusion is making other people really frustrated too. Via billijean.

Oh hey, here's another example. Fresno prof in trouble for teaching anti-gay opinions as facts. Article, sadly lacks enough details for me to properly outraged, however.

Oh, look at that, action on DADT seems to be languishing.

Our census form came in the mail last night. Must wait to send it in until we get our little Queer the Census sticker though.

Read this White Collar fic last night. I was moved. This may be a case of fic smarter than show. We'll see.

Oh! White Collar realization: Peter and El don't have kids. So I think Neal is supposed to be their Tina the Troubled Teen, but this being the Internet, we're all like "oh man, they are so doing it" as opposed to seeing it all as a parental/mentoring relationship. But they are so doing it.

Actorly people: I'm an AFTRA must-join. I've put off joining AFTRA for YEARS because they keep threatening to merge with SAG, but at this rate I feel like it's never going to happen. More and more of the cool shows that shoot in NYC are AFTRA. Should I just suck it up and pay the horrific AFTRA initiation fees already?

Comments

[smirnoffmule.livejournal.com]

I'm sorta on a tear lately about people not grokking the difference between opinions and facts. On the one hand, I don't think people should have to say "in my opinion" before stating an opinion. It's obvious, isn't it, when someone says a piece of art is good or bad that they are expressing an opinion and the way it is expressed provides the viewpoint and how informed a perspective said opinion is coming from? Right? We all get that? Okay.

It ought to be obvious, but it often isn't, even to the person expressing that opinion. Possibly this is an educational quirk of mine, but I tend interpret judgements of good and bad as reflecting on wider artistic/cultural merit rather than personal enjoyment (ie sometimes I can see something is good and still not personally like it, just as I can sometimes see things are, objectively, quite bad, and yet still enjoy them). In that sense, I do read a distinction between someone saying "I didn't like X" and someone saying "X is no good".

This is all semantics, obviously, but then I like semantics better than food, love and people ;)

[rm.livejournal.com]

I have this too (the sense of something being of quality but my not having the receptor sites for it) and do often make those distinctions in conversation.

I am, however, as I mentioned elsewhere, wary of saying "in my opinion" because anything I say automatically has reduced authority in most settings because I am female-bodied. Minimizing my words by reminding people they are merely my opinion doesn't get me what I want. Of course, the fact that I'm pretty good at getting what I want is why I tend to rub people the wrong way as much as I do.

[gement.livejournal.com]

As a highly suggestible person, I start getting tense in conversations where people do not qualify their opinions in some way. It's one of the That Guy markers for me.

That's only in cases where I feel there's no... gah, how do I put it, importance to being right?

"Lost is the best show ever in the history of ever." (Doesn't bother me.)

"Stephen Moffat is just a better writer than Russell T. Davies." (Kind of gets under my skin because it sounds close enough to a statement of objective fact that if I disagree or have different taste, I feel like I have to call you a liar.)

"That is an offensive thing to say." (Same level of absolutism, but as it is important and you really do want to challenge anyone's reality who disagrees, I stand by it and it doesn't bug me.)

I don't tend to use "in my opinion," but the couple of people I know who don't add qualifiers or some kind of room for the fact that people disagree tend to be prone to making me feel mansplained* or run over by the force of their opinion.

You don't make me feel mansplained. You have found some more elegant way of including that space for disagreement. I applaud this.


* I really don't like "mansplained" because it is a group stereotype pejorative and I'm really trying to avoid those. Does anyone have a less inflammatory short term for this kind of jerkiness?

[smirnoffmule.livejournal.com]

I was telling a friend about the concept of mansplaining the other day, and we've been finding just "splaining" a very useful term since, and have identified many variations (Cissplaining! Straightsplaining! Whitesplaining! Amerisplaining! Houndsplaining!) since, yeah, it's definitely not just maleness that can be guilty of that kind of conversational bowling over. Our working definition was simply that a) there is that attempted steamrollering effect and b) that it's usually directed at someone who understands the issue just as well if not better than you do.

I agree it does take a certain amount of linguistic elegance and care to be able to express yourself with certainty but without 'splaining. It's interesting how people sometimes respond to that, though; there seems to be an inherent suspicion in some circles of people who argue well, like there's something manipulative about it (which - hi politicians and the press! - not entirely unfounded). I have no sympathy with anti-intellectualism, but at the same time, I think this relates to x_tricks point below about dealing in emotional truths rather than facts - I think often news outlets and politicians do the public a huge disservice in presenting information to them in such a way that it requires so much unpacking to get at any kind of truth.

[laughingacademy.livejournal.com]

I do read a distinction between someone saying "I didn't like X" and someone saying "X is no good".

Oh man, there's a guy I used to hang out with who was incapable of grokking that distinction, especially when it came to any kind of artistic endeavor — music, movies, books, anything. I'd say, "[X] is not my thing," and he simply could not believe that I wasn't trying to find a polite way to say, "X stinks on toast."

[smirnoffmule.livejournal.com]

Hehe, yeah I know someone like that too. The way I see it "I don't like X" is an irrefutable statement. It's not like someone can come along and argue that actually you do like it; at best, they can tell you why they like it, but that's pretty harmless. Whereas if you're going to make a statement like "X stinks on toast"... that's fighting talk, as far as I'm concerned ;)

[rm.livejournal.com]

It's not like someone can come along and argue that actually you do like it

I would like to say that on the subject of CoE, I have absolutely, positively had people explicitly tell me that I didn't like it, when I've absolutely, positively, have said that I did. And it's like "what just happened there?"

[smirnoffmule.livejournal.com]

Haha, perhaps I should have phrased that as "ought to be irrefutable". Of course there's no accounting for the apparent belief that people who liked CoE are suffering from a weird kind of Stockholm's Syndrome and need intervention.