[Trigger warning for child sexual abuse; racism.]
It's not been a good few days for the Catholic Church.
Shaker InfamousQBert (who hat-tips Atheist at Large) emails the story of a child protection official, hired by the Catholic Church "to monitor church groups to ensure paedophiles did not gain access to children in the church's congregations," who has been caught with 4,000 images of child pornography on his home and work computers.
Despite having a vast child porn collection on his work computer, Christopher Jarvis, a former social worker, was only fired after the police began an investigation into his creation and distribution of the pornographic images, as the Church claims to have been unaware of his activities.
Meanwhile, Shaker Brunocerous forwards the story of a Catholic high school principal in the Bronx, whose student population is primarily Latin@ and Black, who has "published material with American Renaissance, a white supremacy group." Frank Borzellieri, who is now under investigation by the Archdiocese of New York, wrote, among other equally repellent ideas: "Even the most cursory glance at life in America reveals that diversity is a weakness, a hindrance and a terrible burden."
A diocese spokesperson has noted, in response to inquiries about Borzellieri's "interesting" views on race, "Any form of discrimination or bigotry is inconsistent with Catholic teaching."
Whooooooooooooooooooops! That's the same Catholic Church that hates gays and won't ordain women, right?
LOL FOREVER.
[Commenting Guidelines: Please take the time to make sure any criticisms are clearly directed at the Catholic Church leadership and not at "Catholics," many of whom are themselves critical of the failures of Church leadership.]
Showing posts with label Today in Racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Today in Racism. Show all posts
You'll Never Guess
(TW: racism)
Guess what, everyone? Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-eally?) apologized, via a letter to the White House, for calling President Obama a "tar baby."
More guess what: It's a non-apology "apology" pile of garbage!
Shame on us, I guess.
(Tip of the energy dome to Liss. Bolds mine.)
Guess what, everyone? Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-eally?) apologized, via a letter to the White House, for calling President Obama a "tar baby."
More guess what: It's a non-apology "apology" pile of garbage!
In an email, Lamborn spokeswoman Catherine Mortensen wrote, "Congressman Lamborn regrets any misunderstanding. He simply meant to refer to a sticky situation or quagmire.”Oh, of course. He didn't mean it THAT way. Sure.
Monday evening, Lamborn's office sent a news release saying he had "sent a personal letter to President Barack Obama apologizing for using a term some find insensitive." The release said Lamborn is "confident that the President will accept his heartfelt apology."How lovely. First, casually dismiss perfectly understandable outrage over use of a very racist term, because only "some" find it "insensitive." I'm sure they're in the minority, ahem. Then, essentially corner the President into accepting your apology, lest he look like a vindictive asshole. Oh, and let's have a little "who's the real victim here?" for good measure.
Ricker's comments were immediately dismissed as "cheap political shots" by Eli Bremer, chair of the El Paso County Republican Party. Bremer said Lamborn's statement was being taken out of context, and was not at all intended as a reference to Obama's skin color.Offended by Lamborn's statement? You only think "tar baby" is a racist term, and you're being disgraceful. The real victim here is Lamborn, because all of us hyper-sensitive meanies are calling him out on his description of a "sticky situation."
"It's disgraceful that anyone would try and insinuate that he was being racist," said Bremer. "I think there are people out there who believe it is a racist term, but what’s important is not how people construe it but how it’s intended. It’s really unfair to take something completely out of context and try to politically destroy them because of it."
Shame on us, I guess.
(Tip of the energy dome to Liss. Bolds mine.)
Recommended Reading
Julianne Hing: Raquel Nelson and the Aggressive Prosecutions of Black Mothers. I'm not even going to excerpt it; it really just needs to be read in full.
[H/T to @GarlandGrey.]
[H/T to @GarlandGrey.]
The Global Echo of Violent Misogyny
by David Futrelle
[Trigger warning for violence, terrorism, eliminationism, misogyny, racism, Islamophobia.]
We all know that Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, who killed dozens of people in attacks last Friday, was motivated by a toxic m̩lange of far-right ideology largely revolving around his intense hatred of Islam. The 1500-page "manifesto" he posted to the internet Рa grab-bag of his own writing and material cut and pasted from assorted right-wing sites and even the Unabomber's manifesto Рcrackles with denunciations of Muslims, "Marxists" and the assorted other bogeymen that haunt right-wing dreams.
But what has yet to be fully appreciated is the degree to which he was also motivated by a deep hatred of women.
I've spent much of the past year seeking out and exposing (and often simply mocking) online misogyny for my blog Man Boobz. I find much of it in what some have taken to calling the "manosphere" – a loose collection of interlinked sites devoted to Men's Rights Activism, pickup artistry, and a strange separatist movement of sorts called Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW). The overwhelming majority of these sites – the most popular of which include The Spearhead, A Voice for Men, In Mala Fide and MGTOWforums.com (to which I won't be providing direct links, but they're easy enough to find, if you're so inclined)– are steeped in misogyny (and in some cases racism). I've become very familiar with their standard misogynist "arguments" and rhetorical tropes.
After a blog reader alerted me to the misogyny in Breivik's manifesto, I read through those sections of the sprawling work that dealt specifically with feminism. I was struck again and again by how utterly familiar it all sounded. Much of it could have been taken word-for-word from the manosphere blogs I read every day. (Not to mention from some of the misogynist trolls who regularly comment on my site.) The ideology is the same, the language is the same, even the specific obsessions are the same – from no-fault divorce to the evils of "Sex and the City."
Here's one typical passage, which appears to have been written by Breivik himself:
Large chunks of the manifesto consist of cut-and-pasted blog posts from an anonymous far-right Norwegian blogger known as Fjordman. (See my post here for an extensive number of quotes from Fjordman that Breivik included in his manifesto.) Like Breivik's own writings, many of Fjordman's writings could be lifted virtually word for word from "manosphere" blogs.
One internet prankster conducted a little experiment that proved pretty clearly just how unexceptional this sort of rhetoric is in the manosphere, posting an assortment of misogynist quotes from Breivik's manifesto (all of them taken originally from Fjordman) to Reddit's Men's Rights forum – without identifying them as being from Breivik.
Despite – or perhaps because of – the blatant misogyny, the post initially received numerous upvotes and some positive comments ("Nice post man") from the regulars. Once it was revealed that the quotes had come from Breivik's manifesto, the downvotes and critical comments began to stack up. (I wrote about the incident here.)
But Reddit's Men's Rights subreddit is actually one of the most moderate and least misogynistic Men's Rights hangout online. Others in the manosphere have stepped up to defend Breivik's manifesto (if not his actions) plainly and explicitly, in full knowledge of just whose ideas they are endorsing.
On In Mala Fide, blogger Ferdinand Bardamu praises Breivik's "lucidity," and blames his murderous actions on the evils of a too-liberal society:
Meanwhile, Chuck of Gucci Little Piggy offers what appears to be a somewhat more restrained, if ultimately more puzzling, defense of Breivik's manifesto – or at least that portion of the manifesto that Breivik borrowed from the writings of far-right blogger Fjordman.
After first complaining, incorrectly, that feminists are "try[ing] to blame Breivik on MRAs" (he cites me and Hugo Schwyzer as examples), Chuck goes on to endorse Breivik's (and Fjordman's) notion that feminism "grease[s]the wheels to allow Islam into his country," as Chuck summarizes the argument. The rest of Chuck's post elaborates on, and endorses, Breivik's/Fjordman's theories, arguing that feminism's "emasculation of Western men has taken the organic policing mechanism out of the hands of men in society" and thus rendered Western society helpless before the Islamic cultural invaders. (More on Bardamu and Gucci Little Piggy's arguments here.)
But the strangest response I've seen so far to the massacre in Norway comes from Sofiastry, an antifeminist blog that seems to be broadly sympathetic to the "alt" (that is, the "intellectually" racist) right. Apparently taking her cue from Bardamu, Sofia offers an appreciation of sorts for Breivik's repellant manifesto:
And then it just gets, well, weird:
I can't speak for every feminist, but for me, it's more the murdering, and the misogyny, and the racism. But mostly the murdering. (For more on Sofia, see here.)
Despite the many undeniable similarities between Breivik's repellent misogyny and misogynist beliefs that are widespread in the "manosphere," some MRAs profess to be shocked –shocked! – that anyone would connect the dots. MRA bloviator Bernard Chapin, for example, responded to my first piece on Breivik with an angry, incoherent ten minute YouTube diatribe expressing his outrage that I would possibly suggest any connection between MRA thought and a "psychopath" like Breivik. It's a classic case of someone protesting too much. The connections are clear to anyone willing to see them.
No, Breivik is not an MRA. No, he didn't take his marching orders from The Spearhead or In Mala Fide. But he is steeped in the same kind of hatred that is prevalent on those sites, and many of his repugnant beliefs about feminism and women in general are virtually identical to beliefs widespread in the misogynistic manosphere – a fact that a few in the manosphere are already willing to acknowledge out loud, as we saw above.
No, not every misogynist is going to pick up a gun. But ideas do have consequences. Vile, hateful ideas have vile, hateful consequences.
PS: For more on Breivik's misogyny, see Michelle Goldberg's Norway Killer's Hatred of Women in TheDailyBeast.
[Trigger warning for violence, terrorism, eliminationism, misogyny, racism, Islamophobia.]
We all know that Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, who killed dozens of people in attacks last Friday, was motivated by a toxic m̩lange of far-right ideology largely revolving around his intense hatred of Islam. The 1500-page "manifesto" he posted to the internet Рa grab-bag of his own writing and material cut and pasted from assorted right-wing sites and even the Unabomber's manifesto Рcrackles with denunciations of Muslims, "Marxists" and the assorted other bogeymen that haunt right-wing dreams.
But what has yet to be fully appreciated is the degree to which he was also motivated by a deep hatred of women.
I've spent much of the past year seeking out and exposing (and often simply mocking) online misogyny for my blog Man Boobz. I find much of it in what some have taken to calling the "manosphere" – a loose collection of interlinked sites devoted to Men's Rights Activism, pickup artistry, and a strange separatist movement of sorts called Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW). The overwhelming majority of these sites – the most popular of which include The Spearhead, A Voice for Men, In Mala Fide and MGTOWforums.com (to which I won't be providing direct links, but they're easy enough to find, if you're so inclined)– are steeped in misogyny (and in some cases racism). I've become very familiar with their standard misogynist "arguments" and rhetorical tropes.
After a blog reader alerted me to the misogyny in Breivik's manifesto, I read through those sections of the sprawling work that dealt specifically with feminism. I was struck again and again by how utterly familiar it all sounded. Much of it could have been taken word-for-word from the manosphere blogs I read every day. (Not to mention from some of the misogynist trolls who regularly comment on my site.) The ideology is the same, the language is the same, even the specific obsessions are the same – from no-fault divorce to the evils of "Sex and the City."
Here's one typical passage, which appears to have been written by Breivik himself:
It's the destructive and suicidal "Sex and the City" lifestyle (modern feminism, sexual revolution) which we are taught to revere as the truth. In that setting, men are not men anymore, but metro sexual and emotional beings that are there to serve the purpose as a never-criticising soul mate to the new age feminist woman goddess. The perfect matriarchy has now been fulfilled …Breivik goes on to rant about STDs and no-fault divorce, before moving on to another favorite obsession of manosphere misogynists, the supposed sexual "capital" of manipulative women:
Isolated, "sex and the city lifestyle" is relatively harmless, but if you glorify it and ram it down the throat of mainstream society like we see today it becomes a lethal and destructive societal force as we are witnessing which eventually leads to a complete breakdown of moral/ethics, the nuclear family model and a sustainable fertility rate which again is leading us to the extinction of Europeans.
Females have a significantly higher proportion of erotic capital than males due to biological differences (men have significantly more prevalent sexual urges than females and are thus easily manipulated). The female manipulation of males has been institutionalised during the last decades and is a partial cause of the feminisation of men in Europe. This highly underestimated factor has contributed to the creation and rise of the matriarchal systems which are now dominating Western European countries.Obsessed with the purported danger that Islam will outbreed the West, Breivik offers an assortment of creepy solutions to increase the fertility of Western whites. (It's not altogether clear to me if these are all his own views, but they certainly are consistent with what he says elsewhere in the manifesto.) After suggesting limiting contraception and banning abortion, Breivik offers this idea:
Discourage women in general to strive for full time careers. This will involve certain sexist and discriminating policies but should increase the fertility rate by up to 0,1-0,2 points.That last "side effect" does not seem to be much of a problem for Breivik.
Women should not be encouraged by society/media to take anything above a bachelor's degree but should not be prevented from taking a master or PhD. Males on the other hand should obviously continue to be encouraged to take higher education – bachelor, master and PhD. …
Womens "new role" should be actively illustrated and glorified through series, movies and commercials. …
The end result for implementing the above reforms would be an increase in the fertility rate up from 1,5 to approximately 2,1-2,4 which would be sustainable.
However, this will also involve significant restrictions in women's rights and media rights.
Large chunks of the manifesto consist of cut-and-pasted blog posts from an anonymous far-right Norwegian blogger known as Fjordman. (See my post here for an extensive number of quotes from Fjordman that Breivik included in his manifesto.) Like Breivik's own writings, many of Fjordman's writings could be lifted virtually word for word from "manosphere" blogs.
One internet prankster conducted a little experiment that proved pretty clearly just how unexceptional this sort of rhetoric is in the manosphere, posting an assortment of misogynist quotes from Breivik's manifesto (all of them taken originally from Fjordman) to Reddit's Men's Rights forum – without identifying them as being from Breivik.
Despite – or perhaps because of – the blatant misogyny, the post initially received numerous upvotes and some positive comments ("Nice post man") from the regulars. Once it was revealed that the quotes had come from Breivik's manifesto, the downvotes and critical comments began to stack up. (I wrote about the incident here.)
But Reddit's Men's Rights subreddit is actually one of the most moderate and least misogynistic Men's Rights hangout online. Others in the manosphere have stepped up to defend Breivik's manifesto (if not his actions) plainly and explicitly, in full knowledge of just whose ideas they are endorsing.
On In Mala Fide, blogger Ferdinand Bardamu praises Breivik's "lucidity," and blames his murderous actions on the evils of a too-liberal society:
[A]nother madman with a sensible manifesto. Another completely rational, intelligent man driven to murderous insanity. And once again, society has zero introspection in regards to its profound ability to turn thoughtful men into lunatic butchers.He's not being sarcastic here. He continues:
That makes HOW many rage killers in the past five years alone? And not just transparent headcases like Jared Loughner or George Sodini, but ordinary men like Pekka-Eric Auvinen or Joe Stack who simply weren't going to take it anymore. No one bothers to ask WHY all these men suddenly decide to pick up a gun and start shooting people – they're all written off as crazies. Or the rage killings are blamed on overly permissive gun laws …That final reference to "ethnic self-hatred" seems to be Bardamu's euphemistic way of complaining that not enough white people are white supremacists.
Here's an idea – sick societies produce sick individuals who do sick things. Anders Breivin [sic] murdered nearly a hundred teens (not children, TEENS – they were at a summer camp for young adults) and must pay the price, but the blood of those teens is ultimately on the hands of the society that spat him forth. He is the bastard son of a masochistic, degenerate, rootless world that pisses on its traditions and heritage to elevate perversity, mindless consumerism and ethnic self-hatred to the highest of virtues.
Meanwhile, Chuck of Gucci Little Piggy offers what appears to be a somewhat more restrained, if ultimately more puzzling, defense of Breivik's manifesto – or at least that portion of the manifesto that Breivik borrowed from the writings of far-right blogger Fjordman.
After first complaining, incorrectly, that feminists are "try[ing] to blame Breivik on MRAs" (he cites me and Hugo Schwyzer as examples), Chuck goes on to endorse Breivik's (and Fjordman's) notion that feminism "grease[s]the wheels to allow Islam into his country," as Chuck summarizes the argument. The rest of Chuck's post elaborates on, and endorses, Breivik's/Fjordman's theories, arguing that feminism's "emasculation of Western men has taken the organic policing mechanism out of the hands of men in society" and thus rendered Western society helpless before the Islamic cultural invaders. (More on Bardamu and Gucci Little Piggy's arguments here.)
But the strangest response I've seen so far to the massacre in Norway comes from Sofiastry, an antifeminist blog that seems to be broadly sympathetic to the "alt" (that is, the "intellectually" racist) right. Apparently taking her cue from Bardamu, Sofia offers an appreciation of sorts for Breivik's repellant manifesto:
[A]lthough his actions were cruel beyond belief, and committed by a delusional, psychopath driven by his delusions of political grandeur, there is lucidity and sense in much of what he writes. He never seemed to explicitly advocated [sic] for a genocide of Muslims within Europe, but superficially claimed that he just wanted to sustain European culture.So, let's weigh Breivik's pros and cons here. CON: He murdered dozens of people in cold blood, motivated by a hateful ideology. PRO: He didn't explicitly call for actual genocide?
And then it just gets, well, weird:
I feel that Breivik is being tried for more than his cruelty within the feminist community. The fact that he belongs to the privileged group of the white male makes him hate-worthy along with every other privileged white male who might sympathize with his ideology, even if they don't happen to be psychotic. Breivik exemplifies White Men, even though Osama Bin Laden to the very same liberal ideologues did not represent Every Muslim.Yep, that's right. She thinks we hate Breivik … because he's a white dude.
It's another symptom of our culture that feels it is OK to hold white men to higher standards of political correctness, self-flagellation and martyrdom whilst simultaneously relentlessly berating and mocking them on a cultural level.
I can't speak for every feminist, but for me, it's more the murdering, and the misogyny, and the racism. But mostly the murdering. (For more on Sofia, see here.)
Despite the many undeniable similarities between Breivik's repellent misogyny and misogynist beliefs that are widespread in the "manosphere," some MRAs profess to be shocked –shocked! – that anyone would connect the dots. MRA bloviator Bernard Chapin, for example, responded to my first piece on Breivik with an angry, incoherent ten minute YouTube diatribe expressing his outrage that I would possibly suggest any connection between MRA thought and a "psychopath" like Breivik. It's a classic case of someone protesting too much. The connections are clear to anyone willing to see them.
No, Breivik is not an MRA. No, he didn't take his marching orders from The Spearhead or In Mala Fide. But he is steeped in the same kind of hatred that is prevalent on those sites, and many of his repugnant beliefs about feminism and women in general are virtually identical to beliefs widespread in the misogynistic manosphere – a fact that a few in the manosphere are already willing to acknowledge out loud, as we saw above.
No, not every misogynist is going to pick up a gun. But ideas do have consequences. Vile, hateful ideas have vile, hateful consequences.
PS: For more on Breivik's misogyny, see Michelle Goldberg's Norway Killer's Hatred of Women in TheDailyBeast.
Film Corner!
Below, the trailer for the new Justin Timberlake vehicle, In Time, which, as you will soon discover, is a very clever pun. (No it's not. Clever, I mean. It is definitely a pun.) The writer and director of this movie is Andrew Niccol, who wrote and directed some films I liked very much (Gattaca; The Truman Show) but also came up with the story for The Terminal, that garbage film in which Tom Hanks plays a Latka Gravas who lives at the airport, so it could really go either way.
Anyhoo, IMDb informs me that In Time is about a future in which "people stop aging at 25 and must work to buy themselves more time, but when a young man finds himself with more time than he can imagine he must run from the corrupt police force to save his life." Meanwhile, the trailer informs me it is also about a future in which women retain the timeless choice between dude prop or dude trophy.
Once again, I will observe the bitter hilarity of a mind that can conceive of a concept in which a digital life clock counts down on every person's arm, but can't conceive of a concept in which women, and men of color, aren't marginalized supporting cast for a graduate of the Mickey Mouse Club.
To the trailer!
Text Onscreen: "In the late 21st Century, time has replaced money as the unit of currency." ("Time is money!"—My Dad, telling me to get busy dusting the living room if I want my $2 allowance, 1984.) More Text Onscreen: "At 25 years old, aging stops, and each person is given one more year to live." ("What is this shit?"—My Dad, if and when he sees this trailer, 2011.) More Text Onscreen: "Unless you replenish your clock, you die." I originally read this as "Unless you replenish your COCK," which I'm pretty sure is a concept developed by S. Freud.
Cue the action thriller music. Justin Timberlake's clock is ticking down. He wants more time. He is OUTRAGED that it costs four minutes for a cup of coffee when yesterday it cost three. He doesn't get paid as much time at work as he expected; he met the quota but OH SHIT the quota has gone up since last week.
He and his friend Roseanne Conner's Son-in-Law meet a dude at a bar who has a CENTURY in his clock. Everyone oohs and ahhs at the guy with the huge clock. Some other asshole wants the guy's clock. Justin Timberlake helps the white dude with the huge clock escape the white dude with the smaller clock through the bathroom window. No, I am not making this up.
They go back to the dude with the huge clock's apartment, where he tells Justin Timberlake that he is 105 years old, but he's had enough. He exposits some stuff about how there wouldn't be room for everyone if everyone had a clock as big as his: "How else could there be men with a million years, while most live day-to-day?"
I realize the clock is supposed to be a metaphor for money/power/influence, but the absence of women in this trailer, combined with the fact that the acquisition and exhibition of wealth in a patriarchal system is itself often a metaphorical dick-measuring contest, is severely undermining my appreciation of the profound existential and justice commentary to which I'm supposed to be paying attention, because all I can think is that this film should not have been called In Time but In My Pants.
Anyway!
Justin Timberlake tells the dude with the huge clock that he "sure as hell wouldn't waste it" if he had a huge clock, so, after Justin Timberlake falls asleep, the dude gives his huge clock to him. Justin Timberlake wakes up to find himself with a huge clock, and a message scrawled in the grime on the window of the loft: "Don't waste my time." MORE PUNS PLEASE!
Blah blah blah now people, namely Cillian Murphy, are after Justin Timberlake's huge clock. JT is meanwhile using his new huge clock to get access to fancy limos and dress-up parties in "New Greenwich." I think he sleeps with a call girl, but only realizes it when he sees that there's less time on his huge clock…? He gets introduced to some very clock-rich white dude's mother-in-law, wife, and daughter, who all look the same age and very much alike.
Eww.
Cillian Murphy shows up to nab JT. It's not clear why, exactly, Cillian Murphy wants to get him, except, I guess, for how we're supposed to infer that the government (or WHOEVER) always wants to crush any threat to their power, but if there are truly white dudes running around with million-year clocks, is a hundred-year clock really that threatening? I'm sure all will become clear IN TIME!
Justin Timberlake punches people and gets his huge clock the heck out of there by taking lookalike daughter played by Amanda Seyfried hostage. She wants to go home, but he won't let her, because she's his insurance policy blah blah blah. This kidnapping is obviously justified because he has a feeling they'll find him guilty whether they can prove it or not. Not only am I convinced, so is she! Cue the running while holding hands and the making out!
Montagery. A collection of random but suuuuuuuuuuuper trite quotes: "If you can buy loyalty, you can buy their trail." "For you to be immortal, many must die." "No one should be immortal, if even one person has to die." "How can you live with yourself watching people die right next to you?" "You don't watch; you close your eyes." "I'm going to make them pay; I'm going to take them for everything they've got."
Ah, okay. This is a treatise on privilege and is, in fact, just a retelling of Robin Hood. JT breaks into a time-bank (lulz) and steals a bunch of time, which he and Amanda Seyfried then hand out to people. "Take the time! It's free!"
More montagery. Evil white dudes with huge clocks say things about time getting into the wrong hands and upsetting the system. To underline that point, we get a scene of a poor black mother turning time over in her hands. Oof your racist symbolism.
THANK HEAVENS THAT NICE WHITE BOY WITH THE HUGE CLOCK IS GONNA SAVE EVERYONE.
"His crime," says someone who cares in voiceover, "wasn't taking time; it was giving it away."
Okay, player.
Anyhoo, IMDb informs me that In Time is about a future in which "people stop aging at 25 and must work to buy themselves more time, but when a young man finds himself with more time than he can imagine he must run from the corrupt police force to save his life." Meanwhile, the trailer informs me it is also about a future in which women retain the timeless choice between dude prop or dude trophy.
Once again, I will observe the bitter hilarity of a mind that can conceive of a concept in which a digital life clock counts down on every person's arm, but can't conceive of a concept in which women, and men of color, aren't marginalized supporting cast for a graduate of the Mickey Mouse Club.
To the trailer!
Text Onscreen: "In the late 21st Century, time has replaced money as the unit of currency." ("Time is money!"—My Dad, telling me to get busy dusting the living room if I want my $2 allowance, 1984.) More Text Onscreen: "At 25 years old, aging stops, and each person is given one more year to live." ("What is this shit?"—My Dad, if and when he sees this trailer, 2011.) More Text Onscreen: "Unless you replenish your clock, you die." I originally read this as "Unless you replenish your COCK," which I'm pretty sure is a concept developed by S. Freud.
Cue the action thriller music. Justin Timberlake's clock is ticking down. He wants more time. He is OUTRAGED that it costs four minutes for a cup of coffee when yesterday it cost three. He doesn't get paid as much time at work as he expected; he met the quota but OH SHIT the quota has gone up since last week.
He and his friend Roseanne Conner's Son-in-Law meet a dude at a bar who has a CENTURY in his clock. Everyone oohs and ahhs at the guy with the huge clock. Some other asshole wants the guy's clock. Justin Timberlake helps the white dude with the huge clock escape the white dude with the smaller clock through the bathroom window. No, I am not making this up.
They go back to the dude with the huge clock's apartment, where he tells Justin Timberlake that he is 105 years old, but he's had enough. He exposits some stuff about how there wouldn't be room for everyone if everyone had a clock as big as his: "How else could there be men with a million years, while most live day-to-day?"
I realize the clock is supposed to be a metaphor for money/power/influence, but the absence of women in this trailer, combined with the fact that the acquisition and exhibition of wealth in a patriarchal system is itself often a metaphorical dick-measuring contest, is severely undermining my appreciation of the profound existential and justice commentary to which I'm supposed to be paying attention, because all I can think is that this film should not have been called In Time but In My Pants.
Anyway!
Justin Timberlake tells the dude with the huge clock that he "sure as hell wouldn't waste it" if he had a huge clock, so, after Justin Timberlake falls asleep, the dude gives his huge clock to him. Justin Timberlake wakes up to find himself with a huge clock, and a message scrawled in the grime on the window of the loft: "Don't waste my time." MORE PUNS PLEASE!
Blah blah blah now people, namely Cillian Murphy, are after Justin Timberlake's huge clock. JT is meanwhile using his new huge clock to get access to fancy limos and dress-up parties in "New Greenwich." I think he sleeps with a call girl, but only realizes it when he sees that there's less time on his huge clock…? He gets introduced to some very clock-rich white dude's mother-in-law, wife, and daughter, who all look the same age and very much alike.
Eww.
Cillian Murphy shows up to nab JT. It's not clear why, exactly, Cillian Murphy wants to get him, except, I guess, for how we're supposed to infer that the government (or WHOEVER) always wants to crush any threat to their power, but if there are truly white dudes running around with million-year clocks, is a hundred-year clock really that threatening? I'm sure all will become clear IN TIME!
Justin Timberlake punches people and gets his huge clock the heck out of there by taking lookalike daughter played by Amanda Seyfried hostage. She wants to go home, but he won't let her, because she's his insurance policy blah blah blah. This kidnapping is obviously justified because he has a feeling they'll find him guilty whether they can prove it or not. Not only am I convinced, so is she! Cue the running while holding hands and the making out!
Montagery. A collection of random but suuuuuuuuuuuper trite quotes: "If you can buy loyalty, you can buy their trail." "For you to be immortal, many must die." "No one should be immortal, if even one person has to die." "How can you live with yourself watching people die right next to you?" "You don't watch; you close your eyes." "I'm going to make them pay; I'm going to take them for everything they've got."
Ah, okay. This is a treatise on privilege and is, in fact, just a retelling of Robin Hood. JT breaks into a time-bank (lulz) and steals a bunch of time, which he and Amanda Seyfried then hand out to people. "Take the time! It's free!"
More montagery. Evil white dudes with huge clocks say things about time getting into the wrong hands and upsetting the system. To underline that point, we get a scene of a poor black mother turning time over in her hands. Oof your racist symbolism.
THANK HEAVENS THAT NICE WHITE BOY WITH THE HUGE CLOCK IS GONNA SAVE EVERYONE.
"His crime," says someone who cares in voiceover, "wasn't taking time; it was giving it away."
Okay, player.
This is what privilege looks like.
Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks and Hispanics:
The median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of newly available government data from 2009.The piece cites "plummeting house values" as the "principal cause of the recent erosion in household wealth among all groups," which disproportionately affected Latin@s, but, of course, there are other reasons: Whites are more likely to be invested in the stock market (even if merely through a retirement account like a 401k), which recovered its value in a way home equity has not; people of color are more likely to have been targeted by predatory lending; whites are more likely to have inherited wealth; etc.
These lopsided wealth ratios are the largest since the government began publishing such data a quarter century ago...
From 2005 to 2009, inflation-adjusted median wealth fell by 66% among Hispanic households and 53% among black households, compared with just 16% among white households.
...Moreover, about a third of black (35%) and Hispanic (31%) households had zero or negative net worth in 2009, compared with 15% of white households. In 2005, the comparable shares had been 29% for blacks, 23% for Hispanics and 11% for whites.
...Household wealth is the accumulated sum of assets (houses, cars, savings and checking accounts, stocks and mutual funds, retirement accounts, etc.) minus the sum of debt (mortgages, auto loans, credit card debt, etc.). It is different from household income, which measures the annual inflow of wages, interest, profits and other sources of earning. Wealth gaps between whites, blacks and Hispanics have always been much greater than income gaps.
All of which is a function of privilege.
[Related Reading: Can't Vs. Won't.]
Black Women's Hair Ain't Public Property
Woot! Check out two of our favorite bloggers, Tami of What Tami Said and Renee of Womanist Musings, in this CNN piece about people (generally white people) touching black women's hair.
A note about the attempt at equivalency that Renee mentions:
Of course people are naturally curious, etc. But when an adult white person wants to touch a black woman's hair in the United States or Canada, that speaks to segregation more than curiosity. It wouldn't be a curiosity for an adult in a diverse culture that's properly integrated.
And, of course, it wouldn't be an issue if our culture wasn't rife with privilege, narratives about women's bodies being public property (even to other women), and hostility toward consent.
A note about the attempt at equivalency that Renee mentions:
In 2008, Renee Martin wrote "Can I Touch Your Hair? Black Women and The Petting Zoo" for her blog Womanist Musings and said she continues to get e-mails from women thanking her for her post and relaying their personal experiences about their hair being touched.It would have been nice if the author of the piece, Lisa Respers France, noted that women like Renee and Tami are not tourists in a foreign locale, to really underline how offensive the false equivalency of "My hair got touched by people of color while I was on vacation" really is.
Some white women who responded, Martin said, shared their stories of their own hair being touched in countries populated by people of color. They chalked it up to natural curiosity and accused Martin of being too sensitive, she said.
But she says she doesn't think the crux of the issue has to do with curiosity.
"I think it's the idea that they have the right to possess black women and they will take any excuse they can to jump over the border, whether it's policing our behavior or policing our hair," Martin said. "I think it's about ownership of black bodies more than it has to actually do with hair."
Of course people are naturally curious, etc. But when an adult white person wants to touch a black woman's hair in the United States or Canada, that speaks to segregation more than curiosity. It wouldn't be a curiosity for an adult in a diverse culture that's properly integrated.
And, of course, it wouldn't be an issue if our culture wasn't rife with privilege, narratives about women's bodies being public property (even to other women), and hostility toward consent.
Two Facts
1. Someone is still paying Jonah Goldberg to write a garbage column.
2. Jonah Goldberg uses this week's garbage column to write some shambling deposit of tommyrot in which he mendaciously deconstructs an NPR piece about the ubiquity of the phrase, "That's racist!" which the younger set uses as an absurdery to mock racial sensitivity, in order to assert that conservatives are like kids, man: They don't get all sensitive about racial stuff.
Goldberg's right that (many) conservatives are like (many) kids, in the sense that neither one has a particular sensitivity toward covert racism. Thing is, kids have the excuse of youth and inexperience: White kids also have privilege making them insensitive to race; and some kids of color experience something similar to what I did growing up as a girl in a feminist age—the promise of equality that makes social justice seem quaint and antiquated until you run headlong into evidence of the promise unfulfilled.
Conservatives like Goldberg, however, who fancy themselves beyond the tedium of racial sensitivity, do not have the excuse of youth and inexperience. They're just assholes.
2. Jonah Goldberg uses this week's garbage column to write some shambling deposit of tommyrot in which he mendaciously deconstructs an NPR piece about the ubiquity of the phrase, "That's racist!" which the younger set uses as an absurdery to mock racial sensitivity, in order to assert that conservatives are like kids, man: They don't get all sensitive about racial stuff.
Goldberg's right that (many) conservatives are like (many) kids, in the sense that neither one has a particular sensitivity toward covert racism. Thing is, kids have the excuse of youth and inexperience: White kids also have privilege making them insensitive to race; and some kids of color experience something similar to what I did growing up as a girl in a feminist age—the promise of equality that makes social justice seem quaint and antiquated until you run headlong into evidence of the promise unfulfilled.
Conservatives like Goldberg, however, who fancy themselves beyond the tedium of racial sensitivity, do not have the excuse of youth and inexperience. They're just assholes.
Whoooooooooops
[Trigger warning for racism.]
Texas Governor Rick Perry gets tepid response at Latino convention:
Texas Governor Rick Perry gets tepid response at Latino convention:
Gov. Rick Perry received a tepid response when he addressed the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials on Thursday, joking about the pronunciation of a Hispanic appointee's last name and frequently staring blankly at the audience when they failed to respond to his conservative applause lines.Obstacles like your governor making fun of your name, you mean? Or obstacles like this:
...[A] joke about how perfect it was to appoint Jose Cuevas to the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission because his name sounds like Jose Cuervo - a brand of tequila - fell flat. Perry struggled to regain his confidence as he described Texas as a land of opportunity.
"You have a role model you can look up to, someone who proves that any obstacle can be overcome," Perry said. "That is especially true for a Hispanic child in Texas."
Democratic Mayor Julian Castro derided the latest legislative session and Perry's emergency bills, as "the most anti-Latino agenda we've seen in more than a generation, without shame.""Tepid response." Indeed.