So that’s how things stand.

And I certainly hope that isn’t too “civil” for our brave fighters on the right. I wouldn’t want to be accused of being one of the pussy pansy weaksister pussies that are handing this country and all of Western Civilization over to the commiepinkofeminazis who want to enslave us all by making women take birth control or putting more non-white people on tv or whatever it is. Sorry, on my paradisaical holiday from all this shit hiatus I’ve kind of lost track of the latest Plots To Destroy Us All. Just mentally insert your own concern here. I’m sure it’s serious and we’re all going to die.

Anyway, to get back to the current pissing match, the latest thing to set the conservative blogverse on it’s ear can be summed up as “Leave Rush Limbaugh ALONE!!11!! *SOB*!!!” No really, all that’s missing is a video on Youtube of some Proper Housewife crying while clutching her AM radio to her bosom. I have no dog in this hunt, never having been a fan of Limbaugh and hating talk radio of all types with a white hot passion. No seriously, quit your yammering and put some Three Dog Night on. I associate talking on the radio with those deejays that were contractually obligated to break in as the song was ending so that people like me who were trying to record the song on a cassette would have to cut it off early and thus wouldn’t be able to sell our illegally recorded tapes to Chinese pirates. Anyway, not a fan of Limbaugh or talk radio so if a science fiction device destroyed all the talk radio programs in the world I wouldn’t cry. I will say one thing, though: I have worked in offices for years, but not the sort of offices that Kathy Shaidle often complains about — ones full of nicey-nice ladies with pictures of their cats and children cluttering their desks, obsessed with cake and complaining to HR if a man so much as looks at them cross-eyed. In fact, I’d have killed to work in an office like that — at least I’d have gotten cake. No, for the most part in my long, Office Space-like career I’ve worked mostly in male-dominated offices full of telemarketers and mortgage brokers, and I started back when you could still smoke indoors and sexual harassment laws weren’t even a tear in Naomi Wolff’s eye. And I have heard every sexist and racist joke there is. I have paid my dues. I don’t need to relive the early 80s ever again.

There is one thing this all confirms for me: America is by no means a patriarchy. Oh no, it is not. A patriarchy would at least imply adulthood, and as usual there are no grownups to be seen, only sports fan clutching the various souvenirs of their favorite teams. The United States of America is not a patriarchy — it’s a Boy’s Own Clubhouse, full of overgrown adolescents vying among one another for the title of Most Obnoxious. Don’t believe me? Here’s the ideal “Daddy” to an overgrown adolescent: the guy who shoots his daughter’s laptop with real bullets for mouthing off, not even to him, but about him to friends on Facebook. Yes, shooting things is such a level-headed, adult reaction to being dissed. I’m sure if the guy had been black the “conservative” blogosphere would be just as ready to support him… Hey, hey, hey — where are you all going?

Speaking of black people, sorry, but this is not funny. I’m white and I’m sitting here right now not laughing. Here’s a quote:

“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”

“No’m. Killed a nigger.”

“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.

Oh wait, that’s not from the blog post. Or is it?

Anyway, moving on. Like all childish cultures, here in the US of A there’s a tendency to form cliques and to suck up to the alpha creatures at the top of the banana pile. I see you sitting back in anticipation of another rant about liberals and their Obama worship. Ha ha ha ha! Suckers. I’m over that. I’m here to tell you about the increasing sycophancy of “conservatives” and “libertarians” towards their own chosen celebs, as can be seen in the rush — he heh — to “protect” Rush Limbaugh from those awful meanie critics. Sadly, this disease is spreading to other parts of the Anglosphere, as is revealed in this disturbing comment from Australian Joanne Nova, who was thrilled that Mark Steyn read her stuff, or as she put it: “Some days I wonder if an audience of 5,000 readers a day matters, but then I find a famous cartoonist, author, or member of parliament who reads the site, and all the work seems worthwhile. I’m reaching the people that matter.” You know, I’m just going to put that down to a poor choice of words, and perhaps cultural differences, otherwise I’d have to think about how am I supposed to find a difference between leftist and rightist thought on who “matters”? Because apparently if you’re not a celebrity you don’t matter. To any one.

Okay, I’m getting kind of tired. So I’ll leave this with a statement that will no doubt get me branded a feminazi liberal pinko commie slut: notice how it’s always the women who get this sort of criticism? Oh okay, non-white males get it too, but let’s face it, they’re honorary women when it comes to who gets to control their own bodily autonomy. I would like someone to email me evidence that a major news outlet or big deal conservative blog has dissed a white man for sleeping with more than one woman out of wedlock. It ties into our politics, and if you don’t believe me just look at the current Republican contenders for the presidency: white males all. They even dredged up Newt Gingrich, like Grendel’s mother from the slimy mere. (His first name is an amphibian and his last name sounds like Gollum’s family name. You know it’s true.) “Bu-but what about Herman Cain?” I hear you ask. Oh, you mean that black guy who dropped out of the race after a bunch of white people lost their shit when they found out he’d flirted with a white woman? (I wondered at the time if these Mighty Whiteys had ever actually met a black man. Black men flirt with all the ladies, because they are confident and it’s fun. Even gay black men flirt with women.) Anyway, yeah. And there’s also no ladies in the running — after Sarah Palin none of our brave warriors of the right would dare have a vagina anywhere near the line of succession. They’re sexist racist pigs but they aren’t stupid.

You notice (with pursed lips of disapproval I am sure) that I’m not saying anything about the Democrats. Why should I? So far they’ve played the right like a violin — they know that the right wing in this country is dominated by white male titty babies. It’s easy to start a tantrum among such: just try to take one, just one, of their toys away. Today’s toy is “women need to know their place.” I did at first think that Sandra Fluke should have responded to Limbaugh’s sub-Beavis-and-Butthead “hurr hurr she takes the Pill she must sleep with a lot of guys” prostitute allusions with “and your point is?”, but now I think she knew exactly what she was doing: getting the right wing to reveal itself once again as a gang of preteen boys who still think that their mom doesn’t know they stash copies of Playboy under their mattresses.

One more thing: only someone who has never seen an episode of Father Knows Best wouldn’t realize the title to that show was meant to be a joke. Because actually Father rarely knew best, and the comic situations were usually made right by the more sensible Mother. Using that series as an example of how we as a country need to go back to the wonderful patriarchal values of the Fifties is typical of a clueless, incurious, spoon-fed, timid, self-regarding, complacent movement.

Anyway, this place has started to feel stale and confining to me. “Spleenville” isn’t me any more, or hardly ever is me. I have other interests that I’d like to be concentrating on, none of which have to do with (ugh) politics. I certainly don’t want this to become my “brand” — I hate the very idea of “branding” anyway. Also, it horrifies me to think I need to be a person that “matters” as opposed to all those other people that “don’t matter” so I’m opting out of that shit. So I think I’ll be shutting this site down after all and moving on. I have a new thing going but it’s not ready yet. I have stories I need to work on and photography and a general desire to be open (I hate that term but I’m rushing here so I’ll use it for want of a better one) to different things. When I get the new site up and running I may post it here or you can just email me via the contact page (see the bottom of this page for the link) and I’ll send you an email — please use your real address thanks.

(Comments are turned off because I’m not really interested in an argument here.)

But I don’t want to trade it for the European (excluding the UK but possibly including Ireland, since they like to talk so damn much) tendency to talk and talk and talk and then issue a windy, pompous manifesto that often as not demands something be provided in perpetuity for free. Bonus points if no one, including the manifesto-issuer, can quite explain just what it is they want. They only know that they want it without any effort that will cause them to have to stop smoking cigarettes and drinking tiny cups of espresso. This guy wants, I think, for the favorite movies of his childhood to be available for free on the internet. All I can say to him is, you brag and brag about how expert you are at this internet stuff and you’ve never heard of Pirate Bay?

I also like how Lileks points out how things like this are always about Western culture. Yeah, you people in Borneo and Rwanda and other places where everyone doesn’t have a 24/7 plug-in to the Matrix? You don’t count.

(Via Transterrestrial Musings.)

Anyway… Kathy Shaidle linked to this article in the Daily Mail about a woman who is shocked, yes shocked, to find out that her young, smooth, slender body has transformed into a less young, less smooth, less slender body over the years. The idea of the article is that aging is a horrible thing to happen to women, how unfair, waa waa waa.

Okay. Here’s the thing. I find the older woman much more attractive than the younger one. Maybe that’s just me, but I don’t find skin and bones to be sexy. Also, the younger girl is just too young. Maybe that inexperienced, untouched look turns some men and women on, but it just makes me skeevy. The older woman’s body looks lived in and experienced, like someone who has done things and thought things, some of them possibly interesting. And hell, I should look so good.

But. I am starting to be disturbed by what I have been seeing in some parts of the conservative/libertarian/rightwing internet recently: a resurgence in preoccupation with unrealistic and unhealthy standards of female beauty. It was fun to admire Condoleeza Rice and Sarah Palin’s good looks; it was less fun to read petty slams on Hillary Clinton for looking her age and wearing pants suits. That was then. Then I started reading various HBD and men’s rights websites, until I had to quit because I couldn’t see the text for all the hatred of any woman who dared not wear high heels and makeup any time she ventured out of doors, and worse, was over 20 and hadn’t joined an alpha male harem, and worst of all, dared to be overweight — and by “overweight” they meant “is not a stick with boobs and hair.”

What I really hate, though, is I’m starting to see women joining in. Crying because they aren’t young and skinny any more. Criticizing female political figures they don’t agree with by using their looks against them. I’m going to confess something: I love Hillary Clinton’s Dr. Evil outfit. All she has to do is get a dueling scar and be interviewed petting a white cat and she has my vote. (Why vote for the lesser evil indeed?) But from my supposed fellow rightwingers (who aren’t really my fellows these days, but you’re starting to figure that out, aren’t you?) all I saw were sneers and juvenile jibes. That’s worse than the pants suit thing.

I stopped calling myself a feminist because feminists had gotten so silly over the past few decades. The silliness culminated back in the late 80s, when women threw themselves under the bus for the right to none other than Hillary Clinton’s husband to sexually assault all the young female underlings he wanted, so long as he threw the ladies a couple of crumbs of power every now and then. As far as I was concerned feminism as a movement of any importance on planet Earth died when that woman, whose name I have mercifully erased from my memory, said she’d give Bill Clinton a blow job as long as legal abortion was safe.

Still, that doesn’t mean everything feminists said was wrong. They were right about a lot of things, and one of the things the were right about was that our society had unhealthy standards of beauty for women. It disturbs me to see that so many women in the 21st century still think that there is nothing wrong with saying that it would take them years to “recover” from seeing a photograph of their older nude body. That is wrong. I don’t care if it’s “honest.” Young women hearing this from older women will internalize the idea that older women are ugly, that they are only valuable when they are young and skinny. And young women who aren’t skinny (that is, don’t fit into the current sickly, borderline starving ideal of female beauty) have it even worse, because they’ll get the idea that they are already not valuable and they never will be. What is that I can’t even.

And don’t tell me men get treated the same way and have the same feelings of worthlessness when they’re old because it’s not true and you know it. Women have always had to bear the burden of knowing they’ll be considered useless and ugly when they are no longer young and smooth-skinned while men get told things like “older men look distiguished.” Don’t even lie to me and tell me it’s not so. Men won’t lift a finger to put a stop to it because why would they? They’re getting all the benefits of this system. It’s up to women to quit perpetuating it by playing the game. We can start by stopping — stop moaning about how ugly we are, stop crying over the waistline we had when we were young and stupid, stop agreeing with other women that growing old and even (gasp!) not ever finding a man and ending up living alone is the most horrible thing that could ever happen. I can think of a lot more horrible fates — like being young, pretty, and in a coffin.

A few more after the cut:

1. The Daily Mail
2. “Daily Mail Reporter”
3. “…it has been revealed.” (No no NO NO.)
4. I am put in the position of actually having to defend Richard Dawkins, who I think is somewhat of a big jerk sometimes.

By the way, that’s “wrong” as in “wrong-bad,” not “wrong” as in factually inaccurate, and it fills me with dismay that so-called “conservatives” keep falling for tactics like this. After all, isn’t it one of the major complaints conservatives have about liberals and progressives the way that those two groups use “UR ancestors were bad!” tactics to gain political power? I have no doubts (and also don’t care) that some ancestor of Dawkins’ owned slaves in Jamaica. What is wrong-bad about this whole thing is the way his opponents are snickering and giggling about this as if they’d revealed some big, damaging secret. Sadly, in this bizarre world where people (white “liberal” ones, mostly) are trying to one-up each other in the “I’m more anti-racist no I’m more anti-racist” holier-than-thou game, it could probably cause damage to whatever he is trying to do, even good things.

Because I’m sure that he does good things in between setting fire to the kittens of cute Catholic children and trying to cancel Christmas. Let’s look for some. Oh here. Here is the Richard Dawkins Foundation, whose mission says it is to

…support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and suffering.

See, who can argue with that? Aren’t scientific education, critical thinking, and evidence-based understanding of the natural world good things, that people on the right and left side of the political spectrum both claim to want to be used in society? On the other hand, there is that bit about “religious superstition,” but I can remember when I was a kid being told that “superstition” was different from proper religious belief. “Superstition” was both stupid (astrology, palm-reading, thinking that if you broke a mirror you’d have seven years of bad luck) and dangerous (belief in witches led to the death of scores of innocent old women whose only crime was being disliked by their neighbors), and proper Christians, for example, were not supposed to act that way. There was even a song, popular in the Seventies, that spelled that out: “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder. Anyway, to make a long diatribe short, in Sunday school we kids were taught that “proper” religious belief did not involve the use of nonsensical activities like spells, horoscopes, and charms to get things we wanted and to tell the future. We were taught that proper religious belief was supposed to focus on making you behave better. Yes, it was a very Protestant, whitebread sort of religious upbringing I had, but that was before religion on television became popular.

Leaving the religious bit aside, I think that the mission of the Dawkins Foundation is a good one. We have a real serious need for proper scientific education in the Western World. The lack of understanding goes all the way to the top, leading to such things as the banning of the harmless incandescent light bulb as a frankly superstitious gesture towards the problem of overuse of energy. Banning the light bulb does fuckall to save large amounts of energy — it’s like watering a petunia in your front yard while your house is burning. But the scientific ignoramuses we keep voting into the government were fooled into doing this and now if I want to buy 100-watt incandescent bulbs I have to order them over the internet from Germany. What sort of fuckery is that?

Anyway, getting back to the point, how is Dawkins at fault for this? Where is his hypocrisy? The only way this attack could mean anything would be if he had tried to hide or deny his family history, or if he had attacked someone else for having slave-owning ancestors. As far as I know he has not done either of those things. What good does sneering at Richard Dawkins’ slave-owning ancestor do anyone? It gives his enemies a right old laugh. And… that’s about it. All I can say is you must be very depressed if that’s what it takes to cheer you up. Also? I never want to hear one word against “reparations” or anything descendants of African slaves in Europe and the Americas say or do any more if you think this sort of thing is okay. No more complaints about their supposed “lower IQs” being the only thing holding them back from being as intelligent and successful as white people, no more whining when your “funny” racist joke isn’t well-received, no more complaining that “those people stick together,” no bitching that white people aren’t getting 100% of the appreciation any more, no moaning about how some minority critic trampled on your toys when he pointed out some beloved book or movie has racist elements in it. I don’t want to hear any of it any more if you think that it’s just fine to join in when some white person who is on the other side of your white people status games gets slammed.

(Via Kathy Shaidle, who sadly joins in on the mockery — even though, I don’t know, she’s apparently not too pleased with the Catholic church these days, so whatever.)

ASDFGHJKLL;

ADSFHGFJGKJGHJKMIOULILJUKLHJVJK,GM,BN

For. The. Last. Time. KODAK IS NOT GOING OUT OF BUSINESS. THERE IS NO “DEMISE” OF KODAK. CHAPTER 11 IS A RESTRUCTURING MOVE. THEIR “OBSOLETE” FILM DIVISION IS THE ONLY ONE THAT STILL MAKES ANY KIND OF PROFIT, SO GUESS WHAT — THEY ARE KEEPING IT GOING. YEAH.

In other words, they’re actually doing something right for probably the first time in 100 years. Their situation now is not at all analogous to the moribund, blind-to-reality, “it can’t happen to us,” “why should we listen to the peons” traditional publishing industry. A better comparison would be to the Kodak of yesteryear and their efforts to control the film camera industry by dick moves like 620 film, and APS film.

And actually, I don’t even think that works. Because it’s like this: film is not easy to produce, and there are only a few other companies in the world (Fujifilm, Adox) who still make it. Film manufacturing needs specialized equipment and people with the special knowledge of how to operate that equipment. Text, on the other hand, is easily produced. You don’t need specialized equipment or knowledge, just a standard modern education and a writing implement. And with the advent of the internet, e-readers, and companies like Amazon, a writer no longer needs to depend on a traditional publisher to get his works printed and advertized.

According to the post I linked in the above paragraph, an author of an apparently-beloved YA book series (vampire-themed, as so many of these things are these days, sigh), has had her work taken from her and given to a “ghostwriter” because Evil Corporate Publisher, etc. But as you read further (and as is pointed out by a few helpful commenters), the writer in question, one L.J. Smith, wasn’t actually what we think of as an “author.” You know, someone who has a burning need to write a story that they created themselves out of their ideas, dreams, and experience. Instead, she had been hired on to pen a YA series for this publisher, Harper-Collins. Hired on to write something isn’t quite the same thing as you approaching a publisher yourself with your manuscript(s). And it looks like what happened is she either didn’t read the contract or have it read for her by someone more qualified, or she did and didn’t understand certain things, or she did and understood it perfectly well but hoped that something like this would not come to pass but now that it did she’s having a good old public cry about it.

What can I say. Let’s see, how about: this author seems to have put forth a lot of creative effort on this book series and obviously feels used and abused. On the other hand, she did get paid, and she did get name recognition. Of course, now she probably won’t be able to publish anything under that name because the publisher is going to keep on putting it on new entries to the series even though she’s not going to be writing them. Not only did she sell them her time and effort, it looks like she sold them the name “L.J. Smith.” Oops. Of course, she could just start writing under a pen name, but she’ll have to work her way back up the brand-recognition ladder. That’s tough, but that’s the way the game is played. At least now she has the internet to help her — she can notify her fans of her new name and direction.

Still, it just goes to show that being an “Author” and being a writer are two different things. A writer writes, but an Author gets invited to parties. Writers have been told for decades now that they aren’t really writers unless they are Authors too. And like college degrees, the concept of the Author has degraded over time as publishers turned more and more to marketing “trends” and “concepts” and less to actually publishing books. Maybe this is the real “death of the Author.” It’s about time.

A primitive society is being devastated by a disease, so you bring modern medicine to bear, and wipe out the disease, only to find that by doing so you have brought on a population explosion…

What. I mean what. No really, what. This was quoted with approval, by the way, because as we all know conservatives are supposed to want to stop all that improvement-of-the-world stuff because OMG something could change and someone might get uncomfortable by being jolted out of their little shell of complacency! Especially if it results in a “primitive society” (ew!) having a “population explosion” because some stoopid doctors cured them of a disease that was killing them off and making more room for white people.

So you know, I think for myself. If that means I’m not “conservative” if “conservative” means worrying that healthy “primitives” (i.e., people with too much pigmentation in their skin who put too much spice in their food and worship unapproved gods) are having too many babies because some “scientist” (boo hiss) cured them of a disease then fuck it, I’m a liberal.

By the way, I didn’t read the rest of the shit. I know what “unintended consequences” are and I know that they are something to watch out for and when they happen to deal with like grown men and women. They are not a reason to stop curing diseases or trying to fix any of the other problems of life on Earth. They are not a reason to retreat in a thumb-sucking sulk to a playpen lined with the works of Dead White Males.

However, Beck apparently thinks that it’s not really about Buddy Holly, but about the evils of rioting. And um… okay, I’ll admit that I quit reading the transcript. Because I don’t fucking care. And yes, I was subjected to the lecture, on one of the few “dates” I went on when I was in my twenties. I think there is some unwritten law that every man in North America (and possibly the UK and Ireland) has to bore at least one woman in his life at least once with a long-winded disquisition on Don McLean’s opus. What really irritated me was I already knew all that shit about the song. My friends and I were all pop culture junkies back then and were really into the Sixties, so we — men, hang onto your parts so they don’t fall off — had researched the song all by our ownselves. What can I say, cable tv was still in its infancy and we didn’t have the internet then to distract and entertain us, and they cancelled Manimal at some point so there was nothing on tv to watch. Anyway, I went on this date with this guy, who was nice enough, and we’re hanging out in his house (very chaste, he lived with his parents and it was 1983 or something), and he starts with “do you know what the song ‘American Pie’ really means?” He was one of those guys that don’t really listen to girls when they say “I’m not really interested” so I got to sit there in his parents living room in Hialeah for about two hours while he rambled on and on. In retrospect, I should have just gotten up and walked out in the middle of the part about how “I saw Satan laughing in delight” was all about the Rolling Stones at Altamont and that guy getting stabbed and oh my god kill me now why am I even thinking about this

By the way, my date was of the “‘the day the music died’ meant the death of Buddy Holly” persuasion, which I could never buy because Buddy Holly was in my opinion a rather dull singer with a couple of poppy, forgettable hits that people only keep playing because he died tragically in a plane crash along with a couple of other one-hit wonders we’d never have heard of if they were still alive and getting royalty checks in the old folks home.

(Via.)