Happy Thanksgiving and/or Thursday! Open Thread

Hippodameia

Some of Franken’s defenders disgust me. He thought the idea of assaulting a sleeping woman was so funny he wanted to be photographed pretending to do it.

I really think that some feminist writers-thinkers-bloggers might be missing a golden opportunity with that photo. What’s the most important takeaway from it?

Franken’s behaviour is classic idiotic college/ high school, vulgar, bad taste prankery. The important thing is the blaring, foghorn strength, message about (rape) culture. Who Took The Photo? Why did they take it.

The fact is that the faked groping was a performance, memorialised for the later amusement, stupid sniggering and ‘witty’ joke-making, of yet more idiotic, bad taste, thoughtless &or nasty nitwits. Presumably (but not necessarily) all men.

This wasn’t a man acting alone and pressuring a woman to tolerate, perform or engage in sexual acts. It is a vulgar, intrusive, classic boys will be boys _group_ activity where the woman concerned is more of a theatre prop, a thing, than a real, live person. A person who should be allowed to set, and then have respected, her own boundaries on what is and what is not acceptable. If we could get the viewpoint of the photographer, there might be some interesting material to add to the scenario*.

I’m thinking some more about this. (I sometimes fear that my far too frequent familiarity with 1970s style bad male behaviour doesn’t help me to be a good judge of these things now.)

* Or not.

Apropos nothing in particular.

I must admit… it does feel weird to watch Americans fawn all over the doings of the British royal family. I mean it’s one thing for us Canadians to do it; as a commonwealth nation, the Queen is still our Head of State as represented by the Governor General. But America violently threw the monarchy off…. *shrug*

Of course there’s always hubbub about in this country to abolish the monarchy and do away with the Governor General and Rideau Hall and all that, but I can’t get behind it. Perhaps I’m biased because I am of half-British descent, but I think there’s value in at least the tradition of our British ties. Having repatriated our constitution in the 80s, we’re completely self-governing at this point anyway, so the GG is essentially a symbolic and ceremonial role anyway. Not going to have any repeats of the King-Byng Thing around here, I can tell you! (obscure Canadian History joke)

Besides, anybody says thing wrong about Her Excellency the Right Honourable Julie Payette and I will fight you!

As for the weird “OMG teh monarchy impure!” bullshit, the aforementioned Habsburgs kinda laid the blueprint for why all that inbreeding is bad. No seriously, just read the Wikipedia page for Charles II of Spain.

Charles was physically and mentally disabled and infertile, possibly due to this massive inbreeding. Due to the deaths of his half brothers, he was the last member of the male Spanish Habsburg line.[5]

Charles did not learn to speak until the age of four nor to walk until eight,[6] and was treated as virtually an infant until he was ten years old. His jaw was so badly deformed (an extreme example of the so-called Habsburg jaw) that he could barely speak or chew. Fearing the frail child would be overtaxed, his caretakers did not force Charles to attend school. The indolence of the young Charles was indulged to such an extent that at times he was not expected to be clean. When his illegitimate half-brother John of Austria the Younger obtained power by exiling the queen mother from court, he covered his nose and insisted that the king at least brush his hair.

…

Toward the end of his life Charles’s fragile health deteriorated and he became increasingly hypersensitive and strange, at one point demanding that the bodies of his family be exhumed so he could look upon the corpses. He officially retired when he had a nervous breakdown caused by the amount of pressure put on him to try to pull Spain out of the economic trouble it was going through. He lived a simple life from then on, playing games and engaging in other activities. He died in Madrid on 1 November 1700 (the 39th death anniversary of his immediate elder brother), five days before his 39th birthday. The physician who performed his autopsy stated that his body “did not contain a single drop of blood; his heart was the size of a peppercorn; his lungs corroded; his intestines rotten and gangrenous; he had a single testicle, black as coal, and his head was full of water.”[12]

American historians Will and Ariel Durant described Charles II as “short, lame, epileptic, senile, and completely bald before 35, he was always on the verge of death, but repeatedly baffled Christendom by continuing to live.”[10]

…

Dating to approximately the year 1550, outbreeding in Charles II’s lineage had ceased (see also pedigree collapse).[6] From then on, all his ancestors were in one way or another descendants of Joanna and Philip I of Castile, and among these just the royal houses of Spain, Austria and Bavaria. Charles II’s genome was actually more homozygous than that of a child whose parents are siblings.[6] He was born physically and mentally disabled, and disfigured. Possibly through affliction with mandibular prognathism, he was barely able to chew.[6] His tongue was so large that his speech could barely be understood, and he frequently drooled.[6] It has been suggested that he suffered from the endocrine disease acromegaly, or his inbred lineage may have led to a combination of rare genetic disorders such as combined pituitary hormone deficiency and distal renal tubular acidosis.[6]

Alls I can add to that is “Ay carumba!”

@tim gueguen

Ach. The guys on the alt-right / mras etc etc will call literally anyone a cuck at this point. A normal guy with normal relationships? Cuck. A guy who is married? Cuck. A guy who doesn’t agree with them? Cuck. A guy who is a prince, apparently happy, relatively attractive and successful? Cuck. A guy who is like Chad? Cuck.

In fact, Chad only exists in their fantasies as a mist who takes form of a demigod to steal all women away from them.

@Katamount:
Ahh, yes, the King-Byng affair. I’ll admit that, for all that Byng’s status as vice-regal and British representative was part of the reason it escalated the way it did, he seemed to be operating under purer motives at the time. The closest thing to that since would have been what might have happened of Michaëlle Jean had told Harper ‘No’ to proroguing parliament.

The American fascination with royalty takes a darker turn once you realize that, for a lot of the southern parts of the U.S., they were less interested in escaping the monarchy as a general system than they were in turning the plantations into their own little baronies (which George III wasn’t going to grant them).

@nparker

I agree with you, mostly. Some of the defenses I’m seeing, well, they’re so far into hypocrite territory they couldn’t be evac’d.

I disagree with you on this though:

I wish to distinguish between what Franken did and what true slimeballs like Trump and Weinstein

Scum is scum, ’nuff said. There is zero difference between Franken and Wankstain – both used their (very similar) positions of authority to abuse. That is intolerable.

@ Anonymous —

You think we don’t see you violating the comments policy? That’s cute.

Mrex,

It was an entertaining show for me too. I’m a skeptic but am a sucker for anything supernatural or alien related in fiction so I looked at it as more of a fun storyteller program. Plus the people who called in were pretty damn hilarious. Aliens and shadow people were my favorite topics.

I had to stop listening after George Noory took over because it became more of an Info Wars lite type of thing.

Art Bell does have a cameo in the Lindsey Lohan flop I Know Who Killed Me. It’s partially because of that cameo that I have that movie somewhere on my top ten list of so bad they’re good movies.

Sort of related to Weinstein & pals: Don Burke (a fairly big fish in the pond of Australian TV land) has had multiple accusations of sexual assault plus workplace bullying levelled at him. At least 50 accusers and witnesses, so it’s a pretty big deal.
Anyway, he has defended himself by claiming he has Asperger’s and therefore lacks social skills, norms etc. Reminds me a bit of Spacey trying to hide behind being gay. So utterly disgusting.

Unrelated: if someone violates the comments policy, perhaps we could simply let them know? Unless it’s obvious that they’re doing it deliberately, of course.

@Katamount:

Now being the soft wussy Torontonian that I am (we needed the Army to dig us out of the snow one year),

Heh. I remember that year. Then again, I was born in Prince George, B.C., which gets somewhat colder than Toronto. Also lived in Ottawa for a while.

I also remember a few years ago during a heavier winter (first time in history all ten provincial capitals had a white Christmas on the same year) there was an editorial in one of the Vancouver papers along the lines of ‘yeah, we laughed at Toronto then, and now our city has ground to a halt due to unusually heavy snowfall, and nobody’s got much sympathy for us’.

I tend not to blame Mel Lastman for that decision because:
A) given the amount of information he had at the time, it wasn’t actually a bad decision. Toronto had ground to a halt, and there were indications it could have been much worse than it ended up being.
B) there are so many other more justifiable things that can be blamed on Mel Lastman. The man was corrupt in sleazy businessman way, always trying to get his cut, and assuming that everybody else was, so he might as well. On top of being a lot less educated than he apparently thought he was.

Hmm. Thinking about it, Rob Ford was never the deliberate grifter that Lastman was. (His corruption tended more towards ‘I’m only trying to do what needs to be done, why do these rules still apply to me?’ without an ounce of self-reflection that maybe that was precisely why the rules were there.)

Trump has Rob Ford’s populism and poor impulse control, along with Lastman’s con-man and self-aggrandizement aspects. That’s a scary combination.

Unrelated: if someone violates the comments policy, perhaps we could simply let them know? Unless it’s obvious that they’re doing it deliberately, of course.

I’m not even sure what Anonymous did. I guess it was the virgin shamey stuff, which isn’t cool and it’s fine to point that out. But I think that’s more in the comment policy so we have it to point to if someone persists in saying those kinds of things and won’t stop when asked. I wasn’t thinking Anonymous was trying to post in bad faith or be a jerk or anything.

That little shitgibbon Lucian Wintrich was arrested tonight.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-uconn-conservative-speaker-lucian-wintrich-arrested-20171128-story.html

@Dali

You have my sympathy for dealing with someone who is suddenly a completely different person, especially while dealing with a major shift in your life at the same time.
Question for you, without prying or wanting to (your circs are way different from my experience, but there are common issues) – your partner is a completely different person now you find, but are they still a good person? If they are, it’s odd how that can help ease your mind some, no matter what else transpires in the next few months.

Respect to you, and best for you both.