Category: Other People

Found a new advice column: Embarrassing Problems. It’s good, sincere advice about icky medical problems. Being based in the UK means that US readers won’t be put off by it: a British accent, as I have observed before, makes it ok to talk about things like “faeces” and “loo,” Contrast with Savage Love which is funnier advice about embarrassing sex problems, and Ask Kitty Winn, which basically makes askers feel ashamed of themselves, anonymously.

Jimmy Carter has some damning things to say about our electoral system.

For crying out loud, even their database administrators are corrupt. Come November third, lawsuits are going to fly, just like last time, and it’s pretty likely we’ll see a 5-4 vote for President again, and the US losing status as a country where free and fair elections are held. How about some international election observers, please? Check the Independent’s coverage of race-biased voter purges in Florida.

Also, Billionaires for Bush are back at it, send them some props for style. Or cash to help pay for hosting, since they’re not actually rich, they just play rich on the Internet.

Yeah, high school sucks, especially if you’re different in any way.

Salon covered the forced surgical sex-reassignment of children with anomalous genitals back in 1999, and the Times has finally noticed. In the STYLE SECTION? Oh yeah, we’re well-informed.

“As Americans, we should have the right to feel safe. And, if you were doing your jobs, we would be safe,” Taylor said.

Actually, that’s bullshit. The person who said that suffered from a horrible tragedy, and it’s natural that he should want to feel safe. But the right to feel safe? Your reactionary statements don’t do anything to help mentally ill kids. One of the two kids who shot you was on antidepressants. The other wasn’t. What does this prove? Nothing.

I know that these studies are flawed, that Big Pharma has over-promoted the drugs, that sometimes they are used improperly and that sometimes they are ineffective or, yes, dangerous. Medication has risks and we should know them, but your bad outcome doesn’t prove that the risks of treating depression outweigh the risks of leaving it untreated.

Every year they publish another story about how college kids drink too much. Wow. Were these study-conducting people never in college? I suppose they were, but weren’t at the parties, because they were in the library doing statistics homework that has enabled them to go back years later and conduct studies measuring the average number of drinks a partying college boy can toss back in an evening.

I know I was holed up in my room, periodically calling security at 2am because someone was setting off fireworks in the parking lot or throwing up in the bushes. But I also know that kids drank to excess. Most of them at one point or another. Five drinks in a sitting? Five drinks (a.k.a. five twelve ounce cups of watery beer) is a baseline, although it was more than I could do by about two drinks. Ten is what the men would drink. Then there’s shots of Jaeger, throwing up, and more beer. The trick is to throw up before you get too drunk, apparently, to breathe.

The ultimate goal is inebriation sufficient to forget that you’re in a position of absolute irrelevance in the world, that you’re wasting your parents’ money and more importantly your life and privilege and youth.

More coverage of Hastert’s nuttiness and Gawker with embarrassing Convention photos.

Incredibly, there are people who feel that George W. Bush is not deeply enough in the pockets of the religious right. They are voting for Peroutka and the Constitution Party. Unsurprisingly, many of them have voted in the AFA’s latest attempt to skew an online poll. Cute, as usual.

It reminds me of The Economist’s recent headline, Ariel Sharon is a Sissy. Oh yeah, bring it on! Of course, the difference is that for The Economist, that’s supposed to be a droll little joke, whereas the Constitution party is apparently sincere in its tax denial and insistence that Church and State be unified.

I’m beginning to wonder if the Republican Party really has it in for, say, Dick Cheney and his family. Who knows. Atrios comments on the opening speaker of the convention, who wrote a Godwin’s-Law-violating article comparing gay rights to Nazism. Sure, the pressure to grant basic human rights to gay people, and the pressure to join the Nazi party are social and political pressures. And I’m sure that they both seem threatening to people who oppose them. The difference is that gay people aren’t actually trying to, say, TAKE OVER EUROPE, KILL ALL THE JEWS, AND ELIMINATE DEMOCRACY. In other words, you may disagree with both genocide and homosexuality, but that doesn’t make them equivalent.

Now, the RNC is convinced they have God on their side, despite the rifts between groups that claim mutually exclusive holds on truth. This should be as interesting as watching the fiscal conservatives and libtertarians battle the “deficits don’t matter” don’t-tax-just-spend crowd.

I’m surprised the Log Cabin’s refusal to endorse Bush hasn’t gotten more coverage. It’s certainly more legitimate news than claiming that Kerry was actually fighting on the side of the communists, or that George Soros is a drug smuggler. Given the right wing’s support for felon and alleged drug importer Ollie North, you’d think they’d hold off on name-calling, especially given that Soros has an extremely well-documented career as a commodities trader and brilliant investor and Ollie’s got a well-documented career as a shady fixer and a financer of violent terrorism. Oh, excuse me, violent “freedom fighting.”

What’s this? You’re not familiar with US involvement in Latin American civil wars in the 1980s? Of course not. US history courses in the US end at 1945 and at the Rio Grande.

Here’s how it was:
Oliver North ran drugs to Miami to fund the Nicaraguan paramilitaries. The paramilitaries were running around killing doctors and nurses and teachers. This was to destabilize the Nicaraguan government, which had suspiciously left-leaning rhetoric. At the time, the Sandinista government wasn’t really communist– probably no more Socialist than, say, France or Germany or Canada. Of course, the US-backed paramilitaries were going to show you how badly the socialists were doing and how a North-America-backed dictator would do so much better (nobody suggested a democracy at this point– that was what got them into this mess in the first place, just like Chile in 73. God forbid they should elect someone– they might pick the wrong guy!). Anyway, the Sandinista literacy programs didn’t work very well once the teachers were all dead. Nor did the economic system function very well when the peasants were hiding in the jungle. Nor did the health system do very well when most doctors outside of Managua were in hiding or in shallow graves.

That’s what Ollie did, but now he’s a respected Republican again with God on his side. Because that’s what it’s all about, you know. Hating, killing, imposing your views on the rest of the world that isn’t as well armed as you. Yay Neocons! We’re going to impose our society as far as our army will reach! It’ll be great!