https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2024/05/10/trump-promises-rollback-on-trans-rights-heres-what-hes-said/
Yes! (Canada, take note!)
Jun 14 2025
Strip Search – movie by Tom Fontana – highly recommended NOW
I watched this years ago, but happened to watch it again today (it’s on CRAVE), and WOW. Talk about timely. The current political context in the States adds so much to the viewing. Highly recommended.
(Though I the classroom ‘What if?’ bookends are unnecessary and, actually, reduce the film.)
Jun 12 2025
Trump and the ban on food additives
Love the idea. Wish it were worldwide policy. Should’ve gone further to address the entire food process, banning harmful chemicals in fertilizers, pesticides, etc.
Jun 11 2025
American workers / Mexican workers / GM
“Think of how handily Detroit’s auto workers were distracted from GM’s greed when they were given Mexican free-trade-zone labor to treat as a scapegoat; the American worker’s enemy isn’t the Mexican worker, it’s the auto manufacture who screws them both.”
from Overclocked, Cory Doctorow
Jun 07 2025
from The Last Election, Andrew Yang and Stephen Marche
“It is a successful fifteen seconds of television, the result of months of planning and hundreds of thousands of dollars in consultancy fees.” p24
Yeah. Politicians are as bad as business owners. If they spent their marketing budget on making a better product, providing better service … There ought to be a low ceiling in both cases for such expenditures. At the very least, it would go toward leveling the playing field.
“… Americans don’t want reliable information anymore. they want confirmation of teir biases and rage.” p97
Jun 06 2025
funny bit from John Scalzi
I’m reading through his “Whatever” archive …
“See, now, this is a dog: [picture of Kodi …] as opposed to a Shih Tzu, at which you look and say to yourself ‘This is what happens when you put a mop and a stuffed animal in a room with a Barry White CD.'”
Jun 05 2025
An idea for profs
Here’s an idea I’d implement if I were still teaching:
Have your students grade each other’s papers, anonymously.
First, they have to establish critiera and justify them, then they have to grade the paper they’re randomly assigned accordingly.
You grade them according to how well they graded the other’s paper.
Hopefully, this will counteract the ‘likes’ and casual ‘thumbs up’ tendency and develop true critical thinking about what they read — critical reading.
It should also improve their own papers. (Suggest, to the clueless, that they use their own justified criteria while writing, and before submitting, their future papers.)
Jun 04 2025
Research into male/female differences–is a redo required?
Does any research into the differences between male and female distinguish between females who have experienced pregnancy and childbirth and those who have not? It’s doubtful, since most research is conducted by men, to whom making such a distinction would not even occur.
But there are permanent changes to the brain as a result of pregnancy and childbirth. “Gray matter becomes more concentrated” and “Activity increases in regions that control empathy, anxiety, and social interaction.” There are also changes in the amygdala, “which helps process memory and drives emotional reactions like fear, anxiety, and aggression” (https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/what-happens-to-a-womans-brain-when-she-becomes-a-mother/384179/)
So are the much touted differences between male and female differences between male and only mothering females? If so, that entire area of research needs to be redone.
Jun 04 2025
Unpregnant (the movie)
The movie titled Unpregnant has been on my list for a while, but I’ve just subscribed to CRAVE.
One, I was appalled to see that the movie is categorized as a comedy.
I suspect the categorizing is done not by CRAVE staff, but according to the movie’s submitted metadata, which means it’s the writer, director and/or producer who are calling it a comedy. And I suspect that whoever is responsible for the category identification is a man.
Because only a man would find it funny that
– a teenager finds herself pregnant because the condom broke, finds her whole life about to change direction in what she may well consider to be a horrible way—all her plans, her aspirations, her goals, no longer possible
– she discovers that the nearest place at which an abortion without parental consent is available is almost a thousand miles away; she doesn’t have the money to get there
– she discovers that the teenage boy knew the morning after that the condom had broken, but did not tell the young woman; if he had, she could’ve obtained the morning after pill—problem solved
Have I gotten to the funny part yet? Where are the giggles?
As I watch the movie, I see that yes, there are comedic moments. The movie becomes a road trip between previously estranged friends. But who would decide to write a comedy based on such traumatic premises. Again, only a man.
So I was surprised that two of the three writers are women. What the hell?
Shame on the three of you for perpetuating the clueless view that pregnancy and abortion are no big deal.
So when abortion is prohibited altogether in ALL fifty states, oh well. No big deal. Right?
(And to think people have DIED to secure your right to decide for yourself whether or not to reproduce.)
Jun 03 2025
from Slow Motion: changing masculinities, changing men, Lynne Segal
“The question of why it is men, and most often fathers or step-fathers, who sexually abuse children is not addressed [in recent books on fathering].” p55
“And far from criticizing women for failing to satisfy men’s needs, feminists … question whence these ‘needs’ derive, and whether these needs themselves should not be seen as the problem—the problem of men.” p55
“As Andrew Hacker suggests, wives who work ‘are not the cause of divorce so much as their husbands who still expect to hold center stage.'” p99
“Retrospectively, it is startling to realize that rape and men’s violence towards women became a serious social and political issue only through feminist attention to them.” p234
“According to Phillips and Taylor, the work which women do tends to be low in status and reward simply because it is women and not men who do it. Ben Birnbaum has illustrated this from his study of the clothing industry: the same type of machine work was classified as skilled when performed by men, and semi-skilled when performed by women.” p299
“Women [can] not share equally with men at work until men share equally with them in the home.” p304
fiction
