Speculation

I have been struggling with what to say about the Boston Marathon Bombings for the last couple days.  For most Americans the bombings came on "Tax Day," though, if you're a Bostonian you might have thought of Monday as "Patriot's Day," the annual observation of the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

But I am not a Bostonian; I live in the New River Valley and for me April 15th will forever be "the day before the anniversary of the Virginia Tech shootings."  When those shootings happened in 2007 I was writing for Newsvine and I provided a moment by moment account of what we were learning as we learned it: I camped onto every local news station in the area; listened to police scanner feeds; called friends who were on campus; checked little known web-cameras; and basically did everything within my power (from within my locked-down office building) to work out, for people scattered all over the country, many of whom were trying to figure out if their sons and daughters were alive, what was going on.

I did my best to verify things before posting them but even as close to the events as I was the media echo chamber distorted a lot of what I was hearing and I was, eventually, forced to retract several things I'd previously asserted as true.

That was in 2007; things move much faster now.

There Are No Accidental Racists

As a college educated liberal raised by two liberal midwestern professors, I have a confession to make: I rather like Brad Paisley. His music is twangy and rockabilly and kind of terrible but in an oddly afable way that seems to go well with warm summer nights here in south western Virginia.

But his latest album's big track, "Accidental Racist" is just rage-inducingly awful.  Paisley's balad in the key of "whining about being a white guy" tells the tale of him walking into a Starbucks with a Confederate Flag t-shirt and how he's bitter that everyone treats him like a bigot.  It also features L.L. Cool J rapping over-top of the latter half of the song in an attempt to validate Paisley's complaint which, while laiden with its own cringe-worthy lyrics and false equivalencies, at least serves to make the track sound a little more like a Confederate apologists' wet dream and a little less like a Klan anthem.

But back to that confederate flag t-shirt.

No Bad Ruling

Now that the Supreme Court has listened to the arguments over not one but two same-sex-marriage cases it'll be a few weeks before it delivers a ruling. When the Court does so it can essentially deliver one of three verdicts and while a lot of folks are going to be in pins and needles until the Court makes its decision, there is really no decision this Court can make which will mean anything bad for either marriage proponents or the left writ-large.  In broad strokes, the Court can do one of three things.

Missing The Point

The internet and social media in particular is a lot like Who's Line Is It Anyway: everything is made up and the points don't matter.  Nonetheless, with the Supreme Court hearing oral arguments on Proposition 8 and DOMA this week, the pro-gay-marriage folks have taken to the virtual streets in force and you can't swing a flamboyantly homosexual cat on Facebook without tripping over someone with a red equals sign as their profile picture.

The anti-gay-rights folks, who are apparently just now realizing that it's inadvisable in this digital age to pick a PR fight with a group of people who are stereotypically young, technology savvy, pop-culture literate, and willing to endure derision for the sake of what they believe, have managed to marshal an image commissioned from the only anti-LGBTQ graphic designer in the country and are making an anemic effort to mount some kind of counter-attack.  

It's sad, really.

The Friend Zone

Amanda Marcotte writes in Slate that "the friend zone is mostly a straight-male phenomenon based on the widespread sexist belief that straight men can never truly be friends with women without having an ulterior motive. "

She writes this in response to the phrase's inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary, which itself catches some sarcastic flak from her for deigning to give legitimacy to the term. Marcotte's objection is that the phrase "friend zone" implies, in her view, some kind of obligation on the part of a woman that, to quote her, "shifts the locus of responsibility from the subject to the object of the crush. It implies that, as the object is at fault for "putting" her admirer into the friend zone, it is her duty to do something to remove him from it, preferably by getting naked. "

"Real Men Don't Rape" Is Stupid

PoliticsUSA has an article up today that attacks Fox News viewers for lobbing racist taunts and rape threats at Zerlina Maxwell for her comments during an appearance on the network. Ms. Maxwell was invited onto Fox News to discuss women arming themselves to prevent rape in light of a column she wrote in Ebony which suggests that more of the onus for reducing rape needs to fall on men.  

In light of that view, Maxwell rejected the idea that women should have to arm themselves or alter their behavior in any way to prevent rape, drawing, unfortunately, the predictable tidal wave of vitriol, hate, and racial epithets from the right.

Those threats and epithets are unacceptable and universally so and while it is tempting to use them to highlight yet again everything that is wrong with the American social conservative movement, that horse has been beaten about to death.  It is, instead, the folks presently bludgeoning the horse that warrant some attention: Maxwell's hangers on, for lack of a better term.

#StandWithRand

The #StandWithRand hash-tag has been trending on Twitter recently in response to Rand Paul's 13 hour Mr-Smith-Goes-To-Washington-style filibuster of the nomination of John Brennan to be the Director of Central Intelligence.  Senator Paul wanted more information on the Obama administration's assertion that it could use deadly force on US soil without warrant or due process and so he went to the Senate floor.