politics

There are 113 posts filed in politics (this is page 12 of 15).

Mortified

The other day, Wired ran a photo of Limor “Ladyada” Fried, the first female engineer to ever to make it to the magazine’s front cover. You’d think this would be cause for celebration, a sign that a publication as influential Wired was finally getting with the program and reversing its painful trend of only featuring woman primarily known as sex objects. But the internet still knows how to FUBAR this thing like nobody’s business.

I’m usually a huge fan of the writings of Cord Jefferson, but this piece he wrote for Good magazine really got my blood boiling:

Wired didn’t put Limor Fried on their new cover. What Fried actually looks like is below—she’s a normal young woman with a lip ring and an abnormally strong brain, and that’s worked wonders for her her entire life. What Wired put on its cover is an almost cartoonish Photoshop that caused one friend to look at these photos next to each other and ask, “That’s the same woman?”

Here, Jefferson is basically the online equivalent of Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura, but instead he’s screaming “THAT’S NOT WHAT SHE LOOKS LIKE! SHE’S REALLY HOMELY AND BLEMISHED.” Sheesh.

Remarkably, Fried herself was incredibly gracious. Here’s the comment she left in response to Jefferson’s piece:

You found a 3+ year old photo of me in Japan, after a 20 hour flight and short hair.
The cover is stylized but that is really what I looked like. I was not ‘plasticized’ or ‘heavily photoshopped’. if I take off my glasses, have my hair done, and wear make-up its what I look like. Jill uses lighting and makeup to create a glossy look, we saw the shots right off the camera and the only things that changed are the background color and the tool. Its her style and it looks cool! Its a bit different than my every day look, especially when shot with a proper camera and lighting, but it -is- me. I do get dressed up from time to time, being a magazine cover is one of those times! 🙂

My lip ring wasn’t in for most of this year so far, WIRED didn’t remove it or airbrush it. I wasn’t wearing it, just like I wasn’t wearing my glasses. If I’m happy with this and I say it’s looks like me isn’t that GOOD 🙂

A lot of things anger me about this situation. First of all, Jefferson is really complaining about a practice (airbrushing/photoshopping) that’s endemic to magazine covers as a whole. So why bitch about it in this particular case? According to Jefferson, “it makes at least a little bit of sense when the women being Photoshopped are musicians and actresses, professions that, like it or not, often require their members to possess otherworldly features. Where Photoshopping makes no sense at all, not even a little, is in the world of science.” I don’t buy that at all. Regardless of who it is, magazines will still be following the same scripts regarding how their cover models should look. That may be troubling, but it’s no more troubling because it’s Wired’s first cover for a female engineer.

More importantly, here’s a woman who’s put herself (and her face) out there in front of a national audience. Who among us has the courage to face the slings and arrows of a critical public, especially on a cover as attention-getting as this one? And you, Cord Jefferson, are going to try and “unmask” her in such a ridiculous fashion? Get a sense of decency, man.

Matt Buchanan over at Gizmodo made a great point about this too:

[M]ore interesting is what [this situation] says about the ways ultra-smart woman are perceived. What’s implicit in Good’s outrage is the assumption that Fried, badass engineer and genius, couldn’t have possibly been as attractive as she appears on Wired’s cover. The underlying message is that there has to be a distance between brains and beauty. Consider any article that marvels over the fact that Natalie Portman isn’t just an attractive celebrity, she’s like, smart. The general cultural narrative for attractive women who are recognizably intelligent is almost always one of surprise, one way or another—it’s shocking that an attractive woman is intelligent, or that an intelligent woman is attractive…

I’m not really offering a solution (unhelpful, I know!) beyond that we need more nerdy women and more exposure for them, but in a way that’s not misogynist or generally shitty. Oh, except to buy this month’s issue, so hopefully Chris Anderson won’t have that excuse for very much longer.

Right on.

Why We Still Can’t Close Down Guantanamo

And we probably won’t be able to for a long time, if ever:

After Obama’s election, a team led by the Pentagon’s top detainee official, Sandra Hodgkinson, was tasked with determining whether it would be possible to close Gitmo and move all detainees to military prisons in the U.S. A person familiar with the team’s work said that it examined four possible locations: the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C.; the Army prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.; the Marine Corps Base at Camp Pendleton, Calif.; and the Marine Corps Air Station at Miramar, Calif. The team concluded that the incoming administration could meet its 12-month deadline for closing the facility if work got started immediately. The Pentagon conveyed the findings to Obama and his national-security team. Shortly after taking office, the president issued the executive order officially promising to close the prison within a year.

A person who has read the Hodgkinson team’s report said, however, that it failed to adequately take into account the political and logistical challenges of closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. The group didn’t consider whether Congress was likely to provide the necessary funding to build a new prison, and it didn’t examine the sheer bureaucratic challenges of doing major construction on domestic military bases, a lengthy process that involves environmental-impact studies and other hurdles, this person said.

The Villifcation of Teachers

You can say what you want about teacher’s unions. We can probably have totally civil disagreements as to their efficacy and to their place in the U.S. education system. But can we all agree that villifying teachers, as the GOP have been relentlessly doing, is deplorable? Teachers are among the hardest working people in the world. There are a crapton of bad apples, but for every lazy teacher who coasts, there are a dozen that bust their ass to try and give some time and attention to students who the system has often forgotten.

Sarah Averill explains:

The real sting, though, is that suddenly, teachers are characterized by politicians and pundits alike as greedy money-grubbers with powerful unions and bloated benefits, who work a few hours a day with summers off, and can’t even get a kid to pass an exam. There have always been people who say this, and normally we can laugh it off — you need to have a good sense of humor, after all, to be a teacher. But now, it’s not just anyone saying these things — it’s our leaders, the ones we voted for and listen to. And people, from school boards to parents, are listening to them as well.

The Inhumane Treatment of Bradley Manning

David House’s recounting of his visits with friend Bradley Manning is a must-read for those concerned with how the U.S. is upholding its own rule of law. The entire piece is tragic but this excerpt stuck out to me:

Riding the overnight train, one of the things House says he tries to put out of his mind is the hate mail resulting from his part in the campaign to support the solitary young man accused of being the “hacktivist” behind all the notorious recent publications of Wiki-Leaks. “I receive probably 10-15 pieces a day. It’s quite a lot, but only one or two a week are actual death threats.”

When the best part of the hate mail you receive is that “only one or two a week are actual death threats,” then you know the odds are skewed against you.

Charlie Sheen’s War Against Women

Jezebel founder Anna Holmes has written a NYTimes op-ed detailing Charlie Sheen’s violent run against his fairer halves. It’s not only a smart piece about Sheen, it’s also an incisive look at how society devalues certain types of women, and the implications that that devaluation has:

The privilege afforded wealthy white men like Charlie Sheen may not be a particularly new point, but it’s an important one nonetheless. Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears are endlessly derided for their extracurricular meltdowns and lack of professionalism on set; the R&B star Chris Brown was made a veritable pariah after beating up his equally, if not more, famous girlfriend, the singer Rihanna. Their careers have all suffered, and understandably so.

This hasn’t been the case with Mr. Sheen, whose behavior has been repeatedly and affectionately dismissed as the antics of a “bad boy” (see: any news article in the past 20 years), a “rock star” (see: Piers Morgan, again) and a “rebel” (see: Andrea Canning’s “20/20” interview on Tuesday). He has in essence, achieved a sort of folk-hero status; on Wednesday, his just-created Twitter account hit a million followers, setting a Guinness World Record.

But there’s something else at work here: the seeming imperfection of Mr. Sheen’s numerous accusers. The women are of a type, which is to say, highly unsympathetic. Some are sex workers — pornographic film stars and escorts — whose compliance with churlish conduct is assumed to be part of the deal. (For the record: It is not.)

I had the privilege to speak with Holmes today by phone. While I haven’t always agreed with all of her viewpoints, I’ve constantly looked up to her and respected her as a writer and thinker, so it was a thrill to chat with her regarding her thoughts on the whole Sheen situation. We also discussed my (extremely negative) thoughts on Piers Morgan, as well as the fact that Jezebel was recently parodied by 30 Rock. I’ve released the conversation as this week’s Chencast.

You can download the episode by clicking here (right-click and “Save As”).

Or, even better, subscribe to the Chencast in iTunes to have future interesting conversations downloaded automatically!

Tina Fey on Feminism and Comedy

Jezebel’s piece from awhile back about the lack of female talent at The Daily Show really must have struck a nerve with Tina Fey. Fey devoted a substantial amount of time to addressing some of its criticisms in last night’s episode, and Rebecca Traitster at Salon has written up a staggeringly insightful response to it that describes how Fey manages to have her cake and eat it too:

Mesmerizingly, practically the whole half hour of network television was dedicated to slicing and dicing nearly every angle of the arguments that crop up any time anyone tries to talk about gender, popularity and perception. It was a testament to the fact that these arguments have been cropping up ever more frequently in recent years, thanks in no small part to the ascension of Fey and her generation of talented (and very often beautiful) comedians, as well as the rise of a critical and popular feminist-minded blogosphere that keeps a celebratory and often cutting eye on the gender history being made in media, politics and entertainment.

Emily Nussbaum also has some background details in her write up over at New York.

The Case Against Federal Funding for Public Broadcasting

Alan Mutter argues compellingly about why PBS and NPR should man up and stop taking federal funding:

Although the loss of federal largesse initially would stress the nation’s 368 public television stations and 934 public radio outlets, these generally well-funded, well-known and well-established organizations for the most part could carry on, because only 15% of their backing on average comes from Uncle Sam. While an instant 15% drop in revenues would ruin anyone’s day, it pales against, say, the nearly 50% plunge that newspapers have suffered in ad sales in the last five years.

So, yes, public broadcasters would have to retrench. Yes, they would have to step up fund-raising from foundations, from corporations and from listeners and viewers like us. And, yes, that would mean more pledge breaks. But it would be worth it, because public broadcasters would gain the independence they – and viewers and listeners like us – deserve. Once and for all, the broadcasters could concentrate on broadcasting, instead of worrying about the next budgetary challenge from Capitol Hill or the White House.