niyad
niyad's JournalSharks and batteries, part one. I knew I had heard this before! 2 Oct 2023
at a campaign stop in Iowa. TikTok has the video, and it was covered by the Indeoendent, HuffPo, Daily Mail and more. And here on DU.
So my question is, is it worse that this insanity is a rerun, or would it be worse if this were a new manifestation?
Key-coded restrooms: Your thoughts? We disected self-check pretty
thoroughly the other day, so I thought I would bring this one up. My favourite wine bar has them, but hasn't changed the code in months ( and half the time the door is not properly closed anyway!)
I know more and more places are using them, and I can certainly understand why. My favourite supermarket has them, and it requires an employee to punch in the code. This means, at the front restrooms, that generally you have to get one of the Starbucks baristas to stop what they are doing to let you in. The ones in the back, you hope there is someone working back there, or coming or going from break. My first objection is taking employees from their work, which is hard enough without the constant interruptions. My second is worrying for people with medical issues, or someone who suddenly needs that restroom.
As I said, I can well understand the reason for key-coded restrooms, but I hate the extra work for the employees, and the potential health issues for customers. Alas, I have no idea how to resolve these conflicts.
Ohhhh myyyy, we have MUCH more work to do than even I thought!!! On our own
side, no less.
Last night, I went to our local Drinking Liberally group, with a number of regulars, one former regular, and a newbie. One of the regulars just astounded me going completely off the rails ( in my view, anyway. Not sure if the others saw it quite as starkly as I did.). She started off by saying how Pres. Biden just drove her nuts because he can't talk, can't give a speech, can't seem to think on his feet, looks confused. I pointed out that every one of those statements is a reichwing talking point. She said, "I am not a rightwinger.". I replied, "But you are repeating their talking points. Did you even listen to his State of the Union message?" She didn't even know what I was talking about. Several of the other people also suggested that she google the SOTU. I did not even mention the Valley Forge speech or his D-Day speech.
Her next jaw-dropper was saying that, in her mind, Hunter Biden's case was far more serious than the, in her own words, "itty bitty miniscule" hush money case against #####, and that Hunter deserved a long prison term. And she said that FLOTUS had no business showing up at the trial. The others tried to reason with her, got nowhere.
She had never heard of leonard leo, or the federalist society, or how the handmaid got on the extreme court.
Still later, as we were talking about possible actions after the election, should the awful happen, she asked what would happen if Biden chose to behave like #####, and foment an insurrection. We all pointed out that Biden would not do such a thing. "But what if he does?" she persisted. And how Biden would probably not respond if #### fomented another insurrection.
I kept thinking about a scene in "1776", where Adams is talking to Franklin about how some of the other members are tearing apart Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence. He says, "So far, they have struck out 418 words and three paragraphs. And that is just our friends. God knows what the other side will do." (a bit paraphrased)
All this from one person, in one meeting, one who is self-identified as a Dem. I was appalled and frustrated, and sad. How do we address these levels of ignorance and lack of awareness?
Earlier today, I was going to post that, even in the unlikeliest places,
things can get better. Specifically, today/this month, Colorado Springs, previosly the home of the horrific, homophobic, Amendment 2, is now displaying Pride flags and banners all over downtown. Progress!!! Sadly, then I saw the OP about the CO gqp announcing to burn every Pride flag they see. I hope whoever starts this crap reaps exactly what they deserve.
A deliciously wicked thought just occurred to me. Convicted felon, the
RAPIST/TRAITOR**, did this to himself. I don't mean in the sense of being the one to sign the checks, etc. I mean, if he had just displayed his usual arrogance, his usual, "I can do anything I want, and who is going to stop me" cluelessness, his belief that his cultists will accept any of his sick, twisted, appalling behaviours, it would not even have occurred to him that he needed to make a hush money payment. This is the one thing I have never understood about this. His base does not give a damn what he does, and the rest of us are not surprised by anything he does. So WHY, in this one insignificant, brief (in all senses of the word) encounter, does he feel the need to pretend, to hush things up? Pretty sure malaria does not care.
I am reminded of an old spell, the ending line of which goes, "May he be brought down by his own hands."
Louisiana's Criminalization of Abortion Care Demands We Embrace Reproductive Justice
Louisiana’s Criminalization of Abortion Care Demands We Embrace Reproductive Justice
5/23/2024 by Deon Haywood
The people working overtime to maintain racial and gender hierarchies will not stop at the criminalization of abortion drugs—just like they didn’t stop with the banning of abortion.
The World Health Organization recommends two regimens for medication abortion: misoprostol alone or combined with another medication, mifepristone. (Soumyabrata Roy / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
On Tuesday, the Louisiana House passed legislation criminalizing two drugs commonly used for abortion care: mifepristone and misoprostol. The bill received final legislative passage Thursday, and the governor is expected to sign it into law any day now. Instead of working to address the maternal mortality crisis, the infant mortality crisis or the climate crisis (the list of crises goes on), Louisiana’s lawmakers are looking to lock up our neighbors for up to five years for possessing these life-saving drugs. The move is pigheaded, embarrassing and downright dangerous—but not surprising. Thirty-five years ago—at the height of the war on drug users and the HIV/AIDS crisis—a small collective realized how the public health institutions supposed to serve our communities had, at best, abandoned Black folks and, at worst, were actively terrorizing our communities. Women With a Vision’s foremothers took matters into their own hands, operating illegally for decades distributing sterile needles and condoms to those most at risk for HIV/AIDS infection and criminalization. Today, the organization my mother helped found, where I now serve as executive director, works at the intersection of public health, reproductive justice and criminalization—recognizing the ways racial capitalism, queerphobia and the patriarchy function together to isolate, blame, criminalize, erase and take. This week’s move to ban abortion pills in Louisiana is a continuation of the long tradition of infringing on the bodily autonomy of birthing people, Black folks in particular.
WWAV foremothers Danita Muse, Catherine Haywood and Deon Haywood with red AIDS ribbons in their hands, as featured in the Source in April 2001. (via Instagram)
Our lawmakers’ assault on our right to determine what we do with our bodies started with the enslavement of our ancestors, the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, and the taking of their land, and continues by criminalizing and incarcerating folks at the bottom of racial, gender and class hierarchies. Audre Lorde said, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle, because we do not live single-issue lives.” Every day I’m reminded that our oppressions are woven together—each oppressive action reinforcing the one that came before and laying the groundwork for the next one. Two years ago, when the Supreme Court toppled Roe and Louisiana’s trigger ban went into effect, our history showed us the next step would be criminalization.
. . . .
Not long after Women With a Vision’s founding, a group of Black women and women of color were building the human rights framework today known as reproductive justice. They recognized the ways the abortion rights movement failed us and worked to bring our disparate movements together, knowing that the right to abortion was not enough. Their vision for a world where we all have the right to have children when and how we choose, not have children, and live in whole, healthy, thriving communities is a clarion call to counter the white supremacist vision driving the anti-abortion movement. Through a reproductive justice lens, we realize the movements to end mass criminalization and the war on drug users isn’t supplemental to the fight for abortion rights. It is only through embracing a vision for a whole, healthy, liberated future that we can put an end to the assault on our rights. Through a reproductive justice lens, we realize that when we partner with those most vulnerable, when we work as their accomplices, we aren’t just doing good deeds. We are moving towards collective liberation together, the only thing that will save us from the ever-present march of white supremacy. The war on drugs and the HIV/AIDS crisis of the ‘80s and ‘90s are inextricably linked to the terrors of our politics today. And it is only through embracing the lessons learned during those fights—allyship, refusal, speech and dreaming of a world otherwise—that we can equip ourselves for the fights ahead.
Deon Haywood, Gloria Steinem and Angeline Echeverria attend the Ms. Foundation For Women’s annual Gloria Awards on May 8, 2019, in New York City. (Astrid Stawiarz / Getty Images for Ms. Foundation For Women)
As a Black, queer, woman working in the Deep South, I know the people working overtime to maintain racial and gender hierarchies will not stop at the criminalization of abortion drugs—just like they didn’t stop with the banning of abortion. And they are not limited to the Deep South: Our state is a testing ground for some of white supremacy’s worst policies because our home is Black and brown and queer. It’s us, the folks who have been working to counter these forces for decades, who best understand our opposition. And so, as the news of the criminalization of mifepristone and misoprostol spreads across the country, I ask you, those who profess to be with us in this fight, to embrace reproductive justice. We need you to understand the ways our fights are connected and to keep resourcing the folks on the front lines—the Black, queer, poor and working-class Southerners. When they’re using the same tools they used to wreak havoc on Black and brown communities for decades to criminalize anyone for simply possessing abortion care drugs, we know that our collective struggle transcends abortion rights alone.
https://msmagazine.com/2024/05/23/louisiana-abortion-pills-reproductive-justice/
Barbie's Existential Crisis and the Fight for Reproductive Justice
Barbie’s Existential Crisis and the Fight for Reproductive Justice
1/11/2024 by Tomi-Ann Roberts and Jamie Goldenberg
Women’s bodies present a special problem for death denial—and these concerns motivate patriarchal cultures to seek control of those bodies from women themselves.
Margot Robbie in Barbie. (Warner Bros. Pictures)
Awards season is here, and while it first it seemed like Barbie would rake in quite a few, after securing more Golden Globe nominations than any other film this year, it now looks as though Gerwig’s film may get passed over for final awards and end-of-year “best of” lists, despite its overwhelming box office popularity. Perhaps critics could not allow for a seemingly shallow storyline to carry such a deeply existential, feminist message. Some will call it sacrilege for us to compare Barbie, a film that appears to celebrate artificiality and superficiality, with the deeply noir multiple award-winning film many say is the greatest of all time, Citizen Kane. However, we suggest that both films are owed acclaim for the risks their directors took in broaching the most anxiety-provoking of all human concerns: death. Both Orson Welles and Greta Gerwig deliver their existential message through toys—but where Rosebud the sled restores the dying Kane’s lost promise of masculine youth, Barbie the doll depicts the central thesis of our work as feminist social psychologists: that fear of death that undergirds the control of women and their bodies, and women’s own efforts to conform to societal expectations for their bodily control. Considered this way, Barbie is relevant not only to the impending decisions of the Academy of Motion Pictures, but also to the Supreme Court, as they are once again set to adjudicate women’s right to manage their own reproductive bodies.
In our field of social psychology, terror management theory offers an existential framework for viewing the world, with empirical research to back up its claims. The gist is that, unlike dolls, humans are aware of the inescapable fact that they are going to die. This existential threat is quelled by creating and immersing ourselves in a contrived, artificial world that offers an illusion of immortality. As Barbie’s creator Ruth Handler explains to her in the film, “Ideas live forever. Humans, not so much.” Women’s bodies present a special problem for death denial, with their monthly bleeding, lactation and pregnancies. And what women’s bodies giveth, they can take away. In our research, we find that death concerns are what motivate the patriarchal oppressive contrivances of objectification and self-objectification. Objectifying “strips” women’s bodies of their more natural, mammalian, and hence threatening mortal qualities, emphasizing an idealized, contrived attractiveness. Not only are women treated this way, but they also come to treat themselves this way, investing time and resources in attaining flawless, symbolically immortal beauty.
. . . .
From Barbie’s very first tear that felt “achy, but good,” she begins to recognize that being plastic comes at a price. For her, there’s no getting back in the death-denying box, no matter how nostalgic it smells. So even after working to restore Barbieland to its neoliberal, empowerment feminism utopia, she has to make a choice: Stay perfect, plastic and immortal in Barbieland—or become human. “You understand that humans only have one ending,” Ruth said. Holding hands with her creator, Barbie sees a vision of ordinary girls and women who have not chosen to deny death by investing in the plastic world of self-objectification. Some are young, some old, some are laughing, some crying, some are fat, some thin. All are human, all too human. When Barbie opens her eyes, she chooses Reality. She chooses mortality.
Margot Robbie in Barbie. (Warner Bros. Pictures)
The final scene of the film enlists viewers in wondering what downtown appointment Barbie is rushing to make, and the reveal could not be more illustrative of our existentialist feminist perspective, nor more well timed to the moment in which we find ourselves: holding our breaths not for award nominations, but for the highest Court in the land to hear an appeal regarding medication abortion in the wake of the Dobbs decision. Because real women live in the bodies that can create and sustain life, cultures fear and thus seek to wrest control of those bodies from women themselves. Barbie the doll symbolizes that control in the form of objectified beauty, and instructs girls in self-control through self-objectification. But Barbie, the real woman, starts her mortal human journey at an appointment with the gynecologist—which is, of course, a much more appropriate place than a politician’s office or a courtroom for such a journey to begin.
https://msmagazine.com/2024/01/11/death-barbie-abortion-supreme-court/
What Happens When Sex Dolls Can Talk? (DEFINITELY NSFW)
(Dear Goddess, I had absolutely NO idea about this insanity!!!)
What Happens When Sex Dolls Can Talk? (DEFINITELY NSFW)
5/23/2024 by Julie Wosk
The difference between a real-life adult film star and a simulated one tells us much about the kind of sex dolls many users prefer: ones with tightly controlled conversations.
Adult film star Stormy Daniels poses and signs autographs at Chi Chi Larue’s adult entertainment store on May 23, 2018, in West Hollywood. (Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images)
Recently, rapt readers could find out about the testimony presented by adult film star Stormy Daniels at Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan. Her language was amusing and startling, and she didn’t mince words: At one point, she acknowledged she had once called him an “orange turd.” Daniels’ language was a far cry from the kind of words uttered by today’s talking sex dolls, like the ones produced by California’s RealDoll, a subsidiary of Abyss Creations. These are sexy, custom-made AI-enabled dolls that are programmed to never say anything mean or insulting. They are designed to flatter the user and always be compliant. They never say, “No, don’t do that,” or “Get lost!” Daniels herself gave RealDoll the license to produce Stormy Daniels sex dolls—but these dolls were silent and couldn’t talk. The difference between a real-life adult film star and a simulated one tells us much about the kind of sex dolls many users apparently prefer: ones that have tightly controlled conversations. And the difference tells us much about users social attitudes towards women themselves.
Finished silicone RealDoll sex dolls at the Abyss Creations factory in San Marcos, Calif. (David McNew / Getty Images)
The Implications of Talking Sex Dolls
Sex dolls—adult-size dolls with silicone skin—have come in many different configurations over the years. The California-based Realdolls gives users a choice of eye color, hair style, skin tones, height, breast and nipple size and labia formation with varying vaginal inserts. The dolls don’t move, but their bodies—arms, legs, torsos—can be manipulated. Initially the dolls couldn’t talk but starting in 2018, RealDoll introduced dolls with robotic heads that could be attached to a RealDoll body with magnets and could talk. The two-way conversations were based on the type of personality the user chose for the doll. There were 16 traits to choose from and the user could pick 10.
. . . . .
There is a long-standing cultural stereotype of the annoying talkative woman—a chatter box, a gossip and nonstop talker that men would like to control. In the 1970s television series All in the Family, Archie Bunker liked to tell his talkative wife Edith, “Stifle yourself!” Matt McMullen has said the “talkative” trait on a RealDoll could be “dialed down to zero.” Unlike real women, the talking sex dolls have no voice of their own. Their conversations are tightly controlled and programmed to never say anything assertive, combative, hostile, complaining, arguing, disagreeing, debating or unpleasing to the user.
Artificial Women: Sex Robots, Robot Caregivers, and More Facsimile Females by Julie Wosk, published by Indiana University Press, April 2024.
. . . . .
Are all talking female sex dolls just vapid creations that simply serve as soothing substitutes for real women? Cody Heller’s witty 2020 television series Dummy presented a tart-talking feminist sex doll who comes to life. She wears a T-shirt with Ruth Bader Ginsburg printed on it and impishly wears a sex doll vaginal insert around her neck. Last-year’s award-winning film Poor Things gave us a wonderfully comic counterpoint to the perfectly controlled talking sex doll model. Bella (played by Emma Stone) is a composite being created from dead body parts and a live brain, and quickly develops a mind of her own. Ever resourceful, this totally articulate simulated woman goes to Paris and cheerfully makes money as a sex worker. In the film, she has a voracious sexual appetite and takes on johns while always celebrating her own individuality and independence. The manufacturers of today’s talking robotic sex dolls are a long way from marketing dolls that have a mind of their own and can resist, rebel, challenge or voice their own needs. The manufacturers seem to assume that most users wouldn’t even want that type of conversation with their sex dolls. Stepford Wives-type sex doll models win out every time. Still, given the artificiality of these sex doll conversations, real women probably won’t have to worry about being permanently supplanted by a talking sex doll. At least not yet! (Seriously, I would not be that optimistic!)
. . . . .
https://msmagazine.com/2024/05/23/sex-dolls-stormy-daniels-porn-star/
The Daily B***h*: "I accept the fact that every piece of furniture in my house
is basically a cat bed. I am most fortunate!!!"
*Both a noun, and a verb, depending on usage.
Profile Information
Member since: Tue Jul 29, 2003, 03:30 PMNumber of posts: 117,726