Wow... a sexist ad that I actually find offensive. XD Whodathunk?

I found the Evony ads hilarious, and I don't actually mind the bouncing... apple... ones I see on The Pirate Bay.

But this one... this one was on shanghaiist.com, and it really annoyed me. ._.

Maybe it's a case of, well, what do you expect from The Pirate Bay?! Lol! That's fine then! But for a site that isn't in that part of the general interwebs...

...and as a gamer nugget, doubly offended. ;) I'm not sure if my girl-e-peen is more offended, or just the girl-nugget non peen bits. XD


Two great (unrelated) articles, one on medical care for the dying, and the other on harrassment and the Interwebs.

Letting Go - What should medicine do when it can't save your life?

The simple view is that medicine exists to fight death and disease, and that is, of course, its most basic task. Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And, in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don’t want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knew how to fight for territory when he could and how to surrender when he couldn’t, someone who understood that the damage is greatest if all you do is fight to the bitter end.

More often, these days, medicine seems to supply neither Custers nor Lees. We are increasingly the generals who march the soldiers onward, saying all the while, “You let me know when you want to stop.” All-out treatment, we tell the terminally ill, is a train you can get off at any time—just say when. But for most patients and their families this is asking too much. They remain riven by doubt and fear and desperation; some are deluded by a fantasy of what medical science can achieve. But our responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are. People die only once. They have no experience to draw upon. They need doctors and nurses who are willing to have the hard discussions and say what they have seen, who will help people prepare for what is to come—and to escape a warehoused oblivion that few really want. 

Atul Gawande, New Yorker


On Being a No-Name Blogger Using Her Real Name

Because online harassment is still a women’s issue.

It’s a women’s issue because those goals up there–making somebody feel afraid of speaking, making somebody feel powerless to stop what’s being done to them, making somebody feel like the only recourse is to shut up and hide out forever–are the goals a whole lot of men still hold dear and work towards for all women.

You, dear male reader, are totally not one of those men. I know this, and I appreciate it. I really do. But here’s where all this victimy girl shit concerns you:

  • every time you don’t tell your buddies it’s not okay to talk shit about women, even if it’s kinda funny;
  • every time you roll your eyes and think “PMS!” instead of listening to why a woman’s upset;
  • every time you call Ann Coulter a tranny cunt instead of a halfwit demagogue;
  • every time you say any woman–Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Phyllis Schlafly, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, any of us–”deserves whatever she gets” for being so detestable, instead of acknowledging there are things that no human being deserves and only women get;
  • every time you joke about how you’ll never let your daughter out of the house or anywhere near a man, ’cause ha ha, that’ll solve everything;
  • every time you say, “I don’t understand why thousands of women are insisting this is some kind of woman thing”;
  • every time you tell a woman you love she’s being crazy/hysterical/irrational, when you know deep down you haven’t heard a word she’s said in the past 15 minutes, and all you’re really thinking about is how seeing her yell and/or cry is incredibly unsettling to you, and you just want that shit to stop;
  • every time you dismiss a woman as “playing the victim,” even if you’re right about that particular woman…

You are missing an opportunity to help stop the bad guys.

You’re missing an opportunity to stop the real misogynists, the fucking sickos, the ones who really, truly hate women just for being women. The ones whose ranks you do not belong to and never would. The ones who might hurt women you love in the future, or might have already.

‘Cause the thing is, you and the guys you hang out with may not really mean anything by it when you talk about crazy bitches and dumb sluts and heh-heh-I’d-hit-that and you just can’t reason with them and you can’t live with ‘em can’t shoot ‘em and she’s obviously only dressed like that because she wants to get laid and if they can’t stand the heat they should get out of the kitchen and if they can’t play by the rules they don’t belong here and if they can’t take a little teasing they should quit and heh heh they’re only good for fucking and cleaning and they’re not fit to be leaders and they’re too emotional to run a business and they just want to get their hands on our money and if they’d just stop overreacting and telling themselves they’re victims they’d realize they actually have all the power in this society and white men aren’t even allowed to do anything anymore and and and…

I get that you don’t really mean that shit. I get that you’re just talking out your ass.

But please listen, and please trust me on this one: you have probably, at some point in your life, engaged in that kind of talk with a man who really, truly hates women–to the extent of having beaten and/or raped at least one. And you probably didn’t know which one he was.

And that guy? Thought you were on his side.

Kate Harding, kate.harding.net

If this is 'Arthur as you've never seen him before', or some sort of similar superlative...

via amazon.com

...then it's quite right.

An utterly unlikeable Arthur, as despicable as the rest of the equally (save one) scheming warlords, who hasn't managed, in the first third of the book, to distinguish himself from the others in any way.

He has, however, managed to beat and rape his (admittedly scheming) politically-wed Saxon wife, and have her like it. Oh, and also to freely call all the women around him save for Gwynhwyfar (Guinevere), bitch, slut, whore, so on and so forth.

But hey, since ALL the men do it, and all the women accept it without comment (or overmuch comment), I blame the author more than her poor written Arthur.

Apparently Hollick's idea of gritty realism is to render all women either madonnas or whores.

Ooh, this review sums up the book pretty perfectly. I was going to log in and write a scathing one, but it looks like I won't have to!

The bits I found the most relevant:

Without sufficient knowledge of the historical period, very little awareness of the warrior culture of which she would write, possessing unrefined writing skills, but with an apparently strong desire to explore the love story of Arthur and Gwenhwyfar (that's Guinevere to most of the rest of us), an inexperienced author bit off more than she was ready to chew.

Ms. Hollick clearly has limited understanding of combat and very few skills to help bring those scenes to life.

Most frustrating for the reader with some knowledge of the Arthurian tradition is the way in which this tradition has been utterly abandoned, then replaced with nothing of real value. The spiritual Arthur, the chivalric Arthur, the noble Arthur, the sleeping Arthur whose legend inspires hope for the British people are all gone. In their place is a greedy warlord who aspires to little more than women, power, booze, and, did I mention, women? We have no idea what Gwen sees in him, but she's a saint.

The only saving grace in this story is that this Arthur is probably closer to the historical figure (if he actually existed) than most of the fictions we enjoy today. But beyond supposition, there's little evidence that establishes this version over those it seeks to replace. There's nothing gained by supplanting an inspiring fictional character with one who may be closer to the texture of the warlords who lived in fifth and sixth century Britain without, at least, some evidence that the new version is reasonably accurate. And when one considers the number of anachronisms sprinkled through the text, one is hardly inspired to believe that this account of Arthur's history is particularly accurate.

Follow up:
Ended up returning this book in disgust without finishing it, when I reached the part where Ygraine 'realises' that Uther cheated on her !!because he loved her!! and then began to berate herself for not 'understanding'. -_-

The main problem with this book isn't that Hollick has made Arthur evil - because that is exactly what she's made him. But that she's made him a rather banal sort of evil, without even realising that she HAS made him evil (let alone banal).

That - and the world view of the AUTHOR's that comes through the writing is just plain disturbing to me.

Feminism and Video Games 101: Shooting Female Enemies Isn’t Icky | Border House

I have one question, though. There is this one sentence that I am not sure how to read.
“The bottom line is, when women are treated differently simply because they are women–whether by treating them as inferior or putting them on a pedestal–it’s sexist.”

Does this mean “when women are treated as inferiors, or put on a pedestal, simply because they are women, it’s sexist” or does this mean “when women are treated differently simply because they are women it’s sexist, two examples of differential treatment are treating them as inferior or putting them on a pedestal.”

I wonder because while I agree with the first, I disagree with the second. I think it is true that treating women as inferiors or putting us on a pedestal is sexist treatment. But sometimes, treating women differently is not sexist (even if it is because we are women). For example, allowing women maternity leave is treating women differently because they are women, but I don’t think it is sexist. (Of course, it is even better when countries have parental leave that is available to men and women, but given the paltry maternity leave in the USA that seems a lot to hope for.)

I think there are many other examples where differential treatment for women is not sexist. And there is a lot of debate in feminist theory about whether ‘sameness’ or ‘difference’ is the way to go, and each has advantages and disadvantages. More recently in feminist theory, feminists have begun to point out that one problem in both cases is that the male is still the standard no matter which way you go.

via borderhouseblog.com

I wish more of the feminist writers I read on the Interwebs are capable of dicing semantics this finely, and this clearly.

Bakka makes a very important point/distinction, which is often missed, or willfully overlooked.