Walking to work today, I saw something unexpected: a man tried to offer money to a homeless women, and was promptly refused. (It’s always amusing to see the look on people’s faces when this happens - a mixture of surprise and offense: “How dare you not accept my charity?!”) I can’t guess what goes on in that woman’s mind, and I won’t make a poetic attempt to do so, but I couldn’t ignore the fact that she was sitting next to the leftovers of her McDonald’s breakfast - don’t want to judge, but don’t know what to make of that.
Anyways, that reminded me of watching The Newsroom yesterday and how Will McAvoy, as part of his quest to civilize the world, bullies a black, gay interviewee for supporting GOP presidential-hopeful Rick Santorum in that typically smug way we all have - admit it, you do it too - of assuming we know what’s best for “those less fortunate” and that we militants have to protect the minorities we fight for.
And I’m not just talking about the P.C. left here. The right also has its screwed up, self-righteous notions of charity that are equally patronizing - the only difference is that they believe private initiative should do the protecting whereas the left portrays it as a civil right. Then again, maybe I’m just letting my critical thinking be too influenced by the black-and-white worldview of American politics (which is in itself based on the belief that it is “America’s” duty to civilize others as “leader of the free world”, but that’s a subject for another post - recommended reading in the meantime: Democracy Kills).
I was going to expand and suggest a change in attitude, but I started using expressions like “self-determination”, so that put me off.
But I’d love to hear people’s views on The Newsroom. The jury’s still out for me on how much the Hollywood glamourization and the American self-righteousness of it bother me…
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As a Sudanese, I am concerned not because I would like foreigners to stay out of internal affairs, but because the view Clooney is presenting to the world is not an accurate one. This is not out of any deliberate manipulation on his part, but Clooney’s campaign is rooted in a political culture that does not care for nuance.
It all really goes deeper than the criticism aimed at his Enough Project, the Save Darfur campaign, or the “genocide paparazzi”; satellite monitoring scheme – all of which are symptomatic of an overarching failure in US foreign policy, which promotes a black-and-white understanding of some situations, often underscored by moral superiority. After all, “Arabs are genocidally massacring blacks in the Nuba mountains” is far sexier and easier to digest than”the people of the Nuba mountains sided with the Southern People’s Liberation Movement during Sudan’s decades-long civil war between north and south, and after the secession of the south last year, a disgruntled SPLM candidate for governor lost what he believed were rigged elections and then took arms against the government in Khartoum in co-operation with the residual Nuba SPLM cadre, whose grievances had still not been addressed”..
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— Sudanese writer Nesrine Malik explains why George Clooney isn’t helping Sudan (via guardiancomment)
nectarinesubmarines:
feistyfeminist:
veggielezzyfemmie:
[Trigger Warning: Rape, Sexual Assault, Sexual Offender]
Did anyone happen to read the Chicago Reader this week? The cover article is titled “The Misunderstood Sex Offender”.
I’m interested to hear what you have to say about it. It can be found online here.
I am wary to read this.
this article is fucking infuriating. more under the cut because it contains triggering material (rape, sexual assault, sex offenders)
there’s five pages of this bullshit, so to spare you guys i’ll give you a dose of it because it’s a fucking doozy. this guy raped his at the time girlfriend while pointing a gun to her head. so if that’s not enough, the entire point of this article is to try and tailor sex offender laws to better suit sex offenders.
what. wait what.
so after the horrible crime this man committed, we should feel sympathy for him because he can’t see his child for three years? or the fact that he can’t live near a hospital or school? poor baby has to spend halloween all by his lonesome?
thanks, but no thanks shitty article. if i knew someone who would willingly rape a woman at fucking gunpoint i would sure as hell like for them to be punished pretty harshly for it. if they’re capable of an act like that, what is stopping them from doing even worse? if this article had used a less severe example, sure, it might have been an ok read, but holy christ what a horrible way to prove a point.
“the entire point of this article is to try and tailor sex offender laws to better suit sex offenders.”
I really don’t think that’s what the story is saying. It’s the exact opposite in fact. The laws need to be better suited to protect victims from the most common type of sex offender, which restrictions like that don’t do. But when you live in a society that blames victims for rape and wives who are too scared to press charges against their husbands for domestic violence because they won’t be protected, there isn’t much laws can do to help.
(via nectarinesubmarines-deactivated)
feistyfeminist:
veggielezzyfemmie:
[Trigger Warning: Rape, Sexual Assault, Sexual Offender]
Did anyone happen to read the Chicago Reader this week? The cover article is titled “The Misunderstood Sex Offender”.
I’m interested to hear what you have to say about it. It can be found online here.
I am wary to read this.
It’s a terrible title, but the article doesn’t actually try to redeem the rapists’ actions and it does actually have a point, which is that the last thing legislation actually does is PREVENT rape crime. Which is the whole point of rape culture - we live in a society which still accepts rape and doesn’t try to protect women from the most common forms of rape, only it’s extreme forms. As the article puts it:
Keri Burchfield, a sociologist at Northern Illinois University who’s studied sex offenders, says that while some postprison restrictions are onerous, others simply miss the point—they’re “more symbolic in nature than maybe legislators had anticipated,” she says. “I think they’re creating laws to target a type of offender that is relatively rare. These laws play on the fear that the parent has of the dirty old man lurking in the bushes. A law that’s designed to inform you of where a sex offender lives on your block isn’t going to protect you, or your kid, if the sex offender is actually your new boyfriend, or your uncle—which is more likely to be the case.”
