Culture Warriors category archive

Via Job’s Anger.

Via Job’s Anger.

Chez Pazienza is your tour guide.

His phraseology might be a bit–er–strong, but that’s just a matter of style. The substance is quite accurate. Birds of a feather and all that.

Dr. Dan Gottlieb speaks with Dr. Priscilla Ward and Dr. Cindy Dell Clark about the dynamics of fear. The first part of the show considers why Americans are panicking over ebola, but don’t get flu shots. Here’s a bit from the webpage:

Dr. Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, a study of the intersection of medicine and myth in the idea of contagion and the evolution of the contemporary stories we tell about the global health problem of “emerging infections. Wald is also the author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form. She is also editor of American Literature as well as on the Editorial Board of Literature and Medicine as well as a is a member of the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy and an affiliate of the Trent Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities and the Institute for Global Health.

The audio is at the link. I think you will find the show well worth a listen.

I do think that the discussion did not give sufficient weight to one factor: the racism and bigotry that provides a base line to the ebola melody from the wingnut Wurlitzer.

The segment ends at about the 34 minute mark; there’s a short begathon break at the 20 minute mark.

White on white violence plagues public events.

Addendum, a Little Bit Later:

John Cole posts more news of white on white violence.

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*Learn more about the kindly old investigator.

John Aravosis considers the history that is obscured by “tradition.” A nugget:

. . . “traditionally” women were property; they pretty much belonged to their husband. And as property, they couldn’t inherit a dime. In the old days it was all about the kids. If you had a farm, or an empire, you needed a son to take over some day (to hell with the daughters). The wife was important as an incubator, and your daughters were relatively useless, unless you could sell one off and get a decent dowry in return.

So when you hear conservatives, like the National Review’s Mona Charen, talk about the traditional reason behind marriage — the children — she’s half speaking the truth. The traditional purpose of marriage was “male children.” Wives were tolerated as necessary, and little girls were mistakes.

Via Balloon Juice.

Daniel Ruth rounds of the right’s reaction to the Supreme Court’s inaction on gay marriage this week–an inaction that effectively ended bans on gay marriage in 30 states. A nugget:

Still, there was some good news. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who has become a professional chattering-teeth talk show host, was so incensed over what he saw as a lack of proper breast-beating indignation from Republicans over the court’s decision not to take up the gay marriage issue that he threatened to leave the GOP. That makes him even more irrelevant than he already is. At least that got some crickets chirping.

Follow the link for more.

Stephen Colbert considers the recent Supreme Court decision to to hear appeals of lower court decisions overturning bans on gay marriage.

Below the fold because it may autoplay.

Read more »

The God of Hate always has followers, because hate sells.

Jessica Valenti wants parity.

As state after state strips women of their access to abortion and the US supreme court rules to strip women of access to contraception, it seems only fair that men should be “helped” in the same way that women have been “helped” all these years. Right? After all, the laws are said to be there to protect us, from ourselves, and we wouldn’t want men to feel left out.

So, before engaging in any sexual act that could lead to procreation, what if all men had to undergo years of male-centric, abstinence-only education to learn about the horrors and all-around grossness of male sexuality? And what if the standards for how we legislated male sexuality and what we taught about it were based on scientific data of the same quality as that which is applied to women?

Follow the link for some examples.

Werner Herzog’s Bear, history war correspondent, reports:

I am interested in examining exactly why the History Wars have returned with such vehemence. Most of it has to do with Tea Party conservatism, which was called something else back in the 1970s, but was still the same force opposing textbooks that dispensed with a hagiographic vision of the American past. Radical conservatism relies on a certain narrative of American history more than perhaps any other political movement. They constantly make appeals to the “Founders,” who they have transformed into divine figures who can do no wrong. America to them is a kind of tool for God’s will on earth, an “exceptional” nation bringing the light of freedom to the world.

The evangelical/fundamentalist flavoring of the Tea Party colors its historical vision. America can do no wrong, since it is divinely inspired. To point out any shortcomings, or how the Founders were not perfect and actually even fought with each other, is heresy.

Follow the link for the rest of the report.

Sometimes the American Taliban puts on its Sunday go to meeting clothes.

Cenk rips them off.