Culture Warriors category archive

The rituals of the Nacerima Tribe.

Tony Norman.

Just read it.

Debunking de bunk.

The Seattle Times’s Danny Westneat remembers his time as a beat reported doing a weekly “police blotter” column. Despite the publicity, he suspects that, aside from the cover-up, pearl-clutching over the NFL’s abusive husbands and boyfriends may be obscuring a larger problem. A nugget:

. . . I came to call this my weekly domestic-violence tour.

Family fights, usually with a man attacking a woman, are the top reason people call police. They make up anywhere from 15 to 50 percent of what police do. Sifting through the weekly reports of South King County was a bruising tour of family dysfunction: shouting matches in the streets to fist fights to battering of children with canes to assaults with knives to, every so often, homicide.

Family violence was so routine it became background noise. I rarely put it in the crime blotter. Maybe this was a mistake, but there was too much. I could have filled the entire blotter every week solely with horrific accounts of men abusing women. I didn’t. I looked away.

(snip)

But the obsession with the NFL scandal is obscuring the real story: We are the ones who really have an epidemic of domestic-violence problems.

Dick Polman says, “Say it, dammit.”

The press and the Pennsylvania cops have crafted all kinds of labels for Eric Matthew Frein. He’s a “cop-hating gunman,” a “trooper slay suspect,” a “cop ambush suspect,” an “accused cop shooter,” a “suspected cop killer,” a “highly skilled marksman,” a “self-declared survivalist.”

And yet – quite inexplicably – nobody has called him a suspected terrorist. Which, at this writing, is the most accurate description of all.

But why hasn’t anyone labeled him that way?

Follow the link for his answer.

What is it about being a high school principal that breeds the stupid?

When I was a student, my high school principal fought a stupid war against boys’ having “Beatles haircuts” (I’ve told the story elsewhere in these electrons). Now comes a principal who fights a stupid war to protect an ethnic slur because, I guess, ethnic slurs are a tradition.

Afterthought:

The phrase “egomaniacal authoritarian martinets” does come to mind.

Recently, a kerfuffle broke out about men “cat-calling” women, with persons clearly incapable of thought defending the behavior.

Here’s some thought: Gina Barreca discusses the all-too-routine public harassment of girls and women for being. This nugget sums it up:

. . . I discovered around age twelve that one way to dissuade men from leering at me or making sucking-teeth-clicking noises as I passed them on the street was to stick a finger in my ear and start digging. You have to look really determined; you have to appear on a mission.

It can’t look like you’re twirling a strand of your hair or something like that, because that might be seen as cute and then you couldn’t expect anybody’s sympathy even if you were abducted and forced to live on a farm with Todd Akin.

Thoreau tries to understand the reason for the fascination with STEM (I think that means science, technology, engineering, and math). He poses several possibilities. Here’s just one:

3) More specifically, STEM involves making valuable stuff, whereas humanities and social science just inform how we think, and the people throwing money at this just want people to help them make stuff that they can sell. They don’t care about controlling how people think. (There’s a reassuring aspect to this, I guess. But there’s also a glass-half-empty aspect.)

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Things that haven’t changed since I was a young ‘un:

The hemline war

A 15-year-old teenager who moved from Seattle to Clay County, Florida was forced to wear an ill-fitting, brightly colored “shame suit” to classes after she unknowingly violated the school’s skirt-length policy on her first day.

The Washington Post reported that Miranda Larkin’s family moved to Florida just eight days before the first day of school. Larkin dressed for classes without realizing that her black skirt was an inch too short for Oakleaf High School’s dress code.

and the hair-length battle.

The ACLU of Louisiana has come to the defense of a Rastafarian boy who has been suspended from school and forbidden to return until he cuts his dreadlocks.

The boy was sent home from South Plaquemines High School when classes resumed Aug. 8 because his dreadlocks extended beyond the collar of his shirt, in apparent violation of the school dress code.

After he returned to school the following week with his hair pinned up, school officials told the student his dreadlocks remained in violation.

Rastafarians believe Leviticus 21:5 forbids them to cut their hair, and dreadlocks are central to their religious beliefs.

Because conformity is a family value. Freedom of religion and especially freedom of expression are not.

Ducks of a feather.