Current Events – Page 15 – commonplacebook.com

Indianapolis: Super Bowl City

Post author:HFM
Post published:January 31, 2012
Post category:Indianapolis

A collection of recent articles about Indianapolis, many from an outsider’s point of view:

Explore Indy’s Surprising Food Scene – PBS.org
This week the world turns its attention to Indianapolis, as the Midwestern city plays host to Super Bowl XLVI. Long known as a haven for chain restaurants, in recent years the city has undergone a food transformation. Indianapolis food blogger Erin Day gives us a tour of some of the highlights of an Indianapolis you won’t recognize.

Unexpected Indianapolis: Blues, Burlesque And Brains In Jars – Lonely Planet/Huffington Post
As the Super Bowl host on February 5, Indianapolis jumps into the spotlight, and you can bet an ear of corn you’ll hear all about its race cars and mighty museums. But what about its burlesque shows and brains in jars? Meatloaf and mead? The city has a slew of unheralded attractions that deserve a close-up, too. Seek out these seven slices of idiosyncratic Indianapolis

City of dreams – Skysports
“But to borrow the generalissimo’s phrase, ‘I came, I saw, I couldn’t believe my eyes.’ That’s my first impression of this year’s Super Bowl city, having arrived on Monday and spent most of the day out and about in downtown Indy. It was also my second impression, closely followed by my third and fourth.”

There’s more to Indy than the Super Bowl – CNN Travel
Super Bowl visitors will enjoy the fabulous Super Bowl parties and the very best of this Midwestern city’s arts, music and food festivals tailored specially for this sports-filled week. And when the Super Bowl party-goers leave and the confetti has been cleaned up, the locals will return to enjoying their city. Whether you’re traveling to Indianapolis for the Super Bowl or taking a trip later, here’s where the locals have fun — and where they recommend you go, too.

Buffy Vs. Edward – Pop-up Video style

Post author:HFM
Post published:January 29, 2012
Post category:Feminism & Women's Issues Movies

Rebellious Pixels produces this cool video mash-up remix of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Edward from the Twilight series, highlighting how creepy and stalker-like inappropriate Edward’s behavior is during Twilight, and how Buffy would have handled the behavior in a healthier way than Bella does. This latest version contains “pop up video” annotations that provide info about the remix and commentary on the action.

How is sexual orientation defined?

Post author:HFM
Post published:January 24, 2012
Post category:GLBT Issues

Me, on the question of how sexual orientation is decided:

This comes down to the argument of “is it your attractions that decide your sexual orientation, or your behaviors?” And within the gay community, there is fierce argument over that question. Which is why I always go back to the Kinsey scale, which is based on attraction, rather than behavior, when defining my sexual orientation, because it’s a lot more clear what *I* mean when I say it.

Theoretically, it could be determined either way. From a practical standpoint, talking about a topic when different people have different definitions for the same terminology is problematic, to say the least, when real life issues are at stake.

You are awful, too

Post author:HFM
Post published:January 3, 2012
Post category:Feminism & Women's Issues

Whenever you confront, or see confronted, sexism on the internet, there is almost always a chorus of people doing a couple of things in response: 1) excusing the behavior of the people who are sexist, or 2) trying to defend the community in which the sexism is taking place by arguments such as “not all XX people are sexist; most of us are great people except for these few idiots.” or 3) saying things like “if you participate anonymously, you don’t have to deal with the sexism, so hide your identity and you’ll get to participate fully.”

Kate Harding blogs about a specific incident that fits this pattern – a 15 year-old girl who considers herself an atheist and wants to be part of a discussion on atheism posts on reddit in an atheism community about the book her mother got her for Christmas – and the girl gets an enormous number of rape threats and sexist, predatory comments from men who participate in that in the atheist community.

Skeptic blogger Rebecca Watson caught on to what was happened to the young woman on Reddit and wrote about it on her site. Subsequently, the comments on her post were filled with people excusing the behavior of the reddit folks as satire, people suggesting the girl should only post anonymously so she wouldn’t be subject to abusive comments, and people explaining that this is just the way the world works and we can’t change it.

Kate’s response on her site to the excuses in the comments on Rebecca’s blog is phenomenal, and worth saving for the succinct and appropriate answers to a number of common troll-isms, man-splaining and excusing behavior that serves to shelter misogynist abuse online.

I don’t want to seize a massive block-quote of her words because it wouldn’t be fair use, and her writing is also almost too succinct to paraphrase well, so please just go and read her post, and note that I love everything after this paragraph:
“I love that “you are awful, too” bit so much, I’d like to expand on it.”

The True Cost of the Royal Family Explained

Post author:HFM
Post published:December 5, 2011
Post category:Current Events

How the Queen of England actually saves UK taxpayers money by sharing the revenue from her property.

Confusing Sex and Rape

Post author:HFM
Post published:November 21, 2011
Post category:Feminism & Women's Issues

The New York Times addresses a topic that feminists have been trying to illuminate for years – the use by journalists of the word ‘sex’ in descriptions of non-consensual criminal acts that more properly should be called “rape” instead, and the importance of correcting that error for our common understanding of what constitutes a crime involving rape.

Some readers, responding to The New York Times’s first reports on the case, strongly objected to wording in the articles that, in their view, either underplayed the details or wrongly applied the language of consensual sex to the narrative.

The objections focused on the most severe of the accusations against Mr. Sandusky, a former Penn State assistant coach. According to the grand jury report, he subjected a boy estimated to be 10 years old to “anal intercourse” in locker room showers at the university in 2002.
Jennifer Crichton, a reader from Manhattan, said The Times’s initial article on Nov. 5 missed the mark when it described the testimony of a Penn State graduate assistant about the incident. As The Times put it, he told the grand jury that he saw Mr. Sandusky “sexually assaulting a boy in the shower.”

“Why is this described as ‘sexual assault’ and not as ‘rape’ “? Ms. Crichton wrote.

The importance of course is that sex is a consensual act between two persons who have given informed consent. “When the facts warrant it, journalists should be as specific as possible, they should avoid using the language of consensual sex and, when appropriate, they should call a rape a rape.” Those who were accused of sexual assault should contact the law office of Mark Diaz & Associates to help defend their rights.