© Anne Lück, Illustratorin.
No Laughing Matter von Judith Warner:
„(…) “Palin Power” isn’t just about making hockey moms feel important. It’s not just about giving abortion rights opponents their due. It’s also, in obscure ways, about making yearnings come true – deep, inchoate desires about respect and service, hierarchy and family that have somehow been successfully projected onto the figure of this unlikely woman and have stuck.
For those of us who can’t tap into those yearnings, it seems the Palin faithful are blind – to the contradictions between her stated positions and the truth of the policies she espouses, to the contradictions between her ideology and their interests. But Jonathan Haidt, an associate professor of moral psychology at the University of Virginia, argues in an essay this month, “What Makes People Vote Republican?”, that it’s liberals, in fact, who are dangerously blind.
Haidt has conducted research in which liberals and conservatives were asked to project themselves into the minds of their opponents and answer questions about their moral reasoning. Conservatives, he said, prove quite adept at thinking like liberals, but liberals are consistently incapable of understanding the conservative point of view. “Liberals feel contempt for the conservative moral view, and that is very, very angering. Republicans are good at exploiting that anger,” he told me in a phone interview. (…)“
(Danke an Alexander für den Hinweis.)
Edit: Damit das im Artikel verlinkte Essay nicht untergeht, hier ein kleiner Teaser:
„(…) For my dissertation research, I made up stories about people who did things that were disgusting or disrespectful yet perfectly harmless. For example, what do you think about a woman who can’t find any rags in her house so she cuts up an old American flag and uses the pieces to clean her toilet, in private? Or how about a family whose dog is killed by a car, so they dismember the body and cook it for dinner? I read these stories to 180 young adults and 180 eleven-year-old children, half from higher social classes and half from lower, in the USA and in Brazil. I found that most of the people I interviewed said that the actions in these stories were morally wrong, even when nobody was harmed. Only one group—college students at Penn—consistently exemplified Turiel’s definition of morality and overrode their own feelings of disgust to say that harmless acts were not wrong. (A few even praised the efficiency of recycling the flag and the dog).
This research led me to two conclusions. First, when gut feelings are present, dispassionate reasoning is rare. In fact, many people struggled to fabricate harmful consequences that could justify their gut-based condemnation. I often had to correct people when they said things like “it’s wrong because… um…eating dog meat would make you sick” or “it’s wrong to use the flag because… um… the rags might clog the toilet.” These obviously post-hoc rationalizations illustrate the philosopher David Hume’s dictum that reason is “the slave of the passions, and can pretend to no other office than to serve and obey them.” This is the first rule of moral psychology: feelings come first and tilt the mental playing field on which reasons and arguments compete. If people want to reach a conclusion, they can usually find a way to do so. The Democrats have historically failed to grasp this rule, choosing uninspiring and aloof candidates who thought that policy arguments were forms of persuasion. (…)“
Kolumnistin Maureen Dowd über Sarah Palin und ihr schlichtes Gedankengut:
„Sarah has single-handedly ushered out the “Sex and the City” era, and made the sexy new model for America a retro one — the glamorous Pioneer Woman, packing a gun, a baby and a Bible.
Her explosion onto the scene made Obama seem even more like a windy, wispy egghead. Like W., Sarah has the power of positive unthinking. But now we may want to think about where ignorance and pride and no self-doubt has gotten us. Being quick on the trigger might be good in moose hunting, but in dealing with Putin, a little knowledge might come in handy.“
„David Foster Wallace, whose darkly ironic novels, essays and short stories garnered him a large following and made him one of the most influential writers of his generation, was found dead in his California home on Friday, after apparently committing suicide, the authorities said.“
Dimitri Maksimov, via Dons Gezwitscher.
(Ich blogge nur noch, was andere twittern. Eat this, Rivva.)
Publicly Fat in Australia – eine Geschichte aus dem Big Fat Blog, einem Fat-Acceptance-Weblog. Leserin rainalee beschreibt ihre Teilnahme als dicke Frau an einem Workshop der Living Library, die sich damit beschäftigt, Vorurteile abzubauen:
„Borrow a person you normally would think you would not like. We have a wide selection of unpopular stereotypes. Take a walk, have a talk, or don’t. Just remember to give back the person…When you’re done, you are guaranteed to feel like you have just lost a friend.“
So beginnt ihre Geschichte:
„I work at a university in Australia as an academic. Part of my job is being the ‘Women in Technology’ program coordinator, and recently we had one of the staff come talk to us about a ‘Living Library’ project on our campus, as part of multicultural week. People volunteer to become ‘books’ for a day, and borrowers can ‘borrow’ a book for a half- hour conversation about their life experiences. The idea is to confront prejudice and break down barriers.
I believe this is a wonderful project, and I volunteered to be a book. My “blurb” was:
FAT PERSON – “I think one of the biggest ‘light bulb’ moments in my life was when I realised that I am not a broken thin person. I’m a person with feelings, dreams and aspirations – and those don’t all revolve around the size or shape of my body.” In an atmosphere of hysteria about the obesity crisis, what is it really like being a fat person today? Have a read and find out.“
Teil 1, Teil 2, Teil 3. (Abkürzungen in der Story: WLS = weight loss surgery (Magenband und ähnlicher Schrott), FA = fat acceptance)
Tortendiagramm über Prokrastination, schamlos geklaut aus einem Stand-up-Programm von Demetri Martin.
Ich werde dieses Buch nicht kaufen, es ist zerkratzt. Aber das Blog ist sehr hübsch. Und voller Aale.
Les Misbarack, via Caros Gezwitscher.
“That’s why we’ve already won. It’s democracy. They can’t shut that down.”
The Daily Show’s First Post-9/11 Show, via Benjamins Gezwitscher.
Zombie feminists of the RNC von Rebecca Traister auf salon.com:
„(…) In this strange new pro-woman tableau, feminism – a word that is being used all over the country with regard to Palin’s potential power – means voting for someone who would limit reproductive control, access to healthcare and funding for places like Covenant House Alaska, an organization that helps unwed teen mothers. It means cheering someone who allowed women to be charged for their rape kits while she was mayor of Wasilla, who supports the teaching of creationism alongside evolution, who has inquired locally about the possibility of using her position to ban children’s books from the public library, who does not support the teaching of sex education.
In this “Handmaid’s Tale”-inflected universe, in which femininity is worshipped but females will be denied rights, CNBC pundit Donny Deutsch tells us that we’re witnessing “a new creation … of the feminist ideal,” the feminism being so ideal because instead of being voiced by hairy old bats with unattractive ideas about intellect and economy and politics and power, it’s now embodied by a woman who, according to Deutsch, does what Hillary Clinton did not: “put a skirt on.” “I want her watching my kids,” says Deutsch. “I want her laying next to me in bed.”
Welcome to 2008, the year a tough, wonky woman won a primary (lots of them, actually), an inspiring black man secured his party’s nomination for the presidency, and a television talking head felt free to opine that a woman is qualified for executive office because he wants to bed her and have her watch his kids! Stop the election; I want to get off.
What Palin so seductively represents, not only to Donny Deutsch but to the general populace, is a form of feminine power that is utterly digestible to those who have no intellectual or political use for actual women. It’s like some dystopian future … feminism without any feminists.
Palin’s femininity is one that is recognizable to most women: She’s the kind of broad who speaks on behalf of other broads but appears not to like them very much. The kind of woman who, as Jessica Grose at Jezebel has eloquently noted, achieves her power by doing everything modern women believed they did not have to do: presenting herself as maternal and sexual, sucking up to men, evincing an absolute lack of native ambition, instead emphasizing her luck as the recipient of strong male support and approval. It works because these stances do not upset antiquated gender norms. So when the moment comes, when tolerance for and interest in female power have been forcibly expanded by Clinton, a woman more willing to throw elbows and defy gender expectations but who falls short of the goal, Palin is there, tapped as a supposedly perfect substitute by powerful men who appreciate her charms.
But while the Republicans would have us believe that Palin can simply stand in for Hillary Clinton, there is nothing interchangeable about these politicians. We began this history-making election with one kind of woman and have ended up being asked to accept her polar opposite. Clinton’s brand of femininity is the kind that remains slightly unpalatable in America. It is based on competence, political confidence and an assumption of authority that upends comfortable roles for men and women. It’s a kind of power that has nothing to do with the flirtatious or the girly, nothing to do with the traditionally feminine. It is authority that is threatening because it so closely and calmly resembles the kind of power that the rest of the guys on a presidential stage never question their right to wield. (…)“
„die Freundin meiner Schwester wohnte in dem Haus, in dem vorher Heino gewohnt hatte.“
Quasi-Promibegegnungen bei Nelly in den Kommentaren.
Franzi und der Popkulturjunkie urlaubsbloggen aus New York. Mit Bildern.
Liebe Berlinerinnen, liebe Berliner, falls Sie gerade nichts vorhaben, würde ich Ihnen gerne den Herrn René Marik ans Herz legen, der noch heute und morgen abend in der Bar jeder Vernunft auftritt. Ja, das ist der mit Rapante und Schneewante und dem Maulwurf und Kalle und der Titanic und Kermit. Aber das ist längst nicht alles. Er hat nämlich auch noch Catwoman dabei, Frau Schibulski und den oscarreifen Monolog des weißen Hais, der leider der Schere zum Opfer gefallen ist. Zusätzlich: die schlimmste Lyrik aller Zeiten, die Schwitter’sche Anna Blume und melancholisches Liedgut. Ich habe mich zwei Stunden lang wunderbar amüsiert und noch nie vorher in meinem Leben so laut über das Wort „Biochemie“ gelacht. Bitte hingehen und angucken.
Liebe Nicht-Berlinerinnen, liebe Nicht-Berliner: Am 26. September erscheint die DVD.