Oooh, Deb’s going to love this one: Defeat the right in three minutes.
Be sure to read it all the way through. The argument may seem oversimplified, but it provides a lever to achieve some really astute observations. The author’s weblog takes the discussion further.
If you’ve ever found it difficult to understand the behavior of Cheap-Labor Conservatives (and I have), this may just shed some light.
All hail Ursula K LeGuin, one of this (and last) century’s foremost writers. If you haven’t read any of her work yet, you should!
LeGuin’s (later*) work tells the truth with clever lies that strip western social norms to their roots in order to better shake the tree. You’ll never look at the world in the same way.
(*Interestingly enough LeGuin started as a fairly conservative Sci Fi writer.)
Then, when you’ve cut your teeth on that, you can move on to Octavia Butler . . .
OK, who can explain to me why a poster of a man breastfeeding at work would be controversial? I just can’t see it.
Let’s tick off the elements:
A man in a suit with his chest exposed. If this was a problem, most Guess ads would be banned.
A man holding his child. Can’t even imagine a problem there.
A man with his child on his chest. I’ve seen that in Sears catalogs, for cryin’ out loud.
A baby in a diaper. Um, yeah.
An office. Uh-huh.
I got it. It must be the poster of Lucy Lawless’ legs on the wall.
Seriously, though, the real reason it was pulled was the same reason it was made: it makes people think about the double-standard we still have. If men needed to breastfeed at work, do you think there’d be any problem?
Oh, this looks like fun. Austrian guy Felix Baumgartner (who, of course, speaks English better than we do) jumped out of a plane in the skies above Dover, England. But he didn’t just plummet to earth, or even parachute down. Felix was wearing “an aerodynamic jumpsuit with a 6-foot (1.8 metre) carbon fin strapped to his back” and glided…glid…glideded…um, whatever…22 miles across the Channel to Cap Blanc-Nez in France. And THEN he opened his parachute. And it kind of messed up, but he managed to fix it just in time. Whew! (According to a news report I saw on TV yesterday, he named his wingy thing Icarus. If he’d fallen, the irony would have been too great, eh?)
BBC news has got a terrific article about it, featuring nice photos and even a pretty cool graphic of the historic glide. Of course some of you will immediately start thinking of this as a promising new form of earth-friendly transportation, but some of the rest of us aren’t sure we’re willing to try it…