Posts You Must Read #1

I promised to send this article to Smelt and ae when I met them at BlogHer, but never delivered. Better late than never. By Ross at The Talent Show, a classic piece called “I Am Not My Cock“:

Contrary to what many men (even on the left) seem to think, most guys can and do meet women all the time without even once assaulting them. It’s really easy. You just, you know, not be a rapist. Most guys, far as I know, don’t lose control of themselves when they see even a hint of sideboob. So why in hell do we men feel the need to sympathize with, identify with, or justify the behavior of people who haven’t learned the first thing about civilized behavior, or worse, rapists?

Res Publica is from San Antonio, which is almost right up the street from here. His blog is called Republic of Dogs, which rocks, and so does his piece Wherein The Proverbial Truth That There Is Nothing So Crustily Ancient As Claiming That Your Generation Will Change Everything Is Irrefutably Proven, Yet Again. The writing is wicked funny, so make sure you read it, but I’m excerpting below for content instead of style because I’ve been thinking about these specific issues lately:

Kos, it seems, thinks that political pragmatism consists of advocating whatever policy sounds pretty darn good to folks. I would argue that the better form of political pragmatism, the one that actually represents the larger Pragmatist tradition in American political philosophy, consists of advocating policies that we have good reason to believe will work, and then present our fellow citizens with reasonable arguments to persuade them to support our proposed policies.

And we finish up this edition of Saturday morning required reading with a focus on Bark/Bite, also homegrown right here in Texas. Robert Arjet claimed at the end of September that work was kicking his ass, but luckily he has continued to blog. You should pretty much go and read everything he’s written on his blog right goddamned now, but here is some motivation:

From Inspiration:

And I’m standing there in my kitchen yelling “You’re fucking-A right, you bipartisan son-of-a-bitch!” and I’m feeling, I swear to Jesus-Fucking-Christ-in-Geneva I’m feeling the earth move a little beneath the feet of the Neo-con hawks because a decorated, tortured, POW war-hero Republican is finally standing up and saying that the “desperate times call for desperate measures” emperor has no fucking clothes.

From Convicts and Inmates:

“Hmm. We also notice that women who work in this field, and whose work is judged to be good to excellent, tell harrowing tales of constant, deeply-ingrained sexual harassment ranging from subtle hostility towards women to point-blank threats of on-the-job retaliation if sexual favors are not provided.”

“Why are you fucking Feminazis always yelling!?!”

Also awesome: Hetero Privilege, It’s the Patriarchy, Stupid, and What the Fuck?!.

I’m jealous of his community college writing students, honestly.