[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. --L.]
- Awesome alert: Vandy Beth Glenn wins Georgia trans discrimination suit
- [Deeply Problematic]
A federal court handed down a potentially powerful ruling on trans rights today, when judge Richard Story ruled that the Georgia State Assembly’s firing of trans woman Vandy Beth Glenn was illegal discrimination. The decision may help to give trans women the protection that cis women have legally had for decades: the right to not be fired for being a woman.
…Beth Littrell, an attorney with LAMBDA Legal who argued the case, praised the judge’s decision. However, she was cautious in her optimism, and quick to note that the ruling “is no substitution for a statewide law [protecting trans rights to work], but it does send a message.”
- Louisiana Jail Holds Suicidal Prisoners in "Squirrel Cages"
- [ACLU Blog]
[Trigger warning for prisoner abuse and humiliation. -L]
- Enlightened Sexism. A Book Review
- [Echidne of the Snakes]
Susan J. Douglas has written a book about American pop culture and its negotiations or wars with feminism. The full title of the book is Enlightened Sexism. The Seductive Message That Feminism's Work Is Done.
But it really is mostly about pop culture and the paradoxical messages it offers about the role of women. Like "you can be anything you want as long as you have big tits."
That's my summary of the book. It has much more than that, including theories about enlightened sexism and embedded feminism and how they interact. Here's Douglas's definition of the two concepts…
…these are the major concepts Douglas applies in a tour through the popular culture of the last thirty years or so. It's a fascinating tour to take, and I recommend it quite strongly, even if I'm not quite certain how we are to make it all into one tight theory. That would require that the same audiences were watching all the different shows, wouldn't it?
…My third a-ha! moment [while reading this book] had to do with Douglas' discussion of Janet Reno and why she provoked a certain kind of hatred. I'm not talking about criticizing what she did as the Clinton administration Attorney General but about the way her looks were covered in the media…
[Mmmmm, crunchy book review. Go read it all! -L]
- OSHA: Most Gulf Workers Sick from Heat, Not Oil and Chemical Exposures
- [Firedoglake]
Hundreds of workers in the Gulf Coast cleaning up BP’s oil disaster have reported symptoms of nausea, vomiting, nose bleeds, and headaches, but those “almost all have been heat related,” according to Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA Jordan Barab.
Barab – a former worker health and safety blogger at Firedoglake and his blog, Confined Space – says that despite widespread assumptions that workers are sick from exposure to oil, “we haven’t really found that yet.”
“We’re really looking, but haven’t found anything significant in the chemical samplings. We’re looking for people getting sick, but it tends to be overwhelmingly heat related,” Barab told Firedoglake earlier this week…
Barab says the challenges OSHA faces in the Gulf are similar to those of any other workplace for which the agency is responsible, namely that they can’t be everywhere at once…
While OSHA is conducting its own evaluations of worker health through site visits, agencies in states and the federal government are cobbling together reports from emergency rooms and poison control centers, as well as BP’s own reporting, that paint a dire picture of worker safety.
…Barab says Louisiana’s data is misleading. Louisiana is “cataloguing, not describing” its data, which makes it look like people are sick from oil exposure, when in fact, according to OSHA’s analyses, most workers are actually sick from heat. NIOSH, part of the CDC, is working with Louisiana to include “more precises causes” for illnesses reported in its data.
- Protons are smaller than we thought…could the entire universe be wrong?
- [io9]
Protons are 0.00000000000000003 meters smaller than we thought. That sounds like nothing, but it means one of these things must be true: Undiscovered particles are lurking…
- Daily 5: 5 keys to press during burg boot
- [OMG! Ubuntu!]
[BURG makes your boot sequence prettier. Follow the above link to see what you can do with it. Installation instructions here:
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/01/make-grub-themes-beautiful-look-nic<wbr>er.html
-L]
The Link(s): Thu, Jul 8th, 10am by Lee Salazar, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at leesalazar.com.