Sarah Palin and Michelle Obama: Hypocrisy in Mainstream Feminism

August 31, 2008 – 9:22 am

On Friday, McCain announced his choice for a running mate. He chose Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

According to CNN’s John King, McCain met with Palin only one time before deciding that she was his pick, leading one to believe that he chose her because he believed that one vagina could substitute for another. Clearly his aim was to appeal to the disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters. Some women will embrace vagina solidarity, and support McCain because he chose a colluder as his running mate, and others will be enraged because Palins political positions are resoundingly anti-woman.

Palin is not a feminist, though she has benefited from feminist organizing. Were it not for generations of struggle, she would not have the ability to vote, much less run for political office. The Feminine Mystique was written with women like her in mind, and yet if she were elected her decisions would lead to a reduction of women’s rights. The irony of this has not been lost to me, nor I suspect on many women who today are asking how a pro-life woman could possibly represent women’s needs.

Palin is not only staunchly pro-life, she is pro-death penalty, and anti-gay marriage. No matter how many images we see of her shooting guns, or rocking her newborn, her record of conservatism is at odds with everything that feminism stands for. Sarah Palin is not only anti-feminist, she is, as I already mentioned, anti-woman.

Now, the sexist attacks have started against her already. Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in election 08, feminism, north america, politics, racism, women | Comments (13)

Nice Try With Palin, John McCain

August 30, 2008 – 12:56 pm

John McCain waited until after Barack Obama’s speech to make a superbly-timed announcement of his vice-presidential pick.

Unfortunately for him, he undermined what were his best arguments against Obama with that choice.

Sarah Palin is the first-term governor of Alaska, a large, oil-rich state with a small population, and she’s even younger than Obama. Her only political experience before beating the previous Republican governor, Frank Murkowski, in a primary in 2006 was being mayor of Walsilla.

Palin is a mother of five, including one son who’s off to Iraq and another, just born, with Down syndrome. She is staunchly pro-life and considered a Christian conservative, but, rather obviously, is a high-profile working mother.

She campaigned on ethics reform and is considered (much like McCain) a party maverick. She is also seen as a break from ethically-challenged Alaska Republicans like Senator Ted Stevens. However, Palin is under investigation herself for possibly having abused her office to get her former brother-in-law, Mike Wooten, fired from his job as a state trooper, according to the Wall Street Journal. She supports drilling as energy policy, and her husband is a longtime BP employee, but he’s a blue-collar type. Palin has also threatened to evict ExxonMobil and its partners from their drilling rights to publicly held oilfields.

This woman is quite a contradiction, seen at once as a sop to the religious right who have not quite come around to McCain and as outreach to disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters who value biological sex over a record on the issues. Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in election 08, north america, politics, women | Comments (6)

Palestine Inside Out: A Review

August 29, 2008 – 11:51 am

This is a review of Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation by Saree Makdisi. W. W. Norton. 2008.

Saree Makdisi is a Palestinian-American academic. What makes this UCLA professor stand out right away is the fact that he is the nephew of Edward Said.

Makdisi was raised in a Christian home in Washington D.C and Beirut. Conservative pundits such as Rob Shapiro have long urged UCLA to blacklist Makdisi, who is disliked for launching pro-Palestinian discourse on campus.

The book suggests that Makdisi is very much like his uncle. Read More »

By Jonathan Mok | Posted in Arts & Literature, Current Affairs, book reviews, human rights, middle east, north america | Comments (0)

Sarah Palin: The Female Dan Quayle

August 29, 2008 – 11:33 am

“Dan Quayle in a pantsuit.”

That’s what I thought the minute I found out that Sarah Palin will be the Vice Presidential nominee on the Republican ticket with John McCain. She’s young, she has been Mayor of a small town, and is now a first term governor - not a tremendously impressive resume.

But she’s also a woman, shoots a gun, and is pro-life.

This is blatant pandering at its worst, and a huge mistake for John McCain. Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in Current Affairs, election 08, north america, politics | Comments (13)

The Damned, The Birth of the Demons

August 28, 2008 – 10:41 am

The previous installment of Chloe Bradshaw’s tale is here.

We, the Demons, came to this world like this:

Thousands of years ago, there were Angels. They were the guardians of the world, when everything used to be sacred. The world was a happy place where darkness couldn’t set foot. It was a time when magic reigned.

People knew about the Angels for they sometimes came down. Once such an Angel visited a dark witch, wanting to try and stop the witch from using Dark Magic. The witch had other things in mind. She chained the Angel to the wall, so she couldn’t escape. The witch then tainted the Angel’s blood with that of her own. It sent the Angel mad, turning her into a demon. The witch, seeing her malevolence at work, decided to carry on doing the evil deed.

After she turned her the third Angel into a demon, her first creation succumbed to its hunger, and nobody saw anything of the witch after that. The former Angels themselves either killed or turned the humans into one of their own. Ever since that day Demons have ruled the earth and stalked the darkness. Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in Arts & Literature, YA, europe, fiction | Comments (3)

Hand Cat Wife

August 27, 2008 – 4:10 am

Dear Readers, please note that this story is meant to be contained within a single paragraph.

How to begin. That is the difficulty. There are always innumerable points of entry. And the point of entry need not necessarily be the beginning. The beginning can situate itself at the beginning. I mean our point of entry can be the beginning, if that is the way it works. I only mean to begin by stating that it is unnecessary for it to be so. So where do I begin? My birth? No. Let us never speak of it again. Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in Arts & Literature, fiction | Comments (0)

Joe Biden, American Racism, and Optimism

August 25, 2008 – 11:16 am

I must admit my first reaction to Joe Biden being chosen as Obama’s running mate was “meh.”

I’ve had running debates over Joe Biden with a friend for most of the primary season. She loves him, and, well, my feeling was as above. She never managed to convince me, mostly because her arguments were simply that “He’s so intelligent.” Compared to whom? Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in Current Affairs, election 08, north america, politics, racism | Comments (3)

Election 2008: Race Is More Than Black and White

August 25, 2008 – 10:44 am

In the current American presidential election, race has become a pivotal issue. Obama is the first African American man to have a legitimate chance of becoming president of the United States. Blacks and whites vacillate between a celebratory end of the racial divide, and the further entrenchment of racial hostilities.

The post racial world debate has gone mainstream, giving rise to conversations that are long overdue.

While we are continually refining the discourse surrounding race, what has become patently obvious is that the term people of colour stands for black. The United States has a historical legacy of black disenfranchisement that clearly needs to be addressed. Slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, and the rape and sterilization of black women have left a lasting legacy on the social psyche; however this should not erase other bodies of colour from our social conversations. Neither of the candidates, nor mainstream media has made an attempt to specifically address the needs of Muslims, Native Americans, Asians, or Latinos. The aforementioned are the bodies that have become erased. Colour cannot and should not be solely represented by blacks.

Though Muslims are not all of colour they constitute a group of people that have come under extreme social attack since 911. Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in Current Affairs, election 08, human rights, north america, racism, women | Comments (9)

Cold War Revisited: “The Thing”

August 24, 2008 – 10:33 am

As certain factions speculate that the world is headed toward a new Cold War, Mark Farnsworth examines the artistic legacy of this phenomenon.

“The Thing” is the darkest film in the Kurt Russell trilogy of Carpenter’s science fiction films and the beginning of his “Apocalypse” cycle. It is a master class of pessimism nearly unrivalled in cinema and a bleak critique on the nature of humanity itself, inspired by the Reagan administration, Carpenter’s first foray into studio film making, and the escalation of the arms race with the Soviet Union.

The plot is more closely related to John W. Campbell’s novella; “Who Goes There?” than the earlier Hawks production of “The Thing from another World.” Special effects allow the shape-shifting alien to be realised in all its bloody glory, which in turn gives Carpenter the freedom to develop a claustrophobic atmosphere of mistrust, fear, and growing nihilism.

In the earlier movie the scientists and soldiers work together to destroy the visible threat of the thing, as they would do with communism. There is a unity mostly derived from the fact that they are white and embody a people fresh from the moral victory in WW2. America in the 1950s was still perceived as the ‘good guys’, the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave’.

With Carpenter’s creature everyone could be the thing and, as a consequence, an enemy. Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in Arts & Literature, Entertainment, movies, north america, politics | Comments (0)

On the Passing of a Hip Hop Icon

August 24, 2008 – 3:59 am

Today marks the passing of an artist and a legend. Some of us were able to call him our brother, or our son. Another five people called him husband. But one thing we could all call him was… “friend.”

L-Shock was taken before his time. Initial police reports indicate that he slipped on a stray banana peel, and then tragically fell onto roughly seventy large caliber bullets outside of a crowded circus. While the police have heard rumors of foul play, nothing has been made definite at this point.

Rather than mourn the passing of a titan, we at the network would like to celebrate with you the life of a legend. Read More »

By Joe Sapien | Posted in Columnist, Entertainment, humor, music, north america | Comments (0)