RCimT: Saturday tab clean-up

Got a bunch of stuff that’s been in tabs for a while that need clearing out, but that deserve to be seen. Might as well do another Random Crap in my Tabs to catch up, and take back some system resources. A bunch of it is meme-worthy, so I expect you’ve probably seen them before. Maybe even on FtB. Possibly. Frankly, I’m too lazy to check, and either way, I know I haven’t talked about them, so you’re certainly missing my keen insight!

Mike the Mad Biologist deconstructs ‘The Rent is Too Damn High’, showing quite ably that rent prices are driven by income inequality, meaning the actual problem is that wages are too damn low. Of course, that’s not as easily made viral as the McMillan catchphrase, but I suspect you can meme just about anything just by having a wicked white beard and turn-of-last-century curly moustache.

Right Wing Watch put together a great expose of Invisible Children’s fundamentalist Christian roots. Considering the recent skeptical pushback against their Kony campaign, this explains quite a bit about why they’re so keen to send American troops to help the Ugandan army despite how complicated the situation actually is. We know fundies see the world completely without nuance, and we know how much of a saviour complex Jason Russell has developed. RWW’s article is quite parsimonious.

Here’s a great idea to satisfy all those damnable male American congressmen and senators who are so intent on controlling uteri and vaginae: knit them facsimiles so they can have complete control over their very own set of female genitalia. That is, after all, what they want to control, when they legislate against birth control or call certain women nasty names for having said genitalia and actually daring to use them in consentual manners with other like-minded individuals. I sort of see it like having a plush animal or something — that way they can make-believe that they own these genitalia in the same way as responsible adults do. Of course, they aren’t allowed to own one of their own — we’ve seen how they abuse the other sort of genitalia they’ve already been allotted, by running around having sex with women and pushing all responsibility for any of the consequences onto those women for consenting to sex.

I’m sure you’ve seen this particular image floating around, but it bears a link anyway. For the visually impaired, or those who don’t like surprises and won’t just click a link without some sort of description, it’s an image montage of Rick Santorum’s smiling face, made completely out of (possibly NSFW) images and stills of gay porn. This is possibly the only way Santorum could ever be considered sexy. And yes, I mean the double entendre.

Speaking of the homogay menacegenda and the religious fuckwits who rail so hard against it (heh… rail… hard…), did you know Jesus apparently blessed a number of gay marriages? Well, not Jesus per se, considering he could be myth and all, but Jesus iconography was used in church celebrations of male saints getting gay-married in as holy a place as Mt. Sinai. And that isn’t even the extent of the evidence — there are dozens of examples in church history, including an Office of Same Sex Union during the 10th century! I can almost hear the anguished cries of “context!!” and “lies!!!!11one” from the apologists and bigots already.

And finally, something I want to talk about eventually once we get through ME2 and finally dig into ME3: how Bioware succeeded in creating a strong female lead entirely accidentally. Mass Effect is a great franchise, but I admit to being completely confused by all its promo materials since I’ve never found the male Commander Shepard to be at all compelling. Gee, another potato-head with stubble? I got enough of that with inFamous. Beyond the fact that the female Shepard is not sexualized, is every bit as badass as the default male one, and Jennifer Hale is one of the best voice actors ever (and CANADIAN!!), I have grown to consider Commander Shepard a woman, and all this imagery of the default male character to be practically heresy. But I suppose I should keep the rest of my thoughts close to my chest if I intend on writing a full post at some future juncture.

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RCimT: Saturday tab clean-up
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