Opinion
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Melbourne, Victoria, AUS. It seems Tammy Wynette got it right after all. In a new twist to the so-called "mummy wars", conservative US journalist Megan Basham has released a book titled Beside Every Successful Man: a woman's guide to having it all. In it she not only claims that most women would be happier if they stayed at home with their children, but also that they should stand by their man by focusing on his career rather than their own.
Typical of those who employ mummy wars lo... |
07-04-09
Word count: 935
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Reflecting on the idea of a journey, John Pilger wonders if the unsuspected and tragic can change everything.
Sydney, NSW, AUS. T. S. Eliot wrote that the point of any journey was to find out where you came from. As I bore my bulging canvas bag to the wharf at Circular Quay, not far from where my Irish great-great-grandparents had landed in leg irons, I hoped the point of my journey would become clearer once my ship had sailed. The Bretagne was my ship; it was white with blue stripes along th... |
07-03-09
Word count: 1179
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Fairfax, VA, USA. Like many women out of the public eye [N1], what most women born transsexual want more than anything else is not to be noticed, at least no more so than any other woman [N2].
Women learn early that, in other than those moments of our own choosing, standing out in a crowd can invite unwanted sexual attention from males and unasked for behavioral commentary and criticism from the cultural society [N3] in which they live.
We all are judged against cultural stereotypes that va... |
06-30-09
Word count: 2291
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Subiaco, WA, AUS. The climbing frames in the park at the end of my street, to which I take my grandchildren, are so safe our four-year-old is bored. There is a old steam roller that may be climbed upon which the council threatens to remove because it is not safe.
Indeed our four-year-old has fallen off it and hurt himself, no permanent damage but a salutary lesson. Nevertheless, the council frets about duty of care.
Uneven pavements represent potential law suits, as do falling tree limbs a... |
06-29-09
Word count: 1916
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Washington, DC, USA. For at least a half century, “silos” and borders have been tripping up effective governance in America.
The silos loom highest at the federal level, where massive departments from Transportation to Commerce to Labor rarely speak and almost never work together.
Borders proliferate close to home, dividing metro areas into hundreds of economically linked but separately governed cities and suburbs. And borders, as state lines, plunge straight through such massive citista... |
06-29-09
Word count: 949
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Fairfax, VA, USA. Most sexually reproducing species spend most of their evolutionary history punctuated into an equilibria equally divided into male and female. Very few of us ever check the “other” box. Boy or Girl, Girl or Boy, except after “C” and/or if the year is divisible by both 100 and 400.
Within any given representative population x, research suggests that the top level of the gay and lesbian population equals .1x +/- .05. Let’s just say ten percent of any given human popu... |
06-27-09
Word count: 1859
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Melbourne, Victoria, AUS. As someone who has spent the past year researching popular perceptions of feminism, the question I'm most frequently asked is: "Why are young women so reluctant to call themselves feminists?"
The assumption that is often implicit in this query is that feminism is irrelevant to the younger generation and has failed to adapt to modern circumstances.
Worse still, as one young woman told me, calling yourself a feminist won't get you laid.
The irony is that, ... |
06-26-09
Word count: 1019
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Texas, USA. A semantic construct that cultural feminists have all too often used as a club with which to beat us. On the face of it socialization is a pretty simple concept and is an educated way of describing the process of teaching, in this case sex roles/gender roles.
However, among the things I have learned from post-modern folks are ideas like deconstructing and sub-textual readings. Socialization as a concept requires more than a simple face value reading for it is fraught with both sub... |
06-25-09
Word count: 2509
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Providence, RI, USA. Usually sure-footed politically, the Obama administration last week erred seriously by letting a local picket line trigger the withdrawal of Vice President Biden and some 100 federal officials from the U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting in Providence. Rhode Island.
The White House’s stated reason — that it has prevailing policy to bar its officials from crossing union picket lines — may appear politically expedient for a liberal Democratic administration.
Bu... |
06-22-09
Word count: 923
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Fairfax, VA, USA. American Idol has been on the air for eight years and, during that time, has produced two openly gay winners, Clay Aiken and Adam Lambert, and, if rumors are true, one or two possibly lesbian winners.
I’m not telling, even if you ask.
In the six months since he took office, the American President has repeatedly broken promises he made during his campaign to the gay community. Or, sensing a certain gullibility within the liberal wing, perhaps he deliberately lied during h... |
06-21-09
Word count: 1707
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Texas, USA. If you haven’t figured it out already, or if you are new to visiting this list [N1] I should probably say this before plunging into the following. I’m a Second Wave radical feminist of the pre-cultural feminist type.
What I am talking about in the following has little or nothing to do with the post-modern deconstructionalist arguments so popular today and has everything to do with thinking from when feminism was about liberation and not a Ph.D. program in Women’s Studies or... |
06-19-09
Word count: 2309
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Most US states face severe financial challenges during the current deep recession. Efforts to patch budgetary shortfalls in existing programs and services compete with pressures to launch new policy initiatives or fund additional programs. Here is how one US state, neither the best nor worst example, copes with the current crisis.
Lancaster, PA, USA. "It's like déjà vu all over again." These weighty words from the well known philosopher Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra nail p... |
06-19-09
Word count: 975
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Washington, DC, USA. For those of you who believe there is no differences between men and women, Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A*Star) reports it has developed a gender recognition system that, if fully successful, may bring a sea-change to advertising media.
The system uses sophisticated algorithms to differentiate facial features of males and females.The current version of gender recognition system can only detect faces that face the camera, but improvements are ... |
06-18-09
Word count: 340
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Fairfax, VA, USA. A funny thing happened on the way to the Pride Festival last weekend, overnight being gay has become boring and predictable. Not that that’s a bad thing, but as Pride Parades and Pride Festivals move into middle-age (the annual Capital Pride in Washington D. C. is 34 years old), the over-the-top youthful exuberance and acting out is slowly becoming a memory.
We are no longer the sexual radicals and social revolutionaries of our youth. Being queer is becoming middle class a... |
06-17-09
Word count: 1285
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Southhampton, WA, AUS. At an advertising agency where I produced retail advertising exclusively, the owner referred to me jokingly as “his chief vulgarian”. Or should that have been "vulgar Ian”?
This was probably because I understood the vulgate, the everyday informal use of common language, and applied it tactically to the desired section of the market.
I talked to the potential consumers in their everyday speech style, a characteristic which was the style of that agency and wh... |
06-16-09
Word count: 1402
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Washington, DC, USA. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) provided a significant infusion of federal funding to states that already has had some positive effects. Namely, the money released so far has helped limit state budget cuts and tax increases, which in turn has had a positive economic impact.
Despite this, the depth and extent of the downturn is continuing to adversely affect overall state fiscal positions. Unfortunately, the best estimate of state shortfalls over ... |
06-14-09
Word count: 1005
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Dateline LA — Chastity Bono wowed Tinsel Town with boffo plans to formally transition from female to male. She admits to beginning the process earlier this year. Her parents, Sonny and Cher Bono, were unavailable for comment at press time ...
Fairfax, VA, USA. As most of you probably know by now, Chastity Bono, daughter of Sonny Bono and Cher, is in the early stages of transition as he changes his sex from female to male and his name to Chaz. Civil rights advocate, journalilst, author and m... |
06-13-09
Word count: 1458
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Fairfax, VA, USA. I am embarrassed by my home town. In a transphobic rant on their morning radio show [N1] on May 28, 2009, Rob Williams and Arnie States attacked transgender children while discussing a news story about a transgender child in Omaha, Nebraska and her parents’ decision to support her transition.
The appropriateness of the parents’ decision [N2] is not the subject of this column: Rob Williams and Arnie States are. They spent more than 30 minutes explicitly verbally attacking... |
06-12-09
Word count: 1552
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 | ...Sacramento, CA, USA. Everyone knows public finances in California, America’s once-fabled Golden State of opportunity, are in shambles. But should the rest of us care?
The state’s ever-rising deficit has hit $24.3 billion as the legislature’s liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans remain in constant deadlock. Voters in May overwhelmingly rejected five “budget reform” ballot measures. Even before the showdown at the polls, the crisis had forced Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger... |
06-08-09
Word count: 987
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 | ...Fairfax, VA, USA. We have an innate urge to examine, explain, and understand the world we live in. Who or what gave rise to this pale blue planet and the human species that ride upon it around the Milky Way?
Humanity has hundreds, if not thousands of creation stories in the folklore of peoples all over our earth.
Since the scientific revolution in the Seventeenth Century, more and more scientific observations have come in conflict with our common sense view of how things are d... |
06-06-09
Word count: 1747
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The TS-Si News Service is a collaboration of TS-Si staff, contributors, and corresponding institutions. Contents do not necessarily convey official positions of TS-Si, its partners, or affiliates