Respectful of Otters

Mitt Romney thinks you need to take responsibility for your life

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 15:03:36 -0400

Defining “personal responsibility” upward…

Generally, there’s nothing wrong with asking people to take responsibility for their actions to avoid social ills. Stop littering. Spay or neuter your pets. Vaccinate your children. Get up early enough to eat breakfast so you’re not so grouchy at work. If your diet is making you sick, change it. Under the circumstances, these are all reasonable things to ask.

On the other hand, if you’re asking something to “take responsibility” by doing something that’s either extraordinarily difficult or impossible, you’re either woefully uninformed or sort of a dick. You don’t ask people to “take responsibility” by rescuing neighbors from their burning home, scoring in the top 1% on the SAT, or baffling doctors by learning to walk despite a serious spinal injury. Run-of-the-mill “taking responsibility” should not require acts of extraordinary altruism, heroism, or genius.

How should we feel when Mitt Romney goes and says something like this:

These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of people pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. So he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean, that’s what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

According to Romney, if your income isn’t high enough to pay federal income taxes, you’re apparently not taking “personal responsibility and care” for your life. Is it reasonable for Romney to ask people to earn enough that they’re paying income taxes—or is this just an example of out-of-touch dickery? [Spoiler Alert: It’s dickery.]

How long a work day would you need to put in at a minimum wage job to pay federal income taxes? Because it’s Romney’s comment, let’s use his family profile. We’ll have two parents, one of whom works.¹ And let’s limit it to two children rather than Romney’s five to avoid an unseemly number of exemptions.

So we have four exemptions at $3,700 each plus the standard deduction of $11,600. So even without tax credits, you would need $26,400.

Because one spouse isn’t working, there is no child care tax credit. There could be up to $2,500 in education credits per child—but let’s say the kids are younger and go with the lower $1,000 child tax credit for both of them. So that’s a $2,000 credit. To owe taxes at this point, you’d need $19,000 in taxable income—or $45,400 in total income. This still a hair below the EIC phaseout in this case. So to hit zero exactly you would need a few more dollars to bring your annual income to $45,750.

In a given year, you have about 260 work days. Let’s say you work a full day on all of them. This means that any vacation, sick days, or holidays you want had better be paid. To make your $45,750, you need to bring in $174.62 a day. Let’s round that down to $174 to make the math work out more smoothly.

You’re earning the federal minimum wage: $7.25 an hour. To get to $174 a day, you’ll need to work for … 24 hours. Congratulations. You can sleep on the weekends. If you want to get down to an 8 hour day, you’ll need to earn at least $21.75. (You still have to work every day.) Good luck finding an early-career job that pays that well.

If you’re having trouble doing this, I’m sorry. But Mitt Romney isn’t. He thinks you need to take some personal responsibility and care for your life.

After I first posted this, somebody asked, “Why are we assuming the spouse doesn’t work?” We’re not assuming it. We’re stipulating it. There are three reasons for this. First, it’s Romney’s comment so he’d have no grounds to object to using his family’s single income model. Second, as soon as I send the hypothetical spouse to work, child care tax credits come into play and it takes even more hours for the family to earn enough to pay taxes. Third, I think people on the lower half of the income scale should be allowed to have single-earner families. ↩

officialssay: Obama being chased by a toddler.

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 20:57:26 -0400

officialssay:

Obama being chased by a toddler.

"When did “not censoring yourself” become a good thing? We censor ourselves all the time,..."

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 07:04:15 -0400

“When did “not censoring yourself” become a good thing? We censor ourselves all the time, because we are not entitled, sociopathic fucks.”

- http://jezebel.com/5925186/how-to-make-a-rape-joke

"“I don’t think the common person is getting it,” she said from the passenger seat..."

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 09:27:43 -0400

“

“I don’t think the common person is getting it,” she said from the passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach permits. “Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them.

“We’ve got the message,” she added. “But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies — everybody who’s got the right to vote — they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower income — one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact.”

”

- Donors Arrive at Hamptons Fundraisers with Advice for Mitt Romney

"Adults hold the state to a pretty high standard: we expect that the government won’t impose on our..."

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 14:13:40 -0400

““Adults hold the state to a pretty high standard: we expect that the government won’t impose on our freedom without a good reason, and the bigger the imposition, the more compelling the reason should be. With kids, though, any justification at all will do. If it raises test scores, we must do it! Children’s freedoms count for nothing at all. It’s as if the scale has only one side, and is thus tipped by any “achievement gain” whatsoever. How easy it is to require sacrifices from people who have no say in the matter. “”

- A Blog About School

"Since most mainstream feminism focuses on “empowering women” and not challenging male..."

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 16:24:39 -0400

“Since most mainstream feminism focuses on “empowering women” and not challenging male privilege—-mostly for the understandable reason that challenging male privilege creates a much more negative reaction than empowering women—-we’ve created a generation or two where the number of women who feel empowered way outstrips the number of men who are truly ready to relinquish privilege. That’s why the dating market is hard.”

- http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/why-empowering-girls-isnt-working

Here, have a picture of a Hungarian puli jumping over a...

Sat, 09 Jun 2012 20:11:20 -0400

Here, have a picture of a Hungarian puli jumping over a fence.

You’re welcome.

ackb: I AM MAKING SO MUCH PROGRESS! When my family is ready...

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 14:53:30 -0400

ackb:

I AM MAKING SO MUCH PROGRESS!

When my family is ready to go to Disneyworld, I’m going to hire ackb to make us color-coded charts. Then we can follow her charts unquestioningly and have ourselves a perfect vacation.

Crazy good news!

Thu, 24 May 2012 11:45:37 -0400

I am often cynical about the idea of “moral leadership,” but it’s hard to find another explanation for this:

A new Public Policy Polling survey in Maryland finds a significant increase in support for same-sex marriage among African American voters following President Obama’s historic announcement two weeks ago. The referendum to keep the state’s new law legalizing same-sex marriage now appears likely to pass by a healthy margin. Here are some key findings:

-57% of Maryland voters say they’re likely to vote for the new marriage law this fall, compared to only 37% who are opposed. That 20 point margin of passage represents a 12 point shift from an identical PPP survey in early March, which found it ahead by a closer 52/44 margin.

-The movement over the last two months can be explained almost entirely by a major shift in opinion about same-sex marriage among black voters. Previously 56% said they would vote against the new law with only 39% planning to uphold it. Those numbers have now almost completely flipped, with 55% of African Americans planning to vote for the law and only 36% now opposed.

The Teaching Profession

Tue, 22 May 2012 16:07:42 -0400

badhomeschooler:

Teachers have to get a lot of training these days—many districts require teachers to have a Master’s degree. They go through a certification process that involves particular required courses, standardized testing, observation and evaluation. As much as people complain about the quality and focus of teacher training, one can’t deny that teachers do get specialized training.

Our country has gone a bit certification happy. Many jobs that used to be executed by family members or self-trained laypeople now require professional degrees and certifications. In California, one has to have something like 2000 hours of supervised training to be a hairdresser. Louisiana requires special certification to be a florist.

Still, many certifications seem like a good idea to most of us. Things like psychotherapy, nursing care, and home construction used to be done by moms and dads. Now we expect to have licensed therapists, nurses, and contractors do that work. Yet many in the homeschool movement would like people who have not completed highschool to be teachers.

Some certified teachers are terrible—no doubt this is true. However, few would argue that because a surgeon botched your kid’s heart operation, the next step would be to attempt the operation yourself on the dining room table.

It seems like a pretty big dis on teachers to suppose that anyone can teach. Even if they do have a mail-order curriculum. And maybe in some cases especially if they have a mail order curriculum.

I have a PhD and can’t do much math beyond basic algebra. How about you?

As compelling as the heart surgery analogy might be, as one of my undergrad professors used to say, “This is an empirical question.” There are plenty of methodological difficulties when studying a phenomenon as diverse as homeschooling, but if you’re going to argue that homeschooling parents are less effective than certified teachers, you have to explain why none of the research on homeschooling has ever found that to be true.

In Washington State, homeschoolers are required to take the same state tests as public school students. One of the pieces of data Washington collects is whether the homeschooling parent has a teaching certificate, and it turns out that being homeschooled by a certified teacher makes no difference in test scores. Similarly, early research on homeschooling compared high-regulation states (which, at the time, typically required homeschooling parents to have a teaching certificate) with lower-regulation states, and found no difference in child test scores based on parental qualifications. Presumably the same is not true for home heart surgery.

Do I worry about the academic quality of some people’s homeschooling? I totally do. But I also worry about the academic quality of any number of school situations, from inner-city public schools to ritzy Waldorf schools (with their weird philosophies) to ideology-driven private Christian schools (which aren’t required to hire licensed teachers either).

To address your final question: I have a Ph.D. too, and a husband who is comfortable teaching math through calculus. But more importantly, I am comfortable in my ability to outsource subjects I can’t teach myself - as the vast majority of homeschoolers do - through tutors, co-ops, and community colleges.

The hotel where the Nebula awards are taking place has Connie...

Sat, 19 May 2012 19:23:50 -0400

The hotel where the Nebula awards are taking place has Connie Willis-themed drink specials.

Bureaucracy is beautiful...

Fri, 18 May 2012 15:14:00 -0400

…at least, when it comes to Hawaiian bureaucrats fighting off birther nonsense with poetic irony.

On Thursday, Bennett said he sent his request to Hawaii officials eight weeks ago but has yet to get the proof he was hoping for. He said he didn’t want another copy of the birth certificate. He wants Hawaii to give him what he described as “a verification in lieu of a certified copy of a birth certificate.”

In the weeks since then, Bennett said, Hawaii officials have forced him to provide proof that he is who he says he is. They asked him to send them copies of the Arizona laws that prove the secretary of state really is the person in charge of handling the ballots.

Hawaiian public records officials, you are as golden and delicious as fresh pineapple.

ackb: When I was 18 years old (incidentally, the year I came out as queer) I voted in my first...

Thu, 10 May 2012 01:04:35 -0400

ackb:

When I was 18 years old (incidentally, the year I came out as queer) I voted in my first election. It was 1992. That was the year that Oregonians defeated “Ballot Measure 9” by a sound, but not satisfying margin. It read:

All governments in Oregon may not use their monies or properties to promote, encourage or facilitate homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism or masochism. All levels of government, including public education systems, must assist in setting a standard for Oregon’s youth which recognizes that these behaviors are abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse and they are to be discouraged and avoided.

If you told me then—in my first fragile year of attempting to be a whole person—if you told me then that only twenty years later the President of the United States would not only speak of queer folk as real people, but endorse our right to marry each other, I would never—NEVER—have believed you.

And so I am joyous today. And whatever comes after, whatever politics are at play today and tomorrow, it doesn’t matter.

Some things are important.

Ackb and I didn’t know each other in 1992. We lived in different parts of the same state. It was my first election too. I had just come out as bisexual and I was dating my first girlfriend. From that season to this one I have never been able to forget those words: abnormal, unnatural, wrong, and perverse.

All around me people are analyzing the political calculus of the timing and what it will mean for Obama’s 2012 chances, and there’s a whole slew of conservatives who aren’t even bothering to try to put a dispassionate veneer on their gleeful meanness: this is our license to score as many points as we can as fast as we can, so let it loose.

As if real people’s real lives aren’t at stake.

No one knows that more than Ackb, and I am totally not trying to rain on her parade. I did feel the joy. I do agree that it’s astonishing how far we’ve come. But I’m also thinking of Laura Laing’s article about the backlash:

Over the years, these assertions have become less vitriolic. The opposition has learned that it doesn’t necessarily pay to demonize us or outwardly show their contempt. But the contempt is still there. And somehow the fact that it rages under the surface is just as frightening and difficult to bear.

One of my Internet homes is being trashed today over this. Only some of the trashers have deep objections to gay marriage. The rest are neutral about gay marriage, but gleeful to have the chance to use the lives and feelings of gay people as a stick to beat Obama with.

I don’t know. It’s 1 a.m. and I’m rambling. I know that this is a huge victory in a long ongoing war, and I know that we’re gonna win. But right now the collateral damage is making it hard for me to be jubilant.

"One Million Moms’ most prominent crusade to date has been trying to get a fully clothed,..."

Wed, 09 May 2012 13:25:25 -0400

“One Million Moms’ most prominent crusade to date has been trying to get a fully clothed, family-friendly Ellen DeGeneres off the air, because the mere existence of lesbians offends them, and they want them all to go away. That doesn’t have squat to do with “the children”. Children don’t look at a nice lady in a blazer and jeans and think about all the hot-and-dirty lesbian action she gets at home. No, that’s their stupid parents whose sexual repression has completely thwarted their brains to the point where they can’t think about anything but sex, and how delicious and sinful and tempting and dirty it is. The funny thing about not believing that sex is dirty is that sex ends up being less of an obsession. I can look at DeGeneres without really giving much mind to what she’s like in bed. It’s totally possible, if you get over your ridiculous homophobia.”

- http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/sex-and-violence-and-little-kids

“Milk’s favorite cookie.” OMG, Nabisco!...

Mon, 07 May 2012 15:22:13 -0400

“Milk’s favorite cookie.” OMG, Nabisco! Don’t make me like a major corporation!

…Whew, that was close. They repudiated it. But WTF is up with ABC News and especially the SF Chronicle blacking out the nipple like they’re reprinting a spread from Hustler?

Fuck yeah, feminists!: Way to show that girls really can do anything, Scholastic

Mon, 07 May 2012 13:15:04 -0400

Fuck yeah, feminists!: Way to show that girls really can do anything, Scholastic:

Sometimes being the mother of a daughter makes me want to go off-the-grid survivalist.

laura-raptor:

My store got two books in today. Both survival guides. Both feature strong images on the front. Promising survival techniques for ‘boys only’ and ‘girls only’. Let’s look at the boys, shall we?

How to Survive Anything: Boys Only!

Featuring articles such as “How to…

How not to write about characters with disabilities.

Fri, 04 May 2012 11:06:00 -0400

Awesome advice from the blog YA Highway.

DON’T:

-Skip the research! Get your research right, both reading up on your subject and getting to know people in real life. I read so many awful unrealistic depictions of CWD, especially characters with autism spectrum disorders. Good research, knowledgeable beta readers, and knowing people who are like the people you’re writing about are all essential!

-Go in for the same old tired clichés! Using one-note clichéd notions of CWD takes away the personhood of those characters and defines them only in terms of one small aspect of who they are. I call that bad writing. And most of these clichés have troubling implications as well. Sarah’s list of wretched clichés:

CWD who exists only to teach a very special important lesson to the MC, either by being plucky, dying, or being plucky and then dying. These characters don’t exist for their own benefit, they’re only there to provide Life Lessons.

CWD who only exists to inspire or motivate the MC but has no goals or desires of her own (similar to the “magical negro” trope, and problematic for similar reasons).

CWD who is an object of pity, and acts only as a completely inactive idle piece of scenery on the novel stage.

CWD who is 100% solely about their disability. No one is 100% all about one thing. Why wouldn’t a character with a disability have a whole spectrum of other characteristics—traits, hobbies, interests, friends, and family like any other well-rounded character?

CWD who is magically cured of their disability in a fantasy novel. It’s a cheapo plot point that only serves to emphasize how undesirable it is to be a person with a disability. My favorite author did this at the end of a children’s book, and it broke my heart. If a CWD is already awesome and has already managed to save the world, isn’t he great exactly the way he is? If it happens midbook or midseries it basically feels like the author grew weary of writing a character with a disability and wanted to stop doing so immediately. This bears little to no resemblance to the real world.

CWD who has a superpower that more than makes up for said disability. Daredevil, I’m looking at you. It’s an awfully old, awfully boring trope, and IMO not a true CWD. (Someone like Professor X doesn’t count as he still has to deal with his disability despite how powerful he is. Although he does pretty well with his magical flying wheelchair and loyal band of superhumans to defend him.)

-And my last DON’T is: Don’t limit the adventure potential of your characters with disabilities! It’s the twenty first century, and quadriplegics go skydiving, kindergarteners with cerebral palsy ski black diamond slopes, every marathon has its own wheelchair division, and a guy with no legs runs faster than almost everyone on the planet. Your readers with disabilities are the heroes of their own stories. Make sure they are the heroes in your stories too.

Then they'll explain that you keep falling behind because you're shiftless.

Wed, 02 May 2012 20:00:00 -0400

Duty compels me to respectfully reblog this video of Benedict...

Wed, 02 May 2012 13:46:17 -0400

Duty compels me to respectfully reblog this video of Benedict Cumberbatch discussing his similarity to otters.

redscharlach:

Benedict Cumberbatch - VH1’s Big Morning Buzz interview, 02/05/2012

The topic of otters comes up at around the 5:30 mark!

I confess, I find it HILARIOUS that he questions the fact that the first two Otterbatch pics don’t quite match up in terms of hand positioning. I remember dithering a bit over the flat hands/curving hands distinction, but by that point, I’d spent much longer staring at pictures of otters than any sane person ever should, and told myself “Oh, that’ll do, nobody will notice the difference.” Of course, at that point I had no idea that thousands and thousands of people were going to be looking at it, including Mr C himself. Whoops.

So I’m sorry, Benedict. If it’s any consolation, it seems we’re both pedants. You’re just more skilled at it than I am!

Why I won't be reading the "Motherhood vs. Feminism" debate in the New York Times.

Tue, 01 May 2012 15:20:48 -0400

I can’t really bring myself to wade into the vast piles of commentary on Elisabeth Badinter’s The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women. It seems as if this discussion Just. Keeps. Cycling. Around. Every couple of years, there’s a spate of media coverage in which both feminism and motherhood are reduced to a set of individual choices that women make about managing the family burdens for which we are considered to be solely responsible, and every time, women who make differing choices are set at each other’s throats.

Here’s something I wrote during a previous go-round:

With few exceptions, the design and organization of the American workplace are still predicated on the assumption that each employed person has a back-up person who handles all the responsibilities of home and family. Similarly, the design and organization of the major American professions (medicine, law, academia) are still predicated on the assumption that one’s twenties, and probably one’s early thirties, will be spent working as many hours as possible. Prevailing theories of good parenting are far more time- and labor-intensive than the practices of our mothers. And meanwhile, unprecedented levels of economic instability, the shrinking social safety net, the higher incidence of divorce combined with the end of alimony, the spiraling costs of housing and higher education, and the stagnation of low-to-midrange wages mean that, for most Americans, the two-income household looks a lot more like a necessity than a lifestyle option.

These factors combine to place enormous pressure on families with young children. And mothers are told by our society, magnanimously, that feminism has bestowed upon us the “choice” to kludge together whatever solution to the problem we can manage on our own. The stakes are enormous: the well-being of our children is entirely our responsibility, and every last detail of maternal behavior is presumed to have profound implications for our children’s future and the future of society.

As long as this debate is framed solely in terms of whether individual women make “correct” choices, all women lose. Feminism is a social movement, not an individualist one, because the problems identified by feminism can rarely be overcome by individual striving alone.