Favourite latest post by previous poster

[Miles]

BAMF (normal etc.)

[Miles]

not very related to this thread but I couldn't find anywhere better to put it:

Most Popular Sport by Commune

[Miles]

Oh no, I'm not wearing the Luftwaffe jacket! Just the first one as a nice coat over a shirt and sweater. A bit daring, yes, I went looking for a suit on a website and was only able to find this in my size. So, I saw the price, and was like "why not"? Indeed, your "Earl of Grantham" remark is a bit apt"- you all know I secretly wish I could dress like this (and no, not the dowager):



But I was really hoping to get a suit from this deal. I ended up with my nice two last jackets, from Huntsman, for a mere $60 for the both! This jacket was a bit more (than $30), but look at the embroidery! Also offered were these that caught my eye, but, alas, they all were too large:









A shame. This, however, remained too avant-garde for me:

[Miles]

Not sure if that fits in here, but I was playing around with Géoclip (the thing that comes closest to DRA for France) and realized I could very easily gerrymander my city of residence (which voted 55% Sarkozy) into a 57% Hollande parliamentary constituency. All this without having to split any municipality and without even making it too ugly!



For those who wonder, my city (Vélizy) is the easternmost edge of that area. The big left-voting cities of Guyancourt and Trappes are on the western side.

The population is 3.4% over its ideal size, which is perfectly fine by French standards.

[Miles]

Why am I not on this list?

Apparently no one found your posts noteworthy, controversial, or interesting enough.

[Miles]

This, because I thought the same thing about the D-CTs.

My favorites include include D-GA, D-NY, and D-MN.  I used to like D-CT a lot, but the two of them changed their avatars.  

[Miles]

Abortion
Feminism
Racism
Religion
Transgender issues

[Miles]

Does anyone care what Jindal says or thinks? I'm not saying this as an insult, I'm truly curious.

[Miles]

The first thing to note about the hijab and niqab is that it often (not always, perhaps not even most of the time) genuinely is a personal choice to wear one, as opposed to the burqa, of which to the best of my knowledge that's (outside already extraordinarily conservative Muslim countries) very seldom the case. The second thing to note is that the reason why many women choose to do so--this is something that Muslim women I know have told me personally--is feminist, or at least proto-feminist since this rationale wasn't originally developed in cultures in which feminism was conceptually present, in that it's concerned with averting or deflecting the male gaze (whether this is the effect that it has is a separate question). This isn't a form of feminism for which I expect the sex-positive liberal feminists of Atlas Forum to have much sympathy, but it is a feminist idea nonetheless.

This isn't to say that wearing it is generally 'a feminist choice' (and yes, I do think that there are such things as feminist choices and non-feminist choices, which is why I didn't just end this post after the first sentence), but it is to say that prohibiting it would be removing what is a feminist choice for many people. Again, what's being discussed here isn't just discouraging certain types of dress, or opposing or lamenting their intrusion into cultural spheres in which they weren't previously present, it's banning them. Prohibiting them from being worn under penalty of law. In general I think that passing laws about how women can and cannot dress should be presumed anti-feminist. Which obviously means that requiring hijab or niqab is also anti-feminist, indeed much more obviously so.

Impeding communication especially for children and the hard-of-hearing is a genuinely good reason to consider wearing facial coverings a bad idea, but the idea that they're, in other ways, 'anti-human' would seem to rely on assumptions about what is and isn't characteristic of 'humanity' that it does not strike me as rational to expect everybody in a pluralistic society to share. Especially since there are also issues of post-colonial identity involved.

[Miles]

I always have had a soft spot for Landrieu.