Dave Sim's blogandmail #298 (July 7th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast That Make You a Good Feminist

1. A mother who works a full-time job and delegates to strangers the raising of her children eight hours a day, five days a week does just as good a job as a mother who hand-rears her children full time.

2. It makes great sense for the government to pay 10 to 15,000 dollars a year to fund a daycare space for a child so its mother - who pays perhaps 2,000 dollars in taxes - can be a contributing member of society.

3. A woman's doctor has more of a valid claim to participate in the decision to abort a fetus than does the father of that fetus.

4. So long as a woman makes a decision after consulting with her doctor, she is incapable of making an unethical choice.

5. A car with two steering wheels, two gas pedals and two brakes drives more efficiently than a car with one steering wheel, one gas pedal and one brake which is why marriage should always be an equal partnership.

6. It is absolutely necessary for women to be allowed to join or participate fully in any gathering place for men, just as it is absolutely necessary that there be women only environments from which men are excluded.

7. Because it involves taking jobs away from men and giving them to women, affirmative action makes for a fairer and more just society.

8. It is important to have lower physical standards for women firepersons and women policepersons so that, one day, half of all firepersons and policepersons will be women, thus more effectively protecting the safety of the public.

9. Affirmative action at colleges and universities needs to be maintained now that more women than men are being enrolled, in order to keep from giving men an unfair advantage academically.

10. Having ensured that there is no environment for men where women don't belong (see no.6) it is important to have zero tolerance of any expression or action which any woman might regard as sexist to ensure greater freedom for everyone.

11. Only in a society which maintains a level of 95% of alimony and child support being paid by men to women can men and women be considered as equals.

12. An airline stewardess who earned $20,000 a year at the time that she married a baseball player earning $6 million a year is entitled, in the event of a divorce, to $3 million for each year of the marriage and probably more.

13. A man's opinions on how to rear and/or raise a child are invalid because he is not the child's mother. However, his financial obligation is greater because no woman gets pregnant by herself.

14. Disagreeing with any of these statements makes you anti-woman and/or a misogynist.

15. Legislature Seats must be allocated to women and women must be allowed to bypass the democratic winnowing process in order to guarantee female representation and, thereby, make democracy fairer.

_____________________________________________________


UPDATE 25 JUNE 1134 HOURS EST - Time certainly flies when you're old like I am. The subject under discussion is the secret project's Technical Director Five-Point Opinion on whether to address the misogynist charge on the website or ignore feminism altogether.


Had this been the actual White House, I would have just scribbled "OK – DS" in the margin. Basically this is what you have advisors for is their expertise. I explained all of my concerns at elaborate length in as balanced a way as I could find to present them and my Technical Director basically came down squarely on the side of just plain ignoring feminism in promoting my secret project.


Given that I've spent twelve years arguing against feminism – six of them with the neatly distilled Sixteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast – and that hasn't had any impact whatsoever – it certainly hasn't elevated the level or tone of the debate above petty name-calling and character assassination on the part of the members opposite if my Technical Advisor is correct, which I assume that he is -- I figure there is no harm in adopting the adversary's own tactics and just pretending that they aren't there and let's see a) if that works and b) HOW it doesn't work IF it doesn't work (i.e. what cute stunt the feminists choose to pull to destroy the secret project and where and when and how they choose to pull it – around the solicitation date? Around the release date? Using character assassination/innuendo?) The advantage of not addressing them is that the Google list and Wikipedia entry are both pretty much carved in stone by now (as David W. Johnson found out when he tried to delete a few malicious entries) and are pretty obviously their main means of maintaining a 24/7 level of sustained attack. If they're going to "up the ante" I can't think of anywhere else that they could do it


UPDATE 25 JUNE 1150 HOURS EST – Interestingly enough my computer just shut itself down and then started itself back up again and having hit AUTORECOVER it's recovered everything except (even more interestingly) the following:


So basically, I'm looking for volunteers – you, you and you – (who they will have no way of finding even indirectly through me) to download the current list that comes up when you Google Dave Sim's name and the Wikipedia entry for Dave Sim and just out of, you know, curiosity, keep comparing them from now through September and from now through November and let me know if there's anything in the way of suspicious activity – innuendo and character assassination, skewing of numbers like the Dave Sim As Notorious Anti-Feminist Website suddenly jumping up five places on the Dave Sim Google Search Hit Parade in the space of a day or so (not that I would ever accuse feminists of just sitting there and "hitting" on a website a couple of hundred times to, you know, "juice" the numbers and make "Dave Sim as Noted Anti-Feminist" appear to be a more pressing concern for Internet browsers than it actually is – no, far be it from me to ever accuse feminists of such a thing) (but, you know, just to be SURE…)


UPDATE 25 JUNE 1156 HOURS EST: Noon prayer time.


UPDATE 25 JUNE 1222 HOURS EST: Lunch. Here at the Off-White House today we're having a delectable Basil and Jalapeno Coleslaw on whole wheat Kaiser roll with a V8 vegetable juice. The great thing about the B & J Coleslaw is that the J scorches the President of Aardvark-Vanaheim's mouth and lets him know when…as the severely appetite-challenged individual that he is…he is definitively finished lunch (i.e. before his entire head spontaneously combusts).


UPDATE 25 JUNE 1229 HOURS EST: President, having devoured a second sandwich now sucking wind to lower the temperature of his mouth from 119 degrees to a more seasonable 98.6 (V8 Vegetable Juice turning to steam on contact)


UPDATE 25 JUNE 1232 HOURS EST: …and if you have the technical expertise to track such things, it might be worth knowing if all of the "hits" to a Dave Sim As Notorious Anti-Feminist Site are coming from, say, two or three computers. I don't think we want to publicly "out" anyone guilty of "juicing" the anti-Dave numbers (but, then, how could I stop you if you were to decide independently that was the wisest course of action?). My personal interest is only in a suddenly suspicious level of activity timed to coincide with the big push I intend to make, promoting my secret project in September when I hope to have the solicitation in the Previews catalogue and with the book's on-sale date sometime in November. Pretty much just because I've been working on it for two years and I'd like it to have a fair chance in the marketplace. Who knows? Maybe this kind of Who Watches the Watchwomen? is just what the doctor ordered and we'll have smooth sailing between here and November. We'll see.

UPDATE 25 JUNE 1244 HOURS EST - More cable traffic. Brian P. Coppola checks in from the University of Michigan Department of Chemistry:

"Hi Dave

"Thanks for the recent series of faxes and the Art-Exclusives for the Aartvark blog.


"I guess this answers the ancient question: if a fax falls in the wood when no one is around, will anyone hear it?

"I was starting up a project at Peking for the last 3 weeks, and left the US on the day of the original fax (31 May)…so I learned about the Rockwell Museum show the same way everyone else did: on the "Blog `n' Mail" site sometime last week.

"I am just returned and picked up 3 weeks worth of mail this morning.

"More later. Just wanted to touch base."

For those of you keeping track at home, it is officially Day 2110 of the Arthur P. Thurnau Chair Held Hostage Crisis. I hope that forcing him to explain that joke will finally compel the otherwise impeccably modest Mr. Coppola to post a description of the signal honour in the chemistry field that the Arthur P. Thurnau chair at the University of Michigan represents (if only for the indirect legitimacy it lends to the fact that he remains curiously and publicly interested in "that weird misogynistic comic about the aardvark" through his own Cerebus the Original Aartvark website and blog). I also apologize for getting the name and spelling wrong in my previous post. I don't know if Brian is sensitive about such things, but I did notice when research had me at the library on successive days last week and I was able to read Craig's first three fill-in blogs as well as scan the Cerebusdom vicinity to find out what everyone has to say about Star Wars these days. That was when I found out that Brian was in China instead of Blowing the Lid Off the Norman Rockwell Museum Story.


Here at the Blog & Mail we still have a sincerely hard time believing that there are more than twelve people reading this stuff on any given day (or, more likely, Jeff and Margaret each "hitting" on it six times a day and using a variety of aliases to discuss STAR WARS in detail) and, consequently, answer to just about anything: Blog and Mail, Blog & Mail, blogandmail, Blog `n' Mail, Dave's blog, Dave's %&$ing blog – even Matt Dow's Bloggy Mail. Okay – Jeff, Margaret and Matt hitting on it four times each.


And it also provides a serendipitous reminder that the Rockwell Museum is sending a fine art professional art-handling outfit from Toronto to pick up the pages tomorrow and I haven't pulled any of them out yet. Excuse the President while he retreats to the Secret Undisclosed Location Housing the Original Artwork with his short list.


UPDATE 25 JUNE 0239 HOURS EST – Okay, that only took WAY TOO LONG and now here I am with twenty minutes until my next prayer time. My pile of mail in the filing cabinet is reaching a dangerous height where, if it tips sideways it will soon be taller than the sides of the file drawer. Around here we consider that a dangerous height. But, the thing is there were three interesting things that happened in Toronto and I wanted to get to those before tackling the mail.


Tomorrow: You Will Be Visited By The Second Interesting Thing That Happened in Toronto!



___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
If you wish to contact Dave Sim, you can mail a letter (he does NOT receive emails) to:

Aardvark Vanaheim, Inc
P.O. Box 1674
Station C
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada N2G 4R2

Looking for a place to purchase Cerebus phonebooks? You can do so online through Win-Mill Productions -- producers of Following Cerebus. Convenient payment with PayPal:

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

Or ask your local retailer to order them for you through Diamond Comics distributors.