Tiger Beatdown

Here are a few things that crossed our collective radars recently. Some of them are fairly new, some of them are old (SO OLD, SO VERY, VERY OLD.)

• Yesterday was Transgender Day of Remembrance. C.L., writing for Feministe:

“So I will Remember today. I will remember because that body lying somewhere unmourned could be me. Because it is me. I mourn because remembering makes me angry, energizes me to fight again. I mourn because we don’t have all that much to celebrate today, not really, not when even the most elemental of basic protections elude the vast majority of trans people the world round. I won’t shrug or carp about how there’s so much death brought up today. Because there is a lot of death. And that needs to be remembered, to be brought up, to be shoved in the face of those who are indifferent to it until something changes, really changes, and trans people are allowed to join the human race.”

• The Paycheck Fairness Act failed to pass a Republican filibuster:

“More than 45 years after passage of the Equal Pay Act, the pay gap shockingly persists with women still earning on average 77 cents to every man’s dollar. According to the National Women’s Law Center, “This persistent pay gap translates to more than $10,000 in lost wages per year for the average female worker.” The gap is even worse for women of color: African-American women earn 61 cents and Latinas earn 52 cents for every dollar a white non-Hispanic man earns.”

• We are eventually going to run out of chocolate:

“Cocoa’s notoriously difficult to harvest, meaning more and more small-scale West African growers—who make an average of 80 cents per day—have little incentive not to turn to more lucrative crops, like rubber, or give up farming altogether in favor of more stable opportunities in cities. What will the shortage mean? $11 Snickers bars, sooner than you think. Pretzels given out for Halloween. Or more candy made from carob, a poor substitute for the sweet and sticky real deal.”

• Privilege Denying Dude is no more:

“Diana, the 20-year-old woman behind the meme, has posted a screenshot of a message from someone who claims to be the original copyright holder of the base photo she used. The message says her use of the image violates a content license agreement issued by istockphoto, which apparently bought the pic for its subscription photo pool.”

• The Pope slackened his stance on condoms, slightly:

“Until now, the Vatican had prohibited the use of any form of safer sex technology, even for those at risk of HIV infections or other sexually transmitted diseases, claiming that abstinence was the only acceptable means of preventing infection.  It retains the ban on contraception for those practicing Catholic orthodoxy even in cases where a woman’s life might be at risk from an additional pregnancy.  Despite the ban on contraceptive use, the overwhelming majority of Catholics in the United States, and in many Catholic countries, such as Italy, Spain, and Brazil, use contraception regularly.”

• Willow Palin hurled a slur at a Facebook critic:

“During the premiere of ‘Sarah Palin’s Alaska’ Sunday night — a boy named Tre who went to school with the Palin kids wrote a status update that read, ‘Sarah Palin’s Alaska, is failing so hard right now.’ The comment sparked an intense response from Willow — who replied on the boy’s wall, ‘Haha your so gay. I have no idea who you are, But what I’ve seen pictures of, your disgusting … My sister had a kid and is still hot.’ Willow followed up that comment with another that read, ‘Tre stfu. Your such a f**got.'”

• American General refuses to pay life insurance for non-existant pre-existing conditions:

“American General concluded that he had failed to disclose conditions, including bipolar disorder and pulmonary disease, that, according to his doctors, he did not have.For the company, which collected $2.3 billion in premiums last year, the amount at issue was minute. But it was no small matter for Sheila, 62, who reached a confidential financial settlement with American General earlier this year. ‘I lost my house. I lost everything,’ she said in an interview. ‘It was very, very devastating.'”

• We all got VYou accounts!

VYou is a new service that allows you to answer questions with short video responses. It is currently in Beta Testing, and we at The Beatdown are trying to find a use for it besides procrastination. STATUS: Unsuccessful.