Orange is the New Black anyone?

[robertlouis]

I wonder if Netflix will make this available in the UK too?

[VictoriaVeil]

Netflix released the entire series on the 11th, why do they do that. I am in a all day marathon too.

Supernatural is one of my favorite shows too. I am going to do a marathon for that too.
I did a Swamp People Marathon a few weeks ago, not on netflix but I downloaded them. I also did a marathon last week of The Colony.

If you like SiFi check out Primeval.

thanks for the tip!

[BellaBellucci]

Did someone say Kate Mulgrew?

~BB~

[BeardedOne]

Did someone say Kate Mulgrew?

~BB~

Just caught the first few episodes tonite. Very good show. I was surprised to see Kate Mulgrew listed in the cast as I didn't recognize her in her brief appearance in the first episode. Her role begins to flesh out in the second episode.

Was also surprised to see one of my ex's old high school classmates, Lea Delaria.

This show is from the creator of Weeds and has a lot of the complicated character twists and interactions that I've seen in that series.

[Odelay]

I'm actually practicing a little self control and not binging the entire first season. I'm about 7 eps in over the last week. What strikes me is that it just keeps getting better with each episode. I'm a sucker for a good premise, but that only gets a movie or series so far. Eventually the writing has to be good to sustain something, especially something in long form like a television series.

Some of the plot devices are a little derivative, such as the flashbacks for one character in each episode - very much like the series Lost. But over all I think this series shows a lot of promise.

[Stavros]

I have not seen the series, but there is an article on Laverne Cox in the Telegraph today which is positive, something that seems to upset a lot of the -traditionally Conservative party-voting posters in the Comments section. Tom Chivers is writing in response to an article attacking Laverne Cox by Kevin D Williamson in the National Review on May 30.

So, in this post I will give you -with apologies- the Williamson article, and the Chivers riposte in the one that follows.

Laverne Cox Is Not A Woman
Facts are not subject to our feelings.
By Kevin D Williamson

The world is abuzz with news that actor Laverne Cox has become the first transgender person to appear on the cover of Time magazine. If I understand the current state of the ever-shifting ethic and rhetoric of transgenderism, that is not quite true: Bradley Manning, whom we are expected now to call Chelsea, beat Cox to the punch by some time. Manning’s announcement of his intention to begin living his life as a woman and to undergo so-called sex-reassignment surgery came after Time’s story, but, given that we are expected to defer to all subjective experience in the matter of gender identity, it could not possibly be the case that Manning is a transgendered person today but was not at the time of the Time cover simply because Time was unaware of the fact, unless the issuance of a press release is now a critical step in the evolutionary process.
As I wrote at the time of the Manning announcement, Bradley Manning is not a woman. Neither is Laverne Cox.
Cox, a fine actor, has become a spokesman — no doubt he would object to the term — for trans people, whose characteristics may include a wide variety of self-conceptions and physical traits. Katie Couric famously asked him about whether he had undergone surgical alteration, and he rejected the question as invasive, though what counts as invasive when you are being interviewed by Katie Couric about features of your sexual identity is open to interpretation. Couric was roundly denounced for the question and for using “transgenders” as a noun, and God help her if she had misdeployed a pronoun, which is now considered practically a hate crime.
The phenomenon of the transgendered person is a thoroughly modern one, not in the sense that such conditions did not exist in the past — Cassius Dio relates a horrifying tale of an attempted sex-change operation — but because we in the 21st century have regressed to a very primitive understanding of reality, namely the sympathetic magic described by James George Frazer in The Golden Bough. The obsession with policing language on the theory that language mystically shapes reality is itself ancient — see the Old Testament — and sympathetic magic proceeds along similar lines, using imitation and related techniques as a means of controlling reality. The most famous example of this is the voodoo doll. If an effigy can be made sufficiently like the reality it is intended to represent, then it becomes, for the mystical purposes at hand, a reality in its own right. The infinite malleability of the postmodern idea of “gender,” as opposed to the stubborn concreteness of sex, is precisely the reason the concept was invented. For all of the high-academic theory attached to the question, it is simply a mystical exercise in rearranging words to rearrange reality. Facebook now has a few score options for describing one’s gender or sex, and no doubt they will soon match the number of names for the Almighty in one of the old mystery cults.Regardless of the question of whether he has had his genitals amputated, Cox is not a woman, but an effigy of a woman. Sex is a biological reality, and it is not subordinate to subjective impressions, no matter how intense those impressions are, how sincerely they are held, or how painful they make facing the biological facts of life. No hormone injection or surgical mutilation is sufficient to change that.
Genital amputation and mutilation is the extreme expression of the phenomenon, but it is hardly outside the mainstream of contemporary medical practice. The trans self-conception, if the autobiographical literature is any guide, is partly a feeling that one should be living one’s life as a member of the opposite sex and partly a delusion that one is in fact a member of the opposite sex at some level of reality that transcends the biological facts in question. There are many possible therapeutic responses to that condition, but the offer to amputate healthy organs in the service of a delusional tendency is the moral equivalent of meeting a man who believes he is Jesus and inquiring as to whether his insurance plan covers crucifixion.
This seems to me a very different sort of phenomenon from simple homosexuality (though, for the record, I believe that our neat little categories of sexual orientation are yet another substitution of the conceptual for the actual, human sexual behavior being more complex and varied than the rhetoric of sexual orientation can accommodate). The question of the status of gay people interacts with politics to the extent that it in some cases challenges existing family law, but homosexual acts as such seem to me a matter that is obviously, and almost by definition, private. The mass delusion that we are inculcating on the question of transgendered people is a different sort of matter, to the extent that it would impose on society at large an obligation — possibly a legal obligation under civil-rights law, one that already is emerging — to treat delusion as fact, or at the very least to agree to make subjective impressions superordinate to biological fact in matters both public and private.
As a matter of government, I have little or no desire to police how Cox or any other man or woman conducts his or her personal life. But having a culture organized around the elevation of unreality over reality in the service of Eros, who is a sometimes savage god, is not only irrational but antirational. Cox’s situation gave him an intensely unhappy childhood and led to an eventual suicide attempt, and his story demands our sympathy; times being what they are, we might even offer our indulgence. But neither of those should be allowed to overwhelm the facts, which are not subject to our feelings, however sincere or well intended.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...n-d-williamson

[Stavros]

This is the article in today's Telegraph (June 1 2014)
Whether or not Laverne Cox is a woman is not a question of biology; it's a question of language

Tom Chivers, June 1 2014


There's a piece in the National Review by a guy called Kevin D Williamson. It is one of those pieces that is written solely to provoke outrage from milquetoast liberals like me, and by linking to it I am playing the author's game, and losing at it, but here it is, if you want: 'Laverne Cox is not a woman'.
Laverne Cox, for those of you who are unaware, is one of the stars of the US TV series Orange is the New Black, and is a transgender woman – the first openly trans person to appear on the front cover of Time magazine.
For Williamson, the term "trans woman" is, of course, meaningless. He refers to Cox as "he" throughout his piece (despite a Clarksonesque but-you-can't-say-that-these-days line about how "misdeploying" pronouns "is now considered practically a hate crime") and says that our modern sensibilities of referring to trans people as their preferred gender is "sympathetic magic", "treating delusion as fact", "policing language on the theory that language mystically shapes reality", like a "voodoo doll". "Regardless of the question of whether he has had his genitals amputated, Cox is not a woman, but an effigy of a woman," he says.
This, Williamson would no doubt claim, is the-emperor-has-no-clothes telling-it-like-it-is. "Sex is a biological reality," he points out, unarguably. Indeed it is. No amount of surgery or hormone therapy will allow Cox to become pregnant, no terms of address will turn that stubborn Y chromosome into a second X. That is, indeed, a simple fact of human biology.
But who disagrees with that? No one. Williamson's fearless truthsaying is, in fact, a fatuous statement of the obvious, dressed up as iconoclasm. Nobody in the world believes that calling Cox and other trans women "women", using the pronouns "she" and "her", will change anything biological; they know that she will not be able to have children, no matter what words we use. They do it out of respect, and sensitivity – what we used, in fact, to call politeness. If someone wishes to be addressed as X, then it is polite, usually, to do so. There may be times when other considerations apply: if someone insists on being referred to as "Doctor" and using that to give them unearned authority, say. But if someone wants to change their name, then we are happy to let them do so, and to address them by their chosen name, because it's their business. I see no reason why changing one's chosen pronouns should be any different.
Yes, yes, sex is a "biologically reality". But pronouns aren't biology, they're language. Language is a set of conventions, not an agglomeration of eternal truths. If we choose to use "woman" and "she" and "her" to refer to both the biologically female and people who identify as female, then that is what those words mean.
By insisting on tying pronouns to chromosomes, Williamson isn't protecting our shared reality, or blowing apart our comforting illusions. He's just being an unpleasant man, rude for the sake of it, glorying in causing needless offence like a child drawing naughty pictures in his exercise book. A person's identity matters to them, and their gender is a huge, towering, vital part of that identity. The polite, decent, human thing to do would be to say, well, if the pronouns with which I refer to you matter to you, then I will use the ones you prefer. It does me no harm, and it will make you happier, so why would I not?
Or you could shout, and scream, and say "the facts are not subject to our feelings". Well, some of them – chromosomes, for instance – aren't. But the facts of language are. Williamson's refusal to treat trans people with respect is not iconoclastic, it's not clear-sighted or fearlessly honest. It's just rude, mean-spirited, and adds nothing but vitriol and self-importance to the public debate. So well done for that, Kevin.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/to...n-of-language/

[Odelay]

Attempting to debate writers from National Review on certain political/social issues, might have some merit. But they've proven over and over again that they are hopelessly behind on any topic involving civil rights, starting with their founder, William F Buckley, who stood athwart history and yelled "stop", when a supermajority of Americans felt is was time to retire the Jim Crow laws. So really, don't engage these folks on civil rights. It's pointless and a waste of time.

[Prospero]

By any measure Ms Cox (nee Coxxx) is a beautiful woman.

[Odelay]

I laughed my ass off about the reference in episode 3 of season 2 about Chapman looking like Omar of the Wire. Couldn't be further from the truth, even though she's looking the grittiest that she's ever looked.

Oh, and Omar ranks as one of the top characters ever created in a television series. Right up there with Walter White, and definitely a cut above Don Draper.