It’s The Women, Stupid…redux

I have from time to time made the point that the entire debate over abortion and birth control and almost the whole edifice of what we call Fundamentalism in the world, in whatever religion, is all essentially over controlling women. Here is an article which has one of the most bizarre takes on the entire issue I've ever seen. The central premise is early on stated in 0ne sentence that defines all of this nonsense, in whatever creed you care to name. "Sexual relationships, while enacted privately, are public property." The twists in logic, never mind rationality, are among the most byzantine I've ever encountered. What is more, the writer doesn't seem to understand that this "philosophy" reduces children to little more than marks on a scorecard. The exhibition of marital health and fidelity is all that is important. The attempt to limit family size and indulge private acts privately for private purposes is reduced to an attempt to deceive the community, pure and simple. But ultimately, as in all other instances of this kind of obscene interference with the personal, it is the women who bear the costs, the burdens, and the responsibility. I suppose the next step would be to devise a kind of tracking bracelet for the penis and vagina so someone somewhere can determine when either is being used and where. I have no answer for this kind of inanity (or insanity). The fact that this makes sense to some people disturbs me no end, because it means that some people cannot see past the end of their own prurience. Yes, I said prurience, because to come up with this kind of thing, rather than demonstrating a balanced healthy appreciation for sex, shows an obsession with it that can only be described as prurient.

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What’s In A Label?

Conservative. Liberal. We act as if we know what these labels mean. Conservatives are traditionalists, fiscally opposed to anything that smacks of gambling, private, often religious, and pedantic on what they consider “appropriate” in either government or personal conduct. Liberals, on the other hand, are often taken for progressive, willing to spend social capital to repair perceived problems, tolerant, agnostic if not atheist, and overly-concerned with a definition of justice that ought to be all-encompassing rather than what they perceive as sinecure for the privileged. Well. Over on Facebook I posted a brief quote (my own) to boil down the actual underlying distinctions. Conservatives are those who don’t like what other people are doing, Liberals are those who don’t like what other people are doing to other people. It was meant to be taken as humorous. But I’m not being entirely flip here. When you look at it, and try to define the common factor in much that passes for conservative posteuring—of any country, any background, anywhere—it always comes down to one group trying to stop another group from Doing Things We Don’t Approve. I heard a news report this morning (on NPR—I unabashedly don’t pay attention to any other news source, I find them all utterly biased) from Pakistan about the university scene there, and one bit caught my attention—at a campus in Punjabi, conservative students who find men and women sitting too close together interfere and move them apart. At a game of Truth or Dare, conservative students pulled participants out and beat them. How does this apply here? Well, here’s a clip from P.Z. Meyers’ Pharyngula to illustrate: Rising Sun School in Maryland has the standard default take-it-for-granted attitude that Christianity is just fine — there’s the usual well-funded and usually teacher-promoted evangelical groups, like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes — and when one student tried to form a club for non-religious students…well, you can guess what happened.

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Incident On A Country Road

Yesterday, April 29th, I witnessed people being great. Returning along Highway 50 from Jefferson City Missouri, I was passing through Osage County when I spotted a dumped motorcycle to my left. The bike—a newish gold something-or-other—lay on its side, trailing a scatter of broken parts back to a man who was on knees and elbows, clearly hurt. A FedEx truck was ahead of my. I pulled over just behind it. A house was directly across the two-lane from us. People were in the yard. The FedEx driver sprinted to the house to tell the folks about the accident. I ran toward the man. By the time I reached him two more cars had stopped and a group of people converged on him. He had gotten to the grass and rolled over. A bloody mess, at first glance he looked in very bad shape. He was still wearing his helmet, moaning and trying, ineffectively, to take it off. He kept saying “I can’t breathe…” An older man had his cell phone out, dialing 911. A woman, who seemed to have some training, possibly a nurse, helped him unstrap the helmet and pull it gently off, whereupon he lay on his back, legs pulled up, arms sort of help up, covered in blood. The “nurse” cautioned him not to move. Someone else had brought a plastic sheet, which she directed a couple people to hold above him to shield his head from the sun. I started asking questions—”Can you feel everything?” “Oh, yeah,” he said, “everything hurts.” “No tingling?” No. “Open your eyes and look at me.” His pupils looked normal, but that’s not always a reliable telltale. “Oh, I didn’t hit my head,” he said. “Everything else, but not my head.” I looked at his helmet. “Your helmet says otherwise,” I told him. Half of it was badly dented and scraped all along the faceplate. “What happened?” someone else asked. “I think a blow-out,” he said. “I tried to hang onto it and slow it down…” I went over to the bike. By now about eight people were there, two semis parked along the highway. One man was doing a good job of directing traffic through the momentarily constricted access. More cell phones were out. The debris appeared to be all peripherals—mirrors, plastic molding, packs of cigarettes, a cassette tape, mangled sunglasses. The rear tire was missing a long chunk of tread where it had blown. He was lucky in that it was the rear tire. If the front had blown he would have lost it immediately, at sixty-plus miles per hour, but there were no skid marks. He’d managed to slow it down a lot before it dumped and he’d dumped it on the shoulder. When I returned to tell him this, ambulances were on the way. He was laying on a rock and wanted to move off of it, but everyone kept him in place, not knowing what else might be broken. He was coherent. He was a good rider, evidently, and had controlled the spill marvelously from what I could see. The ambulance arrived, along with a truck from the local fire department. The crow began to disperse. As one of the trucks started rolling, the driver tossed the man directing traffic one of those bright orange and yellow safety vests. With nothing more to do (and having done almost nothing anyway) I took my leave. Traffic was slowed and obeying what I now saw were two men, one on each side of the slight hill where all this was occurring, directing. Those who had done whatever they could have and no longer needed to be there were starting their vehicles and moving out in an orderly manner. All those people had seemed to appear out of nowhere, and very fast, and just did this thing. They helped, if only by being willing to stop. It felt very good to be a human just then.

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People Are Idiots. A Cynical Observation

The video below from TED is chilling in many ways. Michael Specter touches on observations about the resistance people have toward anything that seems to threaten their hobbit-hole view of the world. A little of this, as he rightly points out, is fine, even agreeable, but when it burgeons into matters that threaten lives and seek to derail all that has made this present era as wonderful as it is---and it must be stressed, in the face of overwhelming negative press, that we are living in a magnificent period of history---then it loses whatever quaint appeal it might otherwise have. We respect the Amish, but they don't tell the rest of us how to live and try their level best to be apart from the world they disapprove. When you see people filing lawsuits with the intent to halt necessary, beneficial progress because they have bought into some bogeyman horror movie view of science or politics or morality, it behooves us to come to terms with a fundamental reality with which we live today. First, though, the video. Watch this, then read on. Okay, what reality? That many people are just idiots. I cannot think of a more tasteful way to phrase it. But when you consider the list, justifications and rationalizations fade. The Tea Party. The Anti-vaccine Movement. The Birthers. Young Earth Creationists. Medjugorje. Deepak Chopra. PETA. Free Market Capitalism. Global Warming Deniers. Holocaust Deniers. Abstinence-Only. Just Say No. The Shroud of Turin. Astrology. Texas Board of Education. Evolution Deniers. Frankenfood Protesters. Homeopaths. Herbalists. Psychics. Scientology. I could go on. [more . . . ]

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Constance Got Her Prom…Sort Of

This will be brief. In a follow-up to the Itawamba Mississippi flap over the school prom, the school decided to hold the prom after all and told Constance McMillen should could bring her date. But there were only seven kids in attendance, plus a couple of school officials. They had granted Constance a prom all for herself. The rest of the students went to a prom sponsored by the parents and even put up a Facebook Page called Constance Quit Yet Cryin'. Read about it here. The utter childishness and cowardice of this is beyond belief. It underscores everything I said about the true nature of proms in my previous post on this matter and adds to it.

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