Parting Shot: A Rant

The obsession the Right has had for lo these many years with people's sexuality has received a final "gift" from the Bush Administration. This is like grade school stuff. It's classic "If we don't tell them about it, they won't want it" thinking. Many on the Right feel everyone should have the freedom to own weapons. They think, implicitly, everyone is capable of proper usage of guns and that just because a certain number of individuals clearly intend to use them to the detriment of others, that that is no excuse to keep them out of the hands of everyone else. They are supportive of education in proper use of firearms. So why the different attitude toward sex? I expect this question never to be answered in such a way as to be persuasive to those who think sex is something that ought to be left in the gutter and in the closet, who think that teenagers ought not be told about it in the vain hope that they won't use it, but I am so utterly and profoundly tired of this infantile crap.

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Why Won’t Facebook Let them Nurse?

Facebook apparently used its no-pornography policy to justify removing a photo from a woman’s page - of her breastfeeding her infant daughter.  She crossed the line, according to the Facebook spokesperson, for allowing the tiniest peek of her areola to show next to the baby’s mouth.  According to the spokesperson, they don’t…

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Book Review: The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Summary: A superb exercise in consciousness-raising; it paints a detailed picture of the food chains that supply us every day and the environmental and health consequences of each of them. Where does your food come from? If you answered "the supermarket", you're probably like most Americans. And while most people…

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How our time-orientation effects the way we live our lives

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo asks the following question:

What if your attitudes toward time could explain why you are chronically late, why you’re likely to fight for rainforest preservation, or why you might be predisposed to addictions?

Zimbardo has written a new book explaining the psychology of time. In his opinion, the secret power of time is not about “clock time,” but rather about subjective time. His analysis has numerous real-world consequences. For instance, he takes on many addiction recovery programs such as D.A.R.E., accusing them of “useless propaganda. The problem is that these programs “only work for future-oriented people,” whereas addicts are “present-oriented.” addiction prevention programs all too often fail to recognize that the audience is not helped by lectures about future consequences. The real problem is that societal forces trap and tempt these present-oriented people, and they need lots of role-playing to deal with the problem at a point where it matters.

If Zimbardo’s name sounds familiar, it might be because of the famous Stanford Prison Experiment he conducted in 1971.

People divide the flow of human experience in various ways, and it affects the way they live their lives. For instance, time-orientation affects our decisions to give in to temptation or to delay gratification. Many people live in the present, and they focus on the here and now. Alternatively, other people are oriented to the past, and they bring the past to their present, in both helpful and unhelpful ways. Future-oriented people constantly weigh the costs versus benefits–in …

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