Ebonmuse has raised an intriguing point at his site, Daylight Atheism. He suggests that unrealistic expectations promulgated by many churches throw many people into disorienting existential spirals. Instead of acknowledging the limitations of human animals up front, many church-goers (with the encouragement of their religious leaders), conceive of their journeys through life…
We like to think of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day as days when young children give lots of hugs to their loving parents. We don’t like to consider that these days are also days when thousands of innocent children are beaten by their parents, their anguished cries often not heard outside of their dysfunctional homes. Saddest of all, these children are condemned to be beaten and screamed at by the people they trust most.
In 1988, I was waiting for an elevator at the State office building where I worked as an Assistant Attorney General. Many social workers had their offices in the same building, and several of those social workers were also waiting for an elevator.
All of a sudden, a middle-aged man started yelling at a three-year-old boy, who started crying. The boy weighed about 40 pounds. The man quickly got angrier and started smacking the boy violently with the palm of his hand-maybe it was his fist. Whump! Whump! Whump! The little boy was now breathless and whimpering. Like the other half-dozen people waiting for an elevator, however, I did nothing but stand there horrified. The man cocked his arm back to strike the boy yet again when one of the social workers jumped forward and yelled at the man: “Stop hitting that child!”
With that, the man looked confused, then angry, then more confused, then meek. The social worker further instructed him: “follow me.” The man followed the social worker, presumably to the social worker’s office. …
Pleassssse, somebody. Wake me up. I thought we were all done with Princess Diana. But we’re not, because this is the 10th year anniversary of her death. In other words, it’s a terrific opportunity to dust her off and to put her back up on the pedestal so that we can envy her, admire her for her so-called accomplishments and (most of all) become entranced with her image.
While waiting at a pharmacy, I leafed through the June 2007 edition of Good Housekeeping Magazine because Princess Diana’s photo is boldly featured on the front cover. As I picked it up, I thought “Not again . . .” This issue of Good Housekeeping also features a hagiography (what else was ever written about Princess Diana?) The reappearance of Diana aggravated me enough that I’m now sitting down to aggravate you with this rant.
The article describes Diana as “young, luminous and full of promise.” We are told that “she was worried about doing the right thing.” In fact, she was “saintly and endlessly giving.” I have heard it all before, though, and I’ve never been impressed with these sorts of accolades. After all, Diana lived a plush life of glitz. She mingled with her favorite musicians (such as Elton John) and she made unending appearances at fancy dinner parties where she wore her fancy gowns and smiled her fancy smile. She “passionately followed music theatre and ballet.”
That’s what this article tells me, anyway. It also tells me that she …
As a general rule, simple questions, especially simple questions with purportedly obvious answers, are the most interesting questions.
While I attended a wedding this weekend, I noticed all of the sex partners seated together, you know . . . husbands and wives and boyfriends and girlfriends (and a few gay couples).
Why do sex partners sit together at public rituals, I wondered. The obvious answer is that it’s because most sex partners live together, right? Other people thus see sex partners as couples and feel that they should be invited to important rituals together, especially to important rites of passage, such as weddings. But why do so many sex partners live together (and hence get invited to prominent social events as couplets)? After all, instead of living with her sex partner, maybe a woman would rather live with (and then potentially be invited to go to weddings with) a non-sex partner friend or neighbor, or perhaps even her non-sex-partner plumber or accountant. Or maybe she’d rather attend public gatherings by herself, so that she could freely mingle. The norm, however, is obvious to anyone who bothers to scan the crowd at a wedding: the great majority of people who attend such gatherings attend them as sexually-paired couples.
Someone who followed the SSSM model might say that this behavior (of attending prominent rituals with your spouse) is simply learned, or that it is “social convention” or that it “feels right.” There is a compelling story that can be told about paternity …
According to this article in Discover, less can be more when it comes to road signs. The "risk compensation effect" is a recognition that animals "tend to adjust their behavior to compensate for perceived risk." A team of urban planners has concluded that traffic signs and signals actually make the…