Speaking of ending policies of family separation, tomorrow is Juneteenth in the States. What will you be celebrating?
Pervert Justice
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Speaking of ending policies of family separation, tomorrow is Juneteenth in the States. What will you be celebrating?
For several years now, I think 4, Kiev has been having significant queer pride marches, and for just as many years extreme right wingers have been attempting to violently stop the marches. Consider this BBC story from 2015, for instance. Just how extreme have they been? Well, in 2015 they injured several cops, at least one seriously, in their efforts to disrupt the event. There was another outburst of violence by Ukrainian wing nuts today, but it was followed by large numbers of arrests of these protesters, with no arrests of Pride marchers that I can find. It’s very, very possible that this is a sign that things are getting better.
So, a couple days ago cops in Portland, Oregon did the right thing in a rare situation. It was immortalized on the PPD twitter feed:
Portland – Police to 2100 block of NW Kearney St – report of suspicious circumstances – male walking down the street pulling a suitcase with a female zipped up inside of it
— Portland OR Alerts (@pdxalerts) June 10, 2018
NW Kearney Update – Officers made contact with the subjects – officers reporting the female is riding around in the suitcase willingly – all units clearing
— Portland OR Alerts (@pdxalerts) June 10, 2018
Now, I’m all for consensual fun, and if you wanna ride around in a suitcase, you do you, right? But I also get why this was reported. If you do a google search for “portland police alert woman suitcase” you get some seriously not okay stuff all over the first page. Worse, it’s not just multiple reports of the same case, you get links to reports of separate, unrelated incidents. (People with multiple treatment resistant faith in humanity can have it cured right there on that google page.)
I find this completely bizarre.
Jason Thibodeau has a “new” argument against the resurrection over on The Secular Outpost. I say, “new” because even if the argument hasn’t gotten widespread attention before, I cannot possibly imagine that it has not been previously advanced by someone. JT isn’t vouching for this argument per se, but rather he wanted to “present it [there] and solicit the thoughts of the Secular Outpost community”.
What is this grand argument? I copy it verbatim:
(1) God is completely rational.
Thus,
(2) Any action that God performs is undertaken on the basis of some good reason.
(3) There is no good reason for God to resurrect Jesus from the dead.
Therefore,
(4) God did not resurrect Jesus from the dead.
Premise (1) follows from the fact that God is perfect and (2) is a consequence of (1). Therefore, the soundness of the argument depends on the truth of (3). We can defend (3) by considering possible reasons that God might have for resurrecting Jesus and rejecting them. It is probably impossible to consider all possible factors that might count in favor of God’s resurrecting Jesus. However, that need not undermine the argument. Suppose we are not certain that there is no good reason for God to resurrect Jesus from the dead. We can issue a challenge to any person who believes that God did resurrect Jesus. That challenge would be to provide the good reason for God to resurrect Jesus. In the absence of any such account of God’s reason, we ought to be skeptical that there is such a reason.
I’m not sure why, but since the video of Sterling Brown’s mistreatment was released no one on FtB seems to have covered the malicious violence police committed against Brown, a rookie NBA player who may not be a superstar (yet) but is already playing a large contributing role for his team in his first year. From that, we can guess he’s making significant money and had significant local fame even before this incident put him repeatedly in the news. (BTW: I Have Forgiven Jesus spoke about this in anticipation of the video’s release, but we did not yet know what it showed.)
It’s been hard for me to start this piece. This story falls in an awkward place for me. It lacks the immediate, universal concern that appears to exist here on FtB when cops kill someone, but it’s also far more serious than the quotidian racism in policing that I also cover.
Today I’d like to talk about the story of a man who wasn’t beaten by the cops, wasn’t arrested by them (at least in this encounter), wasn’t even searched by them. I want to talk about his story because it goes to the heart of the Black encounter with fascist policing today: the everyday, relentless, low-level harassment of Black residents of the US.
Also? Georgia O’Keeffe wasn’t obsessed, okay?
PZ has another post up on the failures of Jordan Peterson. It points out the irony of skeptics embracing Peterson when Peterson himself does skepticism so damn badly. As a major exemplar, PZ calls out Peterson’s embrace of Freudianism. Among other observations, he expresses surprise that Peterson, a psychologist, would embrace Freud long after he’s been discredited. Others in the comments provide other observations on just how rare it is to teach much Freud in university psychology programs.
I don’t doubt the truth of those observations, but Freud is nonetheless highly relevant today, and his relevance to today very likely explains exactly why Peterson embraces the man’s ideas.
There have been many articles and classes and books and lectures that have attempted to productively address toxic masculinity. And, though this may surprise many of you, there have been blog posts as well. PZ has his own up right now, which is itself responding to another (and thoroughly incompetent) attempt to address toxic masculinity in a blog post.
Nothing PZ says is wrong, but it reminds me that I am ever surprised at how often 2 of the most important points to remember about TM are left unstated. It’s not that people aren’t aware of them, at some level, but I think we get much farther much faster if we make them explicit.
Sometimes a few words are worth a thousand images. In this case the words that tickled my fancy came to me through a company that placed them on a T-shirt. I would think Iris in particular might like them, but even I found them delightful. Can’t wait to hear exactly what I’m talking about? The build up beginning to feel excessive? Well, okay. Here you go: