Her birthday was yesterday, and I would have posted this here earlier, but you all were dragging your heels about filling up the eternal thread.
I first discovered Janis when I was 12, and I was afraid there might be something sinful about her, because every time I listened, I felt funny. Good funny, but kind of dangerous funny, too. But now that I’m a little bit older, I know that she was wicked, the best kind of wicked there is.
Even now when I listen to Janis I feel that same deep-down funny.
(Episode CCXCII: Eradicating all junk science.)
Re: SOPA and birth control coverage: It’s kinda nice to be living in these days and actually get good news from the government sometimes, as opposed to 2001-2009 which was just a nonstop horror show.
…please tell me you’re joking.
I am absolutely not joking, Rey Fox.
The school district caught hell for it in the newspaper, but still those kids had to sit there in a snowstorm in front of a locked building, while Mister Bus Driver toddled off in his nice warm vehicle.
To say nothing of what would have happened if one of those kids had wandered off during said snowstorm… Road conditions were insanely icy.
Um, yeah. But no. A shitty performance by Janis. Couldn’t get a note right. No, that wasn’t just interpretation…her voice sucked hard in this clip.
Josh: I respectfully disagree, I can’t imagine this song performed by anyone else actually. Janis sings like a crow talks, and I love it. Pure raw emotion.
Added filler
Happy birthday, Esteleth!
I can believe the bus story. The town next door had an incident on the first day of school a few years ago where a group of kindergardeners got put off the bus in a median in the middle of downtown because the driver had the wrong directions. I think he was convicted of criminal negligence.
Coyote…she does, and she’s one of the only white women who can sing the blues. But this performance was awful. Her pitch was so bad she sounded tone deaf.
Happy birthday, Esteleth!
Obligatory witty comment
I still respectfully and regretfully disagree Josh. But I might be biased. All other versions I’ve heard are too ‘pretty’ for my liking. It’s a song about the pain of recurrent emotional abuse in a relationship. It’s not supposed to sound ‘pretty’.
I still can’t think too well right now. Rick fucking asshole Santorum.
Happy birthday Esteleth! Greetings from the Darkheart household.
Well, that’s pretty much what her voice sounded like, although she seems even more out of breath than usual (she smoked too damn much)…and that band was always rather sloppy and seems to be rushing a bit.
The performance to watch is this one from the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. That’s Cass Elliot, aka Mama Cass in the audience, staring in awe with her mouth hanging open.
Which is how Janis still affects me, sometimes.
“Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz…”
Eeesh, that video is terrible.
Thanks for the birthday greetings, everyone!
Josh, check your emaill, plz.
I’ve been roaming YouTube, finding videos of Etta James. Damn, that lady had pipes.
Hello, I’m ravingly interrupting whatever else was going on, BECAUSE
…I have to tell everybody to go see Red Tails. That’s George Lucas’s new movie about the Tuskeegee Airmen, which I just saw; word is he made it himself because no studio would get behind a movie with an all-black main cast.
Yes, it’s cheesy and full of cliches and Lucas apparently ruined the dialogue by sheer proximity. But it’s full of dogfights. DOGFIGHTS. More to the point, simple as Red Tails is, it’s plenty good enough. It’s not stupid like Avatar or incoherent like Avatar (the other one) or horrible like Bay’s Transformers travesties. It’s just a cheesy feel-good hero movie. White folks get TONS of those.
And this one worked, because the audience here was completely into it. They gasped when the white officers dissed our guys, and cheered when they shot down Nazis, and we all applauded at the end. This is deep South here, east Texas, and there were several elderly black gentlemen in the audience with whole families around them, some with veterans’ caps. I watched them leave with huge smiles and some wiping tears.
So I don’t care how cheesy it was, it served its purpose admirably. White folks get plenty of stupid feel-good hero crap that makes box office. Least we could do is support this one.
…anyway, back to y’all’s regularly scheduled dignity.
Pteryxx: Whoah, that sounds pretty good.
Maybe a bit of the old pre-Phantom Anus George Lucas? Back when his movies were fun?
Happy birthday, Esteleth!
I’ve heard other good things about Red Tails. It’s on my watch list, if it makes it to around here.
Esteleth— Check my email, but nothing new.
Josh – I emailed you at 7:20 pm. In any case, I sent you something. Check your *other* email as well?
Oh lord, esteleth. Could u pls send whatever it was to the spkesgay address? Thanks :-)
Sent. ;-)
Got it. Thanks esteleth. I’m still learning how to get around on this tablet!
Amy was like her. Didn’t know Etta.
TLC: (yikes I’m still raving…)
I think Red Tails sort of got rescued from Lucas’s ham-handedness by forcing him to stick to reality. Even Lucas couldn’t screw that up. Stuff DOES happen, like how the white higher-ups diss the “Negro experiment”, but it’s still handled typically of Lucas, wide-open with no subtlety. I thought about that a while, but having seen it… the point of Red Tails isn’t to explicitly talk about racism and how awful it is. The racism message is just that this movie exists at all. We just watched a bunch of underdogs and outcasts prove themselves to everyone (how cliche is that, right?) but it happens to be based on reality, and real racism was why they were underdogs in the first place.
Great Josh.
Sorry for not getting back to you earlier (real life happened, excuse, excuse, whine, whine).
I’m actually interested in seeing Red Tails, but it’ll have to wait until it’s out on video. Unfortunately, I can’t got to movies at the theater.
Rave away, Pteryxx.
I need to think about positive shit right now.
Hearing my mom refer to Rick *spits* Santorum as ‘The Nicest Guy she’s ever seen’ was the closest I’ve ever been to hearing something that hit me like a physical blow.
I am not angry at my mother. I am filled with unbridled seething rage at that smiling, smug asshole who says ‘Gawd’ and thus dupes well-meaning souls like her.
Rage like a physical substance. Oozing from my pores. Like the secretions of a poison dart frog or something.
I definitely have to see Red Tails.
oh, and happy birthday, Esteleth! (finally reading…)
Janis on vinyl (or mp3, whatever) does me. Janis pretending to be spontaneous on TV is not my cuppa heart.
Happy birfday, anyway, my love.
Just watched fucking Left Behind.
I hate life now and wish it would end.
Ing: I know your pain.
My fucking non-god, I know your pain. I wish I didn’t.
@feralboy12:
Her bands ALWAYS sucked. That was the (other) tragedy of her all too brief career: the musicians around her never fucking challenged her. Not sure who to blame, but there it is . . .
Oh, it is wretched that Etta James died. ‘At last’ was one of the greatest recordings in modern history. Not to mention the rest of her fabulous musical career. Rock on, Etta.
Alright, I am falling asleep in my chair here. Bedtime.
Sally, are you heading west after leaving the Darkheart estate? If so, are you heading as far west as me?
If you are, drop me a line.
Tomorrow will be a big day. Shoe shopping, followed by a get-together with friends. Should be fun.
*blush* well if someone WANTS me to rave…
I’m annoyed that Red Tails is at 33% on Rotten Tomatoes. It doesn’t deserve that, and I’m seriously wondering if there isn’t some implicit racism going on in the discounting of it. Isn’t War Horse ridiculously cheesy, too, but it’s getting good reviews because… why? Just because of the production values? I keep seeing reviews diss Red Tails because it’s flat and cliche, the editing’s a bit choppy, and it’s got weird 80’s style titles and credits (really, reviewers? This is your substantive complaint?) But it’s absolutely clear and simple, easy to follow, and yet I didn’t find it boring. People even change their minds sometimes and own up to their mistakes.
Also, DOGFIGHTS. Massive air battles. It could’ve been better, but again, Lucas didn’t have a huge production company backing him. It feels a bit raw and clumsy, like a cult classic… definitely a pet project. Also it was filmed mostly in Czechoslovakia for some reason.
Pteryxx: I’ve always figured having a huge production company backing his every ‘creative’ brainfart was Lucas’s biggest handicap. That’s what ruined Star Wars: The Phucking Anus and everything to follow.
The original trilogy was good because Lucas was forced to compromise due to issues like budget, and actors refusing to read his clumsy dialogue. The new trilogy, he could do anything he wanted with digital technology, and he invented JarJar Binks. Among other abominations.
I know this has already been hashed out at length many times, but I was just describing to Mr Kristinc (who’s an atheist but doesn’t read atheist blogs) about the Most Influential Atheist of 2011 debacle, and he became alarmed because just in describing it to him I was starting to churn at my hair. He ended up telling me to stop before I gave myself an infarction or something.
*cleansing breaths*
eh, I thought Lucas just developed hypertrophied ego and became insufferable. Don’t forget that even Episode 4 had its share of racism, and we fans didn’t exactly enjoy the Ewoks.
Hypertrophied Ego indeed. You watch the behind the scenes stuff in the SW prequel trilogy, and you can just tell everyone’s terrified to challenge him. You can see him explaining these wacky ideas and people behind him looking alarmed or shaking their heads or forcing a smile. They laugh awkwardly at every lame joke he cracks.
I genuinely enjoy the original trilogy. It has its flaws, but I enjoy it. Every single one of the prequel movies was an absolute chore to sit through.
Oh, Star Wars was my foundation as a kid (along with Battle of the Planets). I was hard-core then. …My faith in Lucas died less than halfway through Ep 1.
jeeeezus some of you are YOUNG
and I am too OLD.
sumo and bed
Walton (@previous):
I’ve been staying out of the hate speech conversation on purpose, because I’m not quite sure I understand the issue well enough to have a definitive position. I unequivocally support hate crimes laws, but I have some of the same concerns you do about hate speech proscriptions. OTOH, hate speech is undeniably hateful, and if we could find a way to curb it without sacrificing basic freedom of expression….
I’m reminded of an argument I stumbled into long, long ago
in a galaxyon a space policy BBS far, far away: One of the regulars, a German national, mentioned in passing (I don’t even recall what the connection to the topic was, but it was oblique) Germany’s prohibitions against certain kinds of speech about the Third Reich. I commented (equally in passing, or so I thought) that such laws sounded strange to my American ears, and that I didn’t think they would pass First Amendment muster. In the… um, spirited… conversation that ensued, he was at great pains to insist that the laws only restricted speech that was likely to incite unrest or criminal activity… which I’m afraid didn’t really persuade me at the time, but which, in retrospect, suggests an approach:What about applying a hate crimes approach to instances of speech that are already criminal, such as incitement, threatening, and harassing? IOW, incitement to riot (for example) is a crime; why couldn’t there be a hate-crime enhancement if the incitement involved expressions of hatred based on race, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression, creed[1], etc.?
In this way, it seems to me, we could have the kind of legal recognition of hateful speech that drives (as LM suggests) societal norms without criminalizing the opinions per se, and thus hopefully not breaching the First Amendment barrier that you (and I) worry about.
Mind you, I have neither the deep legal background you’ve brought to this nor the philosophical grounding of LM and others; this is just me “spitballing” an idea.
***
[1] Where creed is understood to encompass nonbelief.
Not for nothin’, but I’m’a try making paneer (Indian cheese) tomorrow. It’s supposed to be dead easy; we’ll see if I manage to screw it up.
Honestly I haven’t seen anyone articulate just what this clear threshold is supposed to be.
I mean, I think I get it. I, uh, know hate speech when I see it. “God hates fags” is hate speech, and would be outlawed unless a hate speech law also allowed a religious exemption (which any plausible legislation almost certainly would).
A secular example would be “everyone who is not heterosexual should be killed.” This is what we’re talking about, right? Everybody on board with this as an example of the kind of hate speech, which is not currently illegal, that’s being proposed as worthy of outlawing?
So can that be outlawed? The answer is no, probably not. As I see it:
As Walton sees it:
So he thinks a Supreme Court’s reinterpretation of the First Amendment is more likely; I think an annulment of the “freedom of speech” clause by treaty is more likely. Okay. But both of these options are highly unlikely.
Of particular importance, too, both of these options take control of the process away from the people. In the first scenario, we won’t have any say in how the courts draw the lines. In the second, we won’t have any say in what the treaty imposes.
The only way to get this “right” — to outlaw only the speech we want outlawed, and keep all the speech we want to keep — is to write up a constitutional amendment which dictates exactly how the courts have to interpret. This would actually put control in the hands of the people, but it’s also by far the least likely option. Frankly, it’s just not going to happen, because so many people hold the Bill of Rights to be absolutely sacred.
I really do not see any safe way to get from here to there.
when the weather forecasters said ‘Freezing Rain’, they weren’t mistaken or exaggerating.
All the trees and every surface outside has a layer of ice on it. All the people shovelling their driveways and walkways have kinda fucked up. The snow at least provides something to walk on, everything else is solid ice. This is seriously bizarre.
It goes without saying that I sincerely hope no one is killed on the road tonight or tomorrow.
Oh, I like it. And it’s doable “now” (as soon as it’s politically plausible, that is) without a new paradigm of jurisprudence. Using the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Act as a template:
“Whoever, whether or not acting under color of law, willfully incites a riot because of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability or national origin of any person—
(A) shall be imprisoned [and so on and so forth]”
That would be a harder task than one might think, even if it were politically feasible. It is very hard to draft any kind of law – especially one which deals with concepts so amorphous and value-driven as “freedom of speech” and “hate speech” – in such a manner as to be completely unambiguous and free from interpretive difficulties. And if the legislator tries to draft laws in enough minute detail to avoid any ambiguity whatsoever, it often leads to absurdities, in practice, when circumstances not foreseen by the legislature subsequently arise.
This problem is especially unavoidable with a constitutional provision, which by its nature is designed to last for a long time and to be difficult to amend. Provisions which, when drafted, were completely unambiguous can easily become more ambiguous over time with social or technological change. This is what Larry Lessig calls “latent ambiguity.”
Dhorvath,
The ending of that piece, which I left out:
Hey everyone. I strongly recommend that you see the play Love, Janis if you can. At the time I saw it, it had been performed only in one other city and it was especially cool that Jeff Millar and a couple other Houston media people who covered Joplin’s early career were at the performance. One part of the play was actually lifted from an article by Jeff Millar.
Awesome, awesome play. They performed it at the alley with two actresses playing Janis, and they had two different people playing the “singing Janis” so her voice would not get worn out.
The book it’s based on is good too. I read it and realized that Janis and my mom briefly went to college together.
I don’t think Love, Janis has played NY yet. I hope it gets there as it would totally smoke whatever crap they have on Broadway now.
BTW Red Tails sounds awesome. I think I will go see it next week.
That’s an entirely reasonable idea, in itself – much more so than the kinds of laws about which I was expressing concern – and might very well pass constitutional muster: given that what is being criminalized is the act rather than the opinion itself.
I’m instinctively reluctant to endorse it, though, because (a) I’m not persuaded that such a law would make a great deal of difference to the political landscape, and (b) I’m wary of any solution to a problem that involves the enactment of more criminal prohibitions, of any kind, than presently exist. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t advocate the abolition of the criminal justice system, nor is it my contention that criminal prohibitions can never help to address social problems. (I can think of rare circumstances in which they have done so.) But I am also constantly very conscious of the serious problems with trusting the criminal justice system – a blunt instrument based on institutionalized state violence, and one which is already causing massive problems in American society – to fix any social problem.
More broadly, I’m really sceptical of the ability of forcible solutions, in the long run, to build a more just society. I’m not convinced that using the blunt force of the law to crack down on hate speech, in any context, will solve the real problem: the bigotry and prejudice, often tacit and unexpressed, that people feel. Preventing people from expressing bigoted ideas openly doesn’t make those ideas go away; they just emerge in subtler and more insidious forms. In both our countries, the people who are really dangerous, and who are really driving discriminatory and bigoted government policies, are not the fringe figures like Fred Phelps standing on corners shouting offensive epithets. It’s the politicians and media outlets and advocacy groups, far more numerous and far more influential, who say things like “our country is being swamped with immigrants who are sponging off the welfare state” or “we need to protect our culture” or “traditional marriage should be between a man and a woman”. Those people wouldn’t be prosecuted under any hate speech law, but it’s those people who are really working against equality, and being listened to in the mainstream political arena.
Janis Joplin – Piece of My Heart
It sounds much better on record.
Janis was a favourite of a piano-playing, singing previous flatmate of mine. I loved it. And introduced her to Dresden Dolls.
Pfft. Don’t overstate what the rest of us expect. It’s not about “a great deal”, it’s about whatever little bit can help.
You do know, and will not deny, that people mistake legality for morality. Thus, changing legality will, at least after a couple of generations pass, influence social norms.
(Honestly, this objection looks like overreach, and makes you look desperate.)
For sure. But it doesn’t have to be a huge thing. Really what I want is for a crime to be recognized, with some penalty.
My gut says it would be adequate for the hate crime provision to simply multiply by 1.2 whatever penalties would have otherwise been imposed.
And, as a separate matter, we ought to be considering whether the baseline penalties are already too high. I expect we’d find considerable agreement there.
Of course, that’s because you don’t know shit about psychology. ;)
From just last episode:
Do decisions shape preference? Evidence from blind choice
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3196841/
Although people certainly do sometimes mistake legality for morality, I’m not entirely convinced of the size of this effect; especially since I’ve often seen (well-meaning) people make the same kind of argument for continued criminalization of drugs, and in that context it clearly hasn’t worked. Of course hate speech is a very different matter, but I am not really convinced that the imposition of criminal penalties would necessarily have much effect on people’s attitudes.
Besides, as per above, while it might influence social norms in such a way as to make it less acceptable to use explicit racist or homophobic rhetoric (a process which has been happening anyway, even without criminal prohibitions), this doesn’t necessarily change people’s underlying bigoted attitudes: they’ll just be expressed through subtler and more easily-deniable catchphrases. “I’m not racist, but our country is being swamped by immigrants who are sponging off the state and destroying our culture” is already a common refrain on both sides of the Atlantic, and I don’t think any legal prohibition is going to do much to address this. (As it happens, I remember you once having to explain this phenomenon to me in the Southern cultural context, at a time when I didn’t understand: why it was significant that Nixon and Reagan were very fond of talking about “states’ rights” and “welfare queens” as plausibly-deniable racial dog-whistles, for instance.)
It would be overreach if it were my only objection: “this proposal isn’t likely to do very much good” isn’t in itself a reason for not implementing it. But I raised other concerns.
Actually, the people who engage in already-actionable harassment and threats are really dangerous.
It looks like you forgot to adjust (some of) your talking points to Bill’s new suggestion.
Happy Birthday, Esteleth. *chocolate*
–
Bus story: Once upon a time in an un-named western Oklahoma town (where my mother-in-law lived), the city acquired a bus for the express purpose of taking the old folks from the retirement housing to WalMart and other places of interest. You know, so they could get their meds and grocery shop and shit.
Then the city council or someone(s) in authority decided that, rather than either buy a couple of buses for the school system, the retiree’s bus could be detailed to haul school kids, with priority to the kids. So, they’d haul the retirees to WalMart early in the afternoon, then go pick up and deliver the kids to their homes…and pack it in for the night, leaving the old folks at WalMart without any way to get home.
I assume that they didn’t want to spend the money on the additional gas to make a home-taking run with the old folks. I’d like to think that they weren’t just callous bastards.
–
One Night Stand
To Love Somebody
Try
Summertime
These are obviously the first songs I have heard but the earliest songs I can remember hearing are Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon & Garfunkel and Me And Bobby McGee by Janis Joplin. I guess I want to remember it this way because I still love both of these songs. And my parents’ taste in music was, well, hummmm…
In the fourth grade, my music teacher has us sing a lot of late sixties song. One Tin Soldier and Summertime are the ones I can most clearly remember. I know, Summertime is from Porgy And Bess. I did not know this at the time.
Yes, you’re right; I should have been clearer. They are, but that danger is, of course, addressed already by the existing laws against harassment and threats. If we’re going to increase the penalty for such acts specifically where hatred on the ground of race, religion or sexual orientation is involved, as Bill has suggested, we must be assuming that such an increase in penalty is going to have either a direct deterrent effect, or a cultural or symbolic effect of some kind that will change people’s behaviour over time. You might be right that this will happen, but I’m not entirely convinced.
But it’s the middle of the night and I’m exhausted, and I don’t want to continue this argument; if Bill’s suggestion is to be preferred over European-style “hate speech” laws, then I’ve already won the part of the argument that was most important to me, and will concede the rest.
(Not to suggest that “winning” is important; it isn’t. But I do care a great deal about freedom of expression. Bill’s suggestion, whatever its merits or demerits, doesn’t really interfere with freedom of expression in any significant way, since he doesn’t propose to penalize speech qua speech; so none of my most serious objections apply.)
Not a good comparison, since drug crimes per se are victimless crimes. This notion that people ought to be able to do what they want with their own bodies is currently the primary argument against any supposed immorality of drug use.
Then you probably aren’t even trying to imagine historical precedents which would be counterarguments against your preferred outcome.
Think about the effects of Title II of the CRA 1964. Everybody except fringe libertarians and unreconstructed neo-Confederates now thinks it’s immoral for businesses to discriminate based on race.
Far more people did not believe this 50 years ago.
Even the example you give is an example of changed attitudes. It used to be that people were not concerned about being perceived as racist.
The person who says “I’m not racist” usually isn’t consciously racist and trying to fool other people. They really think it’s bad to be racist, and are thus highly motivated to perceive themselves as not racist, and so there’s a hook: when they can be made to confront the fact that their views are racist, this causes them stress, which they must deal with somehow; and sometimes the way of dealing with it is to start working on letting go of that racism.
This didn’t used to be the case, when acknowledging the fact of one’s own racism was not a stressor. There was no hook.
Note that those frames do not just act as plausible deniability to outsiders. They allow their believers to convince themselves that they really do believe there’s something important about states’ rights, and that they really don’t have any problem with people of color who don’t receive any welfare benefits.
And I didn’t say the other concerns were overreach. This one is: “I’m not persuaded that such a law would make a great deal of difference to the political landscape”. That’s the part that makes you sound desperate, and not just a little bit ignorant.
Little Girl Blue
Trust Me
Move Over
Dear Landlord
Please someone tell me this is a nightmare. I just found out that douchebag Newt Gingrich has a real chance of winning the primaries. Seriously, this disgusting man who said a horribly racist statement in the Republican debate is getting support. I can’t believe this is happening. There are actually morons who haven’t learned their lessons from the Clinton era. I know, all the Republicans are a bunch of douchebags, but Gingrich is the biggest one of them all. And he has a chance in winning! I think my misanthropy stats gained +10 points.
TLC, I sent you an FB friend request. You’ll know it’s me; I have a beard :)
Alethea: Got it! Thanks :)
He does (Intrade is giving Romney only a 75% chance) but this might be a Good Thing.
Polling shows that of all the Republican candidates, Gingrich has the highest negatives among independents. And he loses in the general election by a clear margin, while Romney is in a statistical tie with Obama. Plus it’s easier to paint him as an extremist.
(These trends might not continue, but at the moment I’m rooting for Gingrich.)
K, before I pass out, just want to leave this link. Janis was usually really fucked up at concerts (and elsewhere) so her voice was always strained. Yet I still believe by seeing her you can appreciate her more than just listening to an album cut…she was a performer…meant to be seen. I offer this–she was very messed and died not too long afterwards. I was there, but outside the stadium listening to the Dead’s free concert. We couldn’t afford the $14 or whatever at the time for a ticket.
Yeah, she goes thru her astrology and embarrassing interlude…but the raw emotion is there to see:
Cry Baby
Ball and Chain
Kozimc Blues
Choice Blindness Group at Lund U:
http://www.lucs.lu.se/choice-blindness-group/
hey, way late but Happy Birthday (for yesterday???) Esteleth!
http://mindhacks.com/2010/07/17/researchers-implant-false-symptoms/
«Participants were asked to complete a checklist of symptoms, to report, honestly, on their mental health.
After handing in the questionnaires, the researchers secretly altered a couple of the participants responses – for example, when the participant answered a question about concentration difficulties with 0 (“not at all”), this score was surreptitiously changed to a 2 (“occasionally”).
One of the research team then went through the questionnaire and asked each participant to explain why they answered the way they did.
During the interview, more than two-thirds of the participants gave justification for why a faked item was true, without realising it had been manipulated, and over half were completely blind to the fact that both items had been changed.
The researchers described how “participants would say that they occasionally or rather often experienced concentration difficulties because they had been drinking a lot of coffee lately or because they were going through a difficult time in life with a lot of exams”.
Afterwards, the participants were given the same questions again and those who had justified the faked responses tended to change their answers – having seemingly come to believe more strongly that they really did experience the symptoms ‘given’ to them by the researchers. The effect was not dramatic, but still a significant shift.»
Esteleth: only going as far as Binghamton, got no time to hang out this weekend. Perhaps sometime in Feb. or March. :) Hope you have a happy one! I am up late b/c I just got in an extended Twitter argument with some asshole on Twitter who said that women with 50+ sex partners are “hoes”. I said, oh really? Well, where’s my goddamn money then? Who knew that Twitter put a cap on how many tweets you can tweet in one day? Goddamn that is annoying.
Happy belated birthday, Esteleth!
I wish I were doing my work, but instead I’m staring blankly, wanting very much to play Skyrim or go to bed but keeping myself awake with caffeine and the misguided determination that I will work.
Hi there
A quick and belated Happy Birthday to Esteleth!
re: Creep and police
At this moment I don’t see much use in going to the police. They’ll laugh me out of the building. So I got called by the same guy twice withtin 30 months and he hasn’t technically done anything illegal, except for creeping me out, which is, of course, absolutely my problem because heaven forbid that we ask men to behave themselves in non-creepy ways.
You know, just ask Mallorie.
But I documented the stuff and will absolutely go there if he calls again. On second thoughts I’ll talk about it with my cop-friend when I see him next week. Yay for cop-friends.
An unusual sweepstakes reward. I guess it deserves something for raising awareness.
Sucks that it has an age minimum of 40, at 32 I’ve had three so far (without the New York vacation).
I don’t expect to change much in the way of people’s underlying bigoted attitudes, not immediately and directly. If, by being expressed more subtly and thereby being more easily-deniable, someone won’t be found guilty, even though they caused serious harm, that’s just a limitation I’d have to accept. One could only do so much, without taking it over the line and risking the effects you and I are both worried about. However, I figure more subtle hate speech generally doesn’t cause the level of harm I’m talking about anyway. People will continue to be bigots; but if they’re reduced to mumbling vague bullshit which isn’t quite as blatantly vicious and abusive, then their targets will be less likely to be significantly harmed as a result. That’s the outcome I want.
Over the long run, it may influence a gradual shift in the public away from some of the more rabid bigotry as well. At least, that would be nice; and it would make it harder for bigots to get political traction because they’d have to mince their words even more into convoluted, indirect attacks and incoherent dog-whistles.
By the way, I wouldn’t want the penalties to be as severe as what one finds in the U.S. system currently. I figure that should go without saying, if you’ve gotten to know me, but I’ll say it just for the record.
——
Interesting. I’m surprised it worked for “more than two-thirds” of them.
Sally, are you taking the thruway and down, or going diagonal?
… Which sounds weird. If you have time for a half-hour stop send me an email at carliesinternet at yahoo. :)
For your reading pleasure, I submit one sentence of sophisticated theology:
Ahhhh, Janis on the record player.
It brings back memories and a fuzzy piloerection. First time madame ganja entered my consciousness.
Belated Happy Birthday to Esteleth!
***
So maybe the changed score was right after all. ;)
cr #79 – well we could hypothetically agree that the moon is made of green cheese – but the question remains why should we?
One long exercise in question-begging.
My first attempt at making muffins appears to be a success. And very soon, I’ll be making breakfast for SallyStrange!
I never could stand Joplin. *shrugs* I’m probably still rebelling against my father.
And I missed Esteleth’s party. Phooey. Hope it was good.
___
SG,
From your quote:
I do not find that thought unsettling, it’s just normal. Consciousness lags reality, it doesn’t drive it, and I know damn well that my memory is mutable and subject to all manner of influence. What baffles me is why this should be so frightening, I still enjoy doing things, I still desire to improve at those things that bring me joy, and I still improve: So where is the concern?
It’s part of why the I who I am now doesn’t feel overly attached to the Is I have been. (Cumbersome, but I know not how to make that sentence make better sense.) I have often thought of consciousness as an artifact, an overspill if you will, of processing in our brain. This is looking increasingly likely to me given the research that you and others keep exposing me to.
Thread bankrupt.
How the hell do I argue with that? (It’s the admin of an atheist page on Facebook…)
The Facebook thread from which that comment came.
Now I want someone to do narrative-alteration research on communicative animals… could you trick a dog, or a dolphin, into thinking it made a choice it didn’t actually make?
@Benjamin: “And if you believe a certain kind of person doesn’t deserve to be treated like a person, then you’re a bigot even if everyone agrees with you.” ?
(So atheists lose another few good-faith points, eh?)
Allo, everyone. Yesterday was my birthday, and today I’m driving eastward across New York state. I’ll be in Albany around dinnertime, so if local people (*cough* Audley *cough*) want to meet up for dinner (or if people along 90 want to do something a relevant time before hand) that would be cool. You can email me at esteleth AT gmail.
@Benjamin
OFFS. Disagreeing with an LGBT person does not make someone a bigot. Saying that said LGBT person is undeserving of equal rights DOES. Oh, and asserting “traditional morality” or whatever IS synonymous with denying LGBT people equal rights.
It’s just peachy that someone thinks that sex should be reserved for marriage. Fine. If that person also says that same-sex marriage is forbidden (and, ergo, LGBT people should be celibate) that is NOT okay.
Sorry, got all ranty for a bit there.
Anyone who contradicts themselves in an argument so unashamedly doesn’t deserve comment.
Regardless of whether people are doing that or if he was trying to turn the other foot, he is basically telling you to STFU because you’re a bigot.
Why does he try to silence you via turning the specific into the general? Either the topic in question is an example of bigotry, in which case this is a blatant emotionally manipulative shaming technique meant to shut down conversation (irony DING), or it isn’t and he can argue based on that that it isn’t.
Basically this is an example of an Ad Hom. You’re just disagreeing because you’re an irrational bigot.
Careful, she might be a bit cranky this morning.
Rey,
I think bacon and eggs have cheered Sally right up!
Esteleth,
Shoot me an email: ourdeadselves at gmail.
Some photos from this morning:
A landscape as the fog burned off.
Ducks in black and white (because the light wasn’t good for color).
A wood stork in a pond.
A wood stork and a few other birds in a tree.
A bagworm moth chrysalis.
Ahh, Janis Joplin & Big Brother And The Holding Company. I always hated that she dumped the band to go solo. Her live performances were so powerful because she was so fucked up she would blow her voice out. She burned bright.
I’ve always loved their rendition of Summertime. It’s a great song. But for more melody-to-the-bar I still have to go with Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust.
TLC, I too woke up to an ice covered world. We didn’t have any snow to enhance traction. And tomorrow it’s supposed to be 50F.
Crazy weather. Luckily I laid in enough ‘supplies’ to last a day.
The Sailor: And I just had to snow-shovel a bunch of water out of my basement.
I’m also out of cigarettes, and ratcheted up as tight as piano wire, so I feel no shame in saying I feel like holding every AGW-denier’s head in this ice water until the bubbles stop.
…Yesterday it was 75 F here. <_< Darned Bible Belt.
Esteleth- sent email, if you see it in time!
Stardust
We Are Stardust
Fire and Ice
Regarding George Lucas, he promises not to make another Star Wars movie: http://io9.com/5877264/george-lucas-promises-never-to-make-another-star-wars-movie
Yes! Victory is OUURRRSSS!!! ^_^
Josh, OSG,
I’m sitting here vaping. It doesn’t taste anything like tobacco, but I think I can get used to it.
Much obliged for the advice.
Goddamn, Lucas. It’s like them uppity fans have got the idea that you’re supposed to make movies for their enjoyment or something!
Seriously, cry me a river.
I remember when ANH got rereleased. For just a while, I felt the same thing as the audiences back in 1977. Then Lucas proceeded to oversaturate the market. Does he really expect nostalgia to hold up? Does he really expect the old fans to keep coming back every few years to marvel at the new annoying digital robots and womprats?
He killed A Good Thing. And how he whines about it, like it’s our fault he forgot what makes a good movie.
I echo MikeG’s thanks, Josh. It’s becoming increasingly clear I can no longer live this way. I just got into a stupid yelling match with my family for no fucking reason, other than nicotine withdrawal has me ratcheted up to the point that I just want to flip the fuck out.
I think it might be Time. I will be rereading your emails.
Yeah… on the Daily Show, Lucas said Red Tails was “as close to episode 7 as you’re ever going to get.”
…He also said Red Tails had so much story behind it, it could eeeeasily be expanded into a trilogy or two… YAAAAAHHHH *flees*
NOOOOOOO LUCAS! YOU ALMOST RECAPTURED SOME OF THE OLD FUN! DON’T RUIN IT! DON’T LUCAS IT UP! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
…And you wonder why I crush on you, TLC. X >
I’m watching “Standing In The Shadows Of Motown”. Yea Funk Brothers!
Ah Pteryxx, I’ve never been hit on so charmingly by someone who may or may not be a guy before.
@The Laughing Coyote
The man has become so big that no one has the guts to stand up to him and hold him back (which is why I think his first movies were okay, plus Star Wars V and VI were not made by Lucas, and they were the best ones). Of course he is going to Lucas it up. If he does rerelease that movie, expect him to ruin it.
>_>
*blush*
@TLC: if it bugs you, let me know and I’ll behave. Otherwise, I hope you’ll take me flirting in the spirit in which it’s intended. ~;>
—
@SC and whoever else: Y’all who know so much about international stuff and imperialism and whatnot, I notice y’all keep having these conversations with each other on TET and each other’s blogs. Would you folks consider running an FTB blog devoted to those topics? (selfish motivation: so I could read it?)
Ibyea: I’ve always figured that. Like, I remember interviews with Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, Alec Guinness, talking about the absolutely STUPID dialogue they were given, and how awful it was to actually read aloud, so some of the best lines in Star Wars were completely ad-libbed!
Plus the fact that Lucas had to fly by the seat of his pants and Mickey-Mouse everything to make it work… the way they had to cannibalize hundreds of model sets for the panning ‘death star’ shots at the end. It forced him to be creative.
I could compare it to the original King Kong. I heard that when Willis O’Brien viewed his own stop motion footage, he was annoyed by the way the fur kept moving around due to the nature of stop motion animation. But then when audiences saw it, they were like “OMG THIS LOOKS SO REAL! HIS FUR IS BRISTLING AND EVERYTHING!” Willis O’Brien, of course, had the good sense to run with it.
I’ll never call Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi episodes V and VI. It would be accepting episodes 1-3 exist.
*sticks fingers in ears*
LALALALALALALALALALALA CAN’T HEAR YOU
Pteryxx: As long as it doesn’t bother you that I’m pretty much completely heterosexual, it doesn’t bother me if you keep on flirting. I’m pretty sure I’m taking it in the spirit you intend.
I stumbled upon an indie film maybe some of you will like. I know I did: Monsters
@TLC: nah, I sort of flirt in an RP-like quantum flirtingspace. I mean it honestly, but in a wishful-thinking way, if that makes any sense. To the other person, though, either THEY are okay with not knowing and/or imagining me to be whatever gender they prefer, or not knowing freaks them out, sometimes really badly. So I try to ask.
Someday I might grow up to be poly, which would be AWESOME…
Ing, #29: Why would you do that to yourself?
I may have asked you directly what gender you were before, maybe on the IRC, and I think you gave an evasive answer. I shouldn’t have asked, too much interesting stuff happens around your intentional ambiguity.
I just wouldn’t want to feel like I was ‘leading anyone on’ or anything.
I’m already seeing myself as ‘Poly’, if by poly you mean polyamorous. I love my ex….. but it’s become clear to me that I’d be fully capable of loving someone else too, without loving her or the kid any less.
The only problem with polyamory is the complexity of it… it’s not enough for me to be OK with it… everyone else involved has to be OK with it too. I hate when people try to justify lying and cheating and manipulation and betrayal by characterizing it as ‘an open relationship’ *cough Newt cough*
going on about Latin American countries again, off the building-nations-on-books thread… I didn’t know until just now (from Galean cited on SC’s blog) that undermining posse comitatus and such tricks were used by repressive governments with US support. I haven’t heard any reference in all the kerfuffle about expanded police powers, Occupy and suchlike, and if the internet community knew about this, shouldn’t it have come up? Isn’t this really important shit that I ought to have known?
Also: https://proxy.freethought.online/singham/2012/01/21/chris-hedges-sues-barack-obama-over-the-legality-of-the-ndaa/
re gender: I should have specified, I try to ask if the other person needs to know in order to tolerate me. Otherwise, I display ambiguity because I really am ambiguous, darn it, as near as I can tell. @TLC: I do vaguely remember that over IRC. I think I withdrew damn quickly because I had a really bad experience with a friend turning on me… one would think I’d be better used to that by now. At any rate, it wasn’t personal if I did, TLC.
also, the hell with Newt and all that ilk, excusing betrayal as “polyamory” or rape as “sex” or bigotry as “reasoned discussion” or whatever the frick is the latest travesty of language. If whatever you’re doing has victims, you don’t deserve to use victimless words in good faith.
Poly is great in theory, but when you can’t even get one…
I wish I were poly. I find it to be more reasonable, but with regard to relationships, the unreasonable part of me tends to hold sway. Hmpf.
—
I’m much too confused and tired to do anything. I don’t even want to sleep. I just want to not do anything. Dammit, school.
CC: Just like some people simply aren’t ‘wired’ for monogamy, other people simply aren’t ‘wired’ for polyamory.
As it stands for me right now, Polyamory is just ‘a good idea’… I’m much too socially isolated to actually act on it much. (And before anyone suggests online dating- no. It clearly works for others, but not me.)
@Classical Cipher: sounds like self-care time, eh? Indulgent snack, TV, maybe a hot bath? Also, you can have virtual ankle-hugs if you want; just ignore me ranting about other stuff. >_>
Greg Grandin, cited on SC’s blog (link):
…GISH GALLOPING WAS OFFICIAL US POLICY HOW DID I NOT KNOW THIS RRRRGH *rage*
No wonder politics is full of fundies and MRAs…
The best Star Wars prequel reviews. The first one isn’t so great, but 2 and 3 really nail it, especially showing everyone involved (including Lucas!) knowing that they’re crap.
Hehe ankle-hugs.
Well, as for self-care, I guess I’m going to have some coffee and warm cinnamon applesauce before I start working again, so at least there’s that. :( Unfortunately this is just a bad weekend for me to shut down.
anklehugs: Well, my Archaeopteryx birdsona is a Revolutionary Icon of Science! and the size of a chicken. FROM THE KNEES DOWN, YOUR PRECONCEPTIONS ARE MINE! *scurries under the couch*
I have a close friend who’s very polyamorous, her marriage is close and has communication and intimacy that blows me away and she talks often about going to parties, meeting new people and having new-crush-energy and fun sexytimes. She sounds like she’s having a blast with her life but I always end up thinking how it would all exhaust the fuck out of me.
She thrives on change and novelty and I, well, don’t. I like being able to plan and pre-anticipate emotionally as well as logistically, so I wonder if that’s a big part of the “wiring” for monogamy and polyamory.
Google suspended my account while I was using it. WTF?
Ing, was this an account that had been used for G+ ?
@Love moderately
No. It’s a side one for doing business that I don’t want linked to my name or nyme. (ie freecycle, dating sites, blah blah blah)
That’s particularly distressing, then. I had only heard about them shutting down G+associated accounts like that.
I hope a few minutes writing a short email requesting reactivation wouldn’t be a waste. :( Good luck, and I’m sorry to hear this.
@midnight rambler
At first I liked episode 3. But when you take away the really cool light saber battles, one sees that the fall of Anakin in that movie is very unconvincing.
Why?
My G+ associated one for friend/family that known my name is fine. as is to my knowledge the one for my nyme
I don’t know much about it, but from the early fallout about G+, I was under the impression that only G+ associated accounts were actively policed for having real-sounding names.
I’m afraid I have nothing more intelligible to add to that. :(
Oh…FFS. I used an initial for that accounts first name and they’re suspending it? Why what the hell is the point?
because near as I can figure, G+ has taken it upon itself to end all internet anonymity.
More Santorum leaks from the ears of Santorum-For-Brains.
Woman gets raped. Woman gets pregnant. That fetus is the responsibility of the victim. The victim must change her life in order to care for the child.
Look at it this way, if the rapist gets the woman pregnant, at least the rapist did not go the immoral route of using a contraceptive.
A curse on everyone who uses the emotional ‘KILLING CHILDREN!’ appeal in their anti-choice crusades.
It pisses me off. It’s meant to paint an image similar to a mother hamster eating her own young. It’s meant to make their opponents look like callow, heartless murderers.
There was an abortion protest recently here, with self-righteous churchies waving pictures of dead late-term abortions, piles of limbs and blood and all that, at women. I wrote a scathing letter to the newspaper about that. The response was what you could expect. “Good, I hope they were offended! Maybe they’ll think next time before KILLING BABIES!”
I swear, if I ever see someone waving a sign like that at me, I don’t care what the charges are, that sign is going straight down their throat.
Interesting how the animal-rights groups waving bloody horror-show photos get derided as creepy whackjobs; but not the anti-abortion ones, oh no.
Maybe this picture would be a better answer:
http://motherjones.com/politics/2004/09/way-it-was
…with some captions: ACTUAL SIZE.
(sorry, I keep hitting post faster than my thoughts get coherent.)
Happy birthday, Esteleth.
When I lived in Maryland, an autobody shop out in the western part of the state put up a large sign which read, “Pray for freezing rain.” Presumably so they would get more business. It was funny until we had a freezing rain storm and a father with two toddlers was killed. The sign came down. Fast.
=====
So Santorum, referring to talking with his daughter, uses the phrase
and wants to deny the freedom of choice to everyone. Just like Palin saying that she was glad that her daughter chose to carry the pregnancy to term. Do this idiots even realize what they are saying?
=========
Currently cooking a pork roast with orange marmelade and smoked salt all over it. And am roasting potatoes, rutabaga, onions, garlic and red sweet pepper with lots of olive oil, black pepper and smoked salt. My stomach is growling.
Pteryxx, you have to keep in mind, a dead slut who dies because of a botched illegal abortion is not a bug, it is a feature. These are the same people who protest the use of HPV vaccines, because preventing cervical cancer will just encourage people to have sex.
@janine: I know, I know, I just can’t get my mind to work that way. It only makes any sense if I visualize a sort of stock market in women’s agony.
The Santorums didn’t mind a late term abortion when they needed one. Fuck that sanctimonious asshole and his asshole wife.
Bella has been asking to do Girl Scouts because a handful of her friends at school are in the same troop, and I thought, well, since GSA leaves a lot of issues up to the individual troop it wouldn’t hurt to look into what kinds of activities that troop does, who runs it, and make a discreet inquiry as to what they think of atheist scouts, whether they see group prayer/church stuff as an important part of their troop activity, and what their stance on feminism is.
A lot of the running-things type of people at her school are churchy-military-family retrograde types, and I don’t want her to be That Kid whose mom was That Mom and took her out of Scouts “because they said a prayer” or some such garbage.
To my frustration I find I can’t make those inquiries, because the Girl Scout council in my state only has an automated general inquiry form — I have to give my full name, my kid’s full name and age, and our address, and they tell me what troop I’m interested in finding out more about. So stupid.
This is the Internet, people! There is no reason in the world why there shouldn’t be an “email this troop leader” link for each troop in a given ZIP code. Why, why would anyone use the Internet to be deliberately obstructionist about getting information??
er,
nope. Got nothing for that one.
Yeah, the “OMG DEAD BABIES!!!” pictures are dishonest emotional manipulation. For one thing, they’re deliberately misleading: the overwhelming majority of abortions are carried out in the first trimester, when the embryo or foetus doesn’t look anything like a “baby”. As I understand it, late-term abortions are very rare, and are normally performed either because the foetus has already died in utero or because of a serious medical complication that would otherwise lead to both woman and foetus dying in childbirth.
And insofar as the protests are intended to advocate the enactment of prohibitive laws against abortion, we know for a fact that this approach is a bad one; empirically, outlawing abortion doesn’t reduce the number of abortions. It simply makes abortion more dangerous, and leads to more women dying through botched abortions. This holds true whatever one thinks about abortion from a moral perspective; even those who believe as a matter of religious doctrine that abortion is sinful ought to admit, as a demonstrated empirical fact, that prohibitive laws against abortion don’t actually deter abortion. In reality, anti-abortion laws aren’t about saving foetal lives; they’re about controlling women’s bodies.
Walton: Maybe it’s the nicotine withdrawal and the absolute frustration of dealing with religious dishonesty, but I love you right now.
Can you please do me a huge favor? I need some good links talking about Santorum’s wife’s late-term abortion. Stat. My mother flat out believes that it’s untrue.
@TLC
Santorum’s Santorum problem is making it difficult for me to find links
This one might be interesting though
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/01/15/mrs-santorum-s-abortion-doctor-boyfriend.html#
Might give an explanation on why a not very serious Catholic became the most insane anti-choicer once elected.
Wikipedia is annoying lauding of him as well.
A counter point to the claim
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/06/karen_santorum_did_not_have_an_abortion/singleton/
And a supporting one
http://jezebel.com/5873158/rick-santorums-anti+abortion-stance-would-have-killed-his-own-wife
How about:
https://proxy.freethought.online/lousycanuck/2011/06/19/santorums-wifes-abortion-was-different-you-see/
With extensive citations and source material here:
http://oursilverribbon.org/blog/?p=188
TLC: As I understand it, there’s a dispute as to whether the termination of her pregnancy (at 20 weeks) was deliberately induced. The original story, as far as I can tell, seems to have appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1997: I can’t find the original, but this blog reproduces the text. However, here it’s argued that what happened is not correctly characterized as a deliberate termination. I’m not a physician of any kind, so I won’t comment.
I got to meet Esteleth! *bounces up and down*
I have now met many Pharyngulites, and I have to say that never once have I met one who is not a simply wonderful person. Evil horde, pish posh.
@Walton
It’s also bullshit though because Ricky in his original telling of if fucking describes it exactly as someone would an abortion.
The decision was “harrowing but necessary”
Either it was an intentional abortion or a treatment that would kill the kid…it’s the same decision.
The argument apparently was that labor wasn’t induced just sped up with Pitocin.
Also you know…somehow Santorum’s decision is private and a nuanced medical decision.
Anyone else though it’s a matter of public record and they have to JUSTIFY it.
Nevermind. She won’t even glance at them. Not even a glance.
This is the fruit of God’s spirit. Mom’s always telling me how smart I am and how proud she is of my ability to learn. Then I tell her something she doesn’t want to hear, and suddenly I’m ‘brainwashed by my little websites’.
I love my mother, but it’s getting harder and harder to forgive her for this. I hate it. Every time she ever told me I was ‘smart’, it was hollow bullshit, spewed up just because I happened to be telling her stuff she wanted to hear. But suddenly when I tell her stuff she doesn’t want to hear about some creepy grinning godbotting douchebag, I’m just her little simpleminded aspie son getting his head filled with all kinds of crazy stories and believing them because I just hate God or something.
Every time my mom told me I was smart was a hollow lie.
Every time.
It all meant nothing.
@TLC, for what it’s worth, your friends here are real people too, behind our little screens of text. I’m an actual person in a dark house in Texas, wishing I was there for you to rant at.
I know Pteryxx…. but why would I rant at you anyways? You’re on my side, aren’t you?
I hate christianity so much…. for telling well meaning people like her that they MUST put the words of their fucking stupid shitty book over their own family and friends… actual living people.
She told me I was smart so many times I started to believe it. Until I tell her stuff she doesn’t want to hear.
It all meant nothing. Every single time she told me I was smart means nothing. Every single time. I’ve spent 27 goddamn years laboring under the delusion that I was somewhat ‘intelligent’. All for nothing.
Eh, maybe “to vent at” would’ve been more accurate. (I do still have IRC capability, if that’d be any use…)
You’re not limited to what any given person tells you you are, even someone you love and trust and believe. I know that doesn’t do much good right now, that it’s “only” your trust and love being violated, and not your intelligence.
Benjamin, I like the wood stork in pond best.
–
*hugs* for TLC. Sorry about your mom, dude.
My youngest brother wants to be in a Christian Militia, and has political attitudes to match that aspiration. It drives me nuts that he’s way more than average smart…but has a massive cognitive dissonance problem where religion/politics is concerned.
–
And now…GAME TIME!!!
–
TLC: that kind of betrayal really hurts, doesn’t it. I also grew up being praised for being bright, smart, perceptive. Until it became obvious that bright, smart and perceptive were all synonyms for “agreeing with my mother”.
It pulls the rug out from under you in a way that’s very difficult to recover from properly.
And that, TLC, is more than enough reason to no longer take any compliments she gives you seriously. Or it would be if it weren’t so hard to just give douchebag parents the heave-ho and not care. I guess in her world, there’s the right kind of smart and the wrong kind of smart. You happen to fall into the second category. At least you’ve got the Horde.
Ing: Bear in mind that Catholics believe in the “principle of double effect”. It is sometimes acceptable in their book to administer medical treatment that will cause a termination as a side-effect, provided that they aren’t deliberately trying to terminate the pregnancy. That might seem like hair-splitting sophistry, but Catholic theologians are good at hair-splitting sophistry (they’ve had several centuries of practice).
====
AAAAAARGGGGHHHH. Newt Gingrich apparently predicted to win in South Carolina. Because, evidently, “Republican family values” these days mean “trade in your wife for a younger model when you get bored, because it’s not like women are actually people, you know”. And apparently racist dog-whistles, general hypocrisy, and advocating the state-sanctioned murder of pot-smokers even though he himself once smoked pot are all no impediment to being popular with the voters.
I can’t stand Romney, but I’d vote for him over Gingrich in a heartbeat. It’s like the difference between being poked in the eye with a sharp stick and being decapitated.
TLC, for dog’s sake get some nicotine! (I’m just echoing something my therapist told me;-)
+++++++++++
Aside from the goram ice, I can’t complain about today. I got to hear Duke Fazir on ‘Wait, wait’, watch the Funk Brothers doc, and I’m listening to Leo Kotke play live on Prairie Home Companion.
Psst, I think Leo might have imbibed a bit before (during) the show. But it hasn’t affected his playing.
And the second paragraph in #196 is supposed to be unblockquoted.
TLC
*hugs*
Your mother was correct, you are intelligent.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/01/16/karen-santorum-gays-vilify-my-husband/
Oh, poor Karen, it’s tough being a bigot.
It’d be so easy if my mom was a bad person all around. But she never abused me, she was always so patient with me even when I was a crazy violent angry kid. I don’t like admitting this, but I kind of emotionally abused the fuck out of her when I was young. Any other parent would have had me shipped off to foster care, but not my mother.
That doesn’t change the fact that every time she told me I was smart was meaningless. Stupid and hollow.
I wish my mom was a horrible abusive person. Then I could just go ‘FUCK YOU! OUTTA MY LIFE!’ like I do with any other horrible abusive person I come across.
The real enemy here is people like Santorum. Grinning godbotting hypocrites. Monsters and demons in three-piece-business suits, smiling their fake crocodile smiles. Spewing their lies on TV, poisoning the hearts and minds of otherwise good people.
Sorry, I meant to say I ‘ALMOST’ wish my mom was a horrible abusive person. Actually wishing that would be stupid as fuck and insensitive to those who went through actual abuse. My apologies.
@TLC, it doesn’t sound to me like your mom’s a bad person, just that she’s transfixed by a belief anchored so deeply that even you smacking into it full force can’t budge it. It’s not a safe place anymore, knowing that spike is there.
Newt Gingrich winning South Carolina? Fuck yeah! This is going to be a much messier primary that I originally thought (which I like: if we’re going to hear about the primary for months, it might as well be interesting). Also, if The Newt wins, Obama will have such an easy time.
Some do, some don’t. Some prefer the crackers, some the grape juice, some the torture porn, some the funny hats.
On Newt:
Well, I’m pretty sure he was never guilty of illegally being brown while carrying it across the border. That makes all the difference, you know….
that’s a good quote, Pteryxx.
IRT Neut:He’s counting on “These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons.”
be careful what you wish for, George Fucking Bush got elected twice.
Yeah, sorry. I meant that it’s part of official (and long-established) Catholic moral teaching. Obviously not everyone who identifies as Catholic believes it, or even knows what it is. (But then, plenty of ordinary Catholics largely ignore the Vatican’s line on matters like contraception, abortion and same-sex marriage.)
Technically once
I doubt that. I think you underestimate the stupidity of the average voter.
TLC, I really feel for what you say about your mother. There can be few things more gut-wrenching than feeling something so tied up with the bedrock of what makes you you has been revealed as a sham. Maybe – thinking about what you said about her being so patient with you when you were young and all – maybe it’s kind of more like her being a victim, someone who’s own impulse is to be a good person but who has been indoctrinated with all the godbotting garbage, but you’ve seen through all that and she hasn’t … at least she was right about something: you are intelligent. And compassionate. And we’re all basing that on evidence.
Ah, but the current polling says that Newt would not be as competative in the general election as Romeny. Polls can be wrong, and we’re still really far out from election day, but things don’t look well for Newt in the general.
Newt’s win:
It just goes to show you that being a vindictive, hypocritical, race-baiting asshole pays off.
I wonder if Nikki Haley is going back and deleting all the emails showing she supported Mitt. It would be par for the course for her.
As odd as it seems to say. I think Newt isn’t as smart as Bush. Newt seems to have a personality where he can’t help but exalt himself and over indulge.
I know I linked it before, but again, Eric Taylor – Walkin’ Back Home
(as near as I can tell, anyway, with my rotten hearing.)
Ulrich Schnauss – Shine
Leftfield – Swords
Opposablethumbs: She is. A victim of liars for Jesus. Fucking christ I’ve never felt such burning hatred for something that doesn’t exist. My head is throbbing.
Yeah I think he’s smart, just not as smart as he thinks he is. By a looooooooooooooooooong shot.
I’m pretty sure he has the biggest ego of any politician I’ve seen in a long time.
And that is a herculean accomplishment. More than Blago even.
Newt is totally the person who would monologue his plan.
Newt confuses amoral ruthlessness for intelligence. He thinks that because others aren’t willing to do something that he is because it benefits them he’s smarter than them.
I’ll never understand why so many people my age like Ron Paul. Every time I listen to him speak, I just hear a crazy old man with silly ideas. He doesn’t have good ideas (or even new ones); he doesn’t have charisma; he doesn’t seem intelligent. I don’t get it.
Coyote,
My father is an extremely intelligent person, generally smarter than me, a longtime atheist and freethinker whose views have spanned a much broader spectrum than mine (since he was raised in a much more conservative time), and who for several decades has been as woo-free as any of us here are. But he is intractably, irrationally biased on one rather minor issue of geopolitics, and the internet has exacerbated this somewhat since he’s more able to find sources which reinforce his view.
I won’t go into more detail, and it’s possible that I’m wrong about his view being intractably irrational, but you can trust that I sincerely believe all this about him at the same time.
I can’t possibly know what your mother actually thinks about you, but I do know that it is in practice possible for a person to sincerely believe all the things she’s said.
+++++
Walton,
The claim should be qualified thus: if The Newt wins, Obama will have such an easy time, relative to a race against Romney.
This is what many polls, from many polling orgs, indicate.
That’s a good description.
I almost spit out my whisky when during the last debate he scolded John King for bringing up the ex-wife’s accusations.
Newt’s made a career out of attacking people and dirty tricks and he has the nerve to go after the moderator for bringing up a topic in the news concerning him.
What a fucking asshole.
The conundrum the
moronsrepublican base has the winner of their primary can’t win the general. At least I hope not.++++++++++++++++++++++
Obama definitely has his drawbacks, but you got to be kidding me if you don’t think he’s the only choice.
The thing with the moderator also shows how Newt isn’t good about hiding his sensitive issues. If Obama has the guts to do it, Newt will have announced all of his hot buttons.
Speaking of assholes, the Santorum concession speech
YYYYYYYYYYYYYYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWWWWNNN
Iiked this description I saw: Newt is an unreliable narrator.
For some unknown reason, Santorum is now talking about 9/11 (specifically Flight 93). WTF? How does that have anything to do with what he was talking about?
I should change the channel so I don’t have to watch all of these speeches, but I just don’t have the motivation to find something else to watch right now.
Santorum “I hate the government taking away our freedoms, unless you’re a fag.”
Has anyone seen Obama singing? Damn, he’s still got it. As disappointed as I am with him as a president, he’s got so much charisma that it’s fucking ridiculous.
Fuck. Part of me knew this would happen. I hoped it wouldn’t, but I knew it would. This is just the beginning. Now through the general election, in the primaries and the general election, 9/11 will come up again and again and again. Why? Because the only thing that will help the GOP win is fear — fear of unemployment, fear of China, fear of Muslims, fear of brown people, fear of Obama, fear of liberals, and, most of all, fear of terrorism.
The GOP has realized that terrorism works — domestic terrorism, that is. Terrorism is the creation of fear to affect politics. If they can create enough fear, enough terror, in the voting public, authoritarian candidates will win. And cable news (with the whole, “further news as updates require” mentality) will eat the fearmongering up, true or not, as it gets viewers to watch.
I am sick and tired of these chickenhawk assholes who insist that we must remember 9/11 (and remember it was all the fault of the liberals). At the risk of being too focused on me, I do not need this shit!
Rudy Giuliani isn’t in the race, therefore this is emotional territory that someone else gets to claim. It doesn’t really matter how they stake a claim to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santorum
Joe Paterno just died.
Hmmm. Janis. Blues. This is sorta soul, but fuck it:
Jeff Beck and Joss Stone – People Get Ready
—
Ogvorbis, OM @#171: “And the second paragraph in #196 is supposed to be unblockquoted.”
Prophesy! But did you let RevBDC know in advance? It didn’t come true.
I’m really tired of seeing pro PIPA/SOPA ads. They’re almost as dumb as the coal and natural gas lobby ones. I can’t even escape them by watch MSMBC. Maybe I should switch over to Current TV.
Uh oh, on of our local CBS channel reporters is tweeting that a fight has broken out after the Santorum speech.
Occupiers chanting “Santorum hates the gays”
Lets see if this is real and how it pans out.
Apparently an Occupier Charleston protester ran in screamed OCCUPY, threw glitter in the air and ran out. Then there was a lot of shoving and the occupiers were escorted out.
No, just innate stupidity on my part.
Next stop in the primary is Florida. I think I might attend an event if there’s one in my town. It would make an interesting blog post.
The Dems don’t have to campaign, all they have to do is quote republicans.
++++++++++++
I would prefer to discuss music. I like dulcimers. And there are several types. I also like guitars. I have one of the best, but it has a poor home in that I can’t play it in the way it deserves.
My friends, and even strangers, say I should keep it. I have always depended on the kindness of strangers;-)
++++++++++++
Oh, BTW, have you folks heard about Kickstart.org? There are other ways to do the same thing, but I’m particularly fond of this one.
In the right key, too. He should’ve kept going, but I’ll let Al Green take it from here.
I wonder if he had to get the “okay” from his wife before singing that to a crowd.
Which will be spun by Faux News into an attempted terrorist attack by and Occupy terrorist Canadian liberal muslim.
If Newt likes dirty politics, he better get ready. I have a feeling it’s going to get nasty.
I’ve got beer and popcorn.
Try that again:
Which will be spun by Faux News into an attempted terrorist attack by an OccupyWallStreet Canadian liberal muslim terrorist.
Looks like they’ll have the fight on the local news at 11.
QFT.
I think you hit the nail on the head there. Authoritarianism and fear are inextricably intertwined.
Okay, I have a bit more faith in humanity now. While Red Tails is still at only 34% positive from the critics on Rottentomatoes, the *audience* has it at 74%. It opened at second place (so far) behind Underworld: W’ever.
Source (HuffPo, sorry, sorry)
cr, oh yeah, Al Green has got it going on. The Prez ain’t bad, but Al Green? Ohhhhh yeahhh.
Does anyone know the most recent poll number for Florida?
Man, I need to read the thread more often. So much better than news. I don’t watch the news, but if I read the thread I get to keep up to date. =)
Vanity Fair tweeter taking bets on the song Newt uses. All bets are on Tom Petty “Won’t Back Down”
President Clinton could play the sax, but he couldn’t make a living at it. President Obama can sing, but he couldn’t make a living at it. I still haz some serious like for even being able to do it in public.
Newt just mispronounced the former Lt. Gov of SC name.
Is anyone else watch Newt’s speech noticing all the strange noises that the audience is making?
Rev BDC, the Tom Petty reference is funny! I’ll put my money on ‘whatever song they think applies will have the musicians going ‘nope’ not in a million years!”.
*sigh* I can’t type today.
That’d be “Is anyone else watching Newt’s…”.
More Red Tails fanbirding… holy moley. There’s a long NYTimes article, check it out:
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/magazine/george-lucas-red-tails.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all
Just remember folks, that same crowd chanting USA USA boo’d a gay soldier serving in Iraq.
My brain hurts now :(
Newt is now talking about “religious bigots”. But not in reference to his party, but in reference to judges who ruled to support the separation of church and state (aka, they didn’t get the christians what they wanted). Whhhyyyy is he so stupppiddd? D:
And here’s the Christian Persecution complex portion of tonight’s show
HE’S NOT EVEN USING THE TERM “RELIGIOUS BIGOTS” RIGHT!!! That doesn’t refer to people who don’t like religion, Newt, it refers to religious people who are bigoted because of their religion. What an idiot.
(sorry for the all caps)
Newt calls Obama a bigot and the food-stamp president in back-to-back sentences.
time to go back to the irony meters are us sale.
He’s not. He’s telling them what they want to hear.
One of the things I love about Austin City Limits: Joanna Newsom.
The trombone player made me cheer out loud. My neighbors probably aren’t happy.
Hey, if we’re gonna harp about something, I would prefer we harp about this.
I still haven’t woken up from the nightmare, huh? I wonder what percentage of this country would be stupid enough to vote for Newt Gingrich? Although part of me wants to see Gingrich wins the primaries so that when the election happens, I get to have an objective measurement on what percentage of this country is made up of dumbasses.
@ Sailor
I see what you did there.
Has everyone seen the latest Chick? Here Comes The Judge (yep, that’s the actual title.)
I worry that Penn State will lay all of the blame on Paterno now, in order to avoid anyone actually having any consequences for their atrocious management of Sandusky.
I’m going with “Once, twice, three times a lady”.
He’s apparently not dead.
Caine:
That is, er, what’s the word I’m looking for? No, not that. No, not that either. Yeah, I don’t know, either. I do find it interesting that Jack is actually going after some paranoid authoritarians, thought. Different — tjat’s the word I was looking for. Not different enough, though.
Rev – sources say Paterno’s not dead yet.
Glitter thrown at Santorum video.
Watch out for the sweater vest police!!!
yeah
Rev:
He Is Not Yet Dead!
(Truth in blogging: even with the obvious glaring errors of judgement and legality in the Sandusky case, there are still things I admire about Paterno.)
Happy Ending stout all over my laptop.
@ Rev.BDC
I see your glittery Occupy video and raise you an Occupier being arrested for wearing an Occupy jacket in the Supreme Court.
Janis Joplin, fuck yeah!
Also THE GITS!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3e3X9HORwY&feature=related
We miss you Mia! :(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mia_Zapata
KG and I and some others were arguing with Ophelia and some others at her blog about Islamophobia. She’s seemed to go back and forth between saying that she finds the term misleading and somewhat open to abuse – which is a valid point to some extent but generally not that convincing to me* – and arguments that show that she doesn’t recognize or acknowledge the significance of the phenomenon anti-bigots use that term to capture. This is bizarre because she does the contrary with, say, misogyny. (This discussion, including my extensive arguments, was on her “Islamophobe” thread, to which I haven’t returned, so I don’t know what’s happened with it.)
So now she has a new post making, in the first paragraph, something of an argument from popularity (and I know from the film about Charlie Hebdo that some of the signers of the statement she mentions have more sophisticated views than are represented in that one document) primarily about the term “Islamophobia.” (I should note that we did not suggest that she’s crazy or that her view was idiosyncratic; quite the contrary.)
But the second paragraph quotes from Piers Benn:
This is what she quotes. I just… This is simply incredible to me, and I don’t know where to start.
*I don’t think any term is going to be perfect, and I think that people who have a political agenda are going to do this with any term, including her suggested “Muslimophobia” (“We’re not afraid of Muslims but of the real threat of the imposition of Sharia law in Idaho…”; “You’re criticizing Sharia law just because you hate Muslims”).
Still laughing over the sweater vest Santorum supporters.
Sweater Vest is the new Brownshirt
Thanks StarStuff!
For tonight’s performance, Sailor will be playing the role of janine*
Jubal’s Kin
Smokey Robinson
Jenn Cristy Band
* janine, if I over stepped my bounds, I apologize.
I could’ve sworn that was Wilford Brimley being pushed around by the bald dudes in sweater vests. I think I need more drugs.
Still highly amused by the Santorum supporters folowing his sweater vest love.
The sweater-vest/shaved-head combo is unsettling.
I almost did call the bald dudes “skinheads.” I thought that might seem uncharitable.
SC: Yeah, I largely agree with you on that, and weighed in to that effect over there yesterday. I do think Islamophobia is a real and serious phenomenon, especially as it’s an easy propaganda-tool for the far right to push a xenophobic and anti-immigrant agenda. And I think the term has a specific meaning: reasonable criticisms of Islam are not Islamophobia, but I’d say that the term Islamophobia accurately describes the wildly-exaggerated scaremongering about Western countries being “swamped by Muslims”, and the caricatures and stereotypes of Muslims, that we see from hatemongers like Pat Condell, Mark Steyn or Geert Wilders. Of course Ophelia is right that the term “Islamophobia” is used sometimes to stifle legitimate criticism of Islam, but that doesn’t mean that there is no such thing as actual Islamophobia; and while I understand why she argues that an alternative term would be better, I do think we need an agreed-upon term to label those who are anti-Muslim bigots, and to distinguish them from people who are making reasonable and measured criticisms of Islam.
I was likewise astounded by her use of the quote from Piers Benn, and wasn’t sure at all what she was driving at. To me, the Benn quote sounded like another way of dressing up the tired old “hate the sin, love the sinner” defence of homophobia. I don’t think it supports her position; in fact I think it undermines it considerably, if she’s going to choose to draw that particular parallel.
Well, thanks to Rick Santorum, I will never wear a sweater vest.
Thankfully I have missed all of the speeches to which people allude above, since I haven’t watched any coverage of the primary. I can’t stand to do that to my brain. I’ve been distracting myself by watching videos of European royalty on YouTube, a far more productive endeavour.
walton:
Care to quote his alleged hatemongering?
You’re not serious
Aww, and I liked sweatervests :(
Ing, perhaps Walton can substantiate his allegation.
(Perhaps not)
So, I’m watching Legends & Lyrics. It’s an excellent showcase of song writers. But it’s the standard Nashville guitar pull. I’m more familiar with the LA version where everyone chips in and it is a band that backs everyone else up.
The chords and chord progressions aren’t original, why isn’t everyone on stage chiming in?
Good thing I never wore sweater vests.
Pot.
I think love moderately has a more wordy answer, but that’s the gist of it.
I was getting a throbbing spike headache, and then I learned that if I tense up until the veins in my arms look like writhing worms, it actually goes away a bit.
Ex smokers: What the fuck am I supposed to do with all this energy?
John: Please don’t be an ass about this. This is important.
To take just one example: in his video Goodbye Sweden, he says “no country has done more to embrace the multicultural nightmare… I mean dream… than Sweden”; accuses the Swedish government of trying to “wipe their culture clean out of existence”, and asserts that it’s “now unconstitutional to uphold Swedish values in Sweden”. (What the fuck are “Swedish values”?) He goes on to allege that immigrants are responsible for an increase in rapes in Sweden, saying that Sweden is now “the rape capital of Europe” and explicitly linking this to “immigrant Islamic culture”.
That is anti-immigrant hate speech, of exactly the kind we hear from the BNP and from the likes of Geert Wilders. It’s classic cover for an agenda of opposing immigration. And, unsurprisingly, he also supports UKIP, a party with a racist anti-immigration platform.
He also stands shoulder-to-shoulder with right-wing bigots in the US like WorldNetDaily columnist Pam Gellar, who promoted his video “The Great Palestinian Lie” among others.
Man oh man. Some frozen fruit, milk, and sugar, and baby, you got yourself a smoothie.
I suggest chainsaw sculpting.
What do the statistics say?
So, when the Newt said on TV that he represents the true American values, was he actually joking ? I can’t tell anymore.
John M, I’d have no problem signing off on Condell being a hatemongerer. What I don’t get are the attempts to construe from examples of racism like Condell or Wilders that any criticism of Muslims is somehow tainted with this “islamophobia” beast.
January in most parts of Canada is depressing enough on its own, so I’m not going to think about American politics tonight.
Instead, I’m thinking about my severe case of cabin fever. You know it’s the middle of winter when you’re daydreaming longingly of portaging half your body weight across rocky terrain while donating blood to the local mosquito and horsefly populations. My last canoe trip was completed in a hurry after we were delayed by an unexpected swim in some rapids – I would kill to be back on that river fishing for walleye below unnamed waterfalls.
Since the water in my area is kind of frozen right now, I’m sitting on my couch in front of the fire reading guidebooks and wishing I had better whitewater skills. I’m a very amateur canoeist, but it’s such a great way to access wilderness. In the spring I’m going to join the local paddling club and learn how to negotiate rapids without going for a swim.
What would other folks here be doing if it was your preferred season?
Starstuff:
I see Rey Fox has beaten me to it by a handful of posts, but…
Because he promises not to mess with them for smoking weed.
Also, I sometimes suspect, because they know it makes people my age’s heads explode. ;^)
I didn’t say that. Nor did anyone else here, as far as I can see. As I explicitly said at #260, “…reasonable criticisms of Islam are not Islamophobia.” I certainly wouldn’t label Ophelia herself an Islamophobe; I agree with most of what she writes, and I recognize that her activism is motivated by the desire to protect the rights of women, LGBT people and other marginalized groups within Muslim communities, and to protect freedom of speech and conscience more generally. I think she’s right to stand up against religious bigotry. So too with other activists like Maryam Namazie (who wrote an excellent post on this subject in response to neoconservative Douglas Murray).
But the fact that there are legitimate criticisms of Islam, and that false accusations of “Islamophobia” are sometimes thrown around to counter those criticisms, doesn’t mean that there isn’t such a thing as real Islamophobia. After all, false accusations of anti-Semitism are sometimes thrown around too (particularly in response to justified criticisms of Israeli government policy); but there’s still no shortage of real anti-Semitism out there.
======
Trawling for links to Condell’s hatemongering, I discovered that Richard Dawkins has explicitly defended Condell’s views.
I already disliked Dawkins for a whole host of reasons, but this confirms my inclination to distance myself from him. I often feel that Dawkins is so blinded by his focus on opposing religion that he seems completely unable to recognize racism and sexism when they come from atheists, and unwilling to acknowledge that, sometimes, white Western atheist activists can be on the wrong side of a social issue and can be contributing to oppression of a marginalized group.
It certainly does undermine it considerably. First, it implies a false and sickening parallel: that there’s legitimate criticism of both Islam and homosexuality that can and needs to be distinguished from bigotry (and “disapproval of homosexual behaviour” is meaningfully categorized as the former). Second, it is parallel in that it does exactly what I warned her about yesterday: it tries to claim a narrow, literal reading of a term so as to dismiss or discredit discussion or accusations of bigotry. It’s especially bad here because “homophobia” read literally doesn’t point to “the fear (or hatred) of homosexual individuals” significantly more than “disapproval of homosexual behaviour.” The literal term doesn’t say anything about hatred or individuals vs. acts, and claiming that it does gives away the game. I can’t believe she’d quote that.
No one warned me that every muscle in my arms and spinal cord would turn into bowstrings when I said I had to quit cigarettes.
I’m… starting to like it? I feel like I could rip the hood off a car if I wanted. I know it’s illusory, but I kinda like it.
I wonder how this will effect my hunting?
Indeed. It’s the classic “hate the sin, love the sinner” distinction, and it’s always been bullshit.
Yes, and I think this is particularly dangerous in the context of Islamophobia. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve talked about the racism underlying the far right’s hyperbolic attacks on Islam, and the response has been “What? Islam is a religion, not a race.” This kind of rhetoric is used even by Geert Wilders, who is fond of saying that he hates Islam, not Muslims. It gives the actual racists a degree of plausible deniability: when called out, they can claim that they don’t hate Muslim immigrants personally, and that they’re just concerned about “our culture” being eroded by an influx of “Islamic culture”. Bonus points if they also rail against “multiculturalism” and “political correctness” (the favourite bogeymen of the far right, although I’ve never been able to elicit a satisfactory definition of either concept).
TLC:
I cried a lot, yelled a lot, and then afterwards, I scrubbed down my entire apartment. It was like I was tweaking out.
But, I relapsed. Again. *sigh* It’s incredibly frustrating for me ‘cos I’m good for a month or two, then I slide back into smoking, then I quit again and go through the whole fucking withdrawal thing over again. I’m like a fucking pro at this shit now.
TLC:
I’ve only been half paying attention to Teh Thread™– have you had shaky hands yet? Or is that part of being drawn tight like a bowstring?
More photos!
A bird (I think it was another wood stork) in a tree in the morning.
One of many spider webs along the trail.
The guy who organized the field trip.
Funny.
I actually refrained from making the comparison with “homophobia” to Ophelia because I thought it would be misleading, since there are no legitimate criticisms of gay people as such.
rorschach,
You pretend like anybody does what you’re alleging.
I think you’re lying.
:)
That’s probably the plurality of it.
TLC, for goodness’ sake!
[aside]
Ever read Andrew Vachss, particularly the Burke Series?
Dr Audley: No shaking hands…. huge forearm veins and constant clenching.
It’s actually feeling good now, but that might be the weed. Maybe this will work. Usually I’m used to having a cigarette right after every doobie…. and it turns out I’ve been ripping myself off. I am so fucking high right now, and I’m not burning out.
So there’s two obvious options:
John Morales believes that telling people to vote for a racist party is not a racist action,
or
John Morales is not aware that UKIP is a racist party.
Which is it, John?
Aforementioned spike-headache is also gone like a fart in the wind. Now I just want to run through the jungle.
Frick… if quitting smoking gives you Hulk arms, I’m tempted to take up smoking and then quit just to get the rage out.
I’m now ragey, because I just realized most of the music I love is missing, not only from my computer, but from my memory. My abuser brainwashed MY MUSIC right out of me, and for many years I never noticed, right up until tonight when I started looking for it. What. The. Fuck.
She had me at “C’mon”.
Saw her live at the University of New Hampshire in ’67 (? oh, boy, memory). She had on leather pants and danced with frat boys on stage. I was in high school and not bold enough to step up. Pity, that, I’ve ever after thought . . .
ॐ:
Obvious to you, perhaps.
The claim at hand is that Pat Condell is a hatemonger; I asked for a quotation to substantiate that claim.
(cf. my #262. Quotations so far adduced do not sustain that claim.)
Oh pteryxx. I’m sorry :( just not fucking fair sometimes.
TLC:
Huh. That would actually freak me out if that had happened to me. But I don’t have veiny forearms in the first place.
Pteryxx:
I know this is tongue-in-cheek, but the emotional roller-coaster is not fun nor is it very helpful. It’s not cathartic, you know?
Holy fuck. That’s incredibly shitty. :(
Older kid has lice. Gah …
DR Audley: I think it’s awesome. I can make them balloon up at will if I want.
It’s either some new mutant superpower, or a sure sign I’ll have a heart attack at 35.
Also my body seems to be putting off more heat.
You have to be fucking kidding. Ranting about how Muslim immigration and multiculturalism are destroying Sweden’s culture, fearmongering about Sweden becoming “the first European Islamic state”, and blaming Muslim immigrants for an increase in the number of rapes, isn’t hatemongering in your book? Telling one’s followers to vote for a racist nationalistic party isn’t hatemongering in your book? Campaigning against the peaceful building of a perfectly-legal place of worship isn’t hatemongering in your book?
That is Condell. A racist and a liar.
I have no fucking words. Seriously. John, I don’t think you understand how personally I take this shit. The kinds of sentiments that Condell is promoting – the idea that “our culture” is under threat, and painting Muslim immigrants as a homogeneous scary Other – are having an effect. People listen to this kind of anti-Muslim scaremongering, and they vote. And that’s exactly what leads to this happening, and this. And Condell’s words are being used and quoted with approval by people like Geert Wilders, a man who wants to ban Muslim immigration to the Netherlands and outlaw the Qu’ran.
*headshake* I went looking for songs for TLC, and couldn’t find them. Not that one, or that one, or that one… wait a minute, these are my favorite bands, I had whole collections of them, why do I now have only two or three songs on my computer? Why can’t I remember the songs that used to be a bulwark and refuge for me? Even the titles, so I could find them online?
*sigh* This is going to keep happening for years, isn’t it… finding the edges where bits of myself used to be.
When I calm down I’ll start looking… it was old techno, industrial, trance and ambient mostly, and movie soundtracks.
Thanks for sympathies, you guys. I know you’re real humans at your screens, too.
I really like listening to hammered dulcimers.
–
Anybody got any ideas on how to deal with a 10 year old boy, the son of a friend, who seems to be engaging in acts of petty theft and vandalism? The suspicion is that he’s “acting out” because of his parents’ divorce. What do you do in these cases, without being all accusatory and alienating?
–
*opens mouth*
….
*closes mouth and leaves*
Huh.
So you contend that it’s not hatemongering to tell people to vote for a racist party?
Like, not every Nazi was a hatemonger?
What did I say? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cause any offence. In my defence, it’s the middle of the night here, I’m trying to write a paper at the same time as having this argument, and I was enraged by Condell’s comments (because justice and equality for immigrants is an issue I take personally, for various reasons).
Talking of the homophobia/islamophobia thing (a very unfortunate analogy indeed) :
A new term is born : Christophobia ! (with honorary mention of yours truly as a “miserable Orc”)
Fortunately, when needing a pick-me-up in the dark hours of the morning, the Internet provides. Cracked has a particularly good batch up:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-stupidest-habits-you-develop-growing-up-poor/
http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-absurd-situations-that-only-happen-in-food-commercials/
http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-7-most-baffling-things-about-womens-clothes/
http://www.cracked.com/article_19628_9-ridiculous-cooking-myths-you-probably-believe.html
The bit about trichinosis being gone from the pork supply is in there.
rorschach, did you say something about a coffee cup?
+++++
I don’t expect Christophobia to become common parlance, but if it does, it’ll be like misandry: not really a social problem.
Ok, some do what I’m alleging. Happy now ?
What is even worse, some gloss over, or ignore, or trivialize, the effect that, for example in the UK, the teaching of creationism (or the art of amputating hands) will have on future voters and workers who go to Islamic schools there now, or the effect that the currently ~90 Sharia arbitration courts have on women’s rights, the fact that in the middle of the United Kingdom exists a parallel judiciary system where a woman’s voice counts half that of a man, where husbands can divorce their wifes by just disowning them, while women have to defend and justify their decision to want a divorce, where children are given into a husband’s custody at a certain age by default. And they do that because they don’t want to be seen as “islamophobes” or racists.
You may have heard of the 2 Muslims who were arrested the other day in the UK for distributing flyers calling for the death penalty for homosexuals. Is it islamophobic for the BBC to report this ?
No, I didn’t get that reference…
Passing this on :
Benjamin, I like the spiderweb picture the best, of that lot.
–
No, because you don’t give any examples of it occurring. As you know, I don’t believe you’re generally competent to read and understand basic human conversation.
So I’d like to see an example of what you think constitutes evidence for your assertion that there exist ‘attempts to construe from examples of racism like Condell or Wilders that any criticism of Muslims is somehow tainted with this “islamophobia” beast.’
You probably assume too much. Many people don’t pay attention to polygamy in the FLDS, but it’s not generally because they are afraid of being called anti-Mormon; rather, they just have other shit to do with their time.
Why, is someone alleging that it’s Islamophobic for the BBC to report this?
@rorschach,
As I said in the previous thread, they were found guilty.
@rorschach
You are strawmanning. Obviously, when Muslims do stupid things and break the law, it is not Islamophobic to call them out on it and arrest them for it. Nor is it Islamophobic to say that Islam is a stupid religion. What is Islamophobic though is inciting hate to all Muslims the way Pat Condell does, supporting immigration laws that are racist in its very core.
No, that’s just plain racist, and something to be made public and opposed. “Islamophobic” is a term just as nonsensical as “christophobic”. We shouldn’t be using it. Our criticism of Islam or Christianity is not based on irrational fear, but on rational arguments and the other side’s lack of evidence.
No, neither of those terms is nonsensical. Each has a plain and obvious meaning. That’s how I can say so readily that Christophobia would not be much of a social issue. At least not here. I suppose Christophobia is a real problem in Egypt.
So, once again, an example of when Islamophobia cannot be reduced to racism or xenophobia:
Geert Wilders is bigoted about Muslims, not just about immigrants. When visiting Florida he said “Islam is not a religion” and “the right to religious freedom should not apply”.
He is thus bigoted against not only immigrants, but against Muslims per se, and against some of their cultural practices, including Islam itself. That’s Islamophobia when he says Islam is not a religion; it’s not just Muslim-phobia, let alone xenophobia or racism.
So xenophobia doesn’t cover everything that’s wrong with his statement. But Islamophobia does.
One month ago, rorschach agreed with me that Islamophobia is a real thing. He appeared to recognize the utility of the word.
Was he lying then?
Is he lying now?
Did he change his mind?
Is he just continually confused, and doesn’t know what he believes?
I suspect option #4.
Context matters. Calling me a christophobe for criticising a Christian who threatened SLAPP action against another blogger is done with a purpose in mind, namely to distract from the fact that the SLAPP action is obscene. Calling someone an Islamophobe for say pointing to the problems with Islamic arbitration courts in the UK fulfils the same purpose, it distracts from the actual argument.
Indeed! That’s how we know you were wrong to claim that it’s a nonsensical term.
For if it were a nonsensical term, context could not matter.
+++++
How much are you planning to dodge tonight, rorschach? I’m still waiting on this one:
Why, is someone alleging that it’s Islamophobic for the BBC to report this?
Pteryxx
I’m so sorry =( That’s terrible. I remember after I just out of my relationship, I had no fucking clue what I liked. Without him around to control everything I suddenly could do what I wanted and couldn’t remember anything I liked. I had no idea who I was. I was left sitting staring at the wall wondering “WTF?” I refound my love of books and starting reading like crazy. I’m still stumbling around. Our previous discussions about puzzle people really helped me realize what the hell happened to me growing up. I’m very connected to you guys for that and think “puzzle person” is the best way I’ve found to explain how I feel.
I’m sorry I can only offer internet hugs, if you want them. I hope it gets better.
TLC:
I have no clue. =/ I’m still smoking and the closest I’ve come to not having cigs is re-rolling re-rolls. Yeah, it was bad. I just remember incredible mood swings and mostly wanted to burn down the world. I’m still using tubes to make my own because I can’t afford reg. cigs. I down want to go through the withdraws. Seriously scary. I offer you hugs too, if you want them. I’d share my tobacco if I was near you. Sorry =(
I did try e-cigs and they kept the chemical withdraw at bay but it didn’t satisfy my need to smoke. Plus I had issues with ordering/receiving the refills. Of course those could just be rationalizing it away to smoke cigs. I should look back into that soon through.
Walton:
Not necessarily.
ॐ:
You think every Nazi was a hatemonger?
(Hate-mongering: a serious claim)
Good morning
Last night, my computer decided to give me a heart attack.
Since I was better yesterday but in no way fit for normal household tasks, I decided to do some light work that I’d been pushing off, i.e. finally ordering the holiday pictures photo-book.
So I downloaded the programm, selected, edited, arranged pictures for hours, saved the whole stuff, had to leave, came back some hours later, started the computer, wanted to click on the icon, and it was gone…
Hours and hours and the progarmm was gone.
Well, until I found the Icon in another place where it didn’t belong, but those 10 secs were bad.
TLC
Hugs for mother-woes. I know they’re bad.
Santorum’s wife’s abortion
As mentioned over at Jason’s blog, “abortion” doesn’t even have a clear cut definition, which means that it is pretty difficult drawing any line. Except for the one Santorum and his ilk wants to draw which would have killed his own wife (well, certainly not, there are always ways for rich folks)and lots of other women.
Yep, there are actually cool, anti-racist left-wing skinheads around ;)
SC / islamophobia
I’ll see if I can muster up the time to go there tonight. I think lots of the problems stem from American ignorance of European politics. The fact that those people who were shunned as asshole racist xenophobes during the 80’s and 90’s are now coming back hiding as “critics of Islam”, when in fact they just hate foreigners and always have. Conveniently, those foreigners share a religion. Don’t doubt it, those people don’t care about what a muslim X actually thinks, believes or does, they hate them for being “darkies” and they attack the regardless.
People who called me a “Turkish slut” for having dark hair, dark eyes and coming out of a Turkish supermarket surely don’t care about gays and women being killed in Iran or Saudi Arabia.
If the hear of an honour murder where the brother is arrested, they score a double win.
RE: Pat Condell
Don’t forget his actual wildd-ass lies like “all rapes in Sweden were commited by muslim imigrants”. Which was contradicted by the sources he listed himself.
Oh dear nonexistent gods, it must be a day of lent in Walhalla, I agree with LM.
Benjamin
Your pics are beautifull, I’d probably make prints of them and frame them.
No, I don’t. That’s why I asked if that’s what you’re getting at.
But I think it’s fair to say that becoming a very public spokesperson for the Nazi party would constitute hatemongering, by the indirect effects of such an action, even if the spokesperson didn’t personally feel any hatred or explicitly say “you should hate”.
+++++
That’s twice!
Mwahaha.
Hm.
Heh. I remember that. I remember the first thing I was able to identify myself liking was a pair of tights with purple hearts on them. (I bought them. I still like them!) I also remember that I wasn’t able to consistently make decisions about what to eat, which first of all is shitty but second is really strange because it was extremely rare that any of the people I had relationships with would interfere with my food at all. I apparently just wasn’t equipped to make decisions without someone else’s approval backing me up. It’s not a happy place to be.
This. *hugs to everyone, but especially pteryxx and J_A_L*
So, rorschach is not even going to try to justify asking his question about the BBC.
That’s dishonest of you, rorschach. You’re strawmanning. And it’s a pattern.
Actually, he is getting some dishwashing done right now and is trying to enjoy his one night off for this coming week.
Indeed. Similarly, calling someone an antisemite for criticising the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians distracts from the actual argument. That does not mean antisemitism is not a real phenomenon. Some of us (SC, walton, lm, me, maybe others) have been arguing with Ophelia Benson over this at B&W. It is reasonable to point out that the word “Islamophobia” is problematic, as, taken literally, it appears to refer to Islam rather than Muslims. It is not reasonable to deny the existence of specifically anti-Muslim hatred as a real and dangerous social phenomenon.
This is the sort of fucking stupid nonsense I’ve come to expect from rorschach from time to time.
True in many cases, but not all. The EDL (English Defence League), the main anti-Muslim group of street thugs in the UK, has black, Jewish, Hindu and Sikh members.
The last paragraph of my #325 is a response to Giliell, not part of my response to rorschach.
Are you turning soft or something ?
I’ve chosen to spend this evening listening to music, so bite me, sg.
Wrong G, B.
(And you’ve chosen to spend this evening trotting out bullshit strawmen, then acting like you don’t have any responsibility to answer for your words.
Because you are a habitually dishonest fuck.
Enjoy your tunes.)
Big Meh. I won’t start justifying what I do and when to you mate. Get stuffed.
It really doesn’t matter who’s asking you. You are a liar, and your refusal to explain why you built a strawman is dishonest of you, no matter who’s asking.
That you think it the identity of the critic does matter is just more evidence that you don’t know how to do skepticism.
Pharyngula’s getting weird spam trackbacks that are zombirevivifying old, dusty threads: starting here and here.
Apologies for breaking up the flow of discussion and way late on the topic PZ originally posted, but I had to add this because it is my favorite Janis tune (and some people were posting tunage anywah).
I get messed up when I try the HTML so forgive the wonky format.
Janis singing George Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’:
http://youtu.be/X0B41tBTTko
Another just now: here.
…a coincidence that PZ calls out a feed-monkey then gets a load of spam trackbacks?
Off-topic (but I figure since it’s TET, I can get away with it), but I stumbled across this gem this morning: “CDC researchers say mothers should stop breastfeeding to boost ‘efficacy’ of vaccines”. It’s from NaturalNews.com, which, IIRC, is the brain(less)child of some quack or another. It’s pretty much what you would expect–“The CDC wants to poison your child with teh ebil vaccines and take your child off of the gods’ nectar that is breastmilk*!!!!111!!!1” They’re complaining about a paper titled “Inhibitory effect of breast milk on infectivity of live oral rotavirus vaccines”. Their “sources” include their website, some anti-vax website, and an unrelated Bloomberg Business Week article. A google search of the paper turns up nothing, but I was wondering if anybody here was familiar with it. I’d like to know what this paper is really about, and respond to the friend who posted it elsewhere. Here’s the link for those who can stomach something like Natural News: http://www.naturalnews.com/034722_breastfeeding_vaccines_CDC.html
*While I realize there are many benefits associated with breastfeeding, that is not always in the cards for some (many?) women, and I get fed up with the whole demonizing of those who cannot or will not breastfeed. But that’s another rant for another time.
And since it’s tomorrow already (but not here…if that makes any sense), happy Tết to TeT (not to be confused with a tête-à-tête, if you can wrap your head around that). Someone told me it’s the year of the Dragonmom, or something like that.
Have I mentioned that I really hate Mondays?
No?
Damn, your memory is bad.
I really hate Monday’s, too, Oggie. Thankfully, it’s Sunday in Darkheartland.
Crap dammit. I had a reason for logging in and now I have no clue. NEED MOAR COFFEE.
KG
Hmm, can’t comment on the situation in GB, of course, but sounds a bit like cognitive dissonance to me, like gay Neonazis and Russians reenacting German victories in WWII.
But I agree that it is true that the bad old right have left certain groups of foreigners “off the hook” over this. In my childhood, common terminology for immigrants was still “Gastarbeiter”, guest-worker. Yes, you keep calling people guest-worker after their kids who were born here graduated from high-school and then you wonder why they don’t integrate themselves well…
And a common insult for Italian immigrants was “Spaghettifresser”. I haven’t heard the latter one in a while, nor have I heard many complaints about Italian immigration. Yet, when I look back to my highschool days, there were two girls who needed protection against their own fathers, who wanted to keep them pure and marry them in arranged marriages, and both girls were Roman Catholic Christian Italians. I doubt that this doesn’t happen anymore.
And for your ammusement, brought to you by the stealth-jihadists of BBC4: The eebil Swimming-pool conspiracy
Calendarist!
I just love walking into the buzzsaw of, “We found out about this Friday (which is my Saturday right now), why haven’t you dealt with this yet?” Except not nearly as polite.
Oggie *
Well I could show up to work today in solidarity, but there’d be nothing to do.
Try not to strangle anyone today, okay?
*Damned autocorrect changes your ‘nym to “Foggiest”. :-/
Strangely appropriate for my ongoing state of mind.
Ah. Now I get it. I should have anticipated the problem (which has never been a problem any other day that we expect snow the following day).
Day 2 of my attempt to quit smoking… and I’m feeling surprisingly good about it.
rmw1982:
Without reading the original, I’d say, there’s yer problem. An oral vaccine is given to the baby by squirting it into their mouth. Obviously, if they’re breast-feeding, then breast milk components are going to be in there also; and breast milk (especially early breast milk) contains maternal antibodies and other protective factors designed to help guard the infant against infection. So no duh, breast milk could interfere with a vaccine given by mouth that contains live (weakened) rotavirus. It’s just doing its job.
That means nothing for vaccines in general, particularly ones given by injections; unless someone’s trying to breastfeed subcutaneously.
J_A_L, Classical Cipher: thank you both, again.
It helps to know this isn’t some inherent flaw in me, it’s just old damage being uncovered. Also, it explains a lot. I haven’t been able to decide what to eat either, for no apparent historical reason, and I’d chalked it up to ADD as something I would have to learn to endure forever, instead of old damage that could eventually heal.
That also may explain why I’m having such terror associated with trying to draw or create anything. An artist HAS to be constantly making creative decisions based on faith in oneself.
{Pheeuw, caught up at last.}
@ All Pharyngulites
KUNG HEI FAT CHOI! (Happy New Year!…Pictures of dragonz to follow tomorrow.)
@ TLC
I was led to believe that if you could last out the first 72 hours you would be clear of the whole withdrawal process. You are doing well. (At least give yourself that as a target before googling it.) Break a leg.
Audley:
Just got a cuppa fresh coffee. It ain’t helpin’.
Re the site swiping all of FTB’s blogs: Ed says Tumblr has removed the offending site completely, good on ’em.
His thread turned into a discussion of copyright, SOPA, the use of adblocking, and thus the forms of advertising on FTB. This is of particular interest:
Link to comment
Those are some good reasons for enabling ads and pop-ups while visiting FTB, definitely.
Personally I would rather keep my adblocking on, and donate to FTB directly if such an option existed, because of the risk posed by ads on all the OTHER sites I have open at the same time. However I’m considering customizing a separate browser install specifically for ad-enabled FTB.
Caine,
Yup, not helping me, either. The typos are strong today.
TLC: Cool, keep it up. And think about chainsaw sculpting.
Pteryxx,
If you’re using Ad Block for Firefox, you should be able to disable it for specific sites.
Pteryxx:
I don’t know which adblocker you use, but AdBlock Plus (the Firefox favorite) allows you to disable blocking on a site-by-site basis.
In Denmark children of immigrants are refered to as 2nd generation immigrants. Only of course, if they are from a non-western country.
Since the “2nd generation immigrants” now are starting to have children, you can now hear references to “3rd generation immigrants”.
Yeah, I know I can disable Adblock for FTB (and I do) but Noscript and Firefox’s own pop-up blocker still disable almost all the ads, including the one carefully screened FTB pop-up that makes Ed so much money. I can’t disable pop-ups specifically on FTB, nor script blocking – Noscript blocks the ad server, not FTB, and does so across every tab I have open. If I enable say Google ad services in Noscript for FTB’s benefit, it’s going to attempt to load Google ad services on every single tab I have open; and when some of THOSE tabs have Adblock disabled (but are less cautious about screening their ads) I’m going to get pop-ups and random sound from those other sites.
Sadly, another problem with the ads on FtB is that they slow down page loading. It adds to the annoyance factor.
Now, with AdBlockPlus 2.0, the last version, default settings allow “acceptable ads” (non-intrusive ones, meaning they are small and/or mostly text-based) to be seen. The rationale is to give an incentive to advertisers and websites developers to tone down the average ad:
http://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads
@ Pteryxx #355:
Actually, with Firefox, you can specifically allow pop-ups for FtB (if you decided to). It’s in “Preferences”, “Content”, and then “Exceptions” to “Block pop-ups”. Write “freethoughtblogs.com” and click “Allow”.
@Irene, thanks, I’ll give that a shot. (When I’m on dial-up though, I’m not loading *nothin* but text. It’s the only way I can get TET to load at all.)
in my Firefox 8.0 it’s actually Tools > Options > Content > Block pop-up windows is still checked, but goto Exceptions box – entered “freethoughtblogs.com” to the whitelist. We’ll see how it goes.
(Gaaah! Example of some very annoying ads: the one that shows up on an article page, between the article and the comments! And on the main page, the ones that get between two articles… If it was only the ads in the margin, I’d turn off the ad blocker on FtB. But there’s a content/ad ratio problem, here.)
aaaand my AdblockPlus is already 2.0 and has “Allow some non-intrusive advertising” enabled by default, as specified in the site:
https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads
Sneaky, in the good way. Hm.
@ Pteryxx:
Sorry, I should have said Tools > Options indeed, but I forgot the menu is a little different in Linux.
@Irene, no need to apologize, I found it. I sort of talk out loud about this sort of thing, assuming there are lurkers who’ll find the details useful. (but I did assume it was a Firefox version difference and not an OS difference. *headdesk*)
Yes, I know that term, too.
Now, the official term is “children with migratory background”
*sigh*
I’m watching the last locally produced detective story* with this team of detectives. They had a shitty director, shitty story-writer, good actors and they fired the actors.
*German Sunday evening detective story on public TV is “Tatort”, crimescene. They are produced by the regional public broadcast companies with consistent cast.
Oh, cool. So I’m a 3rd & 4th generation immigrant on my mother’s side.
Am I at risk of deportation?
Wow… this is happening in Texas?!
And there’s a poll! “Should more schools cut sports in favor of academics?” So far, it’s Yes: 86.8%, No: 13.2%. Doesn’t really need Pharyngulation, but it couldn’t hurt….
Only if you’re a muslim and get as much as a parking ticket…
Well, at least by now the kids get German citizenship and have to decide later between one and another citizenship. When this was under debate, the conservatives won a state election simply campaigning against the federal law.
Luckily, that was before 9/11. Afterwards it wouldn’t have passed.
@Ms Daisy Cutter
Obviously that is not real Texas. That is a Texas from a parallel universe in which a majority of Texans are actually rational, and it is bleeding through to our world. Duh.
@Walton
The joke was not at your expense.
As Giliell says, only if you’re Muslim. Or looks like you might be Muslim.
Every time an immigrant-looking (read: darkskinned) person causes trouble, a lot of people are calling for throwing them out of the country, sending them “back where they came from”. It seems that it is impossible to explain to those morons that the people in question have been born and raised in Denmark, and thus are “where they came from”.
Have I ever mentioned that there is widespread racism in Denmark?
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark
*ducks thrown objects*
@Ing
I personally believe that many lame jokes are funny. So I think I will throw you a bouquet of flower. n_n
I have spent my day combing out lice from the kid’s hair, and washing bedding in hot water … and explaining everything to my spouse over and over and over again because it’s “too complicated” for him. Yeah I know, my woman brain is just much better evolved for tediously dealing with disgusting crawly bugs and lots of laundry.
Is that objects thrown by ducks?
kristin
Oh shit, you have my sympathies.
I hope that lice never find this flat, we own about 300 soft-toys…
++++
And I think I cannot make it over to that threadwreck about “Islamophobia”
Why do I get the impression that most people in favour of the term actually don’t live in communities with actual muslims in them?
By “in favour” I mean “proudly declaring themselves to be Islamophobes”
Giliell: Apparently the prevailing wisdom now is not to worry about stuffed animals and plush toys unless the infested person sleeps snuggled up to them. Which comes as a huge relief to me, because we have a shit ton of the damn things too.
kristin
Picture the following scenario:
Kid sleeps in bed with about 30 of them (she randomly insists on a number between 21 and 30). In the morning or the small hours she comes into our bed where the rest is residing. Lots of snuggeling and fooling aroud occurs.
Later the lice are detected.
Horror!
++++++
I hope Ophelia remembers her stance about the word “islamophobia” being a bad one because it talks of Islam and not of Muslims, the next time somebody says they’re not a misogynist because they don’t hate women *rolleyes*
Oh Giliell, horrors is right!
kristinc
Freeze them all!
(the stuffed animals, not the children)
The infested kid doesn’t sleep with any stuffed animals, they live on a shelf across his room. Everything else I can think of is washable and dry-the-snot-out-of-it-on-high-heat-able. Except maybe one of his thick coats.
He has long, thick hair though. Good lord does that kid have a lot of hair. Well, it could be worse, it could be curly.
Pteryxx,
RequestPolicy allows for specific settings of cross-site requests. (h/t lm I believe)
—
kristinc,
I think I had lice three separate times in elementary school, my stuffed toys spent weeks in the freezer.
It was. -.-
Oh, kristinc, I feel for you. Be prepared that it might take 2-4 treatments or so to get all the damned things. Both of mine came home from zoo camp with them, and one buzz-cut his head but the other refused to get his curly hair cut. It’s a little cheaper to use liquid vegetable oil for between treatments if you need to (the buggers get stuck and slowed down in the oil so you can comb them out more easily). I remember how horrified I was the first treatment – I had noticed them scratching a bit, and then finally noticed a little…movement…on one’s head. It was over a week into it by the time we realized it, so the number of bugs that came out in the first treatment washing was…impressive.
Anything snuggled up to can be securely sealed in a garbage bag and left for a few weeks (I think it’s 4?). What we found was that doing so provided a nice winnowing of what was actually not that important, because we just brought up stuffed things when asked directly for them after the quarantine period was over.
My day: cleaned some of the things, went to work for awhile to do some bacterial sample prep for lab this week, tried making korma curry meatballs and think I may have failed spectacularly. The ghee turned brown in less than 10 minutes (it was supposed to take 20-25 to clarify!), the onions fried limp instead of crisp, and I’m not too sure about what’s going on in the pan now that it’s all together. But I got the spice blend from a relatively new Indian grocery store in town, and the owner was super nice so I think I could get some tips if I ask nicely.
Still have to prep lecture for tomorrow. (and watch Once Upon A Time and Downton Abbey…)
Ya wanna know what is really stoopid?
Going shopping at the Chinese Superstore while having forgotten that it is the day before Chinese New Year.
chigau – d’oh!
I know! I was trying to point this out to her! But then she made the unexpected and bizarre move of quoting that despicable homophobia analogy, which was – as lm suggested – about the worst possible that could be used.* This suggests to me that there’s just a total disconnect for her on this subject, because if someone made that argument about homophobia or misogyny or racism outside of the context of an attempted parallel with Islamophobia she would smash it.
“I’m not homophobic. I don’t fear gay people – I just disapprove of homosexual behavior.”
“I’m not misogynistic. I don’t hate all women – I just oppose the castrating radfems and think many feminists are cunts.”
“I’m not racist. I don’t hate black people – I’m just calling attention to the spread of violent ghetto culture.” (It’s unreal to think that Hyp*ron would fit in in her threads on the subject of Islamophobia.)
*And somehow Josh, OSG, didn’t say anything against it.
*checking sky for porcine aerial displays*
Huh. I will be go to hell.
–
kristinc, Son picked up a lice infestation at school, years ago. It wasn’t joyful, but I did definitively learn that I’m allergic to ragweed extract.
–
And now my scalp itches….
*scratching furiously*
–
No suggestions for what to do about a little (10 year old) post-divorce bad-actor? Anyone? Please?
–
cicely
re advice about child
If you could give a bit more info…
That’s what makes me uncomfortable about Butterflies and Wheels. It’s not so much the things that Ophelia herself says; it’s some of the bigoted commenters the blog seems to attract, and the fact that they don’t get called out by others. The argument I got into with steve oberski on this thread is an illustrative example.
My only previous experience with lice was getting them myself. (Twice.) And my mom ran an in-home daycare. I’m so incredibly glad I don’t have to do the kind of epic cleaning and sanitizing she did. (Twice.)
Oh, my friend’s child got them though. She freaked out and ended up paying a specialist to comb through the child’s hair at a hefty per-hour rate (3 to 5 hours per combing) and supervise all their laundry detail. (Same hourly rate as the combing.)
I was telling the kid today how frigging lucky he was with the lice shampoo. I vividly remember the shampoo process as a nightmare that smelled like a bug bomb and made my eyes water and my throat burn. The kid’s shampoo today smelled like, well, shampoo.
(This is surely the most glossy and well-groomed his hair has been since he was about a year old!)
back from a long tiring walk.
Still staying strong with the nonsmoking.
Badly wish I had some weed and rolling papers though.
I don’t know if anybody here likes klezmer or experimental music that incorporates klezmer, but I heard this guy on college radio the other day and liked his stuff: Rob Rudin’s Half-Jewish [Ensemble].
Ah, thanks for the reminder. Someone who celebrates all holidays wants their gold dragon for the celebration.
/me traipses in after long absence, attempts to hijack conversation
So, guess what? My daughter’s pregnant!
Oh, and she’s getting married.
Do we live in a weird world, or what?
nigelTheBold, Abbot of the Hoppist Monks
Congratulations, Grandpa!
Oh, and to your daughter, too.
And the other involved persons.
chigau, the boy is 10. About a year ago, his parents divorced (I’ve heard of the rare beast, the Amicable Divorce; this is not one of those), and we game with his dad, and have done for the last 15 or so years. For the last few months, we’ve been including Boy as well, since his (theoretically-custodial) mother is elsewhere doing a Masters program, and he’s actually staying with his dad. The game rotates among the players’ residences. Just last week, someone, circumstantially (but very solidly so) Boy, has been engaging in petty acts of vandalism and/or theft. We’re unanimously pretty sure (Friend excepted) that Boy is acting out, and depending on the “uncertainty in numbers” to cover for him; but the thing is, this group has been gaming together for a long, long time, and nothing even vaguely like this has happened before. We don’t want to alienate our friend by accusing his son of these acts, but on the other hand, we don’t want our stuff to continue to be messed up or “misplaced”, either. One of our members is opting out of the gaming rotation solely to avoid having Boy in xes house. This is bad. A solution must be found. I’m stumped.
–
chigau:
Thanks! I’m not sure how I feel about the whole “grandpa” thing, but I think I’ll be good at it. I’ll try to rescue the little tyke from fundamentalism as soon as possible. I think I’ll excel at the spoiling part.
My daughter’s been looking forward to this for a long time. Not the “informing her mother” bit — isnt it strange how getting a depo shot from Planned Parenthood is far more embarrassing than telling her fundamentalist Mom she’s pregnant? — but the “having a kid” bit. I think she’ll be just fine at the whole motherhood thing.
The other involved person? He seems like a good kid. Emphasis on “kid,” though. But then, my daughter is 24, going on 16. She’s still a young’un herself.
Or do all parents feel this way, no matter how old the kids are?
I’m trying to approach this all rationally, but I don’t know how, other than to make shit up as I go along.
I can say with absolute certainty that they do exist. My parents have one. (Granted, when my mom divorced my stepdad, it was anything but amicable…)
cicely
Can you do something like openly, in the presence of Friend and Boy (and everyone else), bemoaning the mystery of the broken/missing items.
To let Boy know you are onto him, without making a direct accusation.
I think there’s room to debate the usefulness of the term “Islamophobia”. Doing so does not in any way deny that the things labeled as islamophobic are indeed real things in the world.
It seems to me that basically “Islamophobia” is plain old racism and xenophobic. The disguise is very thin: Arabic-looking Christians have been targetted for hate when they turn up to nominally anti-islam events. I’m not convinced that we need a special phrase for this kind of racism. I’m also uncomfortable with the idea of a special label, because I don’t want to put any religion on a special pedestal. And I AM convinced that Pat Condell is a despicable racist.
The rhetoric reminds me of the anti-Catholic bias in several countries last century. Catholics would outbreed all the nice clean Protestants, they were dirty and over-emotional and talked funny, were treacherous because they’d always put their priest or pope’s say-so before the law, were all mafiosi and IRA terrorists. But this was xenophobia and classism. We didn’t coin terms like Catholiphobia.
MISCHIEF
BREW
:D!
I don’t think I have to address people who can’t be bothered to read the full (and often ridiculously redundant) arguments at B&W or here, so I won’t. I’ll just say that you’re entering a discussion ignorant of what’s been said.
Giants.
And not-Baltimore.
Excellent.
Not Baltimore!
Ophelia doubles down now.
She really does believe that «it’s true that the word “homophobic” is blurred in the same way» as Islamophobia.
You’re just wrong, Alethea, and I already addressed this.
So, once again, an example of when Islamophobia cannot be reduced to racism or xenophobia:
Geert Wilders is bigoted about Muslims, not just about immigrants. When visiting Florida he said “Islam is not a religion” and “the right to religious freedom should not apply”.
He is thus bigoted against not only immigrants, but against Muslims per se, and against some of their cultural practices, including Islam itself. That’s Islamophobia when he says Islam is not a religion; it’s not just Muslim-phobia, let alone xenophobia or racism.
So xenophobia doesn’t cover everything that’s wrong with his statement. But Islamophobia does.
Thoughts on Mischief Brew?
This is all totally cool with you, Josh?
acoustic Crass?
Nothing wrong with that.
Never heard of ’em before; thanks.
Excellent schmexcellent. Between that matchup and the Madonna halftime show, I’m going to be going outside this year. Unless there’s a party, in which case I guess I might show up for some booze and snax.
Well don’t then. We can’t all keep up with everything under discussion all the time. Also these issues are far, far broader and deeper than whatever you happen to have been reading lately. “Anti-Johnny-come-lately” seems to be a recurrent thread.
@ lm
Should we not rather use the term “Anti-islamic” rather than “islamophobia”.
“Phobia” should be applied to a situation beyond conscious control and which is generally irrational. (Think fainting in hemophobia… the sufferer has no control over this.)
“Anti-” on the other hand is a conscious choice. People rationalise, or allow themselves to be rationalised, into this position.
Growing up with a constant “threat” from the islamic bogeymen of late, could instill a very real and irrational fear of anyone that unbundles all their deepest fears into that box. I can imagine there are children growing up in an anti-islamic environment that develop a very real phobia. How will we describe people who are ill in the first instance and not merely antisocial?
(I understand that the linguistic horse may have bolted the gate already. This was brought up way upthread, then left there.)
@ nigel
Conga Rat Elations.
Knock that attitude right off. Do not come at me in another thread and assume a stance that I’m obligated to fight your fight. I don’t appreciate it.
Having said that, I think you and lm (can you stick to one fucking ‘nym within a thread? Is that too much>) are talking at cross purposes with Ophelia. She made it very clear she doesn’t think there are any grounds to rationally “criticize homosexual behavior”, even though one could argue that both the terms islamophobia and homophobia are, in a philosophical sense, imprecise and prone to slippage between person and behavior and concept.
They are slippery. Homophobia has accreted a pretty standard meaning, though, over the years. Yet on more than one occasion I’ve deliberately chosen “anti gay bigotry” when I found it crucial to point out that the perpetrator was indulging his own feelings of disgust or tribal identity primarily, which is a different kind of fucked upness than fear and phobia.
So it is with Islamophobia for me. I think its meaning is much more problematic and unsettled and it’s precisely that ambiguity that gives purchase to those who—out of cynicism or naivete—wish to shut down any criticism of Islamism by painting it as categorically identical to irrational hatred and fear.
I do think “anti-muslim bigotry” is a far better choice. There’s plenty of that to be found here and in Europe. It needs to be called out but that cause is not well-served by a slippery-morphy-in-meaning -and-implication term such as Islamophobia.
Now. Let’s not have any more snotty taunting at me, hmm? If you want my opinion, just ask for it. You know me and you know I’ll give it. Sideways approaches piss me off.
I hope this is a joke. These are threads of this week. On this platform. That have been linked to on this thread.
@ Josh
Snap!
@ nigel
龙年.
You do realise that you will have a Dragon Grandchild. This is very auspicious.
/woo
おやすみなさい。
Another thing: context matters. Really. I’ve been a reader of B&W longer than Pharyngula and I feel like I know the conventions and modes of thought of Ophelia and many of the regulars pretty well. It was instantly apparent to me, for example, that what Ophelia was saying comes from a backdrop of epistemological questions being teased apart pretty finely and abstracted. That really does make a statement mean something different qualitatively than if it were uttered without that context, knowledge, and all around conversational culture.
Now, many of us have had it about up to here with alleged allies excusing their blindness to privilege, homophobia, and misogyny recently. We are primed to have to defend our basic humanity against people who should know better. Ophelia’s aware of this too—-she’s been in the thick of it, which makes this situation doubly depressing. I really, genuinely, not out of special pleading or friendship do not think what Ophelia said was homophobic. The context matters. The fact that she was drawing a comparison for the sake of asking whether Islamophobia and homophobia are truly comparable (using the ‘philosopher’s’ stance of extending the most charitable reading possible even though she made it clear she didn’t believe it in practice) does not strike me as homophobic. It strikes me as trying to tease out what we really mean when we use these freighted terms and doing so through something close to a thought experiment.
I don’t get where all the disagreement is coming from.
@ SC
Take this as a more general observation – though not only in the context of immigration.
She most certainly did not. She did the opposite by quoting that. If you’re going to attempt to argue that, at least acknowledge what’s been said.
Oh, do elaborate. Not just in the “philosophical” but in the social sense. And please do give concrete examples that illustrate the parallel.
Are we reading the same thing?
If that’s not a statement that she doesn’t think there are rational arguments to criticize homosexual behavior, what in the world is it? Come on – I’m being serious. I literally don’t understand how it can not be that. What am I missing?
Oh do FUCK OFF. I’m not playing with you tonight. You’ve got Take No Prisoners Mode dialed up to 11 and you opened this exchange with a bullshit move. Go fucking fight with someone else and look me up when you’re feeling less confrontationally mean. I mean. . the fuck?
You really, genuinely, need to address the fact that that quotation presented “disapproval of homosexual behavior” as meaningfully different from homophobia in the same way that criticism of Islam is different from Islamophobia. Read the quote again.
I don’t think she’s the least bit homophobic. I think she means well and it leads her to have a huge blind spot here.
chigau
Slaap lekker!
What I quoted @ #253.
Seriously, Josh. Step back from this and read that passage.
SC: no. Not tonight. I’m tired and I want to watch Downton Abbey. And I’m especially not disposed to do anything to satisfy your demands. You started with passive aggressive rhetorical moves to play “gotcha” with me. On another blog entirely. Jerk move.
And when you talk to me you’re dripping with condescension and I can see you rolling your eyes. It’s the equivalent of walking in to a room and looking at someone you know (and might even respect) and saying “Bitch, why are you so stupid?”
So, here’s my middle finger. I was actually going to address this topic at some length over at Ophelia’s when I had the leisure time. Totes not into now.
Hey Josh, Good to see ya.
There’s just no content here.
You know I love Ophelia like you do. She’s just wrong in this instance, and you are if you agree with her. There’s no obligation to agree with your friends about everything, and if there were I wouldn’t be able to abide by it.
If SC hadn’t brought it up here, I was going to, because I tried to get you to deal with it there and you ignored me. You spoke up to agree with what she quoted, and so I expect that you can answer for it. Not over there, necessarily, but somewhere, anywhere will do. (I would think it too much to ask iff you had not already weighed in to agree with her quote of Benn.)
Let’s remember what you have insisted upon from me when I was in no mood for it, hmm?
For I know damn well what your response would be if it were Chris Stedman who quoted some guy saying
and then followed up with how it’s okay
+++++
I can’t, unfortunately. The software doesn’t say I’m blocked, but it appears she’s sending me into her spamtrap without coming out and saying that she’s banning me. I’m not complaining about this — I admire techological solutions to interpersonal disputes, and if I were her I’d do use very same trick — but as long as she doesn’t explicitly acknowledge that she’s blocking me, it makes it look like I’ve given up responding. I won’t go out that way.
Oh holy Jesus.
Benn’s point is that it is wrong to call “criticism of homosexuality” homophobia, because that’s not what it “really means”; and it is wrong to call “disapproval of homosexual behaviour” homophobia.
Not just that there’s some potential ambiguity of what exactly one’s referring to, Benn holds that “criticism of homosexuality” and “disapproval of homosexual behaviour” are not homophobia.
But that does not mean it’s wrong to call those “feelings of disgust or tribal identity” homophobia. You found something more hard-hitting, but it doesn’t mean it would have been wrong to call it homophobia.
Then why the fuck did you ignore me when I asked for your opinion?
Do you ever step back and read what you write? Don’t you ever wonder why people who like you are sometimes so insulted by what you say and don’t want to talk?
You’re great at tracking people down in their inconsistencies, but you don’t often apply it to yourself. In this whole wretched exchange you haven’t even acknowledged any of the rude shit you pulled on me. Even if I’m wrong on the issues you don’t have license to pull that shit and not even cop to it. One would almost think you don’t care at all about conveying to people who like you that you think they deserve a minimum of courtesy.
How fucking dare you? You really have mastered insult and disdain. Talking to me like a 10-year-old who needs reassurance that he can disagree with the group. Assuming so blithely that it’s friendship loyalty on my part.
OK. You’ve provoked me. Is that what you were going for? I’m so goddman provoked at you I could spit. If you were in my house I’d throw you out.
And you moderately? You can sit on a fucking porcupine too. Fuck your sanctimony.
Let me be crystal clear about this: there are actually spots where I agree with both of you. I was planning to give that thread some careful thought and weigh in tomorrow. I am not obligated to jump at your whim, LM. I decided to actually have a boring weekend watching TV.
But—and call it a character flaw if you like, I don’t give a shit—I take very, very badly to the way you operate (and you too, SC, when you’re acting as you are tonight). I don’t like being lectured, I don’t like being bated, and I don’t like passive aggression. And when those who engage in this not only won’t acknowledge it (for folks who care so much about how a target feels you strangely don’t give a shit to stop poking when I bite you back) I just see red. I’m completely unwilling to have this conversation with you now. And don’t act like you don’t have those triggers too – the both of you do.
I can take only so much, and I’m way past my limit.
So take it down in your encylopedic brain, and note the links to my comments in a list somewhere. You’ll need them when you find it tactically advantageous to try to catch me out in the future. Oh, won’t that be fun!
Who in FUCK do you think you are? I have to explain my absence in a thread to you? Do I have to ask you permission to leave the conversation because I want to watch Futurama and play with toys the rest of the weekend?
Seriously – what’s wrong with you?
SC:
Oh, fuck off. Not everyone is you, in case you haven’t figured that out. Not everyone shares your opinion, and you don’t get to play Ms. Snottier than thou because someone shares an opinion on a matter you don’t like or isn’t as immersed in other threads as you are.
You’re going off again, insulting people left and right, and it won’t be long before you run off crying, wondering why people are being so mean to you. Knock it off.
Besides which, LM, I was referring to SC, not you (you know it’s not always about you right? Right?), and I was referring to her crap in this thread about whether all that was OK with me.
There is no substantive content here.
No. Not at all.
I am not trying to insult or provoke you. I think Ophelia is wrong, and you are if you agree with her. I was surprised by her stance, and the fact that you didn’t challenge it.
I’m trying to have a reasoned discussion.
Josh:
Oooh. Our big buy for xmas was a blu-ray player, and the first thing I grabbed, natch, was the latest season of Futurama. Much fun to be able to sit back and watch all those eps at leisure. I haven’t even gotten to all the extras yet.
Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.
I’m close to actively hating you right now and I’d better leave before I start calling you things I’d really regret.
Do you have a concrete substantive argument?
One problem I can see is that in this thread, she’s constantly jumping between social comment and epistemological interrogation in a baffling and quite slippery manner. One moment she quotes examples of harm caused by Islamists, another she steps back and asks herself what the words she just used mean. Is she genuinely confused or is she trying to rationalise a desire to claim for herself the label “Islamophobe”?
If she’s trying to tease out what the word mean, how about getting real world data on how Muslim-haters behave instead of engaging in dodgy comparisons with homophobia?
Had she done that, for instance, she’d have noticed that the Muslim-haters aptly describe by the “Islamophobe” label often claim to defend democracy and women’s rights against theocracy, but only when Islamists are in the news, not when it’s Christians who try to take reproductive rights from women in the West, or to impose school prayers, or fund a Creationist museum with tax money. They make a lot more noise when a Muslim immigrant is guilty of a so-called “honour crime” than when it happens in a Hindu family (as it did in the UK in the past year).
What’s baffling here is that Ophelia herself in her blog alerts against all sorts of human rights violations and encroachments of religious extremism, not only what goes on in Muslim communities! But from time to time, she still tries to make a special case about Islam. (Without good results, because you can’t single out one of the three Abrahamic religion on the basis of their horrible human rights records.)
Generally, it’s in reaction to some idiotic comment in a liberal journal, or to a bogus accusation of Islamophobia by some Muslim propagandist who doesn’t like to get called on his intolerant ideas. Is it so hard to see through the rhetoric? Or is this just a blind spot she has?
Whatever it is, it’s unfortunate.
I’m honestly flummoxed.
What might those be? Maybe you could give me a hint.
If you can’t understand why I reacted with “fuck you” to your dismissive “no content” response to my objections at the way you were treating me, then I cannot help enlighten you. You made as clear a statement of “I don’t care to give you minimum courtesy and you’re not worth it to me to even acknowledge when you feel ill used” as possible. It’s active contempt.
I won’t dignify that.
What’s passive about it? I’m angry at you. I think I’m being forthright about it.
Just a minute ago you said “If you want my opinion, just ask for it. You know me and you know I’ll give it.”
Well I did ask for it, Josh.
It seems a contradiction to say that “If you want my opinion, just ask for it. You know me and you know I’ll give it” but you weren’t even going to acknowledge that I’d asked a question which you were going to get back to in your sweet time.
You can take the time you want, but if you’re going to say here that all one has to do is ask you for your opinion, well then it becomes understandable that I’d wonder why you didn’t answer me when I did ask for your opinion.
So. Anyway. You’ve now answered the question of “why the fuck did you ignore me when I asked for your opinion”. Thank you. I of course recognize that that is a reasonable use of your time.
I’m sorry that I ended up being overly demanding of your time. From where I’m sitting, I thought you were telling one person they could ask for your opinion while you were pointedly ignoring me, and that pissed me off. I am relieved that this is not the case.
I am still mad as hell at you, but only about the content of your opinions, not your timing. And I hope you enjoy your TV show.
QFT. Along similar lines, I’d also point out that the usual prescription of said Muslim-haters is to end or restrict Muslim immigration – an aim usually justified by scaremongering rhetoric about “Eurabia” or the “Islamification of Europe” – and to ban Muslim religious practices from the public sphere, as with France’s ban on veils or Switzerland’s ban on minarets. None of these proposals have a damned thing to do with standing up for the human rights of Muslim women, Muslim LGBT people or other marginalized groups in Muslim communities. Indeed, the opposite: ensuring that more victims get deported to dangerous countries, detained by immigration enforcement authorities, or excluded from the public square by anti-veil laws is hardly a way of standing up for their rights. The Muslim-haters’ real aims are not about human rights, but about maintaining a cultural hegemony and excluding Muslims and Islamic culture from “their” countries.
The anti-Muslim rhetoric we’re seeing from the nationalistic right today is disturbingly similar to the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the last generation, and I really worry that the rising tide of anti-Muslim hatred, and the ascendancy of Geert Wilders and his ilk, is going to have some very scary consequences in the long run.
SC, you are beyond obnoxious. Shut the fuck up or go elsewhere to find people who normally like you* that you can insult to no end.
*You’re running out of those here.
Josh, there is still no substantive content there. That’s not an insult. I have no idea what you want me to respond to. You haven’t responded to my reactions to the Benn quote, which was what was primarily at issue.
Cheers!
Oh, and no, you laughable bully.
SC, I believe Josh is feeling that he was dragged into a debate here now, which he wanted to have elsewhere later. He feels we have not noticed how much this bothers him, or not cared. He would like it acknowledged that he can take his time, and he would like to be left out of the argument insofar as it continues in this particular thread.
I would never have mentioned him had he not made a fucking stupid comment on that specific B&W thread.
QFT right back atcha!
The whole “cultural identity” or “national character” thing that the Right in Europe so loves and promotes is the brand new garment of the belief in good ol’ Western superiority over foreign cultures. Especially those of brown or black people.
It does make it harder for human rights activists to speak on behalf of the victims of bigotry or violence within Islamic countries and communities, but it’s one difficulty that can’t be avoided. Chalk it up to one more way for intolerance to make itself a pain in the ass.
—
Oh, and on more pleasant note: Chúc Mừng Năm Mới, everybody!
(I don’t have one smidgen of Vietnamese blood in my veins, but after a convoluted family history over three continents and three generations, there’s still a little bit of my heart that never fails to beat faster on the day of Tết. Such are the vagaries of identity. The true one, not the manufactured kind bandied about in politics.)
Oh, time to killfile SC again I see.
*SOB*
SC: I know, and I don’t accept the implicit premise that we should have known he’d prefer that his fucking stupid comment be addressed over there on that thread. But I’m conflicted, since he’s now expressed that preference.
Anyway, I’ll email you in about fifteen minutes. Nothing urgent, if you’re planning to go to bed before that.
Nah, just waking up.
Irene: Agreed.
And I should say more about Islamophobia. However, the Walton is exhausted, has a headache, and has had very little sleep in the past few days thanks to an excessive workload and his own utter incompetence at time-management, and so will now go to bed without wading further into the debate. Goodnight, everyone.
Thread bankrupt (at least since last night):
So, driving back to Vermont from checking out my new digs in upstate NY, I found myself getting more and more sad, irritated, and angry about my current situation. Then I started considering that the original reason I went to VT was to pursue a dysfunctional relationship that ended up failing anyway. Leaving VT has nothing to do with my romantic relationships, dysfunctional or otherwise. While I was here, I transitioned from thinking that intimate partnerships were the most important thing in my life, to thinking that my career and my possible intellectual contributions to public life are my top priority. Also while I was here, I lived entirely alone for the first time. However, it wasn’t until my best friend/lover left the state that I began truly FEELING as if I was alone. And I’ve found that living alone really doesn’t suit me at all. I do better when I feel as if people need me and there are also people there to support me. So, seeing the house I’ll be sharing with my family made me feel better; returning to the place where I feel alone and stuck makes me feel worse.
Interesting.
Oh, you two are a right pair. “Stupid fucking comment.” A short post saying that I didn’t think Ophelia’s problems with the word Islamophobia were crazy, nor was the concept hard to understand. Totes stupid. So stupid, in fact, that you’re forced to read into it all sorts of approval for sinister and suspect acceptance of homophobia (or whatever else is your current preoccupation). Oh, I’m sorry, that’s right – that’s the default reading, of course, since I didn’t immediately jump back in to the topic.
It’s perfectly reasonable, of course, knowing my track record, to assume the worst and most stupidly conformist opinion on my part. After all, you’ve never seen any examples of me doing anything more sensible. I’m an unknown quantity, after all.
And, you are of course justified in spewing your bile all over another blog. I don’t deserve any consideration based on past demonstrated behavior. There’s no reason at all for you to think I might address this in more detail later, and that I might not be as reactionary as you’re telling the world I am.
You two disgust me. Go fuck yourselves as hard as humanly possible. And be sure to continue complaining about what you imagine is wrong with me or my opinion all night long so that I can wake up to it on this thread.
@lm: NO U.
Why do you even believe Pat Condell when he says it’s the Islam, not the race or culture? I’ve seen exactly the same behaviour over and over again from plenty of other bigots. Racism is a bad word so I’m not racist. I just hate people who wear towels on their heads and eat felafel. No, no, I have nothing at all against black people, it’s just ghetto culture is the problem (haha Michelle Yobabymama lolz).
He’s a fucking racist.
Protesters against the mosque near the 9-11 site beat up a few Coptic Christians who were there to support them. Anybody brown in a turban or robe was the villain, no religious enquiries made. Nobody here in Australia screaming about the dreaded boats full of scary Muslims come to take over with their sharia even cares for one split-second, if it later turns out that they were actually Christians, Hindus or atheists.
They’re fucking racists.
My superficial reaction, not having read the thread in question, is that the civil thing to do would be to respond to that comment on that thread rather than bringing it over here, to our lounge/pub/casual hang-out spot.
Would it be too much to ask for everyone to just chill out for a little while?
You might want to tell that to those who see our lounge as a perpetual intellectual and personal warzone.
@ Irene Delse
… and Kung Hei Fat Choi right back at yah!
I have started compiling some of my dragon pictures on Flickr (I’m still a bit of a noob.) I prefer Chinese New Year to Xmas. I hope it catches on.
Dragon pictures from around Hong Kong.
@ Walton
Welterusten jonge Walton. (I went through your comments re hate speech but just haven’t had time to respond properly (I have examples for you) .) {busy with moving theaphontes office}
@ Sally
We have an endless supply of hugs for you here, 24/7/365.25
Good morning
*sigh*
I know that things don’t end well when I agree with lm…
QFFT
And in that point they overlap with the old xenophobic right. But since Islamophobia goes further, right into the middle of society and is accepted and endorsed by larger parts of society, they get cover.
Actually, they behave like our governments who start objecting to human rights abuses if their allegience to a certain regime drops and who’ll ignore them when talking about friends.
Their other bogeyman is “the multiculturalism of the 80’s and 90’s”. For fucks sake, the 80’s and 90’s were the time of conservative roll-back already. The fact that society ignored honour-killings and misogyny by muslim immigrants didn’t have to do with multiculturalism and moral relativism, but because they didn’t give a fuck about what happens to a Turkish woman. They still don’t care, or there would attempts to actually protect those women, including asylum permits and residency permits on grounds of being prosecuted because of gender and sexual orientation.
Oh, and, of course, the “stealth Jihad”. Say anything along the lines that you don’t think your muslim green-grocerer or Döner cook to be particularly dangerous to you and society and you get accused of being a stealth Jihadist and that you don’t care about women in Iran (never in Saudi Arabia)
Yeah I’m not really a big fan of that shit either. I just try to scroll by Walton’s and LM’s long-ass philomosophical posts and get on with life. But it seems to me like dragging in stuff that happened on another blog entirely REALLY crosses the line.
Alethea,
I brought up Wilders for a reason. Because whatever his motivation might be, his actual argument as presented there in Florida is bigotry about Islam per se. And the fallout will rain down on immigrants, USA-born black Muslims of first or fifth generation, and USA-born white Muslim converts alike.
That is, not only is that kind of argument not framed as being about race or immigration, the direct harm from it will not be limited to minorities. So the argument simply can’t be reduced to xenophobia or racism, regardless of what I imagine his motivations to be. As I find it often necessary to address the effects of an argument, not just motivations, I think it would be an error to limit myself to treating this as xenophobia or racism, when it has some characteristics of being about something else: a particular kind of anti-religious bigotry wherein all Muslims are suspect due to the violence of a few, and not due to race or country of origin, but due to an alleged international political alliance.
I mean, I agree with most of your observations from #454 (the ones I’m not quoting), in that there is a lot of racism too; Islamophobia and racism are often fellow travelers, but I’m unable to honestly reduce one to the other.
rorschach, since you’ve sniped at me out of nowhere recently, I’m still not inclined to let this go:
Why, is someone alleging that it’s Islamophobic for the BBC to report this?
It really doesn’t.
Cf our fuming here on TET against Edwin Kagin recently.
Or the conferencing and coordination here regarding Crommunist’s post.
Now, as I already said, if Josh explicitly doesn’t want to be addressed here about comments there, I can live with that request. But it’s not something that must be implicitly taken for granted.
So much verbiage over Islam and Muslims, as if they were one thing and a bloc.
I guess most of us are aware of Twelver?
(It’s got an eschatology!)
No, I was just putting the question out there wondering what people thought, really. Surely that wasn’t so hard to see ?
As I said yesterday, my opinion is that the word islamophobia is increasingly invoked to trivialize and deflect legitimate criticisms about the inherent problems with the Quran and its more literary followers. The rhetorical question was asked in that context.
IMHO, fuming goes here, off-topic goes here, off-topic fuming ABOUT comments goes here, actual discussion of the issues raised in comments should go in the thread where the comments were, where they are on topic. Usually, the long stuff like Walton does comes up in TET because it’s mentioned in TET in the first place.
Exactly, thanks Pteryxx. Anyway, gnight all.
Oh dear.
I was sort of hoping, for your sake, that you were going to be able to point to someone somewhere alleging that it was Islamophobic of the BBC.
As it is, your question presumes that someone here might answer “yes”.
But wait. If it was a rhetorical question, then you weren’t actually wondering what people thought. Rhetorical questions aren’t actually “asked” for the sake of query.
As I noted yesterday, it was about a month ago you agreed with me that Islamophobia is nevertheless a real thing in the world.
Every way that we talk about these issues will be subject to someone’s distortion. If we call it racism, then Islamophobes will say “I’m not racist, I’m against the religion”, and the minority of Muslim extremists will say “that’s racist” to shut down rational criticism of Islam.
There is no alternative terminology which will not be abused. In a nearby parallel universe, rorschach-B is complaining about the word racism, and offering Islamophobia as a preferable term.
True. But isn’t that a pretty trivial point ? Does it change the truth value of my claim that islamophobia is often invoked to deflect criticism of problems with Islam, just because other people may distort the term to push a racist agenda ?
I see this is the point where you tell me what I really think and what my words really mean, and what you think I would do in a parallel universe, so once again, this discussion is over. You’ll have to wait for Josh to wake up I guess.
what?
both “invoke to deflect criticism of problems with Islam” and “push a racist agenda” are subsets of distortion, so both are covered by what lm was saying. Meaning, it doesn’t matter what the precise string of letters is you use to describe a particular form of bigotry, it will always be abused both to “invoke to deflect criticism of problems with Islam” and to “push a racist agenda”; which means the occurrence of neither is a relevant objection to a particular term.
(that’s what I get for peeking *sigh*)
Nope. it just makes your claim into a trivial point. So you complain about over-broad usage of the word. Okay. I think we can all agree that’s annoying.
But you don’t have anything better to offer. Islamophobia remains the word we’ll be using.
(Or, as Jadehawk points out, I actually made your point for you. But as you’re incompetent to follow human conversation, you didn’t notice.)
Liar. Piece of shit liar. Quotes or it didn’t happen.
was supposed to be either
“which means neither is a relevant objection”
or
“which means the occurrence of either is not a relevant objection”
Cross-posted from the “Oh boy! Another internet popularity contest!” thread. While the feedback I’ve gotten so far is helpful, I could still do with as much assistance as possible in tackling this person I’m debating with on the subject of the Ahlquist case:
I’ve been supporting Jessica, while this other person seems to believe it was unlawful for the government to deny the school the “right” to have their banner. I’ll go through what’s been happening with the debate up to this point, their responses being in bold:
So first I pointed out the school is breaking The First Amendment essentially because it passed a rule allowing that banner to be hung up, thereby violating the Establishment Clause. They said:
1) I’ll pretend for a second that the school faculty sat around and debated this banner and then voted to “pass a rule” that they could hang it up. In doing so, I still maintain the position that a “school rule” is not a law enacted by Congress.
The First Amendment plainly states “Congress shall make no law…” Ignoring for a minute the reality that this clause’s sole intent was to forbid the government from creating a national religion, a school banner still in absolutely no way involves a law being made by any Congress (either federal or state).
It quite obviously is not a First Amendment issue, as anyone who truly understands the Constitution, original intent, and the proper role of government understands.
I also tried to say that America is a secular nation as is the Constitution, and so if governments have any “agenda” (a word he has used quite a few times in our debate) in cases like this, it’s purely to uphold secular law. He said:
2) Secular in the sense that government and religion are separate, and not the same like in England, or the Holy Roman Empire, or the theocracies of today. The only original intent of the Constitution, in regards to religion, is to forbid the government from establishing a national religion. No law could ever be passed establishing a national religion, preventing the belief in a religion, or mandating when, how, and to who the people worship. The states were of course free to have their own official state religions.
If you want to pretend that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison would have fought to make a school take down a harmless prayer banner, because it was unconstitutional, then that is your ignorance. Both of those gentlemen would have conceded that the government has no authority to be involved in the education business at all under the Constitution.
I also tried to point out that the school, as a public institution, couldn’t explicitly endorse ONE religion as the banner made them responsible for doing. He responded:
3) Actually, under the original intent of the Constitution, they can endorse whatever religion they want to since no law is being made and nothing is being mandated.
I tried to point that Ahlquist very likely wouldn’t have complained if the school had equally accomodated all religious beliefs as well as non-beliefs. He replied:
4) Yes she would have, and that you think this school is even capable of passing a law is hilarious. There was no law here, ergo no violation of an alleged “seperation of church and state” in the way you pretend it to mean.
I pointed out the history of other public institutions being forced to remove religiously motivated things (especially Christian things) and stop doing things because they violated church/state separation laws. His response was:
5) Yes, the Supreme Court, as well as entire federal government, does in face have a long precedent of ignoring the Constitution and doing things that are 100% at odds with liberty and the Constitution. But because lawyers in robes apply a bastardized interpretation of the Constitution, to fit their agenda, doesn’t make their rulings in accordance with what the Constitution actually says or means.
I pointed to the “Mass Delusion” argument with regards to what happens if no deity exists, and asked him if he could defend his belief in that regard. When he refused, I asked him what the point of his being in the debate was if he couldn’t even defend whether his beliefs were valid and therefore not actually really caring his spiritual beliefs were true while still trying to defend the school’s stance on promoting a religion through its banner. He said this:
6) Because there is something I care about and that does have an impact on me and everyone else in this country. I’m here because you said what this school did was “quite obviously unconstitutional.” That is not at all true, in fact it’s quite obvious that the Constitution, under original intent, has absolutely nothing to do with this school or any banners they choose to hang.
I just have a problem with people saying things are either constitutional or unconstitutional when they don’t have the slightest clue as to what the hell they are talking about. This kind of ignorance is precisely why our government is so big and so involved with every aspect of our lives despite 95% of what they do quite obviously being unconstitutional when you actually read the document.
He finished by saying that:
7) The only thing that Ahlquist and other atheists have shown me is that they lack a factual understanding of the Constitution and its original intent and what folks like Jefferson actually thought and what the proper role of government actually is.
Oh, one other thing, I also referenced the Lemon Test and how this essentially boils down to how the government must remain neutral on religion. They responded:
8) That is only half of it. Government must accommodate and protect religion. It must protect religion from the hostility of others. It is all part of the freedom of religion which is protected by the Constitution. Take a look at these 3 Supreme Court cases.
Board of Education of the Westside Community Schools v. Mergens 496 U.S. 226 (1990)
Westside School district, located in Nebraska, denied permission to a group of students who wanted to form a Christian Club in their high school.
By an 8-1 decision the Supreme Court decided that the students had the right to begin their Christian Club.
The Lemon test does not mean that all religion is stripped from public places. So stuff like In God We Trust on our money isn’t directly supporting a singular religion. I mean look at the display of a nativity scene. In Lynch v. Donnelly, the Court allowed a city in Rhode Island to display a manger as part of a holiday display. In the decision, it was stated the Constitution “affirmatively mandates accommodation, not merely tolerance of all religions, and forbids hostility toward any.”
James, you said some stuff about the use of a public space for religion. I don’t know how much case law you have actually read but there are plenty of examples where public spaces are used by religious groups and open to the public.
Lamb’s Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School District 508 U.S. 384 (1993)
New York had a law that prevented school boards from allowing schools to be used after hours for religious activities. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously to reject the school district’s decision to refuse to allow school property to be used for religious activities.
So yeah, any help, particularly with tackling points #2, #4, #5, #6, #7 and #8, would be absolutely fantastic.
Much thanks,
James
SallyStrange @459 Said:
‘But it seems to me like dragging in stuff that happened on another blog entirely REALLY crosses the line.’
I’m glad you said it and not me. I wouldn’t want to put my foot into a pile of that E-scat-ology Morales was talking about. I just hope you aren’t now accused of being a tone troll, but that’s a whole ‘nuther tin of Lumbricus terrestris.
It’s a brand new year in Asia. Aren’t we all supposed to be sharing Dim Sum recipes or something?
Ok, back from running about a dozen errands
This morning I noticed that, following the usual pattern we had:
Kid sick: check
Kid very tired, even after sickness is over: check
Kid eating 2 helpings and dessert and her sister’s dessert: check
Kid being a pain in the ass: check
And now we have the last item on the list:
Kid needs new clothes: check
Yay: Second hand shop has 25% discount this week
Meh: I swear whatever size she needs is always sold out. Ther was exactly one pair of jeans her size and it was a boys jeans without adjustable waist, so now she’s got a bunch of them one size too large…
Plus a denim jacket that will be turned into a piece of art.
Re: Lice
The only childhood-memory I have is that my hair was so thin not even lice wanted it. My sister and the girls from a family we always went together on holidays caught them, and even though I was sleeping with my siter in the small caravan bunk, I didn’t get any. Everybody in the two families had them except for my bald dad and me.
Yes, you’re allowed to pity my mum who had to wash everything during a campingtrip
OK, and now to TET business
IMO:
Lengthy debates over here: no problem. Sometimes I engage, sometimes I just read, sometimes I just skip.
Dragging stuff in here that would be OT in that other thread: Yes, of course.
Having side-discussions, remarks, exclamations of love about other discussions: sure, why not.
Discussing stuff parallel to other threads (like it is happening with Islamophobia right now): OK, too, IMO. Often comment threads take a certain turn very quickly and by then it’s impossible to discuss another aspect of the topic you’d like to adress.
Alerting people to what you think might be of their interest: sure.
Coming to TET demanding that somebody answers you, supports you, justifies themselves, whatever as if you were entitled to their time and response: Fucking no.
People will answer if and when they see fit. Not doing so does not mean that you’re right, scored, claimed victory. Unless you’re WLC.
I’m truly speechless. Bye for now, this is not a place I want to be right now.
James,
Regarding #2, you could try reading from Everson v Board of Education, which was the 1947 ruling that incorporated the establishment clause against the states. You might be able to lift the judges’ own arguments from that case. I can’t guarantee that this will be useful; I haven’t read this one myself. But that’s what I would do. Point out that 1947 was a great time to be an American, much better than the 1700s, and only modern understandings of the Constitution can be relevant to modern people.
Well, this is the most unpleasant conversation I can currently recall witnessing in TET. Truly special levels of assholery from people I respect, to people I respect. Kinda baffling and certainly painful.
Goodnight, all. I hope everyone’s feeling better tomorrow.
:/
lm
Just for the record, to quote yourself from up at #324
You’re quick with serious accusations, and you’re doing it to get people to respond to you at your leisure.
That’s BS when you’re doing it to rorschach (and nobody can claim that I’m saying this out of sympathies for him), that’s BS when you’re doing it to somebody else.
And I’m done with you because discussions with my kid about her imaginary walruss are better quality.
Rorschach made up his strawman about the BBC at #305. Look at the question he asked. It is complete bullshit, in and of itself.
That’s why KG pointed out that it’s “the sort of fucking stupid nonsense [he’s] come to expect from rorschach from time to time.”
I responded with at #309 by asking him why he brought it up. Rorschach ignores that and responds to something I said at #313.
He eventually admits it was complete bullshit, a “rhetorical question” as he puts it.
You want to excuse his pattern of dishonesty on this subject. But it is in fact a pattern. As documented already in the comment I linked before, this is his habit. Here’s what he asked back then:
Just lies. Absolute fucking lies. No one here says this shit, but he makes up these strawmen constantly.
It’s a terrible example that you chose with rorschach, since you’re now excusing his dishonesty by scolding people for pointing it out.
My insistence on an answer from Josh was very different, and I have apologized for it.
Don’t excuse rorschach’s lies by equating my response to him — for which I owe rorschach no apology — to my too-far demand of Josh.
This is reminiscent of the atmosphere that resulted in PZ running Pharyngula Survivor. I’m just wondering if he will actually go through with booting people off the blogisland this time round if the lack of decorum makes him drag it back out of Pharyngula storage again.
Jesus Christ, how I wish I was thread bankrupt.
Anyway.
Congrats, Nigel! And to your daughter!
*confetti and sparkling apple juice!*
新年快乐 y’ll.
While reading an old news story I came across another old link that the crochet crew can relate to:
coral reef made up of over 1,000 pieces of crocheted coral
Not enough pictures and I missed the exhibition… wasn’t anywhere near Salisbury until the end of March 2011, I wonder where the reef is now.
nigel – congratulations!!!!
jamesmichaels1 – all of your friend’s arguments are predicated on the idea that the school is a private group that’s being dictated to by the state. He’s wrong; the school IS the state. Public schools are agents of the state government, and therefore have to act like it. Smaller school districts especially tend to “forget” this and be run by the iron fist of their board, but public schools are, in fact, representatives of government. It’s not that the school should be allowed by the state to express their religious views; the school is not an individual or private group that has any views to express. Government shall not means the school itself shall not.
On discussion creep: the times that discussions have come here from other places have been mostly when either a different set of people to talk about it with is desired, or when the topic at the original thread moves onto something else and someone wants to sit and mull over the original (or branch) thought for awhile. I see two problems with bringing over currently-raging discussions with the same people from one thread to another (no matter where the two threads are):
1. people who are involved in the original discussion will miss out on the part of the discussion taking place at the other thread, and things would get confusing fast, and
2. a lot of times people like to think about one thing for awhile and then another, and keep it all very compartmentalized. A move from one thread to another thread to me signals a clear need for a break from the topic on the first thread. Yes, sometimes there is a lot of slopover from one thread to another, especially when lots of blogs are doing the same topic at once, but in general the discussions themselves differ a bit from place to place even with the same theme because the groups of people aren’t exactly the same. Bringing in one exact discussion with one specific person (or small group) to that same person somewhere else seems like the equivalent of, IRL, having one person in a discussion say “I need a break, I’m going out for a smoke” and then the other person following them outside trying to keep it going.
You’ve Got To Stand For Something
The Walk
—-
So here’s to all the soldiers
Who have ever died in vain
The insane locked up in themselves
The homeless down on Main
To those who stand on empty shores
And spit against the wind
And those who wait forever
For ships that don’t come in
(Yeah, I’m on a 90s-country kick, sue me)
@ McCthulhu
Yes! This is what we should be doing. However, I am embarrassed to say, I have never made Dim Sum from scratch.
We tend to just head off to the restaurant and promise we’ll learn how tomorrow.
Tonight I am making some fusion cooking. Old school beef stew but with local spices. I won’t post any recipe just yet. There is a spice shop at the end of our lane and I might have got a little carried away.
@ LM (et al)
Still not happy about how the word “islamophobia” is used in the place of “anti-islamic” – which carries more strongly the sense of a conscious use of language and a degree of rationalisation. In the same way I am not happy with the general use of “xenophobia” in the stead of “bigotry”.
I would like to share an example to illustrate that “xenophobia” (correctly in my opinion) would describe my experience, yet I can find no fault in the person to which the example refers. There is certainly no question of a conscious hatred or discrimination on the part of the person that displayed this xenophobic reaction to me:
When I lived in Sudan, I was invited by my driver to spend a day with his family in his hometown on the bank of the Nile. The town was quite off the beaten track. On awaking one morning I pulled on my clothes and went in search of a toilet. As I entered a small courtyard, a niece of my colleague emerged from a doorway and, upon seeing me, started screaming blue murder. She was beside herself with terror at the sight of this incredibly ugly خواجة . She was completely frozen in fear and peed herself. Luckily her relatives arrived and calmed her down. I never experienced any “xenophobia” in the sense of foreigner hatred from the adults, so I can only presume this was due to a genuine case of xenophobia. (To which experience I quite obviously harbour no ill feeling.)
*raids the Redhead’s on-hard drive recipes*
Try this: (one recipe out of 12 pages worth)
Sichuan Shrimp
½ lb. shrimps, unshelled
1 T. rice wine
4 T. stock
4 dried red chilis, soaked and finely chopped
1 T. Chinese chili paste (puree)
½ T. Kao Ling spirit (or use good brandy)
1 slice gingerroot, peeled and finely chopped
1 scallion, finely chopped
1 t. salt
½ t. Sichuan pepper
2 T. tomato paste
1 T. cornstarch
oil for deep frying
½ t. dark sesame seed oil
Clean the shrimps and cut them in 2 or 3 pieces (original recipe says leave the shells on, I did not). Heat the oil and deep fry the shrimps until they turn bright pink. Scoop them out and pour off the excess oil. Put the shrimps back in the pan, together with the rice wine or sherry and a little stock, cook for about 1 minute, and remove. Heat about 1 T. oil in the wok, add the red chilis, chili paste, Kao Ling spirits, gingerroot, onions, salt and pepper, the remaining stock and the shrimps. Reduce the heat and braise for 2 minutes, then add the tomato paste, and the cornstarch mixed with a little water. Blend well; add sesame seed oil and serve.
Serendipitydawg
That reef is beautifull, and I like that they’re keeping it growing by organizing workshops.
Nigel
These rats are doing a Conga
Yay. Mr. and I swear that there are certain special genes that get activated by the words “You’re going to be a grandpa/ma”.
Chinese New year
My veggies box contained ingredients for making curry paste and appropriate veggies, so I’m preparing Mrs. Colon’s Original Chinese Stir Fry* for tonight
SCD(something completely different)
Am I the only person to get freaked out by the smell of other people’s washing powder?
I have no problem as long as other people wear their cloths, but handling the cloths themselves is something I find highly unpleasant.
*Mrs. Colon’s Original XXX is “foreign food” that isn’t exactly like the actual food the actual foreigners eat but like the idea other foreigners have of said foreign food.
Carlie @486: You forgot a number 3. I can’t claim to be omniscient enough to speak for Rorschach and I’m not saying this was the case here, but sometimes a person will make a comment mid-discussion just because, well, this is an open comments board. Their opinion on the matter may not be as black and white as two people already very engaged in argument. There’s an infinite amount of greyscale between the black and white points of an argument, and that definitely is the case in the Islamaphobia issue. Judging from Rorschach’s answers to questions, his interest in the issue was a bit more ‘beer and pretzels’ and it wasn’t as life and death to him as to other people engaged in the discussion. That’s just my impression of what was going on there.
I’m not meaning to lump on him for saying this, I’m just noting the irony that he said that the blog wasn’t a place he wanted to be at the moment…he had made me feel the same way about a year or two ago. Maybe a few more people need that perspective to make them realize that the argument voice you were using on another blog against fundies and complete irrationalists isn’t conducive to the whole TeT vibe that makes people want to hang around and discuss things, pointless or no.
Ultimately it’s PZ’s blog though. Let’s just not get to the point where he has to wheel out a reality show theme again.
Nerd @489: I hear ya on the peeling of the shrimp. I hate having to do it at the traditional places…my hands get all saucy and shrimpy smelling.
My wife tells me that they leave the shells on because they eat them and like the crunch and it gives people calcium who don’t drink milk. This sounds fishy to me (or it may be more precise to say it sounds crustaceany to me).
theophontes, your argument is effectively an argument for getting rid of the term homophobic as well. It’s stupid.
Nah. That wouldn’t account for his consistent interest in the matter. He brings up the topic on his own. It’s one of his hobby horses.
Giliell,
I hate the way all detergent smells, especially when it’s on my own clothes. Unscented all the way, baby!
I really don’t handle other people’s clothes, but yeah, the smell would probably tweak me out, too.
Good morning people. I’m in a cubicle that’s slowly becoming an empty cubicle cause I’m being moved to another floor – which kind of sucks cause the reason I’m down in the first place is because I’m supposed to have easy access to the people I work with right down the corner from me.
*sigh* Ah well, that’s how these things go sometimes.
I do not understand the concept of leaving shells on. Yuck.
It did lead to a somewhat humorous situation, though. The first time I went to my boyfriend’s (eventually to be spouse) house, they went all out and made shrimp. Peel-n-eat shrimp, and I had never in my life seen an unpeeled shrimp before. It was quite comical (to me) to try and figure out how to peel them properly, how not to get grossed out enough to throw up (all the legs!), and how to maintain a pleasant and impressive exterior in front of said parents.
Child 2 gets braces today, and I am…oddly traumatized. It just hit me yesterday that he’ll never look the same again, and that we’re subjecting him to two years of misery for what is essentially cosmetic surgery. There is a decent amount of moving things around that is going to happen, but it’s not like his teeth are nonfunctional or anything. You have to be up close or see him in a big smile to really see that there’s anything off-kilter. The one thing that might be a big benefit is that the orthodontist said that his lips roll out a bit due to being pushed out by the teeth, so after it’s done his lips will probably be in less of a “pout” when in resting stage. That would be good, because it contributes to him looking surly and angry when he’s just resting. “No, I’m not mad, this is just my face” is one of his more common statements. Given the Asperger’s, it would be good to not have people always automatically think he’s upset.
Thank goodness this didn’t happen on national hug day.
Congratulations, proto grandparent.
My father says the best part about being a grandfather is that when the diaper is full, you get to make a quick handoff.
Yes.
I predict that the team wearing red, white, blue and grayish-silver will win. Or the one with a name that ends in “ts”. Either one.
Spring rolls with sweet chile sauce
1 package pre-made egg roll or spring roll wrappers (Chinese, not Vietnamese)
1 cup fresh mung bean sprouts
10 snow peas, sliced lengthwise very thin
1/2 small onion, sliced very thin
1 small carrot, sliced and shredded
2 cups bok choy or napa cabbage, shredded
2 tbsp good soy sauce
1 tbsp raw sugar
2 tbsp fresh ginger root, mashed and shredded
1/2 tbsp corn starch mixed with 2 tbsp water
1/2 small red chile pepper, seeded and deveined, shredded
1 tsp dark sesame oil
Stir fry over very high heat onion, chile pepper and carrot until it starts to change colour in a splash of corn/canola/peanut oil. Add the snow peas and fry for about 30 seconds. Add the bean sprouts, cabbage, soy sauce, sugar and ginger root and fry until the veggies are coated with the soy sauce and the cabbage begins to wilt. Stir in the sesame oil and the corn starch and heat until the starch clarifies.
Decant the whole mess into a colander set over a plate and let it drain.
Assemble the egg rolls and deep fry until crisp and golden brown. Serve with sweet chile sauce (below)
Sweet Chile Sauce:
1 dried japones chile, crushed in a mortar
1 fresh red chile (serrano or ripe jalapeno work) minced fine (keep the seeds for more heat)
2 tbsp vinegar
1 tbsp corn/canola/peanut oil
1 tsp sesame oil
3 tbsp raw sugar
1 tsp corn starch mixed in 2 tbsp sherry or rice wine
Heat the oil until almost smoking. Add the chiles and stir fry over really high heat for about 1 minute. Add the vinegar (do not place your face directly over the pan when you do this unless you want to be temporarily blinded or have your sinuses instantly cleared). When the bubbles have all settled down, add the sesame oil and sugar. Add the starch and sherry, lower heat, and let it get nice and thick. Decant to a small bowl and let it cool on the counter while you fry the spring rolls.
@ LM
I am not advocating getting rid of the term “homophobic” nor “xenophobic” at all. As I indicated there is a very real situation in which the term “xenophobia” is both consistent with the whole bevy of terms ending in “-phobia” and apt.
Only if you can come up with a more sensible suggestion than I have made. You might get to claim I am “prescriptivist” though. (In the sense of using “-phobia” in a consistent and rational manner as opposed to drifting along with the sloppier bandying of the suffix.)
Why not just call the people that you refer to with the term: “Bigots”? It is not an illness to which you refer, it is a clear decision to be against a group of people and discriminate against them accordingly. “Anti-” would seem far more appropriate. (Is it not both a stronger and more descriptive approach? People do not choose their phobias,… why leave that excuse/escape open to truly bigoted people?)