Ohhh noes! Femminity soaked in lust!

"The sexuality of human developing countries has always leaned on anonomous
heterosexual relationships." Of course! Why didn't I think of that before?

Via Bitch Ph.D

Fri-aturday Random 10

It's that time again kid and kiddlets. Load up your mp3s in your Lappy 486 computer or Diamond 64 mb portable player and set that sucker to random. Post the first ten ditties that come up in the comments, being careful not to disturb the sanctified-ness-ocity by trying to change out songs that make you seem like you lack the verve and moxy of the hep cats.

(Song - Artist)
1. Chance - Savatage
2. Outro - Blueprint
3. Octopus's Garden - The Beatles
4. The Riches - Jane's Addiction
5. C'Mom Wit Da Git Down - Artifacts
6. Get Smart - Theme
7. Space Lion - Yokko Kanno
8. Tribes - Preston Reed
9. What To Say - Enchant
10. Out Of Live Wires And Twisters - Reaching Quiet

Well, it's not great throughout, but that's a pretty sweet list for being totally random. Anyone want to take a shot at guessing the genres of these groups?

Video Games Say The Darndest Things

Here's a nice Saturday post over at The Armchair Empire where they list the "Best In-Game Quotes". Now, it did strike me as odd that their definintion of "best" seems to be humorous or unintentionally humorous, without any seriously dramatic or moving lines making the cut, but with that qualification it's a nice trip down memory lane for those of us that thought it was a really good idea to spend our formative years parked in front of a television or computer screen. Actually, it's a pretty odd collection of games and I, who consider myself an authority on geeky things, have only played six of the ten games, and a couple only very briefly. How 'bout you lot? How many of those games have you played, and do you have any favorite game quotes that didn't make the list? Hit up the comments to let us know.

Sex only counts if it's risky!

You can read what Dawn Eden wrote yourself, or Amanda's post on it, but either way it's hilarious. Be sure to check out the comments under both, though, they get even funnier.

I say it's still a kiss. It is also a deception: your bodies have been altered, and you are trying to pretend they haven't been. Thus, each member of this hypothetical couple would be lying to the other, as well as being complicit in the other's lie. Moreover, while it is still a kiss, it is, like a bad movie climax, lacking in suspense or tension, in any sense of what's at stake. It is lacking in the dramatic weight it ought to have. This kind of training in avoiding certain kinds of drama a) leads to really bad, repetitive, introspective cinema and b) means either that the movie of your life is going to be lacking certain elements of real drama, or that the drama therein is going to be off-kilter. There's very little middle ground, as far as I can tell.

Hence, the best kind of kiss is when you're making out with a stranger who might have cholera. Because that makes for a good movie. Or something.

And we should only have sex when it's unprotected sex with AIDS sufferers and someone can get pregnant. Because then we can maybe star in our own, ultra-tragic version of Philadelphia, which was a decent movie in its day. Or something.

This exchange nicely sums up the insanity of the whole thread at Dawn's:

Ok, let me get this straight. If something goes wrong with your birth control and get pregnant, you see the child as a "mistake." If you mess up or miscalculate your NFP, you see the child as a "blessing." How you see children is contingent on your method of birth control. NFP is as effective or more effective than birth control pills (not true according to every study I've ever read, but I'll go with it for now), but the reason NFP is so great is because it keeps the couple open to new life. Contraception is bad because you're withholding your fertility from your parnter, but NFP is good because you're withholding your fertility from your partner by not having sex during the times you could possible get pregnant.

Did I get it all? Is anyone else's head spinning?
Jill
====================================================
Actually, Jill, you've got just about all of it.[...]
Dawn Eden

Kierkegaard's notion of faith is all about embracing paradox. But he's talking about the paradox of Christ (the 'fully human and fully divine' thing), not this insane shit. Dawn and her ilk make Reason cry.

Because, damn it, we just haven't caused enough suffering yet

Bush is planning on invading Iran.

The title of this post is, I think, the only honest argument one could give in favour of this idea. Note that I said 'honest', and not 'sane', 'rational', or 'non-sociopathic'.

Conscientious objectors: pharmacists and pacifists

Last summer, a handful of pharmacists around the country refused to distribute birth control because they thought the use of birth control was the same thing as an abortion. Now, it's a simple matter of fact that they're either idiots or defining 'pregnancy' completely differently from the AMA, but let's suppose for the sake of argument that one of the ways birth control works is by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterine lining, so they have vaguely reasonable grounds for saying the pill is immoral. At the time, quite a few of us made jokes about Christian Scientist and Jehovah's Witness pharmacists refusing to distributing any drugs whatsoever. Well, leave it to movement conservatives to prove that truth can be as strange as fiction: pharmacists are refusing women their prescribed drugs for no other reason than that the drugs were prescribed by clinics that perform abortions. In certain cases, these drugs including vitamins taken only by pregnant women.

Now, unlike the representative of PP, I think it's my job (qua philosopher) to be as charitable as possible to these pharmacists. So, while I'm not willing to grant their position that abortion is evil, I am willing to grant that they are entitled to hold that belief. I am also more than willing to grant that there had better be very, very good reasons for requiring someone to do something they think is evil. Hence, if we are going to require pharmacists to violate their deeply-held beliefs, we'd better have some damn good reasons why. In particular, requiring these pharmacists to violate their beliefs must be the 'least worst' option of all the ones available.

I think a good analogy is with conscientious objectors in times of war: if we're going to require pacifists to take up arms -- that is, if we're going to require them to violate their deepest principles and most sincere beliefs -- it had better be because something like the Third Reich is going to steamroll over us unless everyone joins the fight, and we can't put the pacifists to work doing something else, eg, growing food.

Now, has this burden been met in the plan to simply strip out conscience clauses, as the PP representative (among others) seems to want to do? I think we must conclude not, as there is an alternative plan that both allows pharmacists to conscientiously object to the distribution of birth control and allows women access to birth control: require pharmacies to distribute properly prescribed drugs within a reasonable amount of time. Pharmacists who refuse to distribute certain drugs to certain customers won't be required to violate their principles, but will also be legally required not to interfere with the distribution of the drugs; more specifically, they will generally not be allowed to harass or insult a customer, and another pharmacists will have to be on-shift with them so the drugs can still be distributed. Similarly, pacifists should generally be exempted from a military draft, but can be legally punished for sabotaging military equipment.

Some of these pharmacists may still be unhappy, however, and feel the desire to actively interfere in the distribution of these drugs. This, I think, is like the monkeywrencher or pacifist saboteur. Here the difference between legal and ethical comes into play: on the assumption that the use of birth control is always evil, then it seems natural to conclude that interfering with the use of birth control by others is ethically permissible or even required, provided the interference is proportional (ie, you can't claim it's ethical to kill someone to prevent them from using birth control, but it could be ethical to burn each carton of pills in the alley as soon as it arrives). But because there is no legal argument to accept that assumption and legal arguments to reject the conclusion, it is legally impermissible to interfere, and such interference can be punished by the state (requiring the pharmacist to pay for damages, etc.). This, then, is civil disobedience, and while I can neither morally nor legally condone this sort of action by these pharmacists, I do believe it is a consistent position for them to take. Similarly, while I happen to believe that the actions of monkeywrenchers interfering with logging are generally morally permissible, this is because I share certain environmentalist background assumptions and values, and I don't presume (here) to have a good legal argument for those values or the permissibility of monkeywrenching, so I believe the state can also compel saboteurs to pay damages to the owners of the equipment they destroyed.

But none of this applies to the shit the article is talking about. I can see absolutely no rational defence for those actions; they're literally insane, and figuratively batshit insane.

Via Bitch, Ph.D.

Carnival of Feminists XII

I'm trying to think up an amusing yet not insipid collective noun for all of us here -- readers, myself, and MosBen. SoRers? Ra-ites? Leave your suggestions in the comments, folks.

Anyway, Staffers might be interested in the 12. Carnival of Feminists, which has several many entries on comic books and cartoons, along with pop culture more generally and 'serious' current eventsy things.

I miss geography

 

"On clear winter days the Olympic and Cascade mountains flank the trough of Puget Sound like a fence of white-capped waves. We've got mountains like Iowa's got flat. And yet the local vernacular admits only one 'Mountain', and when Rainier rises we tell each other, "The Mountain is out." Mount Rainier is at once the most public symbol of the Pacific Northwest and its most sacred private icon. A friend once disclosed that she says a prayer whenever she sees it .... Like rain and rivers and trees, the mountain is a continuous presence in our lives, but in our psychological landscape it occupies a place separate and greater than the forests and falling water. We look at Rainier and feel love for a mountain, if such a thing is possible."

Bruce Barcott, The measure of a mountain: Beauty and terror on Mount Rainier, quoted in Arches (my alumni magazine). Photo from the USGS. 

Friday Random Ten

Hot on the heels of Dan's itunes post, it's time for the Random 10! Let's see some randomness up in this piece!

(Song - Artist)
1. Solitary Soul - Spock's Beard
2. Passion (Feat. Michael Franti) - One Giant Leap
3. Candlelight Fantasia - Symphony X
4. Song About A Star - Okkervil River
5. Of Sins And Shadows - Symphony X
6. Dawn Of A Million Souls - Ayreon
7. The Mirror Maze - Ayreon
8. Holy Land - Angra
9. Monotone - Mars ILL
10. Wake Up - The Ditty Bops

Odd mix. Two repeated groups in five songs, and I don't even have that much music by those groups. I find it really odd that though I have a non-insignificant collection of classical and jazz that they rarely come up in the shuffle. I guess my itunes doesn't like that old stuff...

I cause problems

Are you surprised?

"CoX" = "City of Heroes and City of Villains"

Politically Correct

Amanda has a great point about political incorrect-ness, though I'm not sure she makes much of a case for applying it to Bill Maher. Be that as it may, there are few phrases in common parlance that annoy me as much as "this may be politically incorrect, but..."

As I see it, there are two possible definitions of political correctness:
1) Language used by politicians as a means to give coded messages to their base without using words or phrases that might be inflamatory to either their opponents or other groups they may wish to court.

2) A state in which a person attempts to tailor certain aspects of their speech so as not to be offensive.

As to #1, this is something that all politicians do. It's simply the nature of politics that you want to say the things your base wants to hear but not appear so attached to them that you can't act on your own. Liberals want to assuage the fears of their base that they will protect social programs while not wanting to seem fiscally irresponsible. Neocons want to seem socially compassionate to moderates while reassuring the Movement Conservatism base that they're going to legislate based on all the nasty prejudices that that group holds dear. The annoying aspect of this definition is that conservatives have managed to completely take it over such that when people think of "political correctness" of this type they invariably think of the wishy washy sounding phrases coming out of the Democrats instead of things like Bush saying in the debates that he, wonder of all wonders, didn't support the Dredd Scott decision (where a slave was ruled to be property by the Supreme Court). Of course, his reasoning for opposing this decision was that the judges were inventing things in the Constitution which "weren't there", an obvious nod to the people that think Roe should be overruled because privacy "isn't there".

As to #2, I've always thought that this was just what my grandmother might have called "being polite". If someone I'm talking to or about doesn't like being called Indian because they feel it is a moniker born out of European ignorance, well fine. It's not like it takes much effort for me to say "Native American" instead. I might make a mistake here or there, but we all do and people are generally forgiving about that sort of thing in personal discussions. And honestly, as much noise as people, mostly conservatives, make about honest mistakes or ignorance being punished by the Political Correctness Police, it's not like they're not keenly aware when they're offended by things like the differences between Catholics and Protestants (it's in the footnotes).

Like Amanda's article points out, being "Politically Incorrect" is used as a blanket excuse not to push valid but unpopular ideas, but to prop up unsupportable nonsense by cloaking it as "rebelling against the orthodoxy". In common practice, being PC is really just about not being a jerk to people. Do you know that someone is going to be offended if you say "crippled" when you talk to them? Aren't you a jerk if you then purposefully call them crippled?

Like I said at the beginning, I'm not sure she makes much of a case against Bill Maher. He definitely believes some stuff that I disagree with, but I think he usually has arguments to back it up, even if I think those arguments fail. There is definitely something to be said for the fact that he could use another phrase for his show and that without him using it the phrase might diminish in the popular conciousness, but I'm not convinced he has quite that level of power. Some of the comments over at the Pandagon suggest that the case is made against him because he sometimes gives right wing guests too much slack in making their points, but I think that's unfair. Sometimes giving conservative guests space to make arguments you don't agree with so that conservatives feel comfortable enough to come on the show isn't hackery and, moreover, there have been far more times when the entire panel is composed of moderate to liberal guests.

Nostalgia, and a comic

The neighbourhood I grew up in wasn't your typical suburb. I suppose suburb is the best way to describe it, but this wasn't a dense thicket of virtually identical houses on cul de sacs and meandering streets named for trees that had been cut down to build the houses. All the lots in the neighbourhood were two acre parcels, and all the houses were custom or spec homes -- built individually, not en masse. Back before the white people moved in and cleared the land, my part of California was the Sierra side of the chapparal -- a huge forest of live oaks, digger pines, and manzanita. A forest that survived, at least through my childhood, in the form of 50 or so acres in the contiguous back yards of the neighbourhood where I grew up. We had a stream, that I made various successful and not-so-successful attempts to dam and bridge, and a big hill, and a sink hole from the old gold mines. It was, in many respects, the furthest edge of a very small city, in the exact place where the suburbs began turning to countryside.

'Nostalgia' comes from a Greek phrase -- something like 'sadness at being unable to go home again'. Classically, it was exemplified by Odysseus-type characters, whose literal journey home was thwarted by fate; but in our society, where the children of the middle class move far away from the family home at 18 and only sporadically return, the journey home is a logical, not just logistic, impossibility. 'Home' itself becomes destabilized -- neither the soil dam on the seasonal creek, nor the rainy suburb where I went to college, nor the big city I wandered around in for a while, nor the small midwestern town I've confined myself to, are my home. But nostalgia -- even if it is ultimately a maudlin feeling -- gives me a way to go back home, for just a little while.

And that is the value of Hope Larson's Salamander Dream. Be sure to read the review of Gray Horses in Salon, but take the time to read Salamander Dream thoroughly. It is a journey worth taking.

An iTunes Game

Thanks to Manda for the following game.

Open itunes (whatever program you can have your music like that) to answer the following:
*total number of tracks
*sort by song title, first song on the list
*top 10 most played songs
*first five songs that comes up on shuffle
*how many songs come up when you search "sex", "love", "you", "death", "hate", "wish"

I'll go first, in the comments.

Theocracy in the USA

Amanda argues that the US is slouching towards exactly the same flavour theocracy Iran already has. What kind of theocracy does Iran have?

1. Islam is the official state religion.
2. Freedom to practice for protected minority religions.
3. State laws based on religious principles.
4. The interpretation of the religion into law is determined by mullahs.

Just substitute 'Christian' in for 'Islam', and 'Scalia et al' in for 'mullahs' and there you go.

Be sure to read the comments, too. Someone's there arguing (possibly facetiously) that the US can never be a theocracy because we're a *democracy*, y'see, and (I guess) it's logically impossible for a democracy to devolve into a theocracy. Also, atheists hate god, and they're the ones who are going to destroy democracy.

Better dating advice

If you have trouble hanging onto guys because being (financially) successful and also female makes you "emasculating", you're dating the wrong guys.

This is important

On Wednesday of this week, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be

01:02:03 04/05/06

That won't ever happen again.

Of course, if you (like me) write the date in a European style, you have to wait until 4 May.

via Morgaine

A Political Post!

Whew, it's been a while since I've done one of these. I better ease my way in. Through Kos I ended up at Firedoglake, where they're running a weekly series of posts where they expose the insane things that make their way through the right wing blogosphere and even peak into the mainstream media (MSM to those savvy folks out there) from time to time. All this is in reaction to a piss poor interview by Wolf Blitzer accepted Hugh Hewitt's assertion that the lefty blogosphere is a "fever swamp" at face value.

Ultimately, this is what annoys me about the idea that the MSM is "liberal". It's not so much that I think Blitzer and most of his collegues aren't liberal themselves, but they're either so concerned about appearing liberal or are so woefully uneducated and unprepared that they get railroaded when they have a conservative on.

Actually, I have to run right now, but I may return to this later.

Two Quick Things

First, evidently we may start to see broader acceptance of digital delivery for movies. Just as we've seen with music, primarily through itunes though Pandora would also qualify, digital delivery is simply the way the technology is going. With high speed broad band and wireless networks becoming more standardized over time the industries will be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern era of entertainment. Actually, it's mind boggling how short sighted industry always is. They fought home video, and it became an enormous source of income. Much like with digital music, digital video download will tap into that impulse buying instinct that people get when things are made extremely convenient for them. Now we just need more devices that work with Windows Media Connect, though perhaps Microsoft is only too happy to make the Xbox 360 the premiere device for streaming video from your computer to your nice big HDTV.

Second, I love when video games spill over to the real world. Whether it's live action Pacman, or kids putting Super Mario Bros. coin boxes around town. Unfortunately, sometimes a box with a big question mark on it can look like a bomb.

A parable

from PZ Myers. It even features a fire tiger. Everyone knows the best parables feature fire tigers.

Should men be called feminists?

Ampersand gives this question as long, thoughtful answer:

Years ago, I used to get into arguments about the 'feminist' versus 'pro-feminist' question, but then I began to wonder: Why am I spending time arguing with feminists? Is it my job as an ally to care about what these people I want to support choose to call me? If I get into long debates about what I should be called - or if I'm a feminist at all - aren't I both wasting the time of feminists who might have better things to do, and making myself the center of feminist debate? (For that reason, I've more-or-less stopped going to female feminists' spaces to argue about feminism - if I have to argue with someone, it's better that it be an anti-feminist, or at least that the argument take place on my own space rather than appropriating someone else's.)

I still call myself a feminist - frankly, I think more men should be calling themselves feminists, especially in public. But at the same time, I call myself pro-feminist if I sense that's what most feminists in a room would prefer. It's not helpful to feminism if I get into women's faces and make demands about what I'd like to be called. In the end, I think the content matters more than the label. (Of course, there are feminists who argue that my content sucks, too).

And there's more; take the time to read the whole thing.

In a somewhat different context, I make the following argument in a paper I'm current writing:
First, think of A. A is in her twenties, a grad student in philosophy who's done some serious thinking about feminism, and who calls herself a feminist. B is the same age as A, and also a grad student whose views would easily be called feminist, except that he is male.

Suppose A and B spend a week going around their campus together, documenting all the different instances of sexism they come across. A and B will probably not produce identical lists, of course, but it's quite likely each will only have a few items the other didn't put down.

Now suppose C and D do this same exercise. These two are both first year undergrads, coming from some politically moderate, upper-middle class suburb; they haven't really thought much about sexism, or political issues in general. C is a woman, D is a man. C's list is quite likely to be a great deal longer than D's. And C's list is quite likely to be a great deal shorter than either A's or B's.

I think most of the folks who are concerned about calling men 'feminists' because men don't know sexism 'first hand' have the disparity between C and D in mind. While it's certainly vital to keep this disparity in mind while doing feminist theory or feminist activism, I think it's largely irrelevant to the question of whether B is an 'ally' or a fully-fledged member in the feminist movement.

Is B taking over the discussion, demanding feminists pay as much attention to men's lives as women's and treating other participants in the discussion with a complete lack of respect? Then he doesn't belong in the discussion because he's not really a feminist. But if he's listening respectfully, and contributing his own ideas and stories at the appropriate times -- that is, if he's genuinely a feminist in deed -- why isn't he in fact an equal in the movement?