Author Archives: Leo Tarvi
Sympathy for @StephanieDraven
So an hour or so after I post about women and sexuality on my blog, I go to see if any of the new people following me on Twitter are actual people & not just spambots. Stephanie Draven, the only one I feel sure about, tweeted this yesterday:
Is there gonna be any time today when I log into the internet and don’t stumble over some guy talking about female sexuality? #drdrew
I’m feeling a little self-conscious about that, but c’est la vie. Sorry Stephanie!
From the Stars, and #NudePhotoRevolutionary Calender
Couple of neat things.
First, I found this video at Bad Astronomy.
It’s always fascinated me to know that we literally came from stars, and Neil Tyson explains why very clearly. Truly awesome in that the thought inspires genuine awe. Read the rest of this entry
Modern Democracy
So this happened. The president has claimed the power to execute people without trial. The executive branch has been assuming more and more power since I first started really paying attention back in Y2K. The legislative branch seems to have abdicated its responsibilities and spends its time squabbling like spoiled children. The judicial branch is the only one that seems to still be doing its actual job, except for the Supreme Court, which is just weird.
I had thought the executive branch power-grab was just a Bush thing, since I didn’t pay any attention to politics before his presidency. But no, Obama’s doing the same shit Bush did, he’s just being less stupid and obvious about it. He’s abused the state secrets privilege, signed himself the power to detain people indefinitely, and has now claimed the power to kill without any real limits. Bizarrely, the right-wing never mentions any of this, they criticize him for insane shit like not having a long enough birth certificate, “socialism”, or looking too black. I can only assume the authoritarian power grabs are something they approve of.
And I’m probably still going to vote for the bastard, because evil & competent is still far, far better than the alternatives this election.
What the hell happened to this country?
One small battle won.
Here’s a Rolling Stone article from a month ago about the Anoka-Hennepin school district and its war on gay kids, which I have written about before. It’s painful to read, it tells the stories of a handful of victims of that school district in a very personal way. I won’t blame you if you can’t read it in detail. There will not be a test.
I bring this up because there’s been a tiny victory. A lawsuit settled out of court, some concessions to new policies, a cash payment. You can read the details of the settlement here. One member of the school board, Kathy Tingelstad, resigned. She said the settlement was going to cost too much.
Cost too much. Read the rest of this entry
The limits of tolerence
Natalie Reed is facing a problem that I’ve become more and more aware of in the last year or so. Natalie blogs about feminism, atheism, skepticism, and trans/queer rights (and may or may not be a magical unicorn) and she’s facing hostility, even outright bigotry, to each of these issues from people who are nominally her allies on one of the others. It’s almost as if they’re seen as “teams” and if not directly competing with each other, at least arguing over who gets to use the ball-park.
This bit jumped out at me:
A friend of mine once made the grim but terribly accurate observation (in the context of talking about trans women who dismiss the rights or genders of other trans women who are, say, non-op or lesbian) that people only tend to be exactly as tolerant as it takes to accept themselves, and maybe their immediate friends and family, but have a whole lot of trouble extending that principle beyond that circle, to people who they don’t understand, with whom they don’t share the same experiences or identities or priorities.
That feels very accurate to me, though still very confusing. I’m reminded that soon after I posted this I had an acquaintance discreetly ask me if I were intersex because it seemed so unlikely that someone who wasn’t would think to include them. Read the rest of this entry
Codependency in American politics
Had a couple of potential blog posts started when someone linked this on Facebook. The short version is that a negligent school employee (or possibly volunteer) illegally violated a teenager’s medical privacy and let the fact that she took birth control pills become public knowledge. Since every class apparently comes standard with the kind of people whose only joy seems to be causing misery in others, she’s been hearing how she’s a slut who wants to fuck everyone because Rush “Illegal Viagra” Limbaugh said so.
I’ve already written about this a bit, but I thought this was worth passing along because it brings such a human face to the sort of petty cruelty that’s behind this bizarre birth control argument. It also illustrates something genuinely terrifying: People listen to this asshole.
Think of the implications of that. It’s difficult for me to think about it without feeling sure that it must be a symptom of something terribly wrong with our culture, some sickness that we need to understand and cure.
Here’s a short excerpt from a comment by FishOutofWater at the Daily Kos link above:
Limbaugh is an abuser who encourages others to abuse.
This really strikes me as an accurate description not only of Limbaugh, but of many prominent voices of the American right-wing. It really feels like what the Republican party has been turning into. For all the rhetoric about jobs or fiscal responsibility, the actual platforms of the party candidates seem to be almost entirely based on dehumanizing and taking away rights and freedoms from people, while insisting that it’s for their own good, or that the only people it affects aren’t really people.
The loyalty this party inspires baffles me. This isn’t a Ford/Chevy conflict, some harmless name-brand attachment that gets passed down through the family, this is our home, our nation, our society. The choices we make in our government have long-lasting, far-reaching implications. It affects the entire world. This is our future, and the future we leave for our children. The only way it makes any sense to me is a sort of abusive codependency, like the woman who bails her husband out of jail when he’s in there for breaking her arm because his dinner was cold.
Haven’t they hit you enough?
Unable to comply
It looks like Toys R Us won’t have to choose whether or not they’re going to pull the Archie comic featuring gay marriage from their shelves as the American Patriarchy Association has demanded. Because that issue has sold out.
I think that’s pretty cool, but I wanted to touch on this quote:
Homosexuality is a topic which is “too complicated” for children to understand, say the mothers, and “a trip to the toy store turns into a premature discussion on sexual orientation and is completely uncalled for”.
I really don’t see how this is complicated. It seriously doesn’t seem any more complex than heterosexuality. Two men got married, what’s so complicated about that? How hard is it to explain that people love each other?
A nasty little part of me thinks the real problem is that kids aren’t likely to develop any real hostility towards different people this way. That the complicated part is explaining to them why these people should be treated with cruelty. But I’d like to think that people are better than that. That the only real problem is that these parents are uncomfortable with the subject and they don’t want to have to talk about it.
It seems really silly to me. Marriage is the same regardless of the sex of the spouses. If you can explain to a child why a woman would marry a man, surely to explain her marrying a woman you simply give the same explanation. Gay marriage, for all the talk, really is just marriage.
Turning back the clock on sex.
So, I was looking at this page about a GOP Rep lying about the morning after pill and whining that religion should have some privileged place in the law. I looked at the links in the sidebar, so many of which are about political attacks on women. I thought of Rush Limbaugh’s insane demand for sex videos from women who use birth control. And I tried to imagine the world these assholes are trying to create.
It made me think of My Secret Life. First published in 1888, this anonymous sex diary is a fascinating uncensored look into the side of Victorian culture that was so carefully hidden in published work from that era. “Walter” holds nothing back in describing his sexual adventures and it can be uncomfortable to read at times. Read the rest of this entry
Strange and wonderful
Since I’ve been talking about evolution here lately, this seems fitting. It takes a lot of artistic license, but it’s pretty neat. I’ve seen several links to this during the evening, so I don’t even know where I saw it first now. But here’s an animation made by a bunch of 11 year-olds about evolution. I was a bit torn between picking at all the weak spots and cheering about the idea.
Controversial Ads in Pennsylvania
Free speech is an important right, but are there limits? Should there be limits? Can a billboard ad be so controversial or offensive that it should be rejected?
I’m about to show you an ad that was submitted to be displayed on buses in the County of Lackawanna Transit System. It was rejected based on the advertising policy that they do not run ads “which could be deemed controversial or otherwise spark public debate.”
Objecting to Science Education 2 (Religious Boogaloo?)
Ok, so we have creationists claiming that evolution is a lie and that their religion’s creation story is an accurate & factual account of the beginnings of life, the universe, and everything. Let’s talk a bit about some of the things that they do with this idea.
“Intellectual freedom” is a phrase found on many bills working their way through many state legislatures right now. Almost without exception, these bills are designed to either bring some form of creationism into classrooms or to muddy up science education by suggesting that evolution is somehow optional. (Evolution’s about as optional to biology as gravity is to physics.) The idea here is that teachers are having their freedom restricted by being expected to teach science in science classes.
I suppose in the strictest sense, that’s true. Teachers would have more freedom if they could teach anything they felt like without having to consider the truth or accuracy of their lessons. But I have trouble getting behind the idea of the freedom for state-sponsored institutions to lie to children. Read the rest of this entry
Objecting to science education
So now that I have a workable, if simplistic, outline for what evolution is, let’s talk a bit about some of the groups and people out there opposing it as a scientific theory, especially those who are trying to have the teaching of it banned from public schools.
The most common objections I’ve seen to the theory of evolution are on religious grounds. The more honest ones are open about that, but you also get the occasional liar for Jesus. Perhaps the most famous example is “Intelligent Design”, which was a poorly executed attempt to camouflage religion as science and sneak it into classrooms. The resulting trial is the subject of a NOVA documentary which is well worth checking out. It also gave us the term “cdesign proponentsists”, possibly the clearest indicator of the dishonesty of the ID movement, certainly the funniest.
The Intelligent Design advocates are still out there, but they seem to be much diminished now. In recent years, they have apparently given up trying to pretend that they’re promoting a scientific theory without a religious agenda and openly refer to Jesus & the Bible on their websites. Since I’ve already written about their hypothesis here, I’ll move on to more typical (even generic) creationism. Read the rest of this entry
Evolution for drunk people
From U.C. Berkeley’s Understanding Evolution site:
Biological evolution, simply put, is descent with modification. This definition encompasses small-scale evolution (changes in gene frequency in a population from one generation to the next) and large-scale evolution (the descent of different species from a common ancestor over many generations).
I had a drunken hot tub conversation the other night about evolution. It was the kind of discussion that would probably have been a lot more interesting if it had started much earlier, but it was still fun trying to hang on to a train of thought.
People get funny about evolution. Some people will claim that it doesn’t happen, but they will freely accept that, for example, we each get a random mix of traits from our parents. Given this premise, it’s impossible for populations not to evolve. People will be different, and those who thrive better will pass on their traits to more children so that their genetic legacy will have a stronger influence on the future population than those who are less successful. You really can’t have sexual reproduction without evolution. Read the rest of this entry
Well, damn
In all the crazy busy rush yesterday I totally forgot to blog. I actually have reminders set up, but they can’t help if I’m away from the desk all day.
I will try to catch up with proper posts, but if not this will have to count for one.
Because pointing to cool stuff doesn’t take long.
Running out of time here, so instead of the big post I had in mind here’s a link to Girl Genius, one of the best comics ever made. It’s so good it got through my usual distaste of comic books. You can read it for free on the web, or you can buy books to curl up with or as gifts for your friends, loved ones, and me.
They call it a “gaslamp fantasy” series, but most people would call it “steampunk”. Set in a demented version of Europe in a world ruled(poorly) by mad science, Girl Genius follows the adventures of a large cast of larger-than-life characters as they try to survive the escalating chaos. The plot is thick and tangled and darts around like a crazed beast.
The art is so good that it’s a little shocking to look back at the beginning. It wasn’t bad then, it just looks that way compared to now. There are lots of neat little extras all over the website too, so be sure to explore. And apparently they made a novel while I wasn’t looking.
Out of time now, have a great day everyone.
The end is nigh?
I’d read the blog post, and was skimming the comments when I saw a link to this Wikipedia page. That is a really long list of end of the world predictions. If you worry about the Mayan calendar or Nibiru or some other scenario happening soon, perhaps you can take some comfort in seeing that the vast majority of those predictions are already in the past.
The next one on that list, which is also the next I’ve heard of, is Ronald Weinland’s prediction of May 27 of this year. I’m not especially concerned about this, not because of my lack of piety, but because at this point there have been so many predictions that I can’t believe Jesus would take the trouble to issue a warning. I mean, why bother when pretty much everyone is going to ignore it for very sensible reasons?
The sad truth is that an actual end of the world event would probably be beyond our ability to do anything about. But there are cataclysmic events worth thinking about and planning for. Earthquakes, cyclones, volcanoes and tsunamis are all very real, and it’s certainly worthwhile to plan for them.
And then there’s something in between. Read the rest of this entry
Home Sweet Home
Bad Astronomy featured this pic today, which came from the ESA spacecraft Rosetta.
Crescent Earth from 633,000 km away.
Breathtaking, isn’t it? For all the wonders of this vast universe, there are few sights as beautiful as our home. The little water world that’s named, with seeming irony, after dirt, and is home to all the life we’ve ever found. It’s lovely to see it as a place with phases like the moon, to challenge our usual perception. Read the rest of this entry
The Adventures of Leo Tarvi 