Blog Archives
“a violent society, racism, sexism, sexual harassment and hypocrisy”
A couple days ago I wrote about Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, a young Egyptian woman who posted naked pictures to her blog to “call attention to a violent society, racism, sexism, sexual harassment and hypocrisy”. I believe I called her one of the bravest people I’ve ever heard about, and I stand by that statement. It probably doesn’t surprise you at this point to learn that some Egyptians want to have her whipped.
Look, if someone says that you are violently oppressive and their stance of defiance against your alleged violent oppression is to publicly post photos of themselves, then calling for them to be brutalized, possibly executed, really just tells the world that they’re right.
I’m far too tired to do this subject justice. So I’ll just ask you a question. What’s more obscene, posting public naked photos, or having some publicly whipped?
Friends help you move…
Helping friends move this weekend. I thought I’d still find something interesting to say, but after thinking about it for over an hour, I’ve got nothing. Since I’m going back for more work tomorrow, it’s likely there won’t be anything new and interesting til Monday.
For tonight, I’ll just say that I’m surprised by how tired I am. I don’t really feel like I earned that.
Naked in Egypt
Aliaa Magda Elmahdy is an Egyptian student who posted nude pictures of herself on the internet in the name of women’s rights. Here’s an article about it, and here’s Elmahdy’s blog, which now has many pictures of naked people. It’s caused a surprising amount of backlash: surprising to me, at least.
The comments on her blog are in many languages, so I’m stuck with using Google Translate to get the gist of most of the discussion. And most of them are from outside Egypt, outside the Mid-East, even, and are overwhelmingly supportive.
That gives me some hope, maybe the hardline Muslims will look at that and have a moment of introspection. Maybe they’ll think “If the rest of the world sees our policies as oppressive and archaic, relics of a dark age, could we be mistaken?” I know that’s pretty unlikely, not only because religious fundamentalism leaves little room for introspection but because these movements to expand religious power and take rights and freedoms away from people are expanding. Read the rest of this entry
Interesting times
Busy day for Occupy Wall Street, lots going on. Twitter’s #OWS tag was very active, and yet never trended. Meanwhile, “Women Who Don’t Cook” was a trending topic, with predictable depressing shit being said. Well, fuck. Between that and the truly ugly things opponents of Occupy were saying, I’m feeling a little down.
Look, people disagree on things. sometimes passionately, sometimes even violently, and it’s easy to get angry when someone disagrees with you on something that seems so obvious to you. It’s important not to let anger blind you to the fact that your opponents are still people. Maybe they’re misinformed, maybe they’re stupid, maybe they’re selfish or maybe it’s something else entirely, maybe even they’re right and you’re the one who’s wrong, it really doesn’t matter. They’re still people, and if you dehumanize them, you’re becoming a bit of a monster yourself.
Worse, you’re opening yourself up to the worst kinds of manipulation, where someone can convince you to commit real atrocities. Because how bad can it be? It’s not like they’re asking you to do anything to actual people.
People matter. All of them. How rich or poor they are, what religion they claim, the politics they espouse, the color of their skin, the clothes they like to wear and the sex they like to have, all these things are irrelevant. Even the worst of us matter, we’re all in this together. You don’t have to like them, you don’t have to be nice to them, but when you forget that they’re people, when you start to see them as just obstacles, then what are you becoming?
Take care everyone, and take care of each other.
Copping out again.
Well, at least I have the excuse that I’m still sick. Getting better, but so very slowly.
What really bugs me though, is that I had something I wanted to write about when I finally got out of bed around noon. Well, maybe tomorrow I’ll have enough sense to do my writing when I can, rather than hoping to do it when it’s convenient.
Searching for Leo Tarvi
I’m still sick, but getting better. Let’s take a look at the search terms that led people here over the last month, that was fun last time. As before, their search terms are in bold, while my commentary is in italic.
leo tarvi I’m sort of relieved and bored that my name is number 1.
cardboard cutouts of people I was curious and googled this myself, this blog doesn’t turn up on the first few pages. Wonder what the story was there.
little janie qs meaning We’re probably happier not knowing.
leo+tarvi = awesome
leo stereotypes People just don’t realize how much they can hurt 😦
scott berkun Writes the Daily Post inspiration things. I really think he makes them vague, subject to much interpretation, and kind weird on purpose. I wonder if he has a big list or if he’s making them up as he goes?
the big fat test Uh oh, hope you remembered to study!
little janie qs It’s such a sad little term, isn’t it? I imagine children chanting it in a mocking singsong way.
things i learned on using tumblr I’m guessing grammar wasn’t one of them.
stoya porn tumblr Is more likely to be found on Tumblr than on WordPress. Just sayin’.
matts safe school law I should really do a followup on that, I found the full text of the law and the religious loophole doesn’t apply to students. In fact, according to that law, only students are capable of bullying.
women fucking I hope you enjoyed my fucking patriarchy series!
leo open source software I’m free-as-in-speech, not free-as-in-beer!
fuck patriarchy facebook Seriously, Facebook! Fuck that patriarchy!
rebecca watson elevator The fallout from that tiny non-event is one of the few things in the last couple years that genuinely shocked me. Seriously, if you’re still giving Watson shit over this, step back, take a deep breath, and re-examine your life.
ubuntu unity sucks Yes, yes it does. (Had more to say here but I accidentally hit the windows key, and now I have to wait five minutes for the search menu to pop up and another three minutes to get rid of it.)
Well, that’s all for now. Tune in next time for whatever random crap I can manage to come up with!
Learning curve
Topic #307:
What skill would you most like to learn in 2012?
I’d really like to learn to turn my vague ideas into concrete reality. If that’s not practical, if that’s too much to ask, then I’d like to learn to flap my arms and fly to the moon.
Sick, just punching the clock here
I’m sick and no good at the thinking today. So here’s this just so I still made a post today, now back to tea and drugs. Later.
World building
I’ve been thinking of doing a weekly serial story. I want to do more fiction, which pretty much means I want to do any fiction at all, but I’m really bad at coming up with plots and stories and often it feels like the more I try to prepare before writing something the worse it comes out.
So I thought maybe I’d come up with some characters and settings, and then just make stuff up as I went. Add a chapter a week until I wrote myself into a corner. So I’ve been dreaming up stuff for a space opera setting and generally messing around all day.
I still don’t know if I’m actually going to try that, to be honest I think I have more fun dreaming up spaceships and cultures and strange new worlds than actually doing anything with them. But I can certainly think of worse ways to spend a Saturday.
The Fucking Patriarchy, Part 5
There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, this is the end of Fucking Patriarchy Week. Whatever I still have to say on the subject after this post (and there’s still a lot more) is just going to have to wait for another opportunity. Read the rest of this entry
The Fucking Patriarchy, Part 4
“Boys don’t cry. Man up and grow some balls, you sissy, or are you just gonna cry like a girl?”
More than anything else, the fucking patriarchy hurts and oppresses women. But if we’re going to take in the scope of the thing, we have to look wider than that. Because the fucking patriarchy hurts and oppresses everyone.
Women are inferior, therefore anything a man does that is at all like a woman diminishes him, is something for him to be ashamed of. This has led to some of the most ridiculous stereotypes, since the ideal woman is clean, well-dressed, and able to do all the cooking and cleaning on top of whatever else everybody is doing, the stereotypical man is slovenly, unwashed, and lazy. I can speak to this one from personal experience, when I go out in public clean, well-groomed and stylishly dressed, it’s almost certain that someone will assume I’m gay.
Gender roles are silly things. The idea that your sex is also a job, that it comes with responsibilities specific to it, is an old one. It can be found all over the world, but no two cultures seem to agree just which duties are “manly” and which are “womanly”. There’s no practical reasons for them, we could easily just ignore these tired old social conventions and be who we like, except we still have this ghost of a dinosaur telling us to conform, conform, conform.
Conformity is a powerful force in the human psyche. When someone refuses to conform they’re ostracized, demonized, and frequently targeted for violence. The fucking patriarchy survives on conformity, and has mechanisms to defend itself from iconoclasts.
Another short post, I’m sicker today than I was yesterday. At this rate I’m going to have to stretch this out. Maybe that’s for the best, talk about something else tomorrow and get back to this subject. I’ll think about it later, for now I’m going back to bed.
The Fucking Patriarchy, Part 3
Well, I’m clearly coming down with a cold, so I’m going to try to make this quick today.
What do you call someone who isn’t interested in a long term relationship, but just wants to swing free and have casual sex? Does your answer change with the sex of the person in question? These aren’t just rhetorical questions, it’s easy to accept things like this as normal and never really think about it, never even notice the double standard.
What’s with health insurance that covers viagra but not birth control? Or vasectomies any time, but tubal ligation only if the woman has at least three children? Why is sexual autonomy simply assumed for men, but women have to fight for it?
The only answer I’ve found so far is the base assumption of the fucking patriarchy, that women are inferior. Their desires simply aren’t as important. Controlling whether you get pregnant or not isn’t as vital as getting a good hard erection. As for sterilization, well, a man knows his own mind and can make his own decisions, but women clearly can’t be trusted with important choices like this.
Back in August there was debate going on about women’s health services being covered by insurance companies. (I think the actual issue was making coverage a legal requirement, but I don’t remember and I’m sneezing too much to look it up.) The GOP was heavily opposed, especially to covering birth control. The arguments they presented were bizarre, suggesting that broad access to birth control would threaten extinction. Leaving aside the insanity of such claims, why is it even a debate whether health insurance covers women’s health? Did they have a similar argument over health services specific to men? I must have missed that one.
Starting to feel pretty miserable, so I’m off to take some cold medicine and get some tea and soup. More tomorrow.
The Fucking Patriarchy, Part 2
(While I was writing this, Mississippi’s election results came in. Prop 26, the “personhood” amendment was defeated 57/43. Scary it was that close, really, but sanity won this time.)
Hello, and welcome to Day 2 of Fucking Patriarchy Week. Today’s installment will focus on some of the various ways the fucking patriarchy disenfranchises, trivializes, isolates, manipulates, and even dehumanizes women. My standard disclaimer applies, while this is all as accurate as I could make it, you shouldn’t assume that I know what I’m talking about.
Probably the core idea on which the entire fucking patriarchy is based is that women are inferior to men. This can express itself in variety of ways: Maybe that men are stronger, smarter, and generally more capable then inferior women. Perhaps that women are as capable as men, but God placed men above women in the cosmic hierarchy. Or maybe it’s simply declared without explanation that “bitches ain’t shit”. The general idea is always the same, though: women are inferior at best. Read the rest of this entry
The Fucking Patriarchy, Part 1
Thanks to several blog posts and at least one anecdote that I’ve encountered recently I’ve decided to to dedicate a series of posts this week to the fucking patriarchy. Like all of my writing, I’ve done some basic research but one shouldn’t assume that I know what I’m talking about. I’m going to be discussing this more or less from the ground up, partly to make things clear to anyone who’s not familiar with the basics, partly to squeeze more posts for the post-a-day challenge, and partly for my own education. This is also going to be a lot more vulgar than usual, because somehow that takes the edge off a bit.
So welcome to Fucking Patriarchy Week. I’ll try to get through this with as little alcohol as possible. Read the rest of this entry
Which way are you going, Mississippi?
I often find it easier to write about topics that piss me off, though maybe harder to write coherently. The world at large really doesn’t need to treat this as an invitation.
Here’s the full text of a proposed amendment to the Mississippi state constitution that will be voted on during Tuesday’s election. (Lest you think I’m leaving something out, here‘s a link to the secretary of state’s site. Click the green checkmark for initiatives.)
Be it Enacted by the People of the State of
Mississippi:SECTION 1. Article III of the constitution of
the state of Mississippi is hereby amended BY THE
ADDITION OF A NEW SECTION TO READ:SECTION 33. Person defined. As used in this
Article III of the state constitution, “The term ‘person’
or ‘persons’ shall include every human being from
the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional
equivalent thereof.”This initiative shall not require any additional revenue for implementation.
This is giving full civil rights status to a single cell. Not only that, but single cells which are totally dependent on a woman’s body. Like some cheesy sci-fi flick, it’s two people in one body! Read the rest of this entry
Flooded with evidence
Last night, as I wandered aimlessly through the dark alleyways of the internet, I stumbled across a comment made by a vanishing breed: A true believer in the great global flood story recorded in the Old Testament. Someone who believes the story of Noah’s Ark literally happened.
What interests me about this was an approximate date was given, circa 2400 bc. I’d seen that before, and a quick google search shows that it’s a common year given by flood believers. If there was any method used to calculate this date, it wasn’t mentioned in my brief search. Perhaps generations named in the bible, like Bishop Ussher counting begats to estimate the age of the Earth?
Anyway, the more I thought about it, the more ways I realized how small and provincial the world depicted in the story is. If the entire world had been flooded around 2400bc, killing nearly all land-based life and forcing a global re-population, it wouldn’t just be people from a few scholarly disciplines who knew about it, everyone would know it happened. Read the rest of this entry
The Adventures of Leo Tarvi 