Blog Archives
Blah blah search terms blah blah
It’s the 15th again, and the means search terms. This one is going to be pretty short, because almost all of them were slight variations on stuff I see every month. In fact I almost just skipped it this month entirely, but there were just enough interesting ones that I’ll do it. This particular monthly exercise may not last much longer, though.
As usual, search terms are bold while my commentary is italic. Read the rest of this entry
Christian Fascists in Greece get violent, police do nothing
Here’s a quote that’ll stick in your head:
“Listen here, bitch, we are Greek Christian fascists! 90% of Greeks are Christian fascists, understand? As a fascist, i have the right to tell you to get out of here.”
That comes from this blog, and here’s a Guardian article on the same event. (I found both links at Butterflies and Wheels.)
I’d heard of the Greek political party Golden Dawn before, but hadn’t realized they had actual seats on the Greek Parliament. I’m a little surprised by this. Read the rest of this entry
Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
I touched on this a while back when I mentioned the Presidential Debates, and I want to expand on it a little now, partly because I’m angry and need to vent, and partly because maybe if we talk about this enough we can shame ourselves into doing better.
We’re doing it wrong. The way we go about elections, and making these decisions, is deeply flawed by a persistent lack of substance. You probably already know what I mean, there’s all this useless noise, repeating meaningless talking points and blithely stating the obvious and distorting and outright lying and generally just making a big production show out of wasting time. I guess it gets people talking, at least. But it should be better, and really we have no excuse for not making it better.
Can’t seem to keep blogging
I’ve been trying, really I have. But I just can’t seem to keep the blogging coming. There are many reasons for this, other things to do, difficulty deciding what to write about, general frustration with the knowledge that as soon as I start to write about one thing I’m far less likely to ever write about the others. Yes, I do realize that this is even worse, because that way at least I’d write about one of them, but somehow that doesn’t seem to help.
I started this year jumping into the Post A Day challenge with glee. I abandoned the idea of actually writing a post every day before I even started, telling myself that as long as I had 366 posts by year’s end I’d call it a win. I did very well for a third of the year, but by this point it’s pretty clear I’m not going to make that goal. And that’s okay, we don’t always succeed in our goals. Sometimes trying is more important than succeeding, and I think this is one of them.
But…
Book Review! WBI: Witches Bureau of Investigation by Richard Capwell
A while back, I bought a cheap Android tablet computer. (There’s a lot of story behind the device itself, but I’m not going to talk about that now.) One of the first things I did with it was install Amazon Kindle for Android and start downloading free books. At any given moment Amazon will have a lot of Kindle editions for free, and I grabbed a lot of books based purely on the cover art, or because the title interested me. Most of them I’ve been pretty lukewarm about so far.
This one I’m really pleased with. There’s no way I would have paid money to try it blind like this. Before I started writing this review I checked Amazon to see what the price is now, and found a sequel! The sequel is already purchased and downloaded and as soon as I publish this I’ll be running off to read it. Read the rest of this entry
Coast Guard woes
I saw the strangest headline on Reuters’ Twitter this morning: “U.S. Coast Guard missions in doubt as aging ships wear out”. I thought it had to be wrong, the U.S. is famous for spending more on the military than any other ten nations combined. But I clicked the link and there it is, the Coast Guard is having trouble maintaining its fleet.
Take a look at this table, a screenshot from this Wikipedia page. It shows the 15 countries that spend the most on their military.
As you can see, the U.S. is way out in front, spending about five times as much as the number two country, China. Because I’m so helpful, I added up the other 14 numbers there and got 719.9. Out of the top 15 countries, nearly half of it is the United States alone. That table also tells us that the U.S. alone accounts for 41% of the total military spending in the world.
And we can’t keep our Coast Guard afloat well enough to perform the missions expected of it.
Mitt Romney’s taken a lot of flak lately for saying he’d cut public funding to PBS, which is about 0.012% of the budget and provides a genuinely useful service to everyone. Meanwhile we have this ridiculously huge military budget that still can’t get the job done. If you really want to cut out wasteful spending, Mittens, I think you’re looking in the wrong direction.
Guess I’m not straight anymore
Continuing to try to get all the blogging I’ve been thinking of the last few days out of my head, here’s one from Miss Ion America…. no sorry, that’s Mission America, which doesn’t sound nearly as interesting to me. I’m just going to blatantly copy this screencap from Joe. My. God., where I found this.
I’d like to take this moment to recant my heterosexuality before the jack-booted queens come for me.
I find a sad fascination in people who will, with a straight face, accuse their victim of doing to them exactly what they’re doing. “This is blatant discrimination and amounts to child endangerment.” Who, exactly, is being discriminated against, and how?
“Ex-gay” programs are abusive. This is obvious to anyone who’s made the slightest effort to understand them. Subjecting children to abuse is known by the common term child abuse. Who’s being endangered?
The AIDS dodge is real rich. Most people with HIV are straight women, so by their logic we should be putting all our little girls into Pavlovian training programs to make them think they’re gay, right? Sure it’s horrific abuse and leaves lasting emotional scars, which outlive pretending to be someone you’re not, but it’s for their own good, right?
In my review of her book, Be Ours Forever, (available in paperback or ebook format!) I ribbed R.C. Murphy for her characters’ use of “male” as a noun. She answered that it’s not degrading or demeaning the way it would be with real people, since her characters aren’t actually human. You can’t dehumanize what isn’t human, after all. So likewise, it’s not degrading, demeaning, or dehumanizing to refer to “homosexual males”, because as everyone knows homosexuals aren’t really human.
Once again, I’m just amazed at how important some people think it is to treat gay people like shit. They fight tooth and nail against anything that even hints at treating homosexuals as actual people. They encourage bullying, and psychological torture, and sometimes outright murder because they don’t approve of someone else’s love. Fucking hell, live your own life. Mind your own business.
In a world so filled with human misery, why the fuck would you work so hard to make more of it?
the mind killer, the little death that brings total obliteration
Reading this post on The Pervocracy really got me thinking. The Pervocracy is generally not safe for work, but this post shouldn’t get you in any more trouble than you should be for reading blogs instead of, you know, working. Click over and read it, it’ll open in a new tab and you can come right back.
All done? Really resonates, doesn’t it.
“Fear cuts deeper than swords”, is an axiom in George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series. There’s nothing like fear to get you to do something stupid. Decisions made while I was afraid have ruined my credit, cost me my car, far too much money, caused me to throw away good things and cling to bad, paralyzed me at the moment of action and spurred me into motion when stillness was called for.
It amazes me how we can make the same mistakes over and over.
For most of this year I’ve been living in a sort of low-grade Worst Thing In The World fear, only for me it’s reversed because the unknown, though scary, is far less terrifying to me than the status quo. I’m trying to make big changes and I really don’t know what I’m doing, but easily the scariest thought for me is that changes won’t happen and things will continue as they are.
Seems like that should make it easier, but of course it doesn’t work like that. I guess it’s always easier to make things worse than better, and thinking about that makes it easy to start second-guessing everything.
Today I reached the point where I had to screw up my courage to send a text message asking a friend to wish me luck. That probably means I’m approaching some second-guessing event horizon, past which no action is possible. A scary thought… but fear cuts deeper than swords.
This post feels awfully self-indulgent to me now that I look at it. But I’m going to publish it anyway, because I’ve had someone say they liked my more personal posts more than the ones where I’m just yelling at an asshole, and because I want to share that Pervocracy post as widely as possible, and because it’s my blog and I can write a whole post whining vaguely if I feel like it.
Danger, overload!
So I had at least four things I wanted to blog about today & in the near future, was having an awful time figuring out which to start with. Then a quick shopping trip turned into a several hours long ordeal, plus I watched part of the debate.
Seriously, that debate could have been replaced by two puppets shouting “Is not!, “Is too!” at each other. I’m starting to think that live debates are obsolete and we should instead have dueling websites. Which can provide hyperlinks to back up the shit they say. Sure, it would take days instead of hours, but at least we could actually learn something from them!
Anyway, it was 102 degrees out there today, and I’m just overwhelmed. So I’m going to lay in bed with music and a book. Better blogging tomorrow, I hope.
California gets one right.
Took me a while to get around to this, but better late than never. As of January 1, it will be illegal in California to inflict “gay cure” conditioning on people under the age of 18. The article I linked there calls it “therapy”, personally I prefer “psychological abuse” for that particular strain of cruelty.
There’s not much to say about it that I haven’t said already. But here’s another link to Beyond Exgay, just in case you needed to be reminded that real people suffer under that shit.
The comments on that news article are depressing. I really don’t understand why so many people think it’s so important to treat gays like shit.
Honestly I’m a little surprised it was legal to put a kid into this, it’s obviously child abuse.
An awful metaphor
So, this is the post I mentioned on the Blasphemy Day one. I was bouncing around TVTropes, as I sometimes do, and I found myself following a link to Fundies Say The Darndest Things. Now I generally avoid FSTDT, since it’s more likely to fill me with anger and despair than anything else. In fact I really should have learned by now, I’m far better off with sites like Raising My Rainbow since reading that tends to make me smile.
Pretty obvious now that I think about it. Stories of a gender nonconforming child with a loving family determined to let him be who he wants to be: Good. Collection of the worst quotes made by people who appear to be a danger to themselves and others, many of whom seem to have untreated mental illnesses, which is usually treated as a freakshow for people to laugh at: Bad. And yet I just couldn’t stop myself from clicking the link.
So, here’s the quote that started this post. It’s from 2006, hardly breaking news. As I thought about it, I realized that I had to write about it, and then as my mind branched off into different tracks I decided to do the Blasphemy Day post first. I will reproduce it here below the fold.
Political correctness gone mad?
Last post I mentioned “political correctness” and how I wish the phrase would die out. Here’ s a good example why I feel that way. Consider this billboard.
This is not “politically incorrect”. It is fucking racist. The proper term for it, the term I would like to see people use for this sort of shit, is not some weak, watered-down phrase like “politically incorrect”, implying that it merely toes a boundary of social taboos or something; the proper term is “fucking racist”, because it uses people as a punchline.
Using disenfranchised people as a punchline is at least a little bit more than toeing a social boundary. At best it’s spitting on people you’re already stepping on.
I want to see the term “fucking racist” used by everyone, blogs, newsrooms, political spokescreatures. I suppose I could allow the “fucking” part to be optional, but I think you’re really undermining the impact if you leave it out.
As I said before, I’m a believer in free speech. This should absolutely be legal. But that doesn’t, and shouldn’t free it from criticism. As long as this billboard speaks for him, Scott Brown is clearly a racist. It marks his racism the same way calling someone a “nigger” would.
This is not political correctness gone mad. This is recognizing that the things you say also say things about you. If you respond to this by claiming that your freedom of expression is being stifled by political correctness what I will hear is childish whining that people are actually listening to what you say rather than simply agreeing with you.
And that’s why I want the phrase “politically correct” to fade away, because these days when I encounter it it’s not funny anymore. It’s almost always someone whining that when they say or do bigoted shit, people call them a bigot. The phrase has almost become code for a rallying cry to come defend the privilege, defend the good old boy network, defend the fucking patriarchy, defend white supremacy. Keep the rich white guys in charge by defending anything they say, no matter how awful, by dismissing criticism of it as excessive political correctness. Fuck that.
I don’t know what’s worse, that someone thought blatant racism was a good campaign strategy, or that in some parts of this country it might actually work.
Victimless Crime
Today, September 30, is International Blasphemy Day. There are people around the world imprisoned for blasphemy, some even marked for execution for it. PZ has a list, and there are more in the comments. People’s lives are being threatened because of something they said.
I wasn’t going to post anything for Blasphemy Day, because I’ve had this thing in my head lately that I should actually have something to say when I post, even if it’s pretty much just me thinking out loud, so to speak. Didn’t seem worthwhile to post something just to say “all gods are bastards”, really.
Two things changed my mind. The first was a quote I stumbled over, which will get its own post later. The second was thinking about free speech, which I’ll pontificate about here for a bit.
It’s important to remember that free speech is only a useful concept if it protects unpopular speech, which I’m pretty sure is the whole point of Blasphemy Day. Keep in mind, we don’t need laws to protect speech that everyone approves of.
In the United States, the freedom of speech is probably broader than just about anywhere else in the world. Courts have consistently ruled in its favor for pretty much everything short of direct threats of violence or other clear immediate dangers. The usual cliché is “Yelling ‘fire!’ in a crowded theater” to define the edges. This means that things like blasphemy, hate speech, and sedition are not crimes in the U.S.
Some people aren’t happy about that. I can sort of understand, I guess. It makes me angry when someone derides something I care about, or says hateful or cruel things about people. I suppose I can imagine how someone could shortsightedly miss the point of free speech.
See, the point is that people still get imprisoned and tortured and executed for speaking their mind. Even if you’re the kind of heartless bastard who’s okay with that as long as it’s nobody you know or care about, it’s still a practical matter for the good of everyone, because you can’t make things better if you can’t plainly say what’s wrong.
And there’s always something wrong. Always something that can be improved. How can they improve if people are afraid to speak for fear of sounding disloyal?
That’s not even getting into tyrannical rulers who casually imprison or execute anyone who shows less than enthusiastic loyalty. I remember a scene from a novel I read years ago where a kingdom was sinking into tyranny and the headsman’s axe swung like a pendulum, treason, sedition, treason, sedition… A chilling thought.
The connection to blasphemy is a simple one, every single religion has concepts and scriptures which are blasphemous to some other religion. All of them. If you were to truly enforce a blasphemy law fairly in a multicultural nation, you’d be arresting pretty much everybody. In fact, probably the only way such a law could be used with something that might, on paper, look vaguely like justice, is if there’s only one privileged religion which it is used to defend. Which will inevitably slide into treason, sedition, treason, sedition, if history is any guide.
Speech must be free. That doesn’t mean that all speech is socially equal, though. There’s a big difference between “You’re breaking the law by saying that” and “You’re being an asshole by saying that.” This really seems like it should be obvious, but I recall someone (Ann Coulter?) complaining on national television that she wasn’t allowed to say things. I don’t recall what the things were, but while complaining that she wasn’t being allowed to say them on national television she repeatedly said them, so I felt that the interview somewhat undermined her point.
The phrase “politically correct” really should have faded away soon after the movie PCU was released. All the good jokes had been made by then.
So anyway, yeah. Guess I should do some blaspheming.
All the gods and angels and demigods and saints and heroes and idols and miracles and commandments and divinity in all of existence combined are worth less than any single human being. All of them.
We are the best minds active on this world, and we are capable of so much more. We are risen apes, and we are rising higher. We don’t need to rise above the gods, for we did that long ago, we need only rise above our own fear, anger, and weakness, and we can create a better world.
Party Politics
Saw this article about people signing petitions and having their political party changed without their knowledge, and it got me thinking about an old question of mine. Why are voters registered with a particular party?
I’ve never understood this, it seems ridiculous to me. Parties should be for candidates, not voters. If a voter wants to self-identify with a specific party, that’s fine and they’re free to do so, but including it in paperwork and restricting how you can vote based on it feels needlessly tribalistic to me. At the very least it chafes against my hatred of being labeled, but also it seems undemocratic to me, constraining your ability to vote as you please. Far better, to my mind, to abolish parties in voter registration and allow everyone to vote in a single primary of their choice.
If anyone can shed some light on why this is the way it is I’d very much appreciate it.
Since I’m speaking of parties, there’s another thing bothering me, and that’s that I’ve become a de facto democrat. I’m not registered with any party, (At least I don’t think so, after reading that article I want to double check) but in recent years the republican party has become so batshit that there’s really no chance I would ever vote for any of them. The system in this country is so geared towards two, and only two, parties that there’s no realistic chance for anyone who’s not a democrat or republican, and since the republican platforms all seem to boil down to “Fuck the poor, they deserve to suffer”, “Bitches ain’t shit”, and “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus” that leaves the democrats as my only option.
Frankly, I’m appalled at this state of affairs and would like it to change. But then there’s a lot I’d like to change, and I don’t see a clear path to any of it, so I guess I’m just whining.
The Adventures of Leo Tarvi 
Pornography or Erotica?
Oct 4
Posted by Leo Tarvi
I never got the hang of the WordPress reader.
Shortly after I made this blog I tried to have a weekly thing where I’d recommend a blog for people to read. Riffing on Twitter’s “Follow Friday”, I called it “Subscribe Sunday”. Naturally, soon after I started that I had trouble filling the slot with new blogs, and then the powers that be at WordPress changed the “subscribe” button to “follow”, to my great annoyance, and I abandoned the project. I was having enough trouble just writing any posts at all.
But I do pick up more blogs as time passes, most of them I’ve set up to email me daily or weekly, so I can keep up with them. I still manage to only skim most of those, of course. And there are more languishing in my reader, only checked when it occurs to me that I haven’t seen anything from that blog in a while, or more often when someone else links to it.
To say nothing of the many excellent blogs that, for whatever reason, aren’t on WordPress.
Anyway, yesterday one of the posts those emails caught my attention, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to link to Trish Causey’s Aroused Woman blog and ponder this post a bit. Read the rest of this entry →
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Tags: Aroused Woman, erotica, I expect bad jokes in the comments, postaday2012, questions without answers, Trish Causey, Wordpress's spellcheck doesn't recognize "Wordpress"