Dan Pearce, who blogs at Single Dad Laughing, wrote an amazing post nearly two years ago entitled “I’m Christian, unless you’re gay.” The post talks about Pearce’s 27 year-old friend Jacob, who is gay, and who had lost any connection to almost all of his friends and family as a result.
“Every single person I’ve told has ditched me. They just disappear. They stop calling. They remove me on Facebook. They’re just gone,” he said. “They can’t handle knowing and being friends with a gay person.”
I didn’t know what to say. So I didn’t say anything.
“You don’t know what it’s like, man. You don’t know what it’s like to live here and be gay. You don’t know what it’s like to have freaking nobody. You don’t know what it’s like to have your own parents hate you and try and cover up your existence. I didn’t choose this. I didn’t want this. And I’m so tired of people hating me for it. I can’t take it anymore. I just can’t.”
How do you respond to that?
I wanted to tell him it was all in his head. I knew it wasn’t. I wanted to tell him it would get better and easier. The words would have been hollow and without conviction, and I knew it.
You see, I live in this community too. And I’ve heard the hate. I’ve heard the disgust. I’ve heard the disdain. I’ve heard the gossip. I’ve heard the distrust. I’ve heard the anger. I’ve heard it all, and I’ve heard it tucked and disguised neatly beneath a wrapper of self-righteousness and a blanket of “caring” or “religious” words. I’ve heard it more times than I care to number.
Creepiest picture I could find on short notice (Via morguefile.com)
Crime committed against children is never a laughing matter. It is something we should take all reasonable measures to prevent, investigate, and punish. That said, the paranoia stoked in parents by the media, particularly local news on slow news days, is occasionally hilarious. To me, anyway.
(Now is usually a good time to reiterate that I don’t have kids.)
A warning has been making the social media rounds over the past few days about the risk posed when a parent posts a smartphone picture of their child to the internet. Yes, pictures taken on your smartphone may have Exchangeable image file format (Exif) data that indicates the GPS position where the picture was taken, and yes, it is hypothetically possible that a person could access that data in order to locate your child. A good deconstruction of this paranoia appears on the website Daddy Doctrines (h/t Jennifer):
Here’s the fact you need to always keep in mind when these things come around: the chances of your child being abducted by a family member or someone close to the family is exponentially higher than the chances that some shadowy internet stalker somewhere is going to track down your child.
And if they did? If Shadowy Stalker did see a photo of my kid, and use his techno-powers to pull out the Exif data and determine my home address? How is that more of a threat than all the decades where one need only look in the phone book?
LEGO minifigures are getting angrier and fighting more, according to CNN.
New research by robot expert Christoph Bartneck at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand shows the number of happy faces on tiny LEGO figures is decreasing.
“We cannot help but wonder how the move from only positive faces to an increasing number of negative faces impacts on how children play,” he said in a statement.
First of all, a “robot expert” who researches LEGO toys in New Zealand sounds like the greatest job in the universe. I’m sure there’s a drawback somewhere.
Second, I cannot help but agree. For years now, I have noticed that my excitement over LEGO has steadily decreased. I attribute this to two factors: (1) the gradual loss of my sense of childlike wonder, and (2) the fact that LEGO has, quite literally, sold out. It began with the Star Wars tie-ins for the release of Phantom Menace in 1999, which I thought was pretty awesome at the time. Now it has reached a new low point, in my opinion—at least based on this Lone Ranger tie-in I saw at Target the other day:
Ms Dalelv says she had been on a night out with colleagues on 6 March when the rape took place.
She reported it to the police, who proceeded to confiscate her passport and seize her money. She was charged four days later on three counts, including having sex outside marriage.
Her alleged attacker, she said, received a 13-month sentence for extra-marital sex and alcohol consumption.
(Emphasis added.) I’ll just let that sink in.
It appears both the woman and the rapist were convicted of the same offense, and she got the longer sentence.
The sentence for having sex outside of marriage, a/k/a being a rape survivor, is worse than the one-month sentence given to the married Pakistani couple that had sex in their car in Dubai—and who successfully appealed the conviction and sentence.
It is also worse than the one-month sentence given to the British couple who violated Dubai’s “decency laws” by kissing each other on the mouth in public. They lost their appeal. Continue reading →
A Black woman, Marissa Alexander, who fired warning shots inside her home, allegedly in self-defense, received a twenty-year prison sentence from a Florida jury in May, in ridiculously stark contrast to the Zimmerman case.
Separating racial issues from the Zimmerman case is, quite simply, impossible. Attempting to do so is dishonest.
This:
Zimmerman's brother just said, on @CNN, that he's worried vigilantes will take the law into their own hands. Oh the irony.
— Elitist Liberal Scum (@ElitistLibScum) July 14, 2013
My rage is made all the more sure by those who are “encouraging” black people not to “riot.” They urge us to follow and respect the rule of law.
Because, of course, it is black people who need to be reminded of the rules.
Even though it is we who peacefully assembled by the thousands all over the country and marched in order to turn the wheels of due process. And it is we who waited patiently for 15 months for this case to be brought to trial. And it is we who have yet again been played for fools as we waited fervently for justice to be done.
On the other hand, George Zimmerman deputized himself, sought a confrontation and then became judge, jury and executioner for a kid who committed no crimes.
To ask black people to respect the rule of law is an exercise in missing the point, not to mention an insult.
Although I have been pro-choice for as long as I have known that this was an issue in dispute, I have always felt a certain sympathy for people who genuinely believe that “life begins at [whenever],” but my sympathy stops when they start trying to impose their views on others. Some people do not mince words, saying that because a fetus is a full human being, the rights of the mother cease to matter. Others simply claim to care deeply for the rights of the fetus, and to want to help the fetus survive. The problem is that nearly every other policy favored by the “pro-life” makes it as difficult as possible for the fetus to thrive once it becomes a baby (which, for the purposes of my argument, occurs at birth. Respect my opinions, dammit!) This is why many people, myself included, think the movement should be called “pro-birth,” rather than “pro-life,” because that is where their willingness to help ends.
Libby Anne, who blogs at Love,Joy, Feminism, has an excellent piece from last October about her shift from a vehement “pro-life” stance (scare quotes intentional) to being pro-choice. The whole thing deserves your attention, as she examines not only opposition to abortion among “pro-life” advocates, but also opposition to making birth control available, or even opposition to birth control at all. Contraception is generally agreed to be the best way to reduce the number of abortions, which I agree is a noble goal. By not encouraging contraceptive use, the “pro-life” movement does nothing to decrease the number of abortions, and reveals that for many, the true goal is controlling women’s sexuality.
[T]hose in the pro-life movement, or at least the leaders of the pro-life movement, are incredibly inconsistent. You simply can’t be against the pill for fear that it will result in flushed out zygotes and yet not concerned at all about the vastly greater number of zygotes flushed out naturally every day. At least, not if you really truly believe a zygote has the same worth as an infant, toddler, or adult, and not if you’re truly motivated solely by a desire to save the lives of these “unborn babies.” Fresh off of these thoughts, I came upon two news articles on the subject in the last week that have completely shattered the last bit of faith I had in the pro-life movement.
She then talks about how Obama, through health care reform, has reduced the number of abortions far more than a ban on abortion ever would. She concludes as follows:
The reality is that so-called pro-life movement is not about saving babies. It’s about regulating sex. That’s why they oppose birth control. That’s why they want to ban abortion even though doing so will simply drive women to have dangerous back alley abortions. That’s why they want to penalize women who take public assistance and then dare to have sex, leaving an exemption for those who become pregnant from rape. It’s not about babies. If it were about babies, they would be making access to birth control widespread and free and creating a comprehensive social safety net so that no woman finds herself with a pregnancy she can’t afford. They would be raising money for research on why half of all zygotes fail to implant and working to prevent miscarriages. It’s not about babies. It’s about controlling women. It’s about making sure they have consequences for having unapproved sex.
But I am very sure that there are other dupes out there. If you’re sitting there reading this thinking “but I really am in it to save unborn babies,” I am sure you’re not alone. After all, I was one of you.
If you are one who has been a part of the pro-life movement because you really do believe in “saving unborn babies,” it’s time to cut your ties with the movement. You may be an honest and kind-hearted person, but you’ve been had. You’ve been taken in. It’s time to let go. It’s time to support Obamacare’s birth control mandate, it’s time to call off opposition to birth control, and it’s time to get behind progressive programs that help provide for poor women and their children. It’s time to make your actions consistent with your motives. While I am myself no longer morally opposed to abortion, I and others like me share your desire to decrease the number of unplanned pregnancies and to ensure that every woman can afford the option of keeping her pregnancy.
In a very shouty exchange between Thom Hartmann and professional smug person Austin Petersen regarding the American health care system and “liberty,” an interesting red herring kept popping up. Hartmann kept asking Petersen if libertarians believe in the “right to life” espoused in the Declaration of Independence, and Petersen kept trying to change the subject by bringing up abortion (specifically, liberals’ support for abortion rights).
To his credit, Hartmann didn’t take the bait, but it is a question worth exploring. See, Petersen was trying to confuse two different meanings of the “right to life.” Hartmann was talking about the fundamental right of individuals to live their lives, while Petersen was referring to a very narrow concept that privileges the right of an unborn zygote/embryo/blastocyst/fetus over any rights that the pregnant person may have over their own body. The “right to life” of a clump of cells with slightly different DNA than the mother, in this definition, by necessity trumps the “right to life” of the mother. However, in the Declaration of Independence definition of “right to life,” I would argue that it is the mother, first and foremost, whose “right to life” is protected.
In order to protect the “right to life” of the zygote/embryo/blastocyst/fetus, it is necessary to supersede the “right to life” of the mother. This is not to say that the mother’s actual life is threatened in every instance, but the mother’s right to bodily autonomy is always secondary. Libertarians, or at least the kind of libertarians represented by Petersen, will not abide any sort of infringement on their liberty by anybody, at all, ever, apparently, including Petersen’s belief that tax collection directly involves someone coming to your house with a gun. (I find this viewpoint hopelessly childish, but that’s a conversation for another day.) Petersen seems to believe that he has the sole authority to assert and protect his own rights, and no responsibility to defend the rights of others if he does not want to.
Here’s my first question, then, for libertarians of Petersen’s ilk: do you believe that anyone other than the zygote/embryo/blastocyst/fetus itself has the right or duty to assert or protect its own “right to life” (in your definition)?
If you answer “no,” then let’s just let the zygote/embryo/blastocyst/fetuses of the world find a way to petition for redress of grievances themselves, and stop trying to derail discussions.
If you answer “yes,” how exactly should others assert or protect those rights, in a way that does not infringe the essential liberty of the mother? You have pretty much already established your principle that liberty can only be curtailed by individual consent. I could see your argument that, by consenting to sexual activity, a pregnant person also consented to bear the child. Do you see where I am going with this? It’s not always a product of “consent.” Additionally, why can’t “consent” be withdrawn? I suspect you would reserve the right to withdraw your own consent to just about anything, so how is this different? That “consent” argument is fatally flawed.
I have seen countless ways that people who oppose government intervention in anything except the uterus try to weasel out of this question. I’m even less polite about it than Thom Hartmann. I know that the majority of people who claim to be “pro-life,” but want to assert dominance over all the uteruses, are full of crap when it actually comes to caring about “life.” There is no way to definitively eliminate abortion without state power. You know it and I know it, but most of you don’t have the courage to admit it.
I’ll ask the question more simply: why do you only want to use state power to control women?
The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (h/t Shannon) measures “hostile” and “benevolent” sexism, and is sure to prompt defensive reactions from dudes who, like, respect women, man. I scored a 0.45 on hostile sexism, and a 1.00 on benevolent sexism, which apparently makes me a very below-average sexist. I can live with that.
Hypothetical LEGO structures are much more fun for me now, as a grownup, than actual LEGOs. I learned this at LEGOLAND in San Diego a few years ago, as I stood impassively, or at least unimaginatively, in front of a quantity of LEGOs that, had I been 8-9 years old, might have inspired the early onset of puberty. (Don’t get me wrong: LEGOLAND was all kinds of awesome, but it just didn’t inspire youthful creativity in me the way it might have in the ’80s.)
LEGO technology has advanced considerably since the pinnacle of my LEGO constructions, which was around 1985-86. Back then, if you wanted a horse, you built a damn horse out of bricks. If you wanted a cave troll, you sure as shit didn’t have this:
I don’t have access to 11,647,240 LEGO pieces, nor to the roughly $1,164,724 I’d need to procure that many pieces. I’m definitely never getting that Star Destroyer, alas.
Zero Nerf Tolerance: A school in Edmonds, Washington suspended a group of students who brought Nerf guns to school, which is not all that surprising given schools’ “zero tolerance” policy for anything resembling childhood. What makes it interesting is that the Nerf guns were supposedly part of a school project, and that the kids claim they had their teacher’s permission to have them. Their parents are less than thrilled. In an unrelated incident, school officials in Maryland caught a kindergarten student with a cap gun. Again, zero tolerance blah blah blah, but they allegedly held him for questioning for two hours without calling anybody, and frightened the child to the point that he wet himself. That’ll teach him to trust school administrators! (Maybe that wasn’t the lesson they intended…)
The trend began after University of Kansas student Tiffany Kent tweeted a photo of her breasts in a Jayhawks shirt with the hashtag #kuboobs in the hope of boosting support for her struggling college basketball team during a game in February last year.
The move proved to be a successful one, inspiring a sensational turnaround for the Jayhawks, from a 19-point deficit to a one-point-lead over the Missouri Tigers by the end of the game.
The trend has since gone nationwide too, with over 30 spin-off ‘boobs’ Twitter accounts dedicated to cleavage-led support for other colleges, such as @UF_Boobs, @bamaboobs, @arboobs and @vandyboobs.
The page has over 62,000 followers, but the university sent a cease and desist letter objecting to the sale of unauthorized merchandise bearing KU and Jayhawk brands. This led to a campaign to save the page, which uses the hashtag #saveKUboobs. The school’s athletic director emphasized that they were not trying to shut down the Twitter page, but rather to stop the sale of trademark-infringing merchandise.
The Pirates of Cornwall: Senegalese authorities arrested two Cornish men who converted a yacht into a warship, sort of, and then took it from a Spanish impound in the Canary Islands. Because this story would be very boring without the words “marine commandos,” Continue reading →
![Kraken optional (Ochre Jelly [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0], on Flickr)](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/8512534670_a16f27ff6e.jpg "Ochre Jelly [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0], on Flickr")
