3601 Legitimate?

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Before you fall for the newest thing to come along, ask yourself,
“Is it better than the old?”

--  Me --

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Ok.  We all know about Rep. Akin's stupid theory that women don't get pregnant from "legitimate" rape.  And the Republican Party has castigated and repudiated him.  He has apologized for saying it.

HOWEVER!  Note that he's in trouble not for believing it, and not for operating on it, but for having been so stupid as to have actually said it out loud, in public, where those pesky female-type people could hear him.

In fact, his attitude (if not his biological theory) is right in line with the Conservative/Republican party.  Check out their platform.  No exception for rape or incest.  After all, I guess, most rape is consensual, and any incest after the first incident is consensual, right?  I mean, if you didn't want to be raped, you wouldn't be out without a blood relative escort, you wouldn't wear such revealing clothes, you wouldn't be on birth control unless you were expecting sex all the time, you wouldn't ever be alone with a man, right?  (Oops - sorry.  That's Taliban thinking.)  And incest, well, of course you would report it to someone the first time it happened, and we all know no one gets pregnant the first time they have sex, right?  So if you got pregnant and hadn't reported it, you enjoyed it, and therefore it wasn't rape, right?

Sigh.  It's really true.  There are Neanderthals who do think like that.  They are legion.  And they vote.  They seldom come out and say it (it's not politically correct, and that's what Akin forgot) but it influences their thinking - or lack thereof.

Akin's statement took me back to a time, in my young adulthood, when the first question asked of a raped woman was, "Did you enjoy it?"  To a time when, in Missouri and many other states, a woman claiming rape had to have TWO MALE witnesses to bring charges.  (Two!  Male!  A woman's testimony cannot be believed, you know.)  To a time when law enforcement would not believe a woman was raped unless there was a weapon involved, or the woman was beaten severely, since, "A woman can run faster with her skirt up than a man can with his pants down."  To a time when "She asked for it" was the usual verdict.  Remember then?

Akin is still there.  That's where the "legitimate" came from.  (I wonder if his idea of "legitimate" rape is limited to miscegenation.)

Yeah, there are still women who will scream "rape" falsely, just to make trouble for some guy.  They are traitors to their sex.  Because they exist, many people take rape claims with very large grains of salt, and that's why people still hang on to the theories above.  That's where "legitimate" comes from.

It's easy to get the impression that Conservatives, and especially those infesting the Republican party, hate women.
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3381 Then

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Death is an alternate existence.

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Man, I write next to nothing here for months, and today you can't shut me up. Must be the snow....

Why is it that every time I connect with someone from the past on Classmates.com, they immediately put my email address on their broadcast list and start sending me those stupid cutsy-poo memes that everybody has been sending everybody else for years? Then I finally get annoyed and ask them to remove me from their forward lists, and they get pissed and I never hear from them again.

Well, today I got a forward of the "Remember Back When" genre. Then, coincidentally, Becs wrote about how different playtime is for kids today as compared to Back When. I started to write a comment on Becs' post, then decided it would be too long, so, Becs, here's my comment.

Yeah.

When I was in the 5th, 6th, and 7th grades, we lived in Ottawa, Ontario. We kids used to go everywhere in the city on the city buses and trolleys. A nickle got you on, and you'd get a transfer when you got off that was good for several hours, which you could use on any other bus or trolley, where you'd get another transfer, and so on. You could go anywhere, all day, on that one nickle.

No cell phones. We left the house in the morning with our nickle, and our parents didn't know where in the whole city we were, until we showed up again at supper time. We had another nickle in our sock for the pay telephone, in case we got sick or something.

Actually, we often left the city. We'd take the bus across the river to French-speaking Hull, basically the "other half" of Ottawa, to go to French movies. If we took the ticket stub to school, we'd get 5 points credit in French class.

We'd go for bike rides, straight out into the countryside, passing signposts that said "Ottawa 20 miles" (it was still "miles" then, pre-conversion) behind us.

Or we'd go to the Parliament buildings in the middle of the city, and watch the mounties and pet their horses. There was a hotel near Parliament with an indoor pool, and no one ever questioned our right to use the changing rooms and swim there. I guess they just assumed our parents were guests or members.

The Rideau Canal snaked through the city. It froze in the winter, and we would skate the length of it (maybe 4 miles?) and back. No adults herding us, just lots of kids on the ice.

We were 10, 11, 12 years old, but younger kids were doing it, too. Here, now, kids can't walk the 1/2 block to their home from the school bus until they're over 12. If a pre-approved adult isn't waiting at the bus stop, the driver is not allowed to let the kid off.

Kids are learning that the whole world is depraved. "Back When", we were pretty much set loose on the world. And, hey, we survived! Along the way we learned about weird people, and good people, and dangerous things and safe things. Getting lost and finding our way back again.

We learned about making independent choices, and dealing with the consequences.

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Hallowe'en. I don't want to hand out sugar, the state won't allow fruit (unless very expensively individually wrapped) and last year's kids didn't seem too thrilled with bags of salty corn or potato carbs. This year I ordered small bottles of bubble stuff. The supplier called yesterday (the order was placed over a week ago) and has promised that they will arrive by 3 pm Monday. They're being shipped UPS from a warehouse in northern NJ, so, maybe.

I don't know what I'll do if they don't arrive on time.

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Go to snopes.com and search for Halloween apples razor. There's only one documented nutcase. The rest seem to be hoaxes, or kids being "funny".

People overreact to everything, and I think it's because they've been "guilted" into feeling responsible if anything goes wrong.

That, plus the fear of lawsuits.

And the fear of not being politically correct. (Which, by the way, leads to a whole new topic: "Politically Correct" is gradually going from being a social thing to being a real political thing. People are being arrested for insulting the government or government employees. Death threats or real death are dealt for being "unpatriotic".)

Sheesh.

Really, truly, watch the video in the previous post.

...What if some stupid kid drinks the bubble stuff and gets diarrhea, and the parents sue me? See how it works, where it goes? In the current American climate, it could happen....
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3380 Would you believe?

Saturday, October 29, 2011

The deepest despair is full of secret satisfactions.
-- Albert Speer, Spandau Diaries --

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Remember the quote above when you read "train wreck" blogs. Partly as it applies to the writer, partly as it applies to the reader.

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Would you believe it's 34 degrees F, and it's snowing, and it's sticking?

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Would you believe there are actually women who never touch their own breasts, and who act disgusted when you suggest that they do, to, like, check for lumps and stuff? Like you've asked them to do something "dirty". Really. There are women who have never seen themselves naked in a mirror.

I cannot imagine being so disconnected from and disgusted by one's own body. But they really do exist, right here in River City.

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Would you believe that I know a man (well, actually two men, although I haven't seen one of them in a decade or more) who is disgusted by everything his body produces. Even sweat. He's embarrassed to be seen with beads of sweat on his brow, let alone allowing anyone to actually touch his sweat. He showers at least twice a day, more often if he can manage it.

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The following video is Terence McKenna. Mr. McKenna died in 2000 of a glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), a particularly nasty type of brain tumor. During his life, he, like Timothy Leary, was a proponent of psychedelic drugs as a means of opening the mind to other dimensions.

I do happen to believe that there's a lot more going on than we can normally perceive, that there is another dimension to reality, and that if you are open to it, you can catch glimpses, but I don't agree that magic mushrooms is the key to that opening. Rather, I believe that psychedelics just turn one's mind around into itself. A fractal mobius strip mirror.

Be that as it may, I do agree with Mr. McKenna's take on relativism and political correctness:

[http://youtu.be/7OX77Qv66qw]
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3356 Gotta let folks be themselves, I guess

Monday, September 12, 2011

Don Bender, letter in Mensa Bulletin: It is not statistically (or logically!) valid to examine facts,
create a hypothesis that fits those facts,
and then cite those same facts as proof that the hypothesis must be true.
(And yet, that’s what we do in court.)

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"In 2002, following the passage of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, Arizona started to monitor state teachers to ensure that they used proper grammar and did not mispronounce words." (Story at http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2011/09/12/arizona-grammar-police-stand-down-under-threat-of-litigation/)

But the federal government told them they couldn't do that, since it discriminates against those with accents.

Duh?

I think it should be easy enough to discriminate between an accent, and sloppy grammar and mispronunciation due to ignorance. Sheesh. Remember the PC arguments about Ebonics? Accepting Ebonics as "proper" led to a graduating class who couldn't get a job.

I really don't think it's too much to ask that teachers speak and write properly. In fact, I insist on it. They should set the example.

A few years ago I was reading the blog of a person who seemed to have no idea whatsoever what punctuation was for, who confused homonyms, and used capitalization randomly. Sentences were poorly constructed, and often confusing. I kept reading, though, because the blogger's ideas were good, once I waded through the slop.

I was shocked to discover that this blogger was not only a teacher in a public school, but was an English teacher!

I cringed. That person had no business in an English class, except maybe as a student. I can't imagine what that teacher's students could possibly learn from their teacher.

What do you think? Should teachers be required to be articulate?
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2740 Wishes

Monday, January 11, 2010

We can never predict the outcome of our actions,
which is why every action must be acceptable in itself,
and not as part of a stratagem.

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I often wish I could sort search results, especially news articles, by "latest updated". I also wish every web page had a date on it, so you'd know how old the information is.

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Some people seem to consider Harry Reid's comment to be stereotyping and racist. I understand why some people are pushing it - because they hope people who don't think for themselves will think Reid is racist, and they want to hurt his campaign for reelection.

The statement that Obama stood a chance of being elected because he's light and articulate was simple truth. It doesn't show racism on Reid's part, but simply that Reid understands the inherent racism and/or colorism of many voters, and if anyone should be offended, it should be those who would NOT consider voting for a darker candidate. If there was a disrespected target, it was those voters.

I wish people would think before they react.

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Asbestos is being blamed for all kinds of illnesses, from lung and bladder cancer to kidney failure. Class action lawyers have been trolling for plaintiffs for the past fifteen years, and they've expanded the job classifications that would have been exposed to asbestos.

The whole thing ticks me off. It's not like the manufacturers or suppliers of asbestos, or the companies or people who used it, were aware at the time that it was a problem. At the time, it was seen as a Very Good material, because it was safe and fireproof. People my age spent our entire childhood in schools with asbestos ceilings and floors, because it was considered a good thing in schools, because it was fireproof, and our parents demanded it.

Ok, it wasn't such a good idea. At the time, it seemed like a good idea. Nobody knew it could cause health issues. That was discovered later (and it's not as widespread or as bad as it's being painted), and I don't agree that people/companies who thought they were doing the right thing should be sued when it turned out to be a bad idea.

If that were so, we should all be allowed to sue our parents for bad decisions.

I wish 'lack of harmful intent' would work as a defense to lawsuits.

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I accidentally landed on a PBS cartoon show this morning. It was supposed to be educational, I suppose, but their teaching method left a lot to be desired. I haven't the faintest idea what age group or educational level it was aimed toward. Anyway, they had a series of dashes that they were filling in with letters to make a phrase. The secret phrase was "growing up". There were secret letters the kids were expected to find. The secret letters were huge, like

M L D

in red, smack in the middle of the screen, in groups of three. Wow. "Did you find them? What letter is this? D! What sound does 'D' make?" At the end, kids who apparently weren't sure what sound "R" makes were eventually expected to sound out "GROWING UP". I began to suspect that there was some other purpose to the whole exercise, other than teaching phonics.

The poor presentation wasn't what bothered me most. They were using "The Ugly Duckling" to illustrate the phrase. You know the story, "There once was an ugly duckling, with feathers all stubby and brown...." That one. The guy that turned into a beautiful swan.

The first thing I noticed was that the ugly duckling had yellow feathers, and the other ducklings were brown. That had to be a conscious choice, because swan cygnets are gray, and domestic duck chicks are more likely to be yellow or white.

I wondered what reaction the PC police would have when the blond yellow duckling turned into the swan.

Then the first three secret letters were shown: "R N P", which I at first read as related to "RNC", and I started laughing.

It was along about then that I noticed that the dotted lines they were plugging the letters into reminded me of "Hangman".

Oh, PBS. I wish folks would review before distribution. And I wish the PC police would stop messing with my brain.
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