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Bloodthirsty, violent, rapacious. In other words the status-quo for the pious.
Thanks again Thunderfoot, great video. :)
Ah, cue the outrage. We certainly cannot have seven (7!) year old children traipsing around in a carnival role which is being described by the media as “sexy”. I’m curious as to why it is culturally acceptable for mature females to prance around during Carnival topless but not children.
I mean, speculating from Puritan North America it would be easy to categorize the whole affair as an exercise in lewd, hyper sexual ribaldry. But is it a fair analysis? The BBC’s article weighs in:
“The Rio de Janeiro state Council for the Defence of Children and Adolescents suggested it would only “increase the treatment of children as sexual objects in Brazilian society”.
Whoa…there we go, objectifying people is bad. Whoops! Hang on…
“We’re not against kids participating in Carnival; it’s part of Brazilian culture,” the council’s director, Carlos Nicodemos, told the Associated Press (AP) news agency.
“What we can’t allow is putting a seven-year-old girl in a role that traditionally has a very sexual focus.”
Oh, I get it, it is okay to objectify older females.
But this is right out…
Hmm… her protective father says the following:
“Any man who looks at a seven-year-old girl and feels any sort of excitement should go see a doctor,” her father, Marco Lira, told AP.
Way to go Dad! People just need to realize that objectifying women starts at a later age and that putting a child in a stereotypical ‘sexy’ role is all about the dance and the carnival and not an iota of anything else.
Check.
Another victory against the Patriarchy for sure.
Update: Fire has ravaged the floats this year (2011).
I was surprised when I saw this video up at the AJ news page. It was a legitimate story on the Teabag Party and how they were going to hold a convention. The convention failed as tickets to attend were said to be priced at $500 a head. AJ also says the Teabag Party was instrumental in getting Scott Brown elected in the US senate.
As I watched the video, they had the footage of some of their signs. Painting Obama as a Adolf Hitler, misidentifying him as a socialist. For the record, National Socialism has nothing to do with Socialism, it is quite the opposite.
What I see is people who feel like they are cut off from the system rallying hysterically against strawmen and caricatures they have little understanding of. I believe it is symptomatic of the increasingly fragmented body politic in the US. People are beginning to realize that neither established party is serving their needs.
The experience of arguing on the internets leads me to believe that this hypothesis counts for much of my frustration with others. :)
And no, I do not think I fall into the lower quartiles, for the record.
A paradigm for reading news and following events that should really become more popular. Triangulation. That grab the same story from several feeds and see what is reported and emphasized and more importantly, what is *not* reported in the story in question.
In our case we have the instance of Hakimullah Mehsud either being allegedly dead or really just doing fine. The answer depends on whether you look at the report from the CBC, or the report from English Al-Jazeera.
The CBC says:
“The militant leader’s death would be an important success for both Pakistan, which has been battling the Pakistani Taliban, and the U.S., which blames Mehsud for a recent deadly bombing against the CIA in Afghanistan.
The army’s disclosure came shortly after Pakistani state television, citing unnamed “official sources,” reported that Mehsud died in Orakzai, an area in Pakistan’s northwest tribal region where he was reportedly being treated for his injuries.
“We have these reports coming to us,” army spokesman Gen. Athar Abbas told The Associated Press. “We are investigating whether it is true or wrong.”
Versus
Al-Jazeera:
“There has been a call to a local television station and Qari Hussein, a senior commander of the Pakistani Taliban, is said to have denied reports of the death of Hakimullah Mehsud,” Al Jazeera’s Kamal Hyder, reporting from Islamabad, said.
“There is no concrete evidence to suggest that Hakimullah Mehsud is dead, but there is also some suspicion because there has been no video message to prove that he is alive.”
The AFP news agency reported that a senior Taliban spokesman had said that Mehsud was “alive and safe”.
Now, it is hard to evaluate who has a more accurate reports, as who has information about the sources. We have to base much of our news on the veracity of sources that we cannot easily verify.
So is the Taliban leader alive or dead? Who do you believe?
Well, now that the Senate has been stacked in the Conservatives favour, I’m sure Harper and his minions can get on with the the business of running our country. Unfortunately, the House of Commons is still closed for business till the Olympics are done.
I wonder how much the Conservatives are betting that we will forget about the Afghan Detainee Torture Scandal? I hope, for once our spineless opposition will not let the government squirm away from the issue. Our culpability in Afghanistan needs to be fully explored. Proroguing parliament may halt the formal aspects of our democratic process but it will not end our responsibility to those we have transgressed against.
Three students were caught cheating on their Math 30 finals. Unsurprising, but I’m interested to see how this story develops. Three seems like a very small number compared to the amount of effort it takes to get a hold of a provincial final exam and then smuggle the answers into the examination room so one can reap the sour rewards of skulduggery.
They will be getting a small penalty, but nothing that will be particularly problematic for their overall academic careers. I’m making the assumption they have plans for further academia as that level of math exam is suitable for gaining entrance to post-secondary education.
“Why cheat” is the real question though. University level math is not going to get any easier, so why do yourself the disservice of prolonging your fated crash and burn in the cheating topic of your choice(only now its you who pay directly for the course)?
Pressure to achieve, increased competition, laziness all probably factored into the calculus these kids worked out regarding their decision to cheat. What would be interesting would be if we could interview these students to determine their reasons for cheating because I believe that our educational system has failed them, to a certain extent, because they got their wrongheaded ideas from somewhere. When do you toss away the moral path and descend into less auspicious choices?
I’ll keep an eye on the story.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…