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Filthy atheists going about ruining society for everyone. Unconscionable! If it ever happens, please feel welcome to come to Canada where we still know the value of a modern, secular society.
I’ve never seen an episode of the West Wing, but I would have liked to been there for the episode that has this gem of clip contained within it. I’ve posted this before, but I like it so *poof* here it is again showing exactly why religion, without question, needs to be kept out of the affairs of state.
Wooo! *fist-pump*
Dvorak brings his symphony to a majestic close. In two parts due to youtube length limitations.
Like the first movement, the fourth begins not with its main theme but with an introduction. 00:00:47
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“Nothing is free.” Remember that golden nugget of advice given back when you were young? Of course you do, it made you wary of deals that seemed just perfect and produced nothing but unicorns and butterflies and the separation of you and your money once you made the agreement with the con artist in question. The idea that nothing is free needs to be extended further because the deception continues on a much larger trans-national scale. Citizens of democratic counties are bombarded with messages about the “free market” and the “free press” two terms that will not lose their scare quotes until they actually start representing what the words purportedly mean.
We’ll confine analysis to the “free press’ part of the equation, as Media Lens focuses on the unseemly bias toward the dominant power structures by the media in society today. Objectivity? Fairness and Accuracy in reporting? You will not find it inside the mainstream media of western countries, as shocking a revelation that is for many. It is tempting here to go down the left-wing/right-wing bias arguement black hole at the juncture, but really the left versus right debate is but a mere flickering candle compared to the supernova-like malfeasance of the courtier “free press” fawning to whomever hold the levers of power in society.
The article we’ll be looking at appears on the Media Lens website. Significant sections will be reviewed here, but to see the work in full: “The Golden Rule of State Violence: Terrorism is What they Do; Counterterrorism is What We do.”
“A defining feature of state power is rhetoric about a ‘moral’ or ‘ethical’ role in world affairs. Errors of judgement, blunders and tactical mistakes can, and do, occur. But the motivation underlying state policy is fundamentally benign. Reporters and commentators, trained or selected for professional ‘reliability’, tend to slavishly adopt this prevailing ideology.
Thus, on the ten-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, an editorial in the Independent on Sunday gushed about ‘Bush’s desire to spread democracy as an end in itself’. It was, the paper said, ‘the germ of a noble idea’. There was ‘an idealism’ about Blair’s support for Bush. The drawback was that the execution of the righteous vision had been ‘naive, arrogant and morally compromised by torture and the abrogation of the very values for which the US-led coalition claimed to fight’.”
Who in their right mind actually thought that we were “spreading democracy” in Iraq? But I guess whatever it takes to sell the idea of war to enough people to make it popular.
“Note that the invasion-occupation of Iraq is described as a ‘mistake’, not the supreme international crime as judged by the standards of the post-WW2 Nuremberg Trials.”
We come to point very early in the article is really damning and says so much about the pablum we are fed by the media. The Nuremberg Trials established rules for the world to follow after WW2 in attempt to head off another costly world catastrophe, they were to be followed not only by the losers of the war but by the victors as well. We broke these conventions, actually we ripped them up used them as toilet paper, and an actual “free press” would brought this and kept this fact in the world’s eye for all to see. But instead, only reputations are tarnished:
“The horrendous murder of Baha Mousa, an Iraqi civilian, by British soldiers ‘was a reminder of how much the Iraq war tarnished Britain’s reputation abroad.’ The implication is that Britain’s ‘reputation’ is fundamentally decent, only occasionally ‘tarnished’.
The paper concludes:
‘there is a hope that Britain, with a more realistic understanding of its capability, could regain some of the ethical role in the world that it lost after its mistaken response to 9/11.’
In the wake of all that has happened in the past ten years (and more), it takes a committed form of self-deception to cling to the shredded image of Britain’s ‘ethical role in the world’.”
Ah, self-deception, we all practice it to a certain extent. When left unchecked on the level of societies and countries though, it becomes a malevolent, destructive force.
This is a compete repost of what guest blogger Starling on Shapely Prose, says about our rape culture and how it works for the people who have no choice but to live within its confines. This is a “S2” moment, as in Sit the frack down and Shut the frack up.
This is how it works out there. Starling writes with brilliant clarity on a topic that troubles me greatly, she lays down exactly what being female is in our culture, exposing the double standards, patriarchy, and rape culture that are inherent in our society.
You do not want to be part of the problem, so don’t be that guy or girl who glosses over someones “personal problems” or laughs at a rape joke or endorses the other 101 quadrillion bits of misogyny that passes as humour these days. Problems are not fixed by ignoring them. Not taking personal responsibility for making the society you live in safer is a shitty thing to do. So don’t be that person.
Read on.
Phaedra Starling is the pen name of a romance novelist and licensed private investigator living in small New York City apartment with two large dogs. She practices Brazilian jiu-jitsu and makes world-class apricot muffins.
Gentlemen. Thank you for reading.
Let me start out by assuring you that I understand you are a good sort of person. You are kind to children and animals. You respect the elderly. You donate to charity. You tell jokes without laughing at your own punchlines. You respect women. You like women. In fact, you would really like to have a mutually respectful and loving sexual relationship with a woman. Unfortunately, you don’t yet know that woman—she isn’t working with you, nor have you been introduced through mutual friends or drawn to the same activities. So you must look further afield to encounter her.
So far, so good. Miss LonelyHearts, your humble instructor, approves. Human connection, love, romance: there is nothing wrong with these yearnings.
Now, you want to become acquainted with a woman you see in public. The first thing you need to understand is that women are dealing with a set of challenges and concerns that are strange to you, a man. To begin with, we would rather not be killed or otherwise violently assaulted.
“But wait! I don’t want that, either!”
Well, no. But do you think about it all the time? Is preventing violent assault or murder part of your daily routine, rather than merely something you do when you venture into war zones? Because, for women, it is. When I go on a date, I always leave the man’s full name and contact information written next to my computer monitor. This is so the cops can find my body if I go missing. My best friend will call or e-mail me the next morning, and I must answer that call or e-mail before noon-ish, or she begins to worry. If she doesn’t hear from me by three or so, she’ll call the police. My activities after dark are curtailed. Unless I am in a densely-occupied, well-lit space, I won’t go out alone. Even then, I prefer to have a friend or two, or my dogs, with me. Do you follow rules like these?
So when you, a stranger, approach me, I have to ask myself: Will this man rape me?
Do you think I’m overreacting? One in every six American women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. I bet you don’t think you know any rapists, but consider the sheer number of rapes that must occur. These rapes are not all committed by Phillip Garrido, Brian David Mitchell, or other members of the Brotherhood of Scary Hair and Homemade Religion. While you may assume that none of the men you know are rapists, I can assure you that at least one is. Consider: if every rapist commits an average of ten rapes (a horrifying number, isn’t it?) then the concentration of rapists in the population is still a little over one in sixty. That means four in my graduating class in high school. One among my coworkers. One in the subway car at rush hour. Eleven who work out at my gym. How do I know that you, the nice guy who wants nothing more than companionship and True Love, are not this rapist?
I don’t.
When you approach me in public, you are Schrödinger’s Rapist. You may or may not be a man who would commit rape. I won’t know for sure unless you start sexually assaulting me. I can’t see inside your head, and I don’t know your intentions. If you expect me to trust you—to accept you at face value as a nice sort of guy—you are not only failing to respect my reasonable caution, you are being cavalier about my personal safety.
Fortunately, you’re a good guy. We’ve already established that. Now that you’re aware that there’s a problem, you are going to go out of your way to fix it, and to make the women with whom you interact feel as safe as possible.
To begin with, you must accept that I set my own risk tolerance. Read the rest of this entry »
When you have nothing to refute the truth, you DMCA on youtube. This video might not be up long, view it while you can.
The saga continues…
I’ve had this post on the back burner for months, since a commenter at Shakesville (I think) said, you could never get away with restricting men’s access to Viagra the way state legislatures have restricted women’s access to abortion in America. And no, you couldn’t. But interestingly enough, it’s pretty easy to make a set of arguments for restricting access to Viagra, that are pretty similar to the arguments for restricting access to abortion. For the most part, all you have to do is search the text, and replace “woman” with “man”, “abortion” with “Viagra”, and “ends a human life” with “begins a human life”. (If pre-born human life is that important to you, you should take its creation as seriously as its destruction.) Then there are a few restrictions that claim they’re protecting women, and you just have to look at the flip-side: preventing men from hurting women. For some of the restrictions, I’ve invented an imaginary evil radical feminist anti-het-sex conspiracy to substitute for the Religious Right.
Every restriction on access to Viagra I propose below, is either a fact of life, or a legislated restriction, on abortion in at least one, and often many, American states. When the restrictions and their justifications are imposed on men, they look pretty radically man-hating (never mind that being unable to get a hardon is nowhere near as traumatic as going through childbirth against your will), but in their anti-abortion form, it’s not just fringe whackaloons making the arguments I’ll list, it’s people elected to public office. Read the rest of this entry »
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