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Mystro introduced me to the youtuber WildWoodClair1. She has a nice channel with many videos mocking christian inanity in the multitudinous forms it comes in. Our selection today is a particularly concise take down of bad christian religious ideas stated with risibly solemn rectitude by clueless christians. Enjoy. :)
I’m looking for the transcript (found it)because sometimes the applause drowns out the speaker. In any case, this is a command performance and emphasizes a few important points about discourse in our society in general and feminism in particular.
I remember how the park, outside of parked cars, was frozen with quiet and darkness, when your anger shot through the night.
“Why do you call yourself a feminist? You guys are equal. And as a man, I am always expected to be a man, to make the first move. If anything, it is harder for me; you get all of the good stuff and none of the bad.”
With your brows furrowed with concern, with the capacity of my inferior mind, and your eyes grasp my shoulders, pushing me down as if to add to the gravity of your words.
“Do you understand where I am coming from now?”
I sat there small, draped in a label that was then too big for me. Struggling in the creases that were smothering the pieces of ideals taped together to form my skeleton. Feminist fell over my frame like an old baggy shirt. Suddenly embarrassing, the tag started to itch.
All of the good stuff and none of the bad. Women like Orwell’s pigs squealing to be more equal than others, while you’re pressured to be a man in relationships. The dilemma of having to choose who you spend your most intimate moments with. So while I sympathize with your burden of boyhood bravery, it’s hard to be the problem of a cloud’s troubled position of [working the ward] water while you’re the parched flower waiting for the rain to come only to be bother by the thunderous booms of ingratitude.
This is when you tell me not to get hysterical.
Hysterical, the word invented as a diagnosis to given to women showing inappropriate emotion, like anger. Supplemented with a daily dose of the question”Are you on your period?” As if an internal chemical explosion is the only thing that warrants my passionate opinion. But I am not suppose to talk about it. So I’m still trying to figure out why the hell I am to hide the fact that I bleed.
You illegitimatize the cries of my sisters. You try to deny me of my history. Give me hysterectomy that misdirects me dissect the women from this.
You know what? I am done with the futility of civility. I feel like cussing you out.
I would call you a pussy but that would mine. Cunt is the same predicament because it’s your dick I meant to insult. Can’t call you a slut, bitch, or whore because those are reserved for the ladies. I’d call you a son of a bitch but that would just insult the women you came from. The male equivalent of a bitch — bastard — is calling your mother a whore. Douche-bag, one of the dirtiest descriptions, just depicts the drippings of a woman. How about motherfucker? Throw in a feminine connotation to make it extra horrifying. Or a universal fuck you punctuated by erecting a phallic middle finger, in order to provide you with a visual representation of how I want you to be fucked… like a woman. Use sexual politics as the ultimate degradation.
But I don’t say any of this. I sit in silence because it has been hard to be a word in edgewise over your alpha male gorilla chest pounds. King Cock atop dangling buildings squeezing me in your leathery grip dangling me over the edge asking me why the hell I don’t enjoy the view. Oblivious to the fact I can’t even talk to you without choking on the language designed to remind me of my place. And anything I throw at you as an insult simply boomerangs back and burns my own tongue and threatens to drowned me in these thick veiled fabric of sexist dialect. But I will continue to rip these assaults apart, tearing these baggy rags and tying them tight and proud across my body, filling to the limit the fabric will allow until they fit my feminine form.
Reflecting back on your furrowed brow, I ask, “Do you understand where I am coming from now?”
CBC radio 2 still has goodness left in it, witness the Signature Series. A string of programs that explore popular conceptions of music written in specific key signatures. Today’s interlude will feature the key of G minor and songs that are written in that specific key. The downside to this series is that the musical bits do not embed in wordpress properly, so you will have to go the CBC to listen to the music and enjoy the commentary. However, I can steal what is written about each key signature from the blog. Hence the copypasta below:
G minor: The Contrarian (follow link to play)
Also known as:
The Moody Teenager.
The Complicated Man.
G minors you might know:
Captain Ahab from Moby Dick.
Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye.
Pete Campbell from Mad Men.
The notes: G – A – B♭ – C – D – E♭ – F♯ – G.
Number of flats: two.
Relative major: B-flat major.
What they said about G minor in the 18th century:
“Discontent, uneasiness, worry about a failed scheme; bad-tempered gnashing of teeth; in a word: resentment and dislike.” – Christian Schubart, 1784
“It is suited to frenzy, despair, agitation.” – Francesco Galeazzi, 1796
More G minor listening:
Dido’s Lament from Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell.
Der Erlkönig by Franz Schubert.
The Canadian connection:
“Your Rocky Spine” by Great Lake Swimmers.
My Morning Dog Time
That would be my damn dog looking at me quizzically while I snap yet another phone-photo of her cuteness.
Not too many surprises here folks, subscribing to the radical notion that women are people too is how we roll around here.
Edmonton taxpayers are going to be fleeced without affection or mercy by the Katz Group. This has been in the cards since this atrocious deal was pre-approved last year. Having done some reading though, we can still pull out of this money trap and it looks as if Katz is giving us the golden ticket out. Tony Caterina said in today’s Edmonton Journal:
“The company’s new demands aren’t just for more capital dollars and an ongoing $6-million subsidy for the proposed arena, Coun. Tony Caterina said.
“They don’t want to pay taxes,” he said. “They want help now in operating the arena. They want a guaranteed subsidy. They want the city to be their tenant in a major office building. They want the casino licence.” These were the requests presented behind closed doors last week in a meeting Caterina said should have been public.
“If everybody knew exactly what these new positions were, I think everyone would have seen it as council saw it, which is very unreasonable.”
You don’t say.
This entire arena process has been about trying to get the best possible terms for the legalized blackmail of the the city of Edmonton from Day 1. Otherwise Katz and company are going to move the team. Good. Go. There are myriad of other city projects that actually help the city that need funding, the LRT, Low Income housing, road repair are all in need of more cash. If Katz wants to have a new arena, he can pay for it himself.
The other option is that the city of Edmonton builds and OWNS the arena and gets ALL of the revenue benefits from the complex, plus rent from Oilers.
I’m not hearing a lot from the usual right-wing suspects about the arena because, of course, socialism for the rich is just fine. If this was funding a school or a woman’s shelter I’m sure the hemming and hawing would already be loud and clear, building toward the usual “fiscal crisis” Armageddon they manufacturer when tax dollars are spent on the disadvantaged.
Meaningful discourse requires a mutually accepted set of shared definitions to start. Otherwise the parties involved will unerringly talk past each other and misconstrue what the other is saying. George Lakoff, a cognitive scientist, has mapped this procedure brilliantly in several books ( The Political Mind being the most concise).
I digress.
The excerpt that I’m sharing with you today is from an Alter.net article entitled “The Political Awakening of a Republican: ‘I Had Viewed Whole Swaths of the Country and the World as Second-Class People’.” When you go there and read the rest watch carefully as the author of the piece first has to question his cognitive framework, struggle with it and eventually reject it for being at odds with reality. His epiphany reminds me of the saying, “reality has a liberal bias,” more than a saying because it is a factual statement and one that resonates with me. You can go with god if you’d like, enjoy the trip; I’ll be here in reality waiting once you get back.
We’ll pick up the article as the author has his first breakthrough in discovering that his reality is not everyone’s reality.
“Then something tiny happened that pried open my eyes to the less obvious forms of racism and the hurdles the poor face when they try to climb the economic ladder. It happened on an official visit to a school in a suburb of New Orleans that served kids who had gotten kicked out of every other school around. I was investigating what types of services were available to the young people who were showing up in juvenile hall and seemed to be headed toward the proverbial life of crime.
My tour guide mentioned that parents were required to participate in some school programs. One of these was a field trip to a sit-down restaurant.
This stopped me in my tracks. I thought: What kind of a lame field trip is that?
It turned out that none of the families had ever been to a sit-down restaurant before. The teachers had to instruct parents and students alike how to order off a menu, how to calculate the tip.
I was stunned.
Starting To See
That night, I told my roommates about the crazy thing I had heard that day. Apparently there were people out there who had never been to something as basic as a real restaurant. Who knew?
One of my roommates wasn’t surprised. He worked at a local bank branch that required two forms of ID to open an account. Lots of people came in who had only one or none at all.
I was flooded with questions: There are adults who have no ID? And no bank accounts? Who are these people? How do they vote? How do they live? Is there an entire off-the-grid alternate universe out there?
From then on, I started to notice a lot more reality. I noticed that the criminal justice system treats minorities differently in subtle as well as not-so-subtle ways, and that many of the people who were getting swept up by the system came from this underclass that I knew so little about. Lingering for months in lock-up for misdemeanors, getting pressed against the hood and frisked during routine traffic stops, being pulled over in white neighborhoods for “driving while black”: these are things that never happen to people in my world. Not having experienced it, I had always assumed that government force was only used against guilty people. (Maybe that’s why we middle-class white people collectively freak out at TSA airport pat-downs.)
I dove into the research literature to try to figure out what was going on. It turned out that everything I was “discovering” had been hiding in plain sight and had been named: aversive racism, institutional racism, disparate impact and disparate treatment, structural poverty, neighborhood redlining, the “trial tax,” the “poverty tax,” and on and on. Having grown up obsessed with race (welfare and affirmative action were our bêtes noirs), I wondered why I had never heard of any of these concepts.
Was it to protect our Republican version of “individual responsibility”? That notion is fundamental to the liberal Republican worldview. “Bootstrapping” and “equality of opportunity, not outcomes” make perfect sense if you assume, as I did, that people who hadn’t risen into my world simply hadn’t worked hard enough, or wanted it badly enough, or had simply failed. But I had assumed that bootstrapping required about as much as it took to get yourself promoted from junior varsity to varsity. It turns out that it’s more like pulling yourself up from tee-ball to the World Series. Sure, some people do it, but they’re the exceptions, the outliers, the Olympians.
The enormity of the advantages I had always enjoyed started to truly sink in. Everyone begins life thinking that his or her normal is the normal. For the first time, I found myself paying attention to broken eggs rather than making omelets. Up until then, I hadn’t really seen most Americans as living, breathing, thinking, feeling, hoping, loving, dreaming, hurting people. My values shifted — from an individualistic celebration of success (that involved dividing the world into the morally deserving and the undeserving) to an interest in people as people.”
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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