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Welcome to the Signature series on DWR – you will need to go to CBC radio to hear the A major voice-over/musical interpretations.
A major: The Will-o’-the-wisp
Also known as:
The Flibbertigibbet.
The Problem Child.
A majors you might know:
Jane Eyre.
Maria from The Sound of Music.
Veronica from the Archie comics.
The notes: A – B – C♯ – D – E – F♯ – G♯ – A.
Number of sharps: three.
Relative minor: F-sharp minor.
What they said about A major in the 18th century:
“Expression of joy, cheerfulness, dancing. Beautiful Saxon-green, refreshing aroma of lemons.” – J.J.H. Ribock, 1783
“Women and their sweet passions.” – Johann Jakob Heinse, 1795
More A major listening:
The Celebrated Minuet by Luigi Boccherini.
The Kreutzer Sonata by Ludwig van Beethoven.
Need fetus porn and bullshit arguments? Look up your local, if you’re unlucky, pro-life chapter. This video illustrates the basic lie that hovers below the surface of much of pro-life land. Being pro-life is *not* about preserving life it is about removing choice from women, thus in reality anti-choice is a much more appropriate moniker for this particular subset of deluded people.
An estimated 40 million abortions will take place in the developing world in 2012. Most of these procedures will be clandestine and unsafe, taking a terrible toll on women’s lives. Reducing the number of unsafe abortions is essential for improving public health. And it’s the basic right of every woman to decide whether and when to have a child—without having to put her health or life at risk.
Another neat part of holding a minority viewpoint is that when talking with those still in the matrix, your arguments can be dismissed out of hand as whining or mere supercilious handwaving. This short video paints a slightly different picture and should be part of your 101 level knowledge of what Feminism is about.
Gail Dines knocks this talk out of the park – Neo-Liberalism is exposed, and all the ill-effects that come with that particular set of toxic ideals. Some quotes from the video:
“There is no such thing as cheap labour, there is only labour that has been made cheap”
“Women perform 66% of the worlds work, produce 50% of the food, but earn 10% of the income and own 1% of the property”
On Third Wave Feminism – “Orgasms are nice, but revolutions are better.”
Sit back and soak this one up folks, it is how the world is working, whether you like it or not.
Political theatre harms us all. Issues that are important to public are marginalized while supposedly “important” issues take the spotlight. (Yes, you women, under the bus, stat!)
Noam Chomsky summarizes what elections have become in the US –
“Elections are run by the public relations industry. Its primary task is commercial advertising, which is designed to undermine markets by creating uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices – the exact opposite of how markets are supposed to work, but certainly familiar to anyone who has watched television.It’s only natural that when enlisted to run elections, the industry would adopt the same procedures in the interests of the paymasters, who certainly don’t want to see informed citizens making rational choices. The victims, however, do not have to obey, in either case. Passivity may be the easy course, but it is hardly the honorable one.”
Call to arms or maybe just maybe a little of Mr.Jackson’s “wake the F**k up”, whatever it takes but for goodness sake cut through the noise and get people thinking for themselves again.
Sometimes people manage to crystallize a thought or a notion into a wonderful passage that is explicit, yet concise all at the same time. The Cynical Romantic from an older discussion thread on Pharyngula manages to capture much about what Atheism plus is and why it has been formed.
[fixed formatting from the original post]
I totally dislike the idea of leaving the battleground on the sexism topic to the minority of offenders.
If there were a minority of offenders, that would indeed be a bad strategy.
Unfortunately, we have multiple stripes of “offenders.” The hardcore misogynist rape-threat-spewing hate-driven trolls are a minority. And if the rest of the community were against them, we might be able to drive them out.
However, regular old run-of-the-mill “I don’t hate women; that would require paying attention to them, and I’d rather spend my time talking about how smart I am” moderate sexists who don’t really give a shit about doing anything about the trolls… we appear to have a metric fuckton of those. They are really, really not a minority in the movement. They are likely the New Atheist base. And that sort of bullshit enables the really serious MRAs and trolls. Finding out that those people don’t care about us and don’t have our back in the face of mistreatment is disheartening. The oblivious, genteelly sexist types go all the way up to the “leaders” of the movement, to the degree that we have leaders (see: Dawkins mocking Rebecca Watson for pointing out that atheist men can do stupid shit too).
We cannot kick the hateful trolls out of the movement because not enough people in the movement give a shit. And we cannot kick the regular sexists out of the movement because they make up too much of the movement.
Hence the attempt to explicitly create a separate space within the movement where we all will have each other’s backs.
One person’s story about breaking free from religious delusion and embracing their humanity.
If she can do it, so can you.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…