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I’m not really into the whole prostitution is what happens between consenting adults argument. I find that it reeks with the notion that the experiences of a lucky few, a sub set of a sub set, somehow overlays what happens to most people who get involved in prostitution; that would be degradation, pain, and suffering. Layer that with helplessness, fear and shame and you have a tried and true recipe for broken human beings.
Prostitution is not okay. It is never okay and thus the topic is set for your Thursday DWR PSA.
Thank you to Buy Fair: Fight Slavery for hosting the video.
Oh, those women, they just want to have power over men. Evil feminists that don’t see the FACT that men and women are treated equally now…
Pardon me while I expunge the neurons used to formulate those sentences… *splork*… Ahh…all better. Like it or not, video games are a fairly big part of our culture, and unsurprisingly, the women featured in many video games conform with traditional patriarchal roles.
I’m starting to like CounterPunch more and more. Go read the full article at their site as it is insightful and though provoking.
[…]
“As part of the national mythology many Americans, and likely nearly all liberals and progressives, accept the premise that policies designed to boost the fortunes of the already wealthy might be misdirected, but not outright destructive to their interests. After four years of unwavering support for America’s plutocrats and malignant acts toward their economic victims in every actual administration policy—witness his continuing call to cut social insurance programs while 20 million people remain un and under-employed as corporate profits and financial markets soar, Mr. Obama’s faithful retain the belief he is working in ‘their’ interest. In contrast, Mr. Chavez faced a ruling elite in Venezuela with a long history of taking all of the social resources they could get away with taking and there was never the pretense that allowing oligarchs (and / or the U.S.) to put social wealth in their own pockets benefited ‘everyone.’ Put another way, Mr. Chavez effectively articulated this point to those to whom it wasn’t already clear.
Venezuela’s oil wealth may have made this point more clearly visible, but no more true than it is in the U.S. today. Nature didn’t give Barack Obama the ‘right’ to murder U.S. citizens (or anyone else) without trial or evidence—a policy conspicuously against the interests of all who lack the social power to resist it. This point is likely well understood by those who have historically been on the receiving end of coercive (captive) state power—people of color and various permutations of the poor and dispossessed. The economic elite who have so benefited from Mr. Obama’s policies clearly don’t see themselves and their families as potential targets of the state’s newly ‘legitimated’ right to murder. To the extent economic class provides the dividing line between the giving and receiving ends of this power, the relation between it and wealth concentration is made visible. And it is this very line Mr. Obama has helped to so clearly demarcate.”
[…]
Make no mistake, the pro-life-forced-birth lobby are advocating slavery for women. Dianne, in a comment on Pharygula, captures exactly the position our anti-choice friends would like to put women in.
Query: Why are they talking about the circumstances of the conception as though that matters? A forced pregnancy is slavery, regardless of the circumstances that led to the pregnancy. In the US, at least, people are never, under any circumstance other than pregnancy, required to give use of their body to another under any circumstance, even to save the life of the other person. Why are fetuses granted more rights than living people?
Misogyny, Bigotry and Priest Child-Rape Apologia – all in together in one package of Pope Awesome!
It would be a disservice to the Disservice if we did not comment on the high octane jack-assery that is going on in Catholic-land at the moment as they feverishly scrabble about looking for the best candidate to be their earthly link to the Almighty-Holy-Gibberish in the sky. I’m thinking they would have better luck with Alectryomancy.
Sadly, Canada has a candidate in the running for the title of His Pope-ness, by the name of Marc Ouellet. His grip on reality, like that of many of the religious, is tenuous at best (wanting to be the chosen emissary of the Sky-Daddy here on earth an all that. I secretly think that there is a holy (holey?) sock-puppet that has “god” embroidered on it that only the pope gets to wear and converse with.) Parenthetical ruminations aside, Mr.Ouellet when not fapping for jebus, has some quaintly retrograde points of view when it comes to social issues.
Shocking.
“Once touted as a possible candidate to become pope, Ouellet apparently had no intention of wading into a public policy debate when [he] called abortion a “moral crime” as serious as murder and said it is never justified — even in cases of rape.”
Ah, rapetastic pope gives those bitches what they deserve! No rights, no autonomy and incubator status straight-fucking-up. I am curious as to the calibre of mental gymnastics it takes to be female and to identify as Catholic when the head of your church makes raging misogyny plank #1 on his papal platform. It gets better, Ouellet digs deeper:
“Ouellet said he understands that a sexually assaulted woman has been traumatized and must be helped and that her attacker must be held accountable.
“But there is already a victim,” he said. “Must there be another one?”
Will someone PLEASE think of the children!!!! (While we insidiously erase women’s autonomy, tough darts for you bitchez!!)
Ouellet is also on the progressive cutting edge of other societal issues; same sex marriage and homosexuality come to mind:
“His Eminence raised concern over the positive presentation of homosexuality and same-sex “marriage” in schools. With such questionable education, the Cardinal said, “You are deforming conscience. You are warping the processes of psycho-sexual and psycho-social identification processes of youth.”
Fags and dykes! Back into the closet for you! We’ll see you burning in the lake of fire soon enough, but for now, be away with your sinful practices your presence cannot be tolerated within a properly religious society (and by “properly religious society” I actually mean, fucked-up dystopian hell.)! It is sad to see this sort of bigotry paraded out in the open. The following quote is not what Ouellet has said, but I’m pretty sure he supports it:
“Considerations Regarding Proposals To Give Legal Recognition To Unions Between Homosexual Persons, said that, “Allowing children to be adopted by persons living in such unions would actually mean doing violence to these children, in the sense that their condition of dependency would be used to place them in an environment that is not conducive to their full development.” (No. 7).Homosexual indoctrination is just another form of child abuse.”
To see a nasty slice of the Dark Ages apparently one just needs to dial Ouellet’s Papal Way-Back-Machine, for a heady whiff of the good ‘ole days when the church was leading society straight into the muck. With such progressive views, how can this dude NOT be pope?
Oh and of course, no Catholic article would be complete without commentary on the officially denied by tacitly condoned child-rape-cabal a.k.a the catholic priesthood. Severely enlightened Ouellet in dulcet tones denotes:
“He also said child abuse is not specifically a Roman Catholic issue but that the church has garnered more attention.
“It is not a Catholic problem; it is a human problem. Most of the abuse occurred in families in very general in society, and my hope is what was done by the Catholic Church, which is not yet perfect, but could be also of example for others in society,” he said.
Last month, SNAP, (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) singled out three papal candidates who, either by their comments or their deeds, had tried to brush off allegations of abuse by members of the clergy.”
Oh, it is just a human problem! Okay then. Carry on! (*headesk forever*)
Canada still has a freely flowing super-abundance of toxic religious stupidity; enough (shamefully) that we can *share* with rest of the world. And thus to the world, my heartfelt apologies.
We, in Western Civilization, are constantly bombarded with the notion that Capitalism is the be all and end all. It is the End of History, it is the Ultimate System. More like Ultimate-Horsepucky, in my opinion because we almost never get to see the critiques of our system in the mainstream and not knowing the weaknesses of your own system is hubris of the most dangerous variety. It leads to a variation to what psychologists term the Dunning-Kruger effect. And that is, given sufficient ignorance, we cannot accurately judge the quality of the work we produce. It produces truly transcendental moments such as this.
The following is a forty-five minute required slice of viewing because we really do not want to act and claim competence like the choral master linked above when it comes to arguing about our chosen economic system.
O Lux beata Trinitas, by Michael Praetorius (1571-1621), performed by Stephen Malinowski.
Michael Praetorius (probably February 15, 1571 – February 15, 1621) was a German composer, organist, and music theorist.[1] He was one of the most versatile composers of his age, being particularly significant in the development of musical forms based on Protestant hymns, many of which reflect an effort to improve the relationship between Protestants and Catholics.
He was born Michael Schultze, the youngest son of a Lutheran pastor, in Creuzburg, in present-day Thuringia. After attending school in Torgau and Zerbst, he studied divinity and philosophy at the University of Frankfurt (Oder). After receiving his musical education, from 1587 he served as organist at the Marienkirche in Frankfurt. From 1592/3 he served at the court in Wolfenbüttel, under the employ of Henry Julius, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg. He served in the duke’s State Orchestra, first as organist and later (from 1604) as Kapellmeister.
His first compositions appeared around 1602/3. Praetorius had begun writing some of them when Regensburg was the parliamentary seat of the Holy Roman Empire. Their publication primarily reflects the care for music at the court of Gröningen. The motets of this collection were the first in Germany to make use of the new Italian performance practices; as a result, they established him as a proficient composer.
These “modern” pieces mark the end of his middle creative period. The nine parts of his Musae Sioniae (1605–10) and the 1611 published collections of liturgical music (masses, hymns, magnificats) follow the German Protestant chorale style. With these, at the behest of a circle of orthodox Lutherans, he followed the Duchess Elizabeth, who ruled the duchy in the duke’s absence. In place of popular music, one now expected religious music from Praetorius.
When the duke died in 1613 and was succeeded by Frederick Ulrich, Praetorius retained his employment. From 1613 he also worked at the court of John George I, Elector of Saxony at Dresden, where he was responsible for festive music. He was exposed to the latest Italian music, including the polychoral works of the Venetian School. His subsequent development of the form of the chorale concerto, particularly the polychoral variety, resulted directly from his familiarity with the music of such Venetians as Giovanni Gabrieli. The solo-voice, polychoral, and instrumental compositions Praetorius prepared for these events mark the high period of his artistic creativity. Until his death, Praetorius stayed at the court in Dresden, where he was declared Kapellmeister von Haus aus and worked with Heinrich Schütz.
Michael Praetorius died on his 50th birthday, in Wolfenbüttel, Germany and is entombed in a vault beneath the organ of St. Mary’s Church there.
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