on Videographers "Exposing" Street Harassment

if street harassment is such a pandemic problem, why is it that whenever a woman tries to formally document street harassment she doesn't just wear a t-shit and jeans?  why is she always in a short skirt and low cut top?

if street harassment happens just because men are evil and has nothing to do with how a woman is dressed, why bother tarting her up like that before you go out to get footage?  doesn't doing that kind of defeat your whole purpose?  how does dressing a woman like a pinup girl and parading her around town prove anything about men?

penn and teller did something similar on an episode of "bullshit". they put a camera in a big, obtrusive button, put that big, obtrusive button on a woman's chest, had her initiate conversations with random men... and then they shamed those men for glancing at the big, obtrusive button camera they put on her chest.  penn and teller used this to prove that men are slime (of course), but i think it just means men can see and are human.

if you have to alter the terms of interaction in order to get the kind of interaction you want, you can't then say that what results is a unblemished reflection of reality.  you preempted that possibility. if you have to dress all sleazy to get men to catcall you, then you have to admit that they're catcalling you because you're dressed all sleazy and not because they're evil.  is there a pandemic of men catcalling girls who are dressed all sleazy?  you bet.  is that a problem for those of us (male and female) who don't engage in that social binary?

nope.

Thoughts on the "Unfriend Trend"

an article by a woman talking about purging her facebook friends list.

there was always a better way to handle "facebook overload" than the current state of "mass defriendings", but it was up front.  i only have 83 facebook friends, and no, i don't "know" them all, but i like them all just fine.  facebook hasn't become that kind of overwhelming and stressful and "public-y" to me.

you have to understand, this format was originally designed for a college campus.  it's predicated on the notion that everyone on it has a real-world reason to know everyone else.  it wasn't designed for people who are and intend to remain absolute strangers to one another.

as for the "social" implications of unfriending someone... if someone came into your house and started yelling about social topics that made you uncomfortable, or started insulting or threatening you, you'd kick them out.  it would be worlds harder than just clicking 'unfriend', but you'd do it.  well, that's pretty much what facebook is.  it's allowing people into your home, and they bring their opinions and personalities with them.  if they're upsetting you, you should kick them out.

but before you do that, briefly consider the idea that if someone else having an opinion that isn't a carbon copy of yours makes you so upset you can't have them in your environment... maybe that's not all exactly their problem only.  i have facebook friends i know i disagree with on some pretty fundamental points.  doesn't bother me.  certainly not to the point where i would willingly deprive myself of their input.  i already know what i think.  when all i want is to obsess about my own opinion, i open my word processor, not facebook.

Clothes and Rapists

no, what she's wearing doesn't mean she "asked for it".

i think people confuse what they personally feel comfortable both wearing and looking at for some generalization about how people "should" look or dress.  i don't like it when women dress too revealingly, so my own dress is relatively modest.  and if i wanted to be a bitch about it, i'd mention that i don't really mind making a less attractive target of myself, thanks, but you go right ahead... bait.

however

telling people that they deserve any criminal acts perpetrated against them because of their clothing is actually wrong on a functional level.  clothing doesn't make rapists. blaming rape on things that don't have anything to do with the rapist just victimizes the rest of the community, too... including the rapist.

i think it's okay to ask questions like, "what made the rapist commit the rape?", but that question doesn't include the victim.  they were merely present.  the victim didn't do the thing that made the rapist choose to violate another human being like that.  someone else did something to that rapist to make them that way.

asking how revealing the victim's clothing was is a waste of investigative resources, imo.  there's an answer to "why do rapists rape", but you're not going to find it looking up girls' skirts.

The "Flames of War"?

some links about the "trailer" isis "released" (basically just a short propaganda video).  interesting that it's directed at an english-reading audience.  it's definitely directed at someone.

the video can be seen at both links.  the youtube video is the piece the young turks did about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xli0pByzmAo

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/17/isis-video-us-troops_n_5835036.html

infowars posts a video that looks exactly like that "trailer" about three times a week and the government doesn't have any response at all.  why should this be different?  it's the same kind of ultraconservative paranoid nut jobs.  just because they're from somewhere else doesn't mean everyone should start panicking.  i can find fifty videos just like that made by ultraconservative paranoid nut jobs from around the world about topics from abortion to zombies.

i predict that the people who actually live there are getting megaupset right about now, though.  i bet they start shooting these isis guys on their own in a minute.  you watch.  because nobody in their right mind is going to put up with this going on right in front of their kids for too long, principles or no.  i don't care how much you "hate" america, you're going to reach your limit on "bullshit that fucks up my personal day" eventually.

because whatever america is, we ain't the ones driving trucks dripping with guys dripping with guns up and down the street in front of your kid's school all day.  we don't do things like that.

we buy your land and build military bases to house armed soldiers in your country... which isn't military occupation in that we told you we were going to quarter combat-ready soldiers inside the borders of your country, and your government still sold us the property and gave us building permits.  that's kind of why we like to call these things we do different versions of "not legally a war by our internally decided upon rules for what that entails".  so long as we keep it business, everything seems to go really well for us, huh...

y'know, maybe your problem isn't exactly us.

you should overthrow your government.  ...  that's not directed at anyone.  just a statement of general advice.

Sam Harris Isn't a Sexist Pig, but...

First he said this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2014/09/12/can-atheist-sam-harris-become-a-spiritual-figure/ (comments on women in atheism near the end of the article)

Then he said this:
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/im-not-the-sexist-pig-youre-looking-for

he put the response out because a bunch of atheist women "thanked" him for wishing us into the cornfield instead of calling us out.  it was a mobilizing opportunity for him and he missed it by assuming his preconceptions matched reality.

what might we be doing right now if instead of "i guess women don't think as hard about these things as men do", he'd said, "no, that's *not* true.  i see women at atheist events all the time.  in fact, this is a myth that there are no women in atheism.  let's debunk it, because that's what we do.  everybody tweet #atheistwomenexist."?

even if it accomplished nothing, i think it would have been a much better message than the mouthful of mush he blerfed out.

god kinda screwed up my weekend

i think i bruised a part of my consciousness when i bumped into that divinity school student on campus friday.  i should have just walked away from her, because i *was* busy, but i talked to her for what had to have been a half hour or more.

i told her i was an atheist, and she seemed very much like she was trying to complete an assignment for some kind of communications class by talking to people.  i'll have to do similar things for my own degree.  i hope she got a good paper out of it.  i think all i got was sick.  not from her.  like i said, she was pleasant enough as her goal was most likely not to convert me but to generate academic content for herself.  but just having all that in my direct consciousness for that length of time affected my perceptions of *other* things.  this made functioning difficult.

i ended friday not even knowing if i was going to be able to pick up where i left off on monday, and i sent short emails very politely warning pertinent people that if i wasn't going to be able to stop myself by monday, i just wasn't going to show up.  i think i'm okay now, and since the panache will buy me a *whole* lot of leadership points with some key people, i'm going for business as usual.

Boobs? On the Internet?! (9-2-14)

yeah, about those "nude selfies" of some actresses that were stolen from the apple cloud (an iPhone thing, i gather)... your banking and credit card information is stored on the same servers for the same reason and enjoying the same "security" as those pictures.  just sayin'.

but why *is* apple keeping independent copies of user data?  *any* data, not just pictures.  it'd be nice if one of those naked actress ladies decided to sue apple to get an answer to that question.  seems like one of those people would be the kind of someone who might even have a contractual obligation to legally inquire as to apple's retention of her image without remunerated consent which she could invoke, were she so inclined.

i'd kind of *like* to see hippy computers corporate legal go up against a "motivated" entertainment lawyer or two in a federal court.  i don't think anyone working for apple is near evil enough to take on hollywood esq. and walk away with their terms of service intact.  those guys eat blanket contracts for breakfast.