letting go

am i the only one burning out on the steady stream of news reports about some enclave of religious fundamentalists rotorootering their baby girls' reproductive organs out or giving their infant sons venereal diseases through oral copulation or murdering all their breeding age women just because some men are heterosexual?

it's not that i want to see these things happening, it's that there's nothing i can do about it.  in fact, there really isn't anything i should do about it.  these people are living their lives the way they choose.  it's no more my place or business to try and change them or tell them they're wrong than it is their place or business to tell me.

if we have reached a point in human history where that sort of adherence to fear and shame in the name of religion has become incompatible with the survival of whatever part of the species it afflicts... if religion is what causes a group of people to stop engaging in reproduction, whether through social pressure or physical violation, then that's just evolution.  the environment has changed.  if they are unable to adapt they're going to go extinct, and we're not going to have much choice but to let them.

i'm not forcing religious people to do these things to one another, and i'm having a very hard time not applying what i understand about the nature of reality to this just like i do to everything else.  i don't feel good about it, but there comes a point where my inability to do anything but feel bad begins to interfere with my ability to be a productive member of my own society.

if religious people could understand the kind of toxic despair they're causing in the world, we wouldn't have to have this conversation anymore.  until then, i just don't think i can afford to care about what they do to themselves and each other.  i have a life to live, too.

little things matter

i just realized that i've owned the same watch for three years. i've never owned any small personal item for that long ever before in my adult life.

i just wish i wasn't so sure that the only reason i still have my watch... and my coffee maker, and my violin, and my computer, and my books, and my coffee mug... is because i don't have someone in my life taking those things away from me constantly. there hasn't been someone in my life to "accidentally" break my watch or lose my watch or throw my watch away or give my watch to one of his other girlfriends... and so i still have my watch.

i'm going to guess it's just me, but men do this weird thing with me where they won't let me keep anything of my own. i don't know if it's on purpose or if it's just that men don't realize that i have personal belongings and just see everything in my environment as either theirs or garbage. for whatever reason it happens, i don't like it. i dated one guy who couldn't even let there be a flat surface near me. if i cleared things off a table where i was sitting, he would actually go out to the store and buy something to fill that space with. it would sit there until i cleared the space again, and he would do it again. he was only ever moved to interact with anything in our home whenever he saw that i was treating the apartment where i paid the rent like i actually lived there and wasn't just some unwanted guest he was patiently suffering.

when i pointed out to him what he was doing, he acted like i hadn't even said anything, and not like, "i'm ignoring this on purpose". more like, "i don't recognize the sounds you're making as you attempting to communicate with me." it was like i was suddenly talking to a goldfish. it reminded me of the fable you hear about the native americans not being able to see the first european boats on the horizon because they had no inkling of what they could possibly be.

but this is true for every small personal item i ever owned. i'm just plain afraid to buy things like hairdryers and curling irons ever again.  i haven't been able to own those types of things for more than a few weeks before something "happens". and don't even get me started about my glasses. what is so difficult about "leave my glasses alone. i need them to see"? is it just something about men that makes them not realize that waiting until i'm asleep and then moving my glasses without telling me is actually cruel? and these are people who told me they loved me... who expected me to allow them into my body.  

as long as i'm not getting any kind of sign that men even recognize me as a human being, i'm not really interested in having one around me on a regular basis. that would just be stupid on my part. hey, maybe men are nicer to other women, and maybe it is just me, but that doesn't mean i have to buy a new watch every other month.

i can do bad just fine by myself.

"follow me, and i will make you fishers of men"

The US Air Force will no longer prohibit security personnel at Robbins Air Force Base from wishing people a "blessed day".

okay, my reading of the book goes like this:

(Matt 5,6&7)  My dad left you guys in charge of making sure all the blessings get sent out to all the people because he says that everyone who hears about him gets the Good Stuff now.

that's how i read all that "salt and flavor", "don't hide your light under a basket", "shining city on the hill" stuff.  it means that a christian's job is to do god's good regardless.  if there exists a dog's backside, if you're a christian, you were told to be the sun that shines upon it.

as an atheist, i understand common, conversational, religiously-themed greetings from christians as an interpretation of jesus christ's mission on earth, thus rendering my opinion about it legally irrelevant in the united states of america.  simply disagreeing with what someone says is not sufficient cause to strip them of their right to free expression.

i said, "disagreeing with someone is not sufficient cause to strip them of their rights."

... i really feel like repeating that until i think everyone understands all the implications of this "not a sufficient cause to strip people of their rights" thing.

tl;dr: media bias is bad, m'kay?

so i'm reading a piece in the new york times about the outcome of the ferguson investigation.  of course they found racism in the police.  duh.

but that wasn't what caught my attention about the article. the teal deer here is going to be that bias in news reporting is bad, but if you're interested...

this new york times piece here, called Justice Department Report to Fault Ferguson Police, Seeing Racial Bias in Traffic Stops, contains a lot of implicit bias in favor of the brown side of things. personally, i agree with the reporter who wrote this article.  anybody who knows anything about me knows that i just about hate the police and have to try very hard to keep my discussion about them civil and productive (see my previous post here for one recent helpful suggestion for law enforcement vis a vis the use of force).

the problem is that i shouldn't agree with the writer of this article.  or rather, i shouldn't know that i agree with the writer of this article.  what the writer believes about this article should not be present, because the person who wrote this article was writing as a news reporter at the time.  his beliefs about the situation aren't fit to print, regardless of how many people agree with him.

so shame on the new york times, then.  all and then some, eh?**

but it makes me think about the larger charge of "agenda journalism".  a lot of people talk about bias in the media, and the charge is true.  reporters are guilty of this all the time.  if human consciousness itself is a rube goldberg machine built out of biases, it stands to reason then that our more ephemeral endeavors necessarily stand on these biases alone.  the philosophies of justice and politics are just that... philosophies.  the only hope any of it has of becoming history is through meticulous record keeping.

when the social bias of a reporter or publication becomes evident on a particular issue, that publication or reporter does damage to the institution of journalism in a way that cannot be undone.  the fact that history is written by the "winners" doesn't help the fact that that has changed our history.  time does damage enough to how we'll tell each other it was. biased news reporting in the here and now... voids that perspective on the event almost entirely.

putting your opinion in the reporting doesn't make your opinion news.  it makes your reporting less valuable to history.  when you are reporting the news, you aren't writing for your posterity.  you are being given the privilege of witnessing history on behalf of your kind.  show some respect for their intelligence.

they're going to make their own decisions anyway.

** "All the News That's Fit to Print" is the longtime slogan of the new york times.

dichotomy interrupted

oh your god, people.  is this really that difficult?

dipshit killed those three kids for parking in his spot, and the thing that anti-theism did was give him a context to dehumanize them far enough for the fucking coward to carry it out.

actually, that's only why he killed the first one.  he killed the other two because he was compelled by his own completionism... because he is a weakling.  once the first one was dead, his brain needed to complete the scenario that he'd (obviously) played out repeatedly in fantasy.

a fantasy he'd constructed out of the trappings of anti-theism.  not because they were muslim, but because they kept parking in his spot.  if it wasn't religion, it would have been some other damn thing. if those three kids had been white girls, we'd be talking about how he's an anti-feminist and gawking at the links to "a voice for men" and girl writes what videos on his facebook page. if they'd been three white dudes, we'd all be putting ourselves through talking about elliott roger again.  it didn't start with the kids being muslims.  it started years ago when the village idiot decided to go captain dickhead on his neighbors.  the fact that the ones he ended up shooting were muslims is a result of hicks having a context from which to dehumanize them.

do i blame anti-theism?  no.  but i would suggest (... politely) that anti-theists take stock of what about the collective balance of their output might be getting assembled in such a way that it provides scaffolding for this magnitude of sociopathy.  i make this suggestion the same way i make the suggestion to the catholic church that letting priests be married men might cut down on the kiddyfiddlers and muslims might want to ask that their imams not make people angry on purpose.  just saying.  being anti-stuff doesn't have a good track record, organizationally speaking.  the problem with being anti-stuff is that line between "anti-anything" and "anti-everything" is too thin for the human eye to notice when it's crossed... at least, not in time to make any damn difference.

you know who i personally blame?  whoever gave him the gun.  i have a reason to be acquainted with the type of personality that goes into a "blind rage" when they're angry.  if a gun had been present in my psych 101 class at Hard Knocks U, the vector for that sudden realization you just had about my personal history would not be me.  whoever put that gun into craig hicks' hands needs to be knuckleslapped.

and, postscript, there isn't going to be any resolution for any of us on this, just so you know.  if i'm prognosticating, i'm going to guess there won't even be a trial.  that chickenshit will take whatever deal he's offered to keep his ass out of federal prison.  they'll bust the charge down from murder to whatever they're allowed to keep him in regional for (probably manslaughter) and he'll plead guilty to that.  the judge will sentence him to 99 consecutive life sentences and he'll spend the rest of his life in Podunk County Prison getting federally funded college degrees and visits from his mom every sunday.  the best we can hope for is that he accidentally invents something useful on the company dime before he croaks.

the *real* "domestic violence awareness" day

(sorts through bag looking for the little chalk heart that says "is it over yet?")

yes, national "make anyone who doesn't feel compelled to permanently embed an expensive boat anchor into themselves feel like there's something wrong with them" day 2015 has commenced. let me assure you that all this means to me, functionally, is i have a higher than average possibility of witnessing the domestic violence related death of one or more of my neighbors today.

the women will wake up expecting the men to be solicitous and kind, and the men will wake up expecting the women to be unconscious and lubricated... someone's gonna be wearing a bruise by noon.

we don't need a "valentine's day".  we need a "try not to hit the person you're living with for twenty four hours" day... which i also won't be participating in, because the odds that i'll ever live with anyone again are slim and none, and slim's got no clue he's invited. besides, i kind of like living in a world where none of the things i keep in my home get "accidentally" broken (or sold) every time i go out somewhere.

along those lines, there's a guy out there who has no idea that the reason he's alone this valentine's day is because he assumed he was more welcome in my apartment than my violin.  live and learn, i guess.  at least i know what to say to the next guy who watches me fix a spot on the couch for him, then points to the broken chair my violin is on and grunts, "are you going to let me sit down?" (hint: it's going to rhyme with "shmet the shmuck out of my shmapartment.")

on the other hand, there was the guy who told me "i like everything about you except your personality."  ...  'k.  and he said this with a straight face and the expectation that those words would make me genuinely consider changing my personality in order to give him an opportunity to masturbate into me.  it makes me wonder, because nobody says anything that stupid unless it worked at some point.  i can't imagine what that woman's life must be like.

y'know, maybe it's not valentine's day that's bullshit.

i've been watching some minor fb "drammer" go down, and it reminds me of my hypothesis...

*hypothesis*

hypothesis that young men who appear to be initiating anonymous sexual interactions with women online are actually interacting sexually with whatever other young men are present with them at their end of the interaction, and that group of young men is using the woman as a proxy for their sexual interaction because it keeps them from having to work out how gay they are (because everyone's at least kinda gay - we're systems, not programs.  there are no absolutes).

because you'll notice that heterosexual women don't have the same problem interacting in a superficially sexual way with one another. we braid each other's hair and rate each other's tits and do each other's makeup. there's no need for us to use a male in order to impress a reminder of our heterosexuality into the experience for ourselves because we aren't made to feel bad about ourselves for engaging in first-order sexuality (grooming behaviors) with one another.

i think the closest a young heterosexual man is allowed by "society" to get to having that kind of intimacy with other heterosexual men (where nobody feels compelled to advertise their raging case of notgays) is in the context of physical exertion and competition.  playing sports and working out is the closest men come to grooming with other men without feeling compelled to invoke a female presence to justify their normal, healthy sexual responses to one another.  i mean, have you noticed that auto shops, military barracks, male college dorms... these places are all plastered in images of sexualized women.  look around a locker room next time you're watching a post-game interview.   see any pictures of hoochie-coochie girls there?  hell to the no.  not in a one i've seen.  the locker room is the Man Zone, baby.

that's where real men give each other hamstring massages and carefully wrap one another's most delicate joints to keep them safe. it's the only place we allow men to realize that they're all on the same side, and that loving one another is loving themselves.  men who experience satisfying first order sexuality with other men just don't feel compelled to turn women into a tertiary context for that. team sports affords them all the same-sex interaction they need to feel sexually whole... which, for straight guys, just isn't all that much.  i think we see that an occasional pat on the ass during timeouts tends to suffice.

and what's at fault?  patriarchy.  yes, our good friend patriarchy. this is men telling other men that there's something wrong with them for having any sort of attachment to or need for psychosexual interaction with other men, even though that's normal and healthy. this is men telling other men that they're only "men" if the only people they ever make physical contact with are female.  this is men denying other men the full extent of human experience.  now, nobody's suggesting you go peg a dude for equality or anything if that's not what you're into, but the next time you and your friends are giggling over having made some random woman vaguely uncomfortable by talking to her chest, stop and think about who you're really having sexytimes with right there.

hint: it's not the woman... and that's not her fault.