Slave-Morality, Bad Faith & Microfascism
January 17, 2012
GOP Crowd Boos The Golden Rule
July 28, 2011
Jon Stewart Rips Fox News Religious Hypocrisy
June 05, 2011
"Little Winstons" Trying to Edit Wikipedia Paul Revere Page
You've probably heard about Sarah Palin's family vacation. She's riding around the country learning about American History. Some of news coverage of the tour indicates she definately needs an educational vacation this summer. She either doesn't quite understand what Paul Revere actually did or cannot communicate her understanding clearly. In typical Palin fashion, she is refusing to admit any fault in either her understanding of US History or of her ability to communiate it clearly, she doubled-down on it. The "great communicator" she is not. Some of her supporters have taken things a little further. From Little Green Footballs:
Man, you’ve gotta almost admire the sheer blind dedication of Sarah Palin’s wingnut acolytes.
Now they’re trying like crazy to edit the Wikipedia page for “Paul Revere” to make it match Palin’s botched version of history. Here’s the Revision history of Paul Revere; check out the edits that are being reversed.
Also see the discussion page for an entertaining exchange between Wikipedia editors and a would-be revisionist.
In George Orwell's 1984 - which, I think, is a much better referrence our current economic predicament than Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged - the main character, Winston, works in The Ministry of Truth. His job is to go back and revise the content past documents that make up "the official record" so that it suits the political leadership's current political purposes. But, in order for the machine to work, enough people have to be willing to do this kind of work. Totalitarian regimes require a measure of popular support in order to carry out their plans. It looks like some Palin supporters are willing to do this kind of work. They're Palin's "little Winstons." Thankfully, Wikipedia is not the official record.
Jun 5, 2011 7:55:32 PM
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April 19, 2011
Straight Camp?
Malaysia is sending their effeminate boys to masculinity/straight camp.
Sixty-six Muslim schoolboys in Malaysia identified by teachers as effeminate have been sent to a special camp for counselling on masculine behaviour.
They are undergoing four days of religious and physical education.
An education official said the camp was meant to guide the boys back "to a proper path in life".
Gay rights groups have criticised the measure, saying it promotes homophobia in the Muslim-majority country where gay sex is still illegal.
The schoolboys allegedly displayed "feminine mannerisms" - though educators in the conservative state of Terengganu did not detail what they were, says the BBC's Jennifer Pak in Kuala Lumpur.
State officials say that, if left unchecked, the students - aged between 13 and 17 - could end up gay or transsexual.
The state's education director, Razali Daud, said the students were invited to join the camp and were not compelled to do so.
Yeah, I bet there was no pressure put on them at all.
February 22, 2011
Is Abortion Just a Women's Issue?
Here's an interesting article about why men should speak up on the abortion issue.
But mostly, I don't understand how these issues are still simply referred to as "women's issues." The destinies of men and women are intertwined by sex, and pregnancy, and childbirth. It is time for more men to sack up and start taking responsibility for their end of the conversation.
These "women's issues" have shaped my life: my birth, my adulthood and the children for which I am forever grateful. So yes, I support women's health programs and a woman's right to choose.
via www.salon.com
I see no good reason to think that being male excludes you from having a position on a bioethical issue, but it seems to upset some people. That seems like inversion, rather than subversion.
January 21, 2011
Pull The Plank From Your Own Eye First
The Vatican is disappointed in Berlusconi's behavior.
VATICAN CITY — Premier Silvio Berlusconi came under mounting criticism Friday from the Catholic Church over his dalliances with young women, with the pope saying public officials must set good moral examples and Italian bishops planning to discuss the sex scandal.
Pope Benedict XVI didn't mention the scandal or Berlusconi by name. But during an audience with Rome's police chief and police officers, he said public officials must "rediscover their spiritual and moral roots."
"The singular vocation that the city of Rome requires today of you, who are public officials, is to offer a good example of the positive and useful interaction between a healthy lay status and the Christian faith," Benedict said, echoing more direct comments about the scandal a day earlier by his No. 2.
In other news, the Church directed Irish Bishops not to tell the civil authorities about child-molesting priests. So, we've got priests molesting little children and other priests covering it up.
"Institutions are characteristically and necessarily concerned with what I have called external goods. They are involved in acquiring money and other material goods; they are structured in terms of power and status, and they distribute money, power, and status as rewards. . . . In this context the essential function of the virtues is clear. Without them . . . practices could not resist the corrupting power of institutions" (Alasdair MacIntyre - After Virtue, pg. 194).
It seems quite clear that a number of Catholic priests have failed to cultivate the virtues required to resist the corrupting power of institutions.
January 19, 2011
Jon Stewart on Sarah Palin's Persecution-Complex
July 03, 2010
Glenn Beck's Radical Preachers
June 21, 2010
More on the Philosophy of Lady Gaga
Not too long ago I wrote a post about whether Lady Gaga is an example of sexual liberation or the epitome of capitalist consumerism, which I take to be a prominent form of self-subjugation. Today, over at the NYT's philosophy blog, Nancy Bauer writes the following about Lady Gaga:
The tension in Gaga’s self-presentation, far from being idiosyncratic or self-contradictory, epitomizes the situation of a certain class of comfortably affluent young women today. There’s a reason they love Gaga. On the one hand, they have been raised to understand themselves according to the old American dream, one that used to be beyond women’s grasp: the world is basically your oyster, and if you just believe in yourself, stay faithful to who you are, and work hard and cannily enough, you’ll get the pearl. On the other hand, there is more pressure on them than ever to care about being sexually attractive according to the reigning norms. The genius of Gaga is to make it seem obvious — more so than even Madonna once did — that feminine sexuality is the perfect shucking knife. And Gaga is explicit in her insistence that, since feminine sexuality is a social construct, anyone, even a man who’s willing to buck gender norms, can wield it.
Gaga wants us to understand her self-presentation as a kind of deconstruction of femininity, not to mention celebrity. As she told Ann Powers, “Me embodying the position that I’m analyzing is the very thing that makes it so powerful.” Of course, the more successful the embodiment, the less obvious the analytic part is. And since Gaga herself literally embodies the norms that she claims to be putting pressure on (she’s pretty, she’s thin, she’s well-proportioned), the message, even when it comes through, is not exactly stable. It’s easy to construe Gaga as suggesting that frank self-objectification is a form of real power.
The rest of the post goes on to discuss the legacy of feminism with a generation of Gaga-aware young women. She concludes that it's not so easy to tell the difference between practices of freedom and self-expression and practices of self-objectification or self-instrumentalization.
June 12, 2010
Katy Perry on Lady Gaga
Apparently, Katy Perry doesn't think much of Lady Gaga's new video.
You've got the No. 1 song in the country with "California Gurls," the undisputed, inescapable summer anthem. You rocked the MTV Movie Awards in a blue wig and the world's greatest cleavage. (By the way, thank you.) Your fiancé is starring in a hit movie. You're on the top of the world, Katy Perry. In fact, there's probably only one other star in the galaxy whose current illumination matches your own.
Ruh roh.
And so it came to pass that in the same week she utterly dominated pop culture, the 25-year-old hottest woman in the world took what sure looked like a swipe at the competition, tweeting that "using blasphemy as entertainment is as cheap as a comedian telling a fart joke."
[. . .]
Perry, who started her career as a Christian singer before turning poster girl for the bi-curious with her hit "I Kissed a Girl," is the daughter of two Christian ministers. And though she seems to have left her devout upbringing behind, it would appear she still doesn’t take messing around with the Lord's iconography lightly.
Call me crazy, but I don't think Katy Perry has much room to talk here. In her video for "California Girls" her tits shoot foam. Is marketing yourself as bi-curious and using sex to sell music as cheap as fart joke or cheaper than a fart joke?
Ruh roh.
And so it came to pass that in the same week she utterly dominated pop culture, the 25-year-old hottest woman in the world took what sure looked like a swipe at the competition, tweeting that "using blasphemy as entertainment is as cheap as a comedian telling a fart joke."
[. . .]
Perry, who started her career as a Christian singer before turning poster girl for the bi-curious with her hit "I Kissed a Girl," is the daughter of two Christian ministers. And though she seems to have left her devout upbringing behind, it would appear she still doesn’t take messing around with the Lord's iconography lightly.
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