John Bolton recently got on the Daily show to support his argument that Israel should attack Iran. He now works for the American Enterprise Institute, aka Crazy Right-Wing Fucknuts, and wrote this article in support of his view.
I can't even believe he got up and said this. Regime change??? Aren't we over that crap? Iran hates us today because of or previous attempts at regime change. And I'm sure ass-faces like him were arguing the same things he's arguing now back then. He's wrong. Totally wrong.
Every time the US starts fucking around with politics of another country, it leads to bad things. EVERY TIME. The last time it worked was friggin' Teddy Roosevelt and Panama. And that's because Teddy didn't couch his arguments in obfuscation and euphemism. He said American has a right to take what it wants, and he fucking did it.
Something tells me that politics like that wouldn't work today. What's that called, unilateral action, or something like that. Yes, something tells me that that would not work. I don't know what.
All you need to do to realize how wrong he is, is read this article from Smithsonian magazine.
Bolton is from the right, which means he likes to use the argument that liberals are pie-in-the-sky dreamers, who live in their academic towers far from reality. Any man who's running around arguing about the US invading other countries, instigating fights among other countries, and otherwise being a war-monger doesn't have a fucking clue. Not one clue.
He says that once Iran has nuclear weapons, everything changes. Why?! Why does everything change? Why does he assume everyone is an enemy? Iran can never use the weapons. So how does it change how we treat Iran in even the slightest?
He's not fighting. He doesn't understand these people. He doesn't know what Iran is. Hell, he barely has a grasp of basic psychology that any first-year college student would know. He doesn't know life outside of supermarkets and air conditioned cars. I'm not saying I do. I've lived a posh life just like most other Americans.
Getting self-righteous and talking like you know better than other people, and then sitting safe, fat, and happy as other people do your dirty work makes you worse than scum.
I have written about how I see sexism as far more prevalent and damaging than racism. That is NOT to say that racism doesn't exist, I just think a lot of it stems from pop-black culture and a glorification of the thug/gang mentality. Truly, blacks would stop being looked at as criminals, if they stopped acting like them. Still, it's so disheartening to hear things like this.
By JESSE WASHINGTON, AP National Writer Jesse Washington, Ap National Writer – 42 mins ago
It took less than a day for the arrest of Henry Louis Gates to become racial lore. When one of America's most prominent black intellectuals winds up in handcuffs, it's not just another episode of profiling — it's a signpost on the nation's bumpy road to equality.
The news was parsed and Tweeted, rued and debated. This was, after all Henry "Skip" Gates: Summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale. MacArthur "genius grant" recipient. Acclaimed historian, Harvard professor and PBS documentarian. One of Time magazine's "25 Most Influential Americans" in 1997. Holder of 50 honorary degrees.
If this man can be taken away by police officers from the porch of his own home, what does it say about the treatment that average blacks can expect in 2009?
Earl Graves Jr., CEO of the company that publishes Black Enterprise magazine, was once stopped by police during his train commute to work, dressed in a suit and tie.
"My case took place back in 1995, and here we are 14 years later dealing with the same madness," he said Tuesday. "Barack Obama being the president has meant absolutely nothing to white law enforcement officers. Zero. So I have zero confidence that (Gates' case) will lead to any change whatsoever."
The 58-year-old professor had returned from a trip to China last Thursday afternoon and found the front door of his Cambridge, Mass., home stuck shut. Gates entered the back door, forced open the front door with help from a car service driver, and was on the phone with the Harvard leasing company when a white police sergeant arrived.
Gates and the sergeant gave differing accounts of what happened next. But for many people, that doesn't matter.
They don't care that Gates was charged not with breaking and entering, but with disorderly conduct after repeatedly demanding the sergeant's name and badge number. It doesn't matter whether Gates was yelling, or accused Sgt. James Crowley of being racist, or that all charges were dropped Tuesday.
All they see is pure, naked racial profiling.
"Under any account ... all of it is totally uncalled for," said Graves.
"It never would have happened — imagine a white professor, a distinguished white professor at Harvard, walking around with a cane, going into his own house, being harassed or stopped by the police. It would never happen."
Racial profiling became a national issue in the 1990s, when highway police on major drug delivery routes were accused of stopping drivers simply for being black. Lawsuits were filed, studies were commissioned, data was analyzed. "It is wrong, and we will end it in America," President George W. Bush said in 2001.
Yet for every study that concluded police disproportionately stop, search and arrest minorities, another expert came to a different conclusion. "That's always going to be the case," Greg Ridgeway, who has a Ph.D in statistics and studies racial profiling for the RAND research group, said on Monday. "You're never going to be able to (statistically) prove racial profiling. ... There's always a plausible explanation."
Federal legislation to ban racial profiling has languished since being introduced in 2007 by a dozen Democratic senators, including then-Sen. Barack Obama.
U.S. Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., said that was partly because "when you look at statistics, and you're trying to prove the extent, the information comes back that there's not nearly as much (profiling) as we continue to experience."
But Davis has no doubt that profiling is real: He says he was stopped while driving in Chicago in 2007 for no reason other than the fact he is black. Police gave him a ticket for swerving over the center line; a judge said the ticket didn't make sense and dismissed it.
"Trying to reach this balance of equity, equal treatment, equal protection under the law, equal understanding, equal opportunity, is something that we will always be confronted with. We may as well be prepared for it," he said.
Amid the indignation over Gates' case, a few people pointed out that he may have violated the cardinal rule of avoiding arrest: Do not antagonize the cops.
The police report said that Gates yelled at the officer, refused to calm down and behaved in a "tumultuous" manner. Gates said he simply asked for the officer's identification, followed him into his porch when the information was not forthcoming, and was arrested for no reason. But something about being asked to prove that you live in your own home clearly struck a nerve — both for Gates and his defenders.
"You feel violated, embarrassed, not sure what is taking place, especially when you haven't done anything," said Graves of his own experience, when police made him face the wall and frisked him in Grand Central Station in New York City. "You feel shocked, then you realize what's happening, and then you feel it's a violation of everything you stand for."
And that this should happen to "Skip" Gates — the unblemished embodiment of President Obama's recent admonition to black America not to search for handouts or favors, but to "seize our own future, each and every day" — shook many people to the core.
Wrote Lawrence Bobo, Gates' Harvard colleague, who picked his friend up from jail: "Ain't nothing post-racial about the United States of America."
Let's see, average IQ of a cop: almost undoubtedly under 100. IQ of a distinguished Harvard historian: 150-plus. Who's likely lying to cover up bad behavior? Oh you better fucking believe it's the cop.
Still, as with the segregated Mardi Gras celebration in Mobile, Alabama, the behavior of cops does not a nation make. Racism, sexism, violence, and overall bad behavior is rampant among all cops, in every area on this planet. Racism is only one small part of the problem with the police. To pick this out and say that we still live in a distinctly racist society is stupid.
Ok, I like Twitter well enough, but man is it chaotic right now. Spam, trolls, slower-than-molassas website. It's a winner! My current amartincolby Twitter will now be exclusively to this site. Cartoon Vixens and Watery Gourmet all get their own, as well.
I think about AI a lot. Read about. Write about. Masturbate to it (sexbots... Mmmm yeah). I still think that building AI is going to be impossible.
I look at it like a tree. Yes, we understand the basic model of a tree. We know where parts go in relation to one another, how the systems work, etc. But still, we can't build a tree from the top down. We can't engineer branches here, and leaves there. Because even though all trees are pretty similar, they are also wholly unique. Defined by the manifold variables to which they are exposed as they grow.
Instead, we start with a seed and let it grow. We know the primary, fundamental variable required to grow a tree, the seed, but we cannot construct a tree artificially. I think the various learning robots being created, where they respond to and learn from their environments, are the first steps in the creation of non-biological intelligence.
I use that term because I don't consider them artificial at that point. They've grown of their own action. Yes, we created the stuff at the beginnning, but that's like calling a GE ear of corn artificial corn. It just doesn't make sense. It's non-biological, but it has grown naturally, in the same way our own intelligence grew.
I somehow missed this memo, but apparently Evolutionary Psychology went from being generally accepted to facing substantial amounts of mainstream resistance. I just always assumed there was widespread criticism to it, um, always. All you have to do is go to Amazon.com and read the user reviews of any book dealing with Evo-Psych to see that there are bundles of people who consider it nonsense.
Evo-psych is a difficult case. It can make, and has made, testable hypotheses, but it also goes wildly into outright speculation very frequently.
We are creatures of evolution, and come born with certain coding and behavior. This coding must have come from evolutionary developments. So it makes sense that any behaviors we perform are rooted, in some way at least, to what helped us survive in the wild.
I think evo-psych falls off the rails most spectacularly when it progressively minimizes the roll of higher thought and culture to mold and outright alter mental workings. For example, thin people are attractive today. One hundred years ago, it was the opposite. Chubby people were attractive. Thin in America, birthin' thighs in many areas of South America. We are looking at two states at the extremes of a spectrum, yet they all are rooted in reproduction in some way.
Trying to distill humans down to purely animalistic behavior is doomed to failure. We can't test it, and importantly, ignoring the effects of a complex society, regardless of culture, means that the number of confounding variables is effectively infinite. We can never be sure of evo-psych arguments about our behavior.
Still, evo-psych does make a lot of sense. Many of the broader arguments about things like reproductive viability, the grosser aspects of our behavior, and importantly, unconscious reactions to stimuli work well in broader behavioral theory.
I also feel that the fear that evo-psych gives people an excuse for bad behavior is unfounded. It may work in a moralistic system of judgment, but we don't have that. We have a (supposedly) logic-based system of justice. So if a man rapes a woman, it doesn't matter if evolution made him do it. He's dangerous and MUST BE locked up. Our culture and its rules don't somehow transcend evolution, they stem from it. Thus what evolution begets is immaterial to how we treat the criminals in our species. Evo-psych is in no way a "Get Out of Jail Free" card.
I've just started a Twitter account to Tweet my daily musings. I'll also use it to discuss my Cartoon Vixens blog. My Watery Gourmet blog will receive its own Twitter account that I think I'll make open.
I'm going to post one of my more "out there" ideas.
First, some points. There's a growing feeling in the world of science that the world is the way the world is because we are built to perceive it that way.
Many people know that colors don't actually exist, only light waves of particular frequencies. Our eyes detect those light waves which are then translated into the abstract experience of "color."
Old philosophers had a terribly hard time explaining these subjective experiences and would frequently refer to them as secondary, or subservient qualities. Primary qualities were those that could be measured across observers, such as height, weight, and perhaps speed. These were supposedly objective.
I'm beginning to think that existence itself is not objective. Everything right down to our very perceptions is an objective experience that tells us little about the actual workings of the universe.
Kant argued that meta-physicists try to reach beyond what humans can know, which results in chaos in inquiry. Perhaps the reason why current physics can't explain some things is because the nature of reality is imperceptible.
Physicists have a tendency to say that what we see is not truth, but mathematics is. What are mathematics but discreet measurements. What is one? What is five? You can spend your time in theoretical math, but it must eventually leave that and become part of the "real" world. It must be testable. And where did the very first numbers come from? I argue they came from having one, or two, or three apples. Numbers were born of perceptions and are forever tied to those roots.
Psychology has a primary tenet, that our perceptions are fundamentally disconnected from reality by multiple steps.
I think time is disconnected from our perception by multiple steps. What is time? It is things moving forward. I argue that there is no time, only position. Discreet, unmoving position. Position becomes time when two things interact. Then, two more things perhaps farther apart interact. This could be two theoretical particles in a detector, or the light hitting our eyes. Time appears to move forward because our very perceptual construction is based on impact.
In reality, the only position we are aware of is that collision. Namely, the collision of an event with our senses. Be it light, smell, taste, or touch. The combined multitude of these collisions gives us the illusion of things moving, much like a movie is not movement, it is multiple discreet moments combining to give the impression of movement through time.
I just discovered a new blog. It's called Jezebel and I have no idea how I didn't know about it before. It's run by Gawker media, the same company that runs Gizmodo, Jalopnik, io9, Lifehacker, and seemingly every other blog I read, so I don't know where I was.
It's a fantastic example of what I see as true feminism. Doing whatever the fuck you want and feeling good about it. Girl power. They're not my ideal feminist state, which requires non-self-awareness. If you are aware of your state of being liberated, then you aren't perfectly liberated, since your thoughts and perceptions are colored by an antagonistic environment. My ideal is a woman who does whatever she wants, loves it, and doesn't realize that it's special.
SEED Magazine has an interview with a number of experts in the electricity generation and environmental field to discuss the choice between coal and nuclear.
I agree most with Gwyneth Cravens, a full-on supporter of nuclear power. I consider the pollution generated by nuclear to be easily manageable, and fears about meltdowns and radioactive waste are so comically overblown as to be meaningless.
I wish she had at least mentioned an overhaul of the current coal industry, though. We have hundreds of coal-fired plants in the US, and stimulating advances in clean-coal technology, through tax breaks and direct government investment would pay huge dividends in pollution reduction. It's something that can be done now. Hopefully, we'll move away entirely from coal in the future, but we aren't now, and we must do something to make it more palatable to a green-conscious world.
K.J. Reddy comes up next, and he discusses clean coal, so I guess his advice combined with Ms. Cravens' is the best course of action. He makes the opposite mistake by not mentioning nuclear at all.
Edwin Lyman is one of those fear-mongering over-reactors I hate. He even manages to squeeze in some hating of "The Man" near the end of his section, where he accuses the evil government and special interests of hiding the "true" costs of coal and nuclear. And I'm disgusted that he pulled out the terrorist attack line. I thought that was restricted to Bush supporters. Unless he is a Bush supporter. And if he is, whoa. Just, whoa.
Benjamin Sovacool is one of the pie-in-the-sky dreamers, who I would argue has both feet squarely in fantasy. He calls both nuclear and coal "Faustian Bargains."
"Energy efficiency—getting more out of each unit of energy—means insulating our homes, retrofitting our businesses, changing light bulbs, purchasing more efficient appliances, streamlining industrial manufacturing processes, and driving cars with better fuel economy to get more bang out of each kilowatt-hour (kWh) or gallon of gasoline. Over the last 40 years, these efforts have saved more energy than any single source of existing electricity supply in the United States."
So his argument is to... retrofit the entire country from the ground up. Yes, that would be ideal. But all of this is only ideal if we assume that both nuclear and coal are not just equally bad, but just bad. I argue that nuclear isn't even bad.
...renewable power technologies as they exist in the market today could quite easily meet three times the country’s 2007 electricity needs. Last year in the United States, for example, wind turbines and landfill gas generators produced electricity far cheaper than the newest coal and natural gas plants. Hydroelectric dams, solar thermal plants, and geothermal facilities provided billions of kilowatt-hours of baseload electricity. Scientific studies have confirmed that the country has so far tapped an infinitesimally small portion of this resource base.
First off, I think he and his fantasy crew are the only people who think we could "easily" meet our power needs with renewables. I'll use the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant in Japan as an example. It produces 8.2G gigawatts of power. Using GE's largest wind turbine as a counter example, it
produces 3.6 megawatts per turbine
Each turbine requires 1 acre of land to operate, with five to ten turbine diameters separating each turbine.
The GE 3.6Gw turbine would thus require one-half to one kilometer between each turbine.
Placed on a grid, you could fit four turbines on one square kilometer, with one on each corner.
To match the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant, we would need 2,278 turbines.
This would require a grid placement of 47km x 47km, or, 2209km^2. Over half the size of Rhode Island.
But wait! The diagonal in the grid isn't 1km, it's 1.414.
So we shift the rows alternating left and right and move them down, which reduces the separation between rows to .866km. So instead of 47x47, we have 41x47, or 1,927km/sq, which is still nearly half the size of Rhode Island.
This all assumes 100% efficiency of the turbines at all times.
The US consumed 3.35 terawatts of power in 2004. Assuming an increase in consumption from then, we can round the 930,555 turbines required in 2004 to an even million.
This results in an area of around 866,000 square kilometers. Or round-abouts twice the size of California.
Wind turbines operate at about 30% efficiency.
This means we would need three times the number of generators, or six times the area of California.
If we dedicate OVER ONE-QUARTER of the US to wind generation, we can power the US today. Mr. Sovacool is beyond wrong. The only renewable power capable of reaching the levels we need are hydroelectric dams, such as the Grand Coulee or Three Gorges Dam, the latter of which produces an eye-popping 22.5Gw.
Still, dam's are limited to where there's flowing water, and the dams themselves result in massive amounts of environmental damage. There are positives, certainly, but the good/bad combo could be said of nuclear and coal as well.
I argue that not only does nuclear have the fewest downsides, I see NO downsides to nuclear. We produce such a small amount of waste from fission, that if need be we could simply fire it into space. We will run out of uranium long before we run out of places to store the spent fuel. It produces almost no CO2. It's compact. It can be placed anywhere. It runs 24/7. It's expensive, surely, but we get what we pay for.
Hopefully we will reach his powertopia some time in the future, but we're certainly not there now, and we have to change what we have. Altering our entire infrastructure is not a solution. It's the end-goal of many different solutions. Simply talking about how great it will be adds nothing to the discussion. Shut up.
I've noticed that I've been writing about sex a lot. I guess living in a time when one of two major political parties has taken it upon itself to be the party of moral righteousness, sex just comes up.
I just finished reading an article in Scientific American that says in a slightly less confrontational way than me, that pedophilia is not only not an illness, but an evolutionary advantage. And not only that, but pedophilia isn't even easily defined.
Adult male attractions to very young females is easy, even if they aren't sexually ready now, they will be soon, so it's a good idea to claim them young. The article brings up an interesting question when it comes to boys and gay men, though.
Gay men have a penchant for very young men. Why would this have evolved? I think it's simply a reversal of psychological drivers. The primary driver of a male is youth, which is good for heterosexuality which comprises the majority of the population. Reverse that for homosexuality, and there's no evolutionary impetus to eliminate the driver for youth.
Finally, the court has instituted some limits on American schools' crapping all over the Constitution.
By JESSE J. HOLLAND, Associated Press Writer Jesse J. Holland, Associated Press Writer – 51 mins ago
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a school's strip search of an Arizona teenage girl accused of having prescription-strength ibuprofen was illegal.
In an 8-1 ruling, the justices said school officials violated the law with their search of Savana Redding in the rural eastern Arizona town of Safford.
Redding, who now attends college, was 13 when officials at Safford Middle School ordered her to remove her clothes and shake out her underwear because they were looking for pills — the equivalent of two Advils. The district bans prescription and over-the-counter drugs and the school was acting on a tip from another student.
"What was missing from the suspected facts that pointed to Savana was any indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear," Justice David Souter wrote in the majority opinion. "We think that the combination of these deficiencies was fatal to finding the search reasonable."
In a dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas found the search legal and said the court previously had given school officials "considerable leeway" under the Fourth Amendment in school settings.
Officials had searched the girl's backpack and found nothing, Thomas said. "It was eminently reasonable to conclude the backpack was empty because Redding was secreting the pills in a place should thought no one would look," Thomas said.
Thomas warned that the majority's decision could backfire. "Redding would not have been the first person to conceal pills in her undergarments," he said. "Nor will she be the last after today's decision, which announces the safest place to secrete contraband in school."
The court also ruled the officials cannot be held liable in a lawsuit for the search. Different judges around the nation have come to different conclusions about immunity for school officials in strip searches, which leads the Supreme Court to "counsel doubt that we were sufficiently clear in the prior statement of law," Souter said.
"We think these differences of opinion from our own are substantial enough to require immunity for the school officials in this case," Souter said.
The justices also said the lower courts would have to determine whether the Safford United School District No. 1 could be held liable.
A schoolmate had accused Redding, then an eighth-grade student, of giving her pills.
The school's vice principal, Kerry Wilson, took Redding to his office to search her backpack. When nothing was found, Redding was taken to a nurse's office where she says she was ordered to take off her shirt and pants. Redding said they then told her to move her bra to the side and to stretch her underwear waistband, exposing her breasts and pelvic area. No pills were found.
A federal magistrate dismissed a suit by Redding and her mother, April. An appeals panel agreed that the search didn't violate her rights. But last July, a full panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found the search was "an invasion of constitutional rights" and that Wilson could be found personally liable.
Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented from the portion of the ruling saying that Wilson could not be held financially liable.
"Wilson's treatment of Redding was abusive and it was not reasonable for him to believe that the law permitted it," Ginsburg said.
The Constitution does not end at school grounds. In ANY way shape and form. Justice Thomas can go screw.
LiveScience has posted an article about the recent Sanford sex scandal, and they basically explain that politicians will do stupid crap like this because power and corruption go hand-in-hand. Gah!
It's not corruption! Having sex with another woman is not corrupt. Even if you campaigned as being against sex with women, it's not corrupt. Corruption in politics means that you did something for your own good to the detriment of those you are supposedly representing.
The only problem in the situation is that we have a populace that will be taken in on moral grandstanding, and vote for those who scream about it from the bully pulpit. Sex with those other than your wife is fine, as long as your wife doesn't mind. If your wife expects fidelity, and you boink someone else, you better be prepared for the consequences with her. Everyone else can just fuck off.
Still, I'm happy when I see people like this fall so spectacularly. Moral crusaders and those who campaign on family values are all full of shit. Luckily for us, we get to see that shit every now and then, and man is it entertaining. Especially when they're forced to discuss their behavior within the paradigm they had been espousing. For example, Sanford had to get up on TV and say that what he did was just plain wrong. Wrong? Define wrong. I say it wasn't wrong. I say it was merely stupid.
Governor Mark Sanford crying for Argentina (photo:AP)
Well, that didn't take long.
Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina has admitted to an affair, which is why he was down way the fuck in Argentina. Witnessing yet another politician self-destruct has me again thinking, why does any of this matter? This culture's singular obsession with sex is maddening. We blew how much money during that Ken Starr/Clinton/Lewinsky circus? Who gives a fuck?! As soon as something event remotely shifty happens, people's ears perk up. Like "What? Oooooh? Looks juicy!" We're an entire country of gossip queens.
This of course brings to mind Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York who famously got caught Sir Humpsaloting some prostitutes. At least with that, Spitzer was revealed to be a glaring hypocrite in light of his crusade against prostitution. I don't know about Sanford's past and his platforms, but all of these cases end the same way, with some guy crying in front of the cameras. You'd think that after this happened enough times, people would start, I dunno', thinking that this sort of thing is common and not really worthy of getting worked up over. We live in world of instant communication, near-ubiquitous camera coverage, and, as I mentioned, a populous so bored with its own insignificant existence that anything interesting happening in others' lives becomes instant news fodder. Yet, still, men in positions such as this will put their entire careers and lives in jeopardy for some roll in the hay.
This incident basically destroys any chance that Sanford had for the Republican run in 2012. Why? What about having an affair has any bearing on that? Presidents have been ridiculous philanderers for all of history. Because regardless of what many people want to think, we're animals, and males in power will hump just about anything with two legs and a pulse (Or not! Pulse optional!). Some of our greatest presidents were comically unfaithful. Kennedy is well-known, but so was FDR, Teddy, and even the fat ones like Grover Cleveland were having illegitimate children. This behavior is part of the human animal.
I don't have much respect for even the very concept of sexual fidelity. I think our obsession with it is both a misogynistic and religious construct. Why misogynistic? Because who stands the lose the most from sexual infidelity? Men. Men don't want to raise a child that isn't genetically theirs. Emotional infidelity is damaging for the female, because she loses the support of the male, but that's not what we're talking about, here. We're talking about sex. No one cares that he may have been down there reading bad love poetry to this mystery woman. They care that he had sex with her.
Sexual fidelity is a fantasy. Some people have it, certainly, but that's because they want it. Others do not want it. It is not our place to judge them for that.
I've said before how I consider myself a practical feminist. I have always said that the more militant feminists actually do a greater disservice to the cause of female equality than they do good. For a historical precedent, I look to Martin Luther King and his peaceful approach, basically revealing the racist whites to be the barbarians that they were, as opposed to the angry blacks which contributed to the Great White Flight.
I also decry modern racism as "fake" racism. It's not real racism that has a significant effect on the lives of otherwise upstanding blacks. We have black men in all echelons of power and prestige in various industries. Real racism has nothing to do with cops racially profiling, it has to do with the subtle, underlying assumptions that people don't usually think about.
This applies to sexism, as well. The feminist straw man of a belligerent, overtly-sexist asshole ranting about how women are all alike doesn't exist in any significant way. Sure, those men run gas stations across the country, but they don't exist for the most part. Instead, we have subtle assumptions that result in the treatment of women in a different way. This can sometimes result in ostensibly positive behavior, whereby women are gauged with less rigor than men.
For example, sports. Yes, it could be argued that men are better at many sports simply because they can get stronger more easily. But what about snowboarding or skiing? There is nothing different between men and women that should result in the wide difference in stunts, times, and successful moves seen during the winter Olympics. It has entirely to do with the men being treated differently. They're judged more harshly. The stakes are higher. The competition is fiercer. This is real, damaging sexism.
One area that's sticky, though, is sex. I consider men and women, as far as non-social programming goes, to be effectively identical. Social programming, though, is different. There is an undeniable difference socially and sexually.
For example, I present the case of Valeria K., aka The Black Widow;
A young Russian woman, a devoted collector of horror films and spiders, is on trial for sedating and raping ten men.
The police were shocked that 32-year-old Valeria K., a quiet good-looking woman from the city of Tambov, was the mysterious rapist who abused ten local men after poisoning them with clonidine, Life.ru reports.
Valeria, who has already been nicknamed the Black Widow for her love of spiders, would get acquainted with men and invite them to her place.
She gave them drinks with clonidine, which almost immediately sent them to sleep for almost 24 hours.
After that, she undressed her victims and raped them, tightening a rope on their male organs to kep them erect.
Waking up in hospital with clonidine poisoning and penis trauma, all the victims could remember was a friendly brunette who gave them drinks.
Finally, local police identified the offender and arrested her.
At present, the police know about ten of Valeria’s victims, although one of them refused to file a complaint against her.
“It was great,” the unnamed man said.
“I like hot women. I only wish she hadn't use the clonidine on me.”
The most interesting aspect is the thing I can't copy: the comments. Comment after comment on all the blogs is the same thing, where can I find this woman?! I want to be raped! The difference is so staggering. And even in myself, I'd be fine with it. I would love to be raped by a woman. I guess that means it can't possibly be rape, but still.
I don't believe this difference is cultural/social. The thought of a woman being raped is repulsive down to my very core, but the idea of me being raped? That's fine. I guess if I change the staging of the hypothetical rape, a woman forcibly penetrating a man anally sounds worse perhaps, but even then, it's kind of kinky/cool.
It just doesn't seem possible that it's cultural. Rape has been a blight on society in multiple cultures for thousands of years. When ravaging packs of women roam around (the few times it's happened), they just kill and steal. When men do it, they kill, steal, and rape. I even think that the psychological damage done to boys by priests has more to do with culture than sex with boys causing any fundamental harm. Why? Men and boy sexual relations has happened in multiple cultures in many areas on the planet. Homosexuality among young soldiers and older soldiers was common. There is a precedent to indicate that it may be cultural that the event was harmful to the boys. Rape of women has no such precedent.
So, for me, rape is a difficult point. I have become convinced that a militant attitude is in fact necessary to sort of punch out latent prejudice when it comes to rape allegations.
I was doing random research on sex and rape and came across this text book, first published in 2000, for college classrooms. Just Sex discusses sort of the history of student activism in the march towards equal rights for women.
The story of Brown University really drives home how far we have to go.
This was 1990, people! The Sega Genesis was out! It's stunning to think that a highly liberal area such as Rhode Island would be at the center of such a controversy.
Rape and sex are part of the animal human, which I separate to a degree from the higher-functioning aspects of the human. As a species that considers itself advanced, we must push aside some aspects of animalism in favor of a recognition that all of us, men and women alike, are merely thinking entities. To look at one another as people as opposed to a man or a woman. Rape cannot be allowed in that world.
I must say the determining if rape has occurred or not is difficult. Most of the time, all that can be determined is that sex has occurred. So we are left with a he-said she-said. But even here, in court, a woman's life can be brought into consideration, but the man's past history, unless a pattern can be identified, is out of bounds. There's something fundamentally wrong with that.
I default to believing women who say that they have been raped. Unfortunately, every case I've encountered, it's been eventually revealed that either the woman lied or exaggerated. That's very depressing. I want to believe. I must believe since any logical, caring person would err on the side of caution, but I've been proven wrong in all cases.
Still, it doesn't matter. In the same way that racial profiling is idiotic, sexual profiling is just as dumb. To take my experiences with previous women and then project their actions into this new person is laughably wrong. To do otherwise is sexist, and it is here, perhaps, that militant feminism is needed.
For example, one of the girls I knew who went to a New England university claimed rape. The case was handled aggressively by the University police, the local police, and the boy was brought in, fingerprinted, and questioned. He was suspended from school for the duration of the investigation. That didn't last long, because it was revealed two days later that the girl had lied. She told the story to friends, didn't expect them to call the cops for her, then kept the story going. The innocent boy's life was turned upside down, he now has a criminal record, and resources were wasted.
It was an injustice, to be sure, but perhaps a necessary one. If men the world over know that pendulum has swung very far in the opposite direction, and that their life could be ruined for even a minor misunderstanding, it will force men to be cautious when entering into sexual relations. We could go as far as Antioch College's famous manual to consensual sex, and while that's pretty stupid, again it may be necessary. I think that goes a bit too far. Rape is pretty easy. If she says "no," and you keep going, congratulations, you're raping her. It's not hard to avoid this.
This article from Newsweek in 1993 decries what it sees as the overswing of feminism and injustice against men. It's startling to read the barely concealed venom and condescension by the author. It's also startling that all of the authors are women. They lament the loss of sexual surprise and unexpectedness if these rules are followed. Yeah? Well too bad. When you're stupid and drunk, like most college students are, I'm completely behind strict, no-nonsense, unromantic rules.
It may seem to you that I'm about a decade late in writing about this, but I don't think so. These issues still exist. Sexism is still rampant. I don't even want to think about the number of men I heard who voted for McCain-Palin because they thought Palin was "hot." Gah. The pendulum is again swinging back towards center, and hopefully it won't overshoot it by too much.
I mentioned a belief that militant feminism does more damage than good, and also that hidden 'isms are what are truly dangerous. The Newsweek article makes an excellent point in this regard.
This defensive mind-set is at the heart of the escalating battle over date rape. Critics charge feminists with hyping the statistics and so broadening the definition of rape that sex roles are becoming positively Victorian. Women are passive vessels with no responsibility for what happens; men are domineering brutes with just one thing on their minds. "People have asked me if I have ever been date-raped," writes Katie Roiphe in "The Morning After." "And thinking back on complicated nights, on too many glasses of wine, on strange and familiar beds, I would have to say yes. With such a sweeping definition of rape, I wonder how many people there are, male or female, who haven't been date-raped at one point or another . . . If verbal coercion constitutes rape, then the word "rape" itself expands to include any kind of sex a woman experiences as negative."
Roiphe, 25, a Harvard graduate and now a doctoral candidate it Princeton, argues that a hysteria has gripped college campuses, fomented by "rape-crisis feminists." "The image that emerges from feminist preoccupations with rape and sexual harassment is that of women as victims, offended by a professor's dirty joke, verbally pressured into sex by peers. This image of a delicate woman bears a striking resemblance to that "50s ideal my mother and the other women of her generation fought so hard to get away from. They didn't like her passivity . . . her excessive need for protection . . . But here she is again, with her pure intentions and her wide eyes. Only this time it is the feminists themselves who are breathing new life into her."
The hidden 'ism that is doing actual damage. Still, that strong pendulum swing was needed. Humans as a whole never work in fine details. We don't deal with gray areas. We only move and change when REALLY big things happen. Look at school segregation. It took small wars to break out. I think that continued militant behavior is the only way through. Yes, it's overblown. Yes, it's paranoid. But I think that a fear that at any moment, a woman can totally ruin a man's life with a single word is what's needed to permanently banish this behavior from society.
If that destroys romance, at least for a time, so be it. Men and women will be forced to treat each other as people, as opposed to the opposite sex. Sex will simply be off the menu. Hmmm. Perhaps a university that's free and liberal in every way except not allowing sex between students. Have sex, get kicked out. Interesting idea. Would never work. Interesting, though.
UPDATE 6/24/2009: I was thinking about the Newsweek article and its assertion that we are reverting back to a more Victorian form of sexual identity, whereby women are pure and helpless and men are horrid brutes. I don't fully agree that women are being portrayed as pure and helpless, but men are being portrayed as brutes. But I see that as the point. Humans operate best on primary drivers. I think the biggest of those drivers is fear. If men are literally fearful of talking, touching, looking at, or otherwise interacting with women, that is the kind of circumstance that results in psychosocial change.
