Entries from March 2008 ↓

Paul Waldman had an interesting post on Code Pink which was linked by Andrew Sullivan:

…this week, which will see the fifth anniversary of the start of the war, Code Pink plans to “step up the pressure,” as its leader Medea Benjamin said. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “Code Pink has a full roster of activities planned for the week, including: yoga every morning at 8:30; organic potlucks every noon; nightly movies and popcorn; a bike ride around Berkeley on Tuesday; an open-mike musical jam on Wednesday; and a ’send-off’ to the Marines on Friday, when protesters will bring suitcases and pink berets for traveling.” How the Bush administration will be able to resist is anyone’s guess.

Any effective political movement has to engage its participants in a way that makes them feel their contributions are meaningful and redefines their sense of self. But if those contributions aren’t actually meaningful, if they amount to an extended series of circle jerks that accomplish nothing, then the movement will inevitably be confined to a small group of self-deluding members with a lot of time on their hands. There are tens of millions of Americans who want to end the war in Iraq. But how many of them see something like Code Pink protesting a Marine recruiting station and say to themselves, “I want to be a part of that”?

Ridiculous, pointless nonsense can in fact do more harm than good, and more harm than nothing would do. It can create sites like this that attempt to intentionally reverse the original pointless stupidity with more pointless stupidity. Occasionally it is countered as Berkeley’s marine recruiter debacle was, with stripping of federal funding, resulting in the City Council backing down in response.

We see the cry for “something, anything!” often when there is a tragedy of any scale. School shooting? We must do “something, anything!” to fix it by banning Doom and Marilyn Manson. One deranged individual shooting up a college campus does not require a response, and certainly not an ill-reasoned “something, anything!!1!” response.

If you want to feel good about yourself by flailing your arms about so that mass-media will see you, at least be willing to put your money where your mouth is.

From an Obama rally in Oregon, viewable here:

“I mean, think about what these last few election cycles have been about,” the Senator said. “We argue about immigration, but we don’t try to solve the immigration problem. It’s an argument that is all about people’s passions instead of trying to figure it out.

“We argue about gay marriage. You know, in the meantime the planet is, you know, potentially being destroyed. We’ve got a war that is bankrupting us. And we’re going to argue about gay marriage? I mean, that doesn’t make any sense.”

Yeah because, I mean, you know, civil rights are, you know, I mean, kind of a waste of time.

Bullshit.

Relative to action required by government, Obama is totally off-base. Global warming is a non-issue. The war in Iraq is a non-issue. The immigration “problem” is a non-issue. All three of these talking points would be solved with inaction, and require no direct government interference. Without government interference, the most clean, effective, and efficient form of energy will bubble to the top and state governments will handle the rest. Without (further) government interference, we will not be able to afford empirical activities in Iraq and will be forced to withdraw our troops. Without government interference, our immigration “problem” will cease to be interpreted as a problem.

The basic civil right of having social contracts recognized, however, requires government to defend it and so is a much more important issue than global warming, the war in Iraq, or immigration. It’s a shame that Obama doesn’t see basic civil rights as something that makes sense.

Every so often, in order to justify horrific abuses of power and destruction of civil liberties, the term “moral authority” is thrown around. It is the duty of the United States as a “moral authority” to have gone into Iraq, for instance.

What?

What moral high-ground do we have as a nation when we are invading sovereign nations on false pretenses? Much less any beyond-imagined authority to do so. Crackpot defenses like “moral authority” are used to subjugate, enslave, and persecute people. They are not used to create freedom or extend liberty.

The United States has no business policing the affairs of the world, just as the Vatican has no business policing what is on our televisions. If you find yourself about to speak those two words, “moral authority,” stop yourself and rather than to pretend to believe it, simply admit to yourself that you want to control people by force. You want to force someone to do something they wouldn’t otherwise do, because you think it is right for them but they shouldn’t be able to decide for themselves. Just admit it: you’re a fascist, not a freedom-loving American.

We would all be a lot better off if everyone just minded their own fucking business. We wouldn’t be as comfortable, but we would be significantly more free and that is what really matters.

Tonight, I watched the film Proof, with Hugo Weaving as Martin, an emotionally-vacant blind photographer; Geneviève Pico as his twisted housekeeper Celia; and a too-young-to-lob-phones Russell Crowe as Andy, a friend of Martin’s who describes his photographs to him with varying degrees of honesty.

Celia is obsessively in “love” with Martin, of which Martin is aware but refuses to acknowledge. Perhaps driven by Martin to make his existence more painful in an attempt to milk ANY sort of emotion from him, she re-arranges his furniture and holds back his dog when Martin calls for him at the park. A love triangle of sorts materializes between the three main characters — Martin adores Andy, horny-horny Andy wants into the pants of Celia, and Celia wants to carve her name into Martin’s chest. Hey, I said “of sorts.”

Honesty — trust, really, and its place in relationships — is what the film is ultimately about. In the end, the most important scene of the film shows us how a lack of trust can turn someone into an emotional cripple. How without understanding how to reconcile the ethical imperfections of people, one can become a shell of a person, incapable of healthy human interactions. Only after we have proof of our wrongs will the most stubborn and untrusting of us have a chance to redeem ourselves — hopefully, before too late.

Trust is a difficult thing to give openly, particularly if you have been stung in the past. It is the single most important thing that someone can earn of you, more so than love. Love can be volatile — as in the case of Celia, whose love has twisted her into a sadistic bitch — but someone in which you can place complete trust is beyond our concept of worth. Martin’s innate distrust, not the imperfections of Celia and Andy, is the cause of his troubles. Perhaps had he been exposed to the proof at a younger age that his limited senses required, he would have learned the value of trust and thus of love without trudging through so much misery.

I rate Proof 4 out of 5 deranged housekeepers.

Eric linked me this fascinating read which has several interesting bits about bisexuality specifically, and the potential evolution of human sexuality as a whole.

The possibility that everyone is born with the potential to experience both same-sex and opposite-sex attraction is borne out by the anthropologists Clelland Ford and Frank Beach in their pioneering study, Patterns Of Sexual Behaviour (1965). They examined dozens of tribal-based societies all over the world, including many where homosexual relations were common and accepted. In some, all young men went through a period of homosexuality as part of their rite of passage to manhood, and then later switched to heterosexuality and got married. Ford and Beach concluded that human sexuality was predisposed to bisexuality and that a person’s subsequent sexual orientation was largely the product of social learning and expectation: “Men and women who are totally lacking in any conscious homosexual leanings are as much a product of cultural conditioning as are the exclusive homosexuals who find heterosexual relations distasteful and unsatisfying. Both extremes represent movement away from the original, intermediate condition which includes the capacity for both forms of sexual expression”.

..thus reinforcing the idea that sexuality is in fact not binary, and that it is perfectly natural for a majority of people to engage in various sexual activities with the same gender — diluting the impact of the gay stereotype in association with homosexual behavior.

These insights suggest that if society ended its favouritism towards straightness and its chastisement of gayness, same-sex desire would, since it is an intrinsic human potentiality, be much more widespread. This doesn’t necessarily mean that a higher proportion of the population would be lesbian and gay. More likely, bisexuality would become the norm, and the prevalence of both exclusive heterosexuality and exclusive homosexuality would diminish.

I see this as a good thing. Call me a homophobe if you wish, but I do not find stereotypical gay men in any way appealing, sexually or otherwise. This distaste is not borne of any self-hatred, but of contempt for those who let themselves be so easily defined by others. As I told John, I try not to be definable with a single word — be it “fag”, “geek”, “emo” or what have you. To consider oneself gay or bisexual does not necessitate that you adhere to the applicable stereotypes. Though many people do, even if only subconsciously, and that irritates me greatly.

Adherence to negative stereotypes helps to perpetuate them and give them value. It doesn’t make me a homophobe to look down upon homosexuals (declared or otherwise) who are walking manifestations of a negative stereotype. By not adhering to it myself, I am helping to defeat it as an inaccurate label of homosexuals, whereas they are proponents of it and make it more difficult for me to fight it.

Patrick says..

dude

people should just be who they are

and not worry about stereotypes

for the realz

..which I am afraid is a bit silly. “Who they are” is imaginary. Our self is not determined in the womb, it is a culmination of our upbringing and interactions with society. We do have free will to determine who we become (as inferred by “interactions with society.”) Part of this interaction involves stereotypes — either learning from them in attempts to defeat them, or adhering to and propagating them.

The other day I was reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog and came across this other guy’s post about bisexuality which contained this eye-roll-inducing goodness:

There’s a part of me that’s always thinking that the bisexuals are getting the joys of homo transgression while reaping the benefits of hetero assimilation.

Please.

Homosexuals who aren’t absolute “I-like-it-like-a-latte-but-noooot-quite-there-yet” fags can enjoy homosexual transgression while fitting in with the assumed heterosexuals around him. You don’t need to be bisexual to not conform to the homosexual stereotypes.

And from the comments of that post:

My own experience echoes yours. I’ve long felt I would “get” bisexuality if I met bi guys who were in relationships with other guys and having sex with women on the side, instead of always the other way around.

Intellectually bisexuality makes sense, Kinsey scale and all that. In practice, it seems more live a closet tactic.

Intellectually it makes sense because even in nature, sexuality is not binary. We are not all either “gay” or “straight” — in fact, few of us statistically-speaking would precisely fit those labels. Labels. Our intense desire to label those people and things around us — to put them into easily understandable boxes and categories — is what drives so much misunderstanding regarding sexuality.

Mr. Bugg decries bisexuality because those who he performed oral sex on went back to their girlfriends and made fag jokes. How does that make bisexuality in any way less substantial? One can experience many things sexually and yet not tailor their lives to revolve around it. While the labels of “gay” and “straight” imply a lack of sexual attraction (and thus interaction) with the other gender, bisexuality is a very grey space in which you would be foolish to require equal-time or deny the comfort of a relationship with either gender.

Certainly some bisexuals like women more but occasionally have varying degrees of sexual interaction with men. Just as certainly, some bisexuals are much more into men but don’t deny some level of attraction or interaction with women. Just because few people have heard of a bisexual man who is in a steady relationship with another man but occasionally sleeps with women doesn’t mean that bisexuality is a figment of our collective imagination, it just suggests that perhaps the average straight woman offers something different than the average gay man. Agreed, one of the things that she offers is social acceptance, but I am wary to boil it down solely to that.