So, I just got around to watching Blindness, a movie which uses the physical blindness of its characters as a metaphor for the inability of humans to "see" pain and suffering around them.
Apparently the National Federation of the Blind threw a hissyfit because the movie portrays blind people as "one dimensional" in their responses to blindness.
A) No, it doesn't. In fact there are a lot of different characters who react in very different ways to their blindness. Some assist one another, some look out for themselves. Some learn to adapt quicker than others. One even gets (understandably) upset at his wife (who can see) trying to help him do simple tasks.
B) I guess they might have noticed this if they had seen the movie.
(Bad Joke, but I couldn't help it)
Saturday, August 8, 2009
This again
Ephebophilia is not pedophilia.
Whatever these men might have done, it is ridiculous to accuse them of a paraphilia associated with abuse and truly immoral (amoral?) activity. As the adult industry can attest, throw an ill fitting plaid skirt and pigtails on a twenty five year old, and you have "teen".
(Link is safe for work, my ISP over here limits even the hint of adult content)
So, to round this out, here is an excellent piece from the Economist on some of the other silliness we have in defining "sex offenders" and how we deal with them. My favorite line in the article (or at least the most relevant), is this:
Sex-offender registries are popular. Rape and child molestation are terrible crimes that can traumatise their victims for life. All parents want to protect their children from sexual predators, so politicians can nearly always win votes by promising curbs on them. Those who object can be called soft on child-molesters, a label most politicians would rather avoid. This creates a ratchet effect. Every lawmaker who wants to sound tough on sex offenders has to propose a law tougher than the one enacted by the last politician who wanted to sound tough on sex offenders.
As usual, it's "all about the children."
But what we end up with is a purely emotional response rather than looking at the actual scientific examination of many of these activities:
Politicians pushing the get-tough approach sometimes claim that sex offenders are mostly incorrigible: that three-quarters or even nine out of ten of them reoffend. It is not clear where they find such numbers. A study of nearly 10,000 male sex offenders in 15 American states found that 5% were rearrested for a sex crime within three years. A meta-analysis of 29,000 sex offenders in Canada, Britain and America found that 24% had reoffended after 15 years.
Whatever these men might have done, it is ridiculous to accuse them of a paraphilia associated with abuse and truly immoral (amoral?) activity. As the adult industry can attest, throw an ill fitting plaid skirt and pigtails on a twenty five year old, and you have "teen".
(Link is safe for work, my ISP over here limits even the hint of adult content)
So, to round this out, here is an excellent piece from the Economist on some of the other silliness we have in defining "sex offenders" and how we deal with them. My favorite line in the article (or at least the most relevant), is this:
Sex-offender registries are popular. Rape and child molestation are terrible crimes that can traumatise their victims for life. All parents want to protect their children from sexual predators, so politicians can nearly always win votes by promising curbs on them. Those who object can be called soft on child-molesters, a label most politicians would rather avoid. This creates a ratchet effect. Every lawmaker who wants to sound tough on sex offenders has to propose a law tougher than the one enacted by the last politician who wanted to sound tough on sex offenders.
As usual, it's "all about the children."
But what we end up with is a purely emotional response rather than looking at the actual scientific examination of many of these activities:
Politicians pushing the get-tough approach sometimes claim that sex offenders are mostly incorrigible: that three-quarters or even nine out of ten of them reoffend. It is not clear where they find such numbers. A study of nearly 10,000 male sex offenders in 15 American states found that 5% were rearrested for a sex crime within three years. A meta-analysis of 29,000 sex offenders in Canada, Britain and America found that 24% had reoffended after 15 years.
Monday, August 3, 2009
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Crazies and Super-Crazies
Now that I'm back in the hell-hole, I don't really have much opportunity to listen to the crazies very much. Rush is occasionally on the radio when I go to dinner, but that's about it for my exposure to him. And on the other side of the fence there are people like Max Fortes, who is a crazy on the left. (And by crazy, I mean it, he has a comment about not believing Al Qaeda was behind 9/11).
These are just regular run of the mill crazies, though. The super crazies are not very often on the radio, or hosted on their own websites. They're the ones who post comments, or, certain other things I'll discuss in a moment. I once had a discussion with a friend of mine over whether or not the crazies on the radio actually believed what they were saying, or if they were just saying it to make money. Generally, we felt that they were just saying it to make money. The listeners, however, we had no doubt actually believed every crazy word coming out of the crazy mouths. Case in point, a wonderful and thoughtful comment on a right-wing blog from Brenda:
"Uh. NO. The reason we don't "like" BO is because he is a lying, alien COMMUNIST MUSLIM. His ideas are to CHANGE AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL, One Nation Under GOD, into The United Socialist States of America. He wants to kill the heart and soul of the country--Free Market Capitalism--by installing govt. controlled businesses, Cap and Trade and "GREEN" programs, reduce the population and Social Security payments thru INFANTICIDE and EUTHANASIA of the aging population via govt. 'healthcare', encourage women to work outside the home and abandon motherhood to daycares which will 'indoctrinate' the babies into socialism in order to increase the tax-payer base, abandon all Judao-Christian MORAL VALUES, sell out America to China and the Middle East, overload the Social Services System with illegal aliens, dead beats, Sloths, and Liars, nationalize the media in order to stifle opposition to him and his disgusting programs, and place the most completely INSANE BURDEN OF ECONOMIC DEBT on our children and theirs, resulting in WORKERS receiving 20% of their paycheck, with the rest going to the deadbeats. Everyone who CAN will LEAVE America. This is THE WAR OF ALL WARS: Spiritual Warfare between the powers of darkness and GOD. The prize of America will go to the winner!"
Yeah, spooky. However, I'd like to draw your attention to the "alien" statement in the first sentence. Now, considering how crazy this person is (super-crazy), she might actually believe that Obama is an alien from outer space. However, I suspect rather that she is one of the group of people now known in common parlance as "birthers." (What is it about the right wing that they just can't nail down good names?)
EDIT: I never expected to find a website talking about Obama's extra-terrestrial ties. I will never underestimate the internet ever again. Now if I could only find that nun thing...
One of the more famous, in my circles, anyway, is a man by the name of Stefan Frederick Cook. I will not honor him with a rank, whatever the Army might allow him to claim. Mr. Cook made news by refusing to deploy to Afghanistan because he didn't believe Obama was a legitimate President. Then dentist, real estate agent, and attorney, Orly Taitz took up his case. I was always a bit confused over this fiasco. I am not by nature a conspiracy theorist (I swear, it's fun to imagine them, but I rarely actually believe them). However, after discovering that Mr. Cook volunteered in May for his deployment, only later requesting it be revoked, everything kind of fell into place.
Either:
A) he volunteered to deploy, and then, like Wesley Snipes, got some bad advice from his lawyer
or
B) he volunteered to deploy so that he could then, in a blaze of media suck-up, publicly announce he could not because Obama is a secret Muslim Communist terrorist born in Kenya
Either way - he did not have to make any public show of it at all. As he was a volunteer, all he needed to do was simply ask the Army not to deploy him. Simple as cake. Instead, he makes a big deal, gets the story in the press, and allows the crazies to prattle on once again about how Obama is a secret Muslim terrorist communist, out to destroy the country with his socialist programs, born in Kenya, rather than Hawaii where there is legal documentation, plus two birth announcements in local papers (it was all a plot you see, they knew he was going to be the first black President when he was born, so they had to put those announcements there to establish his credentials. Or even better, they hacked into the archives of the papers and placed them there later, cause that's so easy to do...)
So, the long and the short of this post is that maybe I was more sane when I only had the crazies to deal with, and not the super-crazies.
These are just regular run of the mill crazies, though. The super crazies are not very often on the radio, or hosted on their own websites. They're the ones who post comments, or, certain other things I'll discuss in a moment. I once had a discussion with a friend of mine over whether or not the crazies on the radio actually believed what they were saying, or if they were just saying it to make money. Generally, we felt that they were just saying it to make money. The listeners, however, we had no doubt actually believed every crazy word coming out of the crazy mouths. Case in point, a wonderful and thoughtful comment on a right-wing blog from Brenda:
"Uh. NO. The reason we don't "like" BO is because he is a lying, alien COMMUNIST MUSLIM. His ideas are to CHANGE AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL, One Nation Under GOD, into The United Socialist States of America. He wants to kill the heart and soul of the country--Free Market Capitalism--by installing govt. controlled businesses, Cap and Trade and "GREEN" programs, reduce the population and Social Security payments thru INFANTICIDE and EUTHANASIA of the aging population via govt. 'healthcare', encourage women to work outside the home and abandon motherhood to daycares which will 'indoctrinate' the babies into socialism in order to increase the tax-payer base, abandon all Judao-Christian MORAL VALUES, sell out America to China and the Middle East, overload the Social Services System with illegal aliens, dead beats, Sloths, and Liars, nationalize the media in order to stifle opposition to him and his disgusting programs, and place the most completely INSANE BURDEN OF ECONOMIC DEBT on our children and theirs, resulting in WORKERS receiving 20% of their paycheck, with the rest going to the deadbeats. Everyone who CAN will LEAVE America. This is THE WAR OF ALL WARS: Spiritual Warfare between the powers of darkness and GOD. The prize of America will go to the winner!"
Yeah, spooky. However, I'd like to draw your attention to the "alien" statement in the first sentence. Now, considering how crazy this person is (super-crazy), she might actually believe that Obama is an alien from outer space. However, I suspect rather that she is one of the group of people now known in common parlance as "birthers." (What is it about the right wing that they just can't nail down good names?)
EDIT: I never expected to find a website talking about Obama's extra-terrestrial ties. I will never underestimate the internet ever again. Now if I could only find that nun thing...
One of the more famous, in my circles, anyway, is a man by the name of Stefan Frederick Cook. I will not honor him with a rank, whatever the Army might allow him to claim. Mr. Cook made news by refusing to deploy to Afghanistan because he didn't believe Obama was a legitimate President. Then dentist, real estate agent, and attorney, Orly Taitz took up his case. I was always a bit confused over this fiasco. I am not by nature a conspiracy theorist (I swear, it's fun to imagine them, but I rarely actually believe them). However, after discovering that Mr. Cook volunteered in May for his deployment, only later requesting it be revoked, everything kind of fell into place.
Either:
A) he volunteered to deploy, and then, like Wesley Snipes, got some bad advice from his lawyer
or
B) he volunteered to deploy so that he could then, in a blaze of media suck-up, publicly announce he could not because Obama is a secret Muslim Communist terrorist born in Kenya
Either way - he did not have to make any public show of it at all. As he was a volunteer, all he needed to do was simply ask the Army not to deploy him. Simple as cake. Instead, he makes a big deal, gets the story in the press, and allows the crazies to prattle on once again about how Obama is a secret Muslim terrorist communist, out to destroy the country with his socialist programs, born in Kenya, rather than Hawaii where there is legal documentation, plus two birth announcements in local papers (it was all a plot you see, they knew he was going to be the first black President when he was born, so they had to put those announcements there to establish his credentials. Or even better, they hacked into the archives of the papers and placed them there later, cause that's so easy to do...)
So, the long and the short of this post is that maybe I was more sane when I only had the crazies to deal with, and not the super-crazies.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Iraqi Food
So, anyone who knows me since 2004 knows how much I love Iraqi food. Today one of our interpreters brought in food for a "welcome here" dinner. Kabob, lamb, bread, hummus all the fixings. The funny thing is our interpreter was like "Iraqis complain about not having food, but look at this! I said enough for five people, and they give us all this." Now, it was good, very good, but it was a lot of food.
Here is what was left after we all ate as much as we could:
And a closeup of Iraqi Kebob, because it's my favorite food in the whole world:
Here is what was left after we all ate as much as we could:
And a closeup of Iraqi Kebob, because it's my favorite food in the whole world:
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