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Well, that was fun. There’s still plenty to do, of course, and I’m still juggling bits here and there, the flux seems to be growing daily rather than shrinking, but that’s the fun of working in a place that plays Calvinball daily, with House Rules Parcheesi on the weekends. Tonight’s cooking adventures will have their biggest test tomorrow, when I inflict them on other people to see if they’ll be welcomed and chowed down upon, or rejected as failures of culinary skill. Only time will tell (I’m betting they’ll at least be politely noshed.)
Today is the 66th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. While this attack is studied in United States history classes and is considered the day that lives in infamy, because of a radio speech not soon afterward, it is the other event, when America attacked Japan, that is the day that needs to be most remembered for introducing us to what really happens when you use atomic weaponry on civilian populations.
In the middle of all this selling of LiveJournal, more issues continue to crop up - this one is currently being attributed to SixApart, but it appears crude and ineffective language filters are being used in an attempt to stop searching for "forbidden" interests. The problem is that they appear to be working in a manner where any word or phrase that holds the forbidden character sequence is not searchable. “spice” is unsearchable because it contains “spic”, a slur. Of course, as with all implemented forbidden lists, it is by no means complete. And like all poorly designed filters, it stops legitimate queries. Not to mention that those who are being supposedly targeted are unlikely to be using the forbidden words, anyway. Unthinking reaction is swell, isn’t it?
There have been more posts in the various communities of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
lj_2008 and lj_policy, including an update on the flagging and filtering, where the filtering of words problem has been brought to prominence. The new overlords are probably getting an excellent idea of what the plebes are like when things happen that we notice and don’t like. This either means the issues will be addressed or will be hidden with even more subtlety.
Now running out of time on his presidency and with the likelihood of his legacy being written in blood as an evil, evil, man, George W. Bush has been doing a lot of backpedaling. First, he got a Mideast peace talk going. Now, he's politely asking North Korea to disclose its nuclear specifics and utilize the diplomatic table. Considering how well his wars have turned out, maybe he’s finally figured out that he doesn’t have the stuff in manpower or money to start a third one with either of the nuclear powers he’s most worried about. R. Emmett Tyrell Jr. has a much more rose-colored picture of Mr. Bush, confidently declaring in Bush Is Back that the surge is working (truncating Rep. Murtha’s words), the economy is strong, and that Iran and Libya stopped their nuclear programs because the United States invaded and thumped Iraq so soundly. He even turns Mr. Bush’s outright refusal to continue funding embryonic stem cell research lines into a positive because scientists found a possible alternative using skin cells. The alternative may not have been found as quickly with the ability to use embryonic stem cells, but I’m fairly certain it would have been found if and when the amount of embryos were exhausted, or research demand outpaced supply, or any one of a hundred more things. But no, it’s the president’s insistence that embryos be destroyed rather than put to scientific purpose that produced this. All glory to the hypnotoad.
The United States Senate exercised bad judgment, attaching a provision that would have expanded hate crime categories to include homosexuals to a defense spending authorization. Way to make someone choose between their hatred of Iraq’s war and their desire to see homosexuals protected. The provision went down in flames, the defense bill may make it to Mr. Bush’s desk before the end of the year. It wasn’t said whether there were any troop withdrawal deadlines in this defense package.
The House doesn’t escape scrutiny, however. Originally reported that a bill called the SAFE Act would require anyone who offered an open Wi-Fi connection to report any "obscene" material or be fined up to $300,000 passed the House, but the actual language is a little bit more abstract than that. Ars Technica interprets the language to say that monitoring is not required, but if one should happen across obscene material, then one must report it. The Democrat who sponsored the bill said that his intent was to get ISPs, social-networking sites, registrars, and e-mail service providers to report things , not to force anyone offering a WiFi hotspot to get into the act. As always, things using “obscene” as a definition will have to deal with potentially vague “community standards” as well. So your hentai and yaoi of characters under 18 may be safe in one place, and obscene somewhere else. As might fanart. There’s wiggle room in the law for definitions, but the potential fine stomp will probably have people erring on the side of caution rather than freedom in those grey areas. To examine the language of the bill for yourself and make decisions on just how much people will be affected, consult THOMAS's reference to H.R. 3791, the SAFE act of 2007.
Dan Gainor believes he’s found a nice hypocrisy in pointing out that the U.N. Conference on climate change is happening in Bali, and all the people that are going to nice weather, at great cost, to then talk about what he sees as an unacceptable cost to the United States if they would adopt some greenhouse-fighting protocols. More than just financially, he sees a plot to control people’s lives through getting everyone on board to be more energy-efficient and greener. And the costs of doing so are just too much, and if the U.S. adopted Kyoto or its replacement, then the United Nations would just drain the United States dry with such spending requests. I have to ask - are we still in arrears over our United Nations dues over the last few years? And has anyone run very long-term numbers for economic savings on these matters? Might cost a good chunk of change now, but does that get made back and-then-some over time? A trillion here to save three later? Might be worth the investment, then.
In a rare glimpse into the lives of the Roma, a Southern California court is hearing the case regarding two clans that are feuding over fortune-telling businesses set up by one clan near another. There were apparently demands for money, and eventually, an alleged break-in. Relations have gone downhill from there.
Having spoken his mind to the world, Mitt Romney now gets to reap the consequences of that airing out. First, before the commentary, a complete transcription of Mr. Romney's speech, so that all my see and make comment on his words. Many of them, are profoundly negative. The most lukewarm of responses, from Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council, praised Mr. Romney for saying things about religion in public life, but noted that his religion was still a stumbling block for them. This lukewarm praise despite having used several "code-words" in his speech to try to tell evangelicals that he would do as they did. On the other end of the spectrum, The Slacktivist describes how Romney believes those who don't have the "right" religion are enemies of freedom, and that government is the only one qualified to determine what the "right" religion is, based on his choicest sound bite. The Questionable Authority also takes issue with Romney’s God-talk and says only through not recognizing anyone's god officially can the country be free to worship and recognize their own gods. And that includes, by definition, those who recognize no god at all, whom Mr. Romney was clearly against. Rounding out the Romney coverage, The General weighs in on why religion does matter in candidates, even if he does manage to make good on the promise that the religion will not directly interfere with his presidency. The General suggests that Romney may be a president in the vein of the current president, claiming God is on his side, despite whatever evidence accrues to the contrary.
Now to making fun of Bill’O and those who believe a little too seriously about Christmas’s require Christ-centricness, a comic that made Comics I don’t Understand go LOL - a call where one issue is clearly not being related to another.
Continuing with the trend of showing opinions in sequence with each other, a message for those who believe in moving goalposts that are always out of reach. Shapely Prose calls it The Fantasy of Being Thin, seeing it in the context of the perpetual dieter who always thinks they’ll be better once they’re thin, not realizing that they can be all the things they want to be, and can do it at their current body shape, too. None of this “I wish I was a bit taller, I wish I was a baller” sort of stuff.
The Commodore 64 is still a much-loved machine, despite being out of production and way outclassed by today’s machines. I think it’s because almost everyone had a good experience with their Commodore computer, learning the syntax and being able to do important things like play games. It’s been twenty-five years since the Commodore arrived - we’ve gone from the sound chip to symphonies playing the music in those games. It’s been really cool. What’s the next 25 years going to do? For those who speak mathematics, which often sounds like a foreign language, an open-source free software program called Sage is taking on commercial applications like Matlab for high-power number-crunching. Hrm... open-source, collaborative and potentially no cost, and it can supposedly do all the things normal math research needs? If it lives up to the billing, Sage could be quite the coup.
One more piece in the puzzle of finding an Earthlike extrasolar planet - an Earth-based telescope, after a lot of measurements and filtering, has determined the atmospheric content of an extrasolar planet. So, we have a good list of possible earthlikes, then if we can measure atmospheres, we might have an idea which planets could develop life like ours. At that point, though, if the probes do find life like ours... how do we do the whole communicating thing? Much like learning a foreign language, no doubt.
I can hear the crowing of several groups already. According to researchers at Columbia University, watching violent media repeatedly appears to inhibit the brain's ability to control aggressive behavior. Now someone will say that they have a reason to ban all that icky violent video game and television stuff, because now it’s proven that repeated viewings makes people more violent. However, what the research says is that real-life conditions have not been tested, and that some enterprising researcher in the future should do that, and see if something else doesn’t kick in to regulate the apparent loss of control over aggression.
Tonight’s “D’oh!” moment comes from a deli display that wants to include its Jewish friends in a celebration of one of their holidays...by putting it on food that’s not kosher. D’oh.
Involving food, and a similar sort of misstep, McDonalds fronted the cost for printing a school's report card, and in return, the report card had some advertising for McDonalds on it. First, it’s just sad that the school doesn’t have enough money in the budget (or thinks that it’s a good idea) that they outsource the printing of their progress reports. Second, McDonalds is not the first choice I would have for such a partnership (Pizza Hut was apparently the sponsor of such materials beforehand). And third, for the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s sake, can we kindly not have schools be plastered with advertising? If the companies are so interested in education and materials, then they can give the money to the schools directly and without needing any advertisement in return. I’d say something about how schools are supposed to be teaching American values, but that’s obviously snarkable.
In a much more serious moment of stupidity, one carrying all sorts of consequences, a Florida man was convicted of murder because he lent his vehicle to a friend, who then committed violent crime and murder. Yep, lent his car to a friend, was nowhere near where the violence, but was convicted of being a murderer without firing a single shot. Welcome to America. More civilized countries eliminated this part of common law several decades ago. The prosecution made their entire case out of the argument that without the car, the crime wouldn’t have happened, and thus the man who lent the car is responsible for everything that was done with it, including the murder. So a man is serving life without parole for doing his friends a favor that he didn’t think would end in anything serious. How is that in any way justice?
For sheer hubris, and quiche, though, WingNutDaily takes the cake (which, according to what I have seen painted on many walls, is a lie). WND bitches about not being able to get interviews with major presidential candidates, saying that all they got from their interview requests were to be put on the campaign donation appeal lists. Which, if you believe them, is just not fair. Later on, however, they show off some of their sample questions.
So they’ve revealed themselves to be in fear of the Amero conspiracy, are probably anti-choice, and are pushing hard for homosexuals to be second-class citizens in law (Oh, by the way, the DOMA that Clinton passed, and all those state constitutional amendments aren’t good enough for you? Greedy bastards, aren’t you?). Not surprisingly, the Democrats told them to go bother someone else, as did Mayor 9/11 and Mr. Romney. Maybe when WingNutDaily stops being the place to go to get all the latest fundamentalist crap and starts being an actual news-type organization, they’ll get interviews. I might have a better shot at getting interviews with the candidates than they do.
I’m surprised that WND wasn’t crowing over the Westboro Baptist Church, which successfully got an injunction against Missouri's laws preventing picketing near funerals. The court involved believed that they might have a case in First Amendment grounds, and so granted the injunction. Well, one of the things everybody hates about free speech is that it means that people who you would give the finger to in real life are allowed to do the same to you. But at least most of us agree that we’d rather be flipping each other off than being whisked away to some re-education center in the middle of nowhere every time we said “Down with Big Brother”.
The Big Philosophical Discussion for tonight involves what I perceive to be two or three separate points from a post entitled Dead Heat on SuperWeed. The first is one that I think most people would agree with, that sex workers, and especially prostitutes, run a very severe danger of rape, abuse, and assault while they are in that profession, and that a large amount of sex workers do have one or more of the above happen to them, sometimes by law enforcement officers. A second thread that wraps around this core is that those who work in adult films and pornography are also prostitutes, because people are paying for sexual access to someone, even if they don’t touch them sexually in any direct way. Trying to tie this neatly into a package are statistics quoted that say over half of persons working as prostitutes (I am guessing by the classic definition rather than the re-definition mentioned above, but I could be wrong) were sexually assaulted as children, three-quarters of them struggle with drug addiction, and eight-four percent had been homeless at some point. Armed with those statistics, she comes to the conclusion that sex workers are so used to being objectified, and that the culture is so used to objectifying, that if they should be raped or killed or otherwise assaulted, it does not garner the attention that it should. Which is good. The further conclusions, in a comment defending herself from an accusation of being a Bible-thumper, I find a bit more suspect. Claiming experience with sex work, the original poster claims that sex work and pornography are women inflicting sexual violence on themselves, and that just about every person who goes into sex work does it because they were abused, tricked, forced, or hurt in some manner before they went into sex work. I will grant that there is probably a high percentage of people in prostitution where that is true, because prostitution is outlawed in the United States. I will even further grant that culture does objectify women as sexual beings first and other things later, and that objectification contributes to negative effects with regard to how males treats females sexually. But the claim that adult film actresses are prostitutes and that all forms of sex work visit violence upon the females that engage in it is stretching things a tad, I’d say. Because of the money it stands to make, and the requirements of being an adult film actor or actress as a profession, plus the ever-present implied threat of being one mistake away from the government closing you down, I’d say a large part of the danger in that kind of work has disappeared. Those who work as strippers, I can’t say with as much certainty, having no experience with those establishments, but I would guess, from anecdotes that I have heard from those who do, the rules are structured generally so that dancers and customers don’t touch, and may not even get close to each other, and the enforcers are vigilant people who won’t hesitate to give someone the non-refundable boot (and possibly bar them from attending for some amount of time) if they look like they’re going to get frisky. In each of these environments, though, I acknowledge that these are professionals working in a licensed and regulated environment, with oversight and means of recourse if things should get out of hand. Where I think the poster is most concerned about are those places that are unlicensed, unofficial, and quite illegal. In that environment, though, there’s no easy method of exacting justice when things go wrong, and no oversight body that will make examples of violators in a sufficiently nasty way that others will think very hard before putting someone else in that position. In situations like rape or violence, usually the victim, or the victim’s survivors, have no way of bringing the power of the constabulary down on their assailants, to have their charges and investigations taken seriously, or even worse, they’ll get sixty lashes for reporting their rape because they were engaging in something that was illegal at the time the crime was committed. That occasionally the police are the perpetrators of these assaults only makes things worse. Of the very real dangers described in that post, I suspect a large amount of them would disappear and there would be a sharp drop the statistics about prostitutes being the abused, the vagrant, and the addicted if all forms of sex work were legalized, even if then placed under a draconian regulation system. With the ability to exert force back, and probably with a few well-publicized instances where someone who assaulted a licensed worker got the return blow in the form of a hefty fine and jail time, the problems would lessen. At least, I think that would be true. There might even be a beneficial splash effect that the culture becomes more open about sexuality and changes their attitudes away from the size-comparison power contest into something more equitable and enjoyable for all parties involved.
Winding down for tonight, Evel Knievel was one lucky S.O.B., with all the injuries he sustained throughout his career and life. Perhaps he inspired, in some very small way, Claire Markwardt, who despite breaking her leg forty-five feet from the end of the state cross-country meet, crawled across the finish line. It’s being played up as a story of guts, heart, and the determination to finish, but it could also be just as easily a story of stupidity in making a bad thing worse, just to prove a point. Because the damage was fixable, and it looks like a full recovery will be made, it’s a heart story. If she were confined to a wheelchair after this, it probably would have been a stupidity story. How easily the balance tips from one to another.
Last for tonight, though, is a really fine obituary. That it’s for Robert Anton Wilson only makes it better. I think having a life where an obit like that could be written meant that you succeeded with the time that you had. And for all we know, just to screw with him, R.A.W. got reincarnated, probably against his better judgment, somewhere else in the world.
Today is the 66th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. While this attack is studied in United States history classes and is considered the day that lives in infamy, because of a radio speech not soon afterward, it is the other event, when America attacked Japan, that is the day that needs to be most remembered for introducing us to what really happens when you use atomic weaponry on civilian populations.
In the middle of all this selling of LiveJournal, more issues continue to crop up - this one is currently being attributed to SixApart, but it appears crude and ineffective language filters are being used in an attempt to stop searching for "forbidden" interests. The problem is that they appear to be working in a manner where any word or phrase that holds the forbidden character sequence is not searchable. “spice” is unsearchable because it contains “spic”, a slur. Of course, as with all implemented forbidden lists, it is by no means complete. And like all poorly designed filters, it stops legitimate queries. Not to mention that those who are being supposedly targeted are unlikely to be using the forbidden words, anyway. Unthinking reaction is swell, isn’t it?
There have been more posts in the various communities of
lj_2008 and lj_policy, including an update on the flagging and filtering, where the filtering of words problem has been brought to prominence. The new overlords are probably getting an excellent idea of what the plebes are like when things happen that we notice and don’t like. This either means the issues will be addressed or will be hidden with even more subtlety.Now running out of time on his presidency and with the likelihood of his legacy being written in blood as an evil, evil, man, George W. Bush has been doing a lot of backpedaling. First, he got a Mideast peace talk going. Now, he's politely asking North Korea to disclose its nuclear specifics and utilize the diplomatic table. Considering how well his wars have turned out, maybe he’s finally figured out that he doesn’t have the stuff in manpower or money to start a third one with either of the nuclear powers he’s most worried about. R. Emmett Tyrell Jr. has a much more rose-colored picture of Mr. Bush, confidently declaring in Bush Is Back that the surge is working (truncating Rep. Murtha’s words), the economy is strong, and that Iran and Libya stopped their nuclear programs because the United States invaded and thumped Iraq so soundly. He even turns Mr. Bush’s outright refusal to continue funding embryonic stem cell research lines into a positive because scientists found a possible alternative using skin cells. The alternative may not have been found as quickly with the ability to use embryonic stem cells, but I’m fairly certain it would have been found if and when the amount of embryos were exhausted, or research demand outpaced supply, or any one of a hundred more things. But no, it’s the president’s insistence that embryos be destroyed rather than put to scientific purpose that produced this. All glory to the hypnotoad.
The United States Senate exercised bad judgment, attaching a provision that would have expanded hate crime categories to include homosexuals to a defense spending authorization. Way to make someone choose between their hatred of Iraq’s war and their desire to see homosexuals protected. The provision went down in flames, the defense bill may make it to Mr. Bush’s desk before the end of the year. It wasn’t said whether there were any troop withdrawal deadlines in this defense package.
The House doesn’t escape scrutiny, however. Originally reported that a bill called the SAFE Act would require anyone who offered an open Wi-Fi connection to report any "obscene" material or be fined up to $300,000 passed the House, but the actual language is a little bit more abstract than that. Ars Technica interprets the language to say that monitoring is not required, but if one should happen across obscene material, then one must report it. The Democrat who sponsored the bill said that his intent was to get ISPs, social-networking sites, registrars, and e-mail service providers to report things , not to force anyone offering a WiFi hotspot to get into the act. As always, things using “obscene” as a definition will have to deal with potentially vague “community standards” as well. So your hentai and yaoi of characters under 18 may be safe in one place, and obscene somewhere else. As might fanart. There’s wiggle room in the law for definitions, but the potential fine stomp will probably have people erring on the side of caution rather than freedom in those grey areas. To examine the language of the bill for yourself and make decisions on just how much people will be affected, consult THOMAS's reference to H.R. 3791, the SAFE act of 2007.
Dan Gainor believes he’s found a nice hypocrisy in pointing out that the U.N. Conference on climate change is happening in Bali, and all the people that are going to nice weather, at great cost, to then talk about what he sees as an unacceptable cost to the United States if they would adopt some greenhouse-fighting protocols. More than just financially, he sees a plot to control people’s lives through getting everyone on board to be more energy-efficient and greener. And the costs of doing so are just too much, and if the U.S. adopted Kyoto or its replacement, then the United Nations would just drain the United States dry with such spending requests. I have to ask - are we still in arrears over our United Nations dues over the last few years? And has anyone run very long-term numbers for economic savings on these matters? Might cost a good chunk of change now, but does that get made back and-then-some over time? A trillion here to save three later? Might be worth the investment, then.
In a rare glimpse into the lives of the Roma, a Southern California court is hearing the case regarding two clans that are feuding over fortune-telling businesses set up by one clan near another. There were apparently demands for money, and eventually, an alleged break-in. Relations have gone downhill from there.
Having spoken his mind to the world, Mitt Romney now gets to reap the consequences of that airing out. First, before the commentary, a complete transcription of Mr. Romney's speech, so that all my see and make comment on his words. Many of them, are profoundly negative. The most lukewarm of responses, from Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council, praised Mr. Romney for saying things about religion in public life, but noted that his religion was still a stumbling block for them. This lukewarm praise despite having used several "code-words" in his speech to try to tell evangelicals that he would do as they did. On the other end of the spectrum, The Slacktivist describes how Romney believes those who don't have the "right" religion are enemies of freedom, and that government is the only one qualified to determine what the "right" religion is, based on his choicest sound bite. The Questionable Authority also takes issue with Romney’s God-talk and says only through not recognizing anyone's god officially can the country be free to worship and recognize their own gods. And that includes, by definition, those who recognize no god at all, whom Mr. Romney was clearly against. Rounding out the Romney coverage, The General weighs in on why religion does matter in candidates, even if he does manage to make good on the promise that the religion will not directly interfere with his presidency. The General suggests that Romney may be a president in the vein of the current president, claiming God is on his side, despite whatever evidence accrues to the contrary.
Now to making fun of Bill’O and those who believe a little too seriously about Christmas’s require Christ-centricness, a comic that made Comics I don’t Understand go LOL - a call where one issue is clearly not being related to another.
Continuing with the trend of showing opinions in sequence with each other, a message for those who believe in moving goalposts that are always out of reach. Shapely Prose calls it The Fantasy of Being Thin, seeing it in the context of the perpetual dieter who always thinks they’ll be better once they’re thin, not realizing that they can be all the things they want to be, and can do it at their current body shape, too. None of this “I wish I was a bit taller, I wish I was a baller” sort of stuff.
The Commodore 64 is still a much-loved machine, despite being out of production and way outclassed by today’s machines. I think it’s because almost everyone had a good experience with their Commodore computer, learning the syntax and being able to do important things like play games. It’s been twenty-five years since the Commodore arrived - we’ve gone from the sound chip to symphonies playing the music in those games. It’s been really cool. What’s the next 25 years going to do? For those who speak mathematics, which often sounds like a foreign language, an open-source free software program called Sage is taking on commercial applications like Matlab for high-power number-crunching. Hrm... open-source, collaborative and potentially no cost, and it can supposedly do all the things normal math research needs? If it lives up to the billing, Sage could be quite the coup.
One more piece in the puzzle of finding an Earthlike extrasolar planet - an Earth-based telescope, after a lot of measurements and filtering, has determined the atmospheric content of an extrasolar planet. So, we have a good list of possible earthlikes, then if we can measure atmospheres, we might have an idea which planets could develop life like ours. At that point, though, if the probes do find life like ours... how do we do the whole communicating thing? Much like learning a foreign language, no doubt.
I can hear the crowing of several groups already. According to researchers at Columbia University, watching violent media repeatedly appears to inhibit the brain's ability to control aggressive behavior. Now someone will say that they have a reason to ban all that icky violent video game and television stuff, because now it’s proven that repeated viewings makes people more violent. However, what the research says is that real-life conditions have not been tested, and that some enterprising researcher in the future should do that, and see if something else doesn’t kick in to regulate the apparent loss of control over aggression.
Tonight’s “D’oh!” moment comes from a deli display that wants to include its Jewish friends in a celebration of one of their holidays...by putting it on food that’s not kosher. D’oh.
Involving food, and a similar sort of misstep, McDonalds fronted the cost for printing a school's report card, and in return, the report card had some advertising for McDonalds on it. First, it’s just sad that the school doesn’t have enough money in the budget (or thinks that it’s a good idea) that they outsource the printing of their progress reports. Second, McDonalds is not the first choice I would have for such a partnership (Pizza Hut was apparently the sponsor of such materials beforehand). And third, for the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s sake, can we kindly not have schools be plastered with advertising? If the companies are so interested in education and materials, then they can give the money to the schools directly and without needing any advertisement in return. I’d say something about how schools are supposed to be teaching American values, but that’s obviously snarkable.
In a much more serious moment of stupidity, one carrying all sorts of consequences, a Florida man was convicted of murder because he lent his vehicle to a friend, who then committed violent crime and murder. Yep, lent his car to a friend, was nowhere near where the violence, but was convicted of being a murderer without firing a single shot. Welcome to America. More civilized countries eliminated this part of common law several decades ago. The prosecution made their entire case out of the argument that without the car, the crime wouldn’t have happened, and thus the man who lent the car is responsible for everything that was done with it, including the murder. So a man is serving life without parole for doing his friends a favor that he didn’t think would end in anything serious. How is that in any way justice?
For sheer hubris, and quiche, though, WingNutDaily takes the cake (which, according to what I have seen painted on many walls, is a lie). WND bitches about not being able to get interviews with major presidential candidates, saying that all they got from their interview requests were to be put on the campaign donation appeal lists. Which, if you believe them, is just not fair. Later on, however, they show off some of their sample questions.
- At what point do agreements with other nations begin endangering the sovereignty of the U.S., such as the Security and Prosperity Partnership, NAFTA highways and the like?
- Share with us your position on Roe v. Wade and when life begins
- Would you support a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to one woman and one man?
So they’ve revealed themselves to be in fear of the Amero conspiracy, are probably anti-choice, and are pushing hard for homosexuals to be second-class citizens in law (Oh, by the way, the DOMA that Clinton passed, and all those state constitutional amendments aren’t good enough for you? Greedy bastards, aren’t you?). Not surprisingly, the Democrats told them to go bother someone else, as did Mayor 9/11 and Mr. Romney. Maybe when WingNutDaily stops being the place to go to get all the latest fundamentalist crap and starts being an actual news-type organization, they’ll get interviews. I might have a better shot at getting interviews with the candidates than they do.
I’m surprised that WND wasn’t crowing over the Westboro Baptist Church, which successfully got an injunction against Missouri's laws preventing picketing near funerals. The court involved believed that they might have a case in First Amendment grounds, and so granted the injunction. Well, one of the things everybody hates about free speech is that it means that people who you would give the finger to in real life are allowed to do the same to you. But at least most of us agree that we’d rather be flipping each other off than being whisked away to some re-education center in the middle of nowhere every time we said “Down with Big Brother”.
The Big Philosophical Discussion for tonight involves what I perceive to be two or three separate points from a post entitled Dead Heat on SuperWeed. The first is one that I think most people would agree with, that sex workers, and especially prostitutes, run a very severe danger of rape, abuse, and assault while they are in that profession, and that a large amount of sex workers do have one or more of the above happen to them, sometimes by law enforcement officers. A second thread that wraps around this core is that those who work in adult films and pornography are also prostitutes, because people are paying for sexual access to someone, even if they don’t touch them sexually in any direct way. Trying to tie this neatly into a package are statistics quoted that say over half of persons working as prostitutes (I am guessing by the classic definition rather than the re-definition mentioned above, but I could be wrong) were sexually assaulted as children, three-quarters of them struggle with drug addiction, and eight-four percent had been homeless at some point. Armed with those statistics, she comes to the conclusion that sex workers are so used to being objectified, and that the culture is so used to objectifying, that if they should be raped or killed or otherwise assaulted, it does not garner the attention that it should. Which is good. The further conclusions, in a comment defending herself from an accusation of being a Bible-thumper, I find a bit more suspect. Claiming experience with sex work, the original poster claims that sex work and pornography are women inflicting sexual violence on themselves, and that just about every person who goes into sex work does it because they were abused, tricked, forced, or hurt in some manner before they went into sex work. I will grant that there is probably a high percentage of people in prostitution where that is true, because prostitution is outlawed in the United States. I will even further grant that culture does objectify women as sexual beings first and other things later, and that objectification contributes to negative effects with regard to how males treats females sexually. But the claim that adult film actresses are prostitutes and that all forms of sex work visit violence upon the females that engage in it is stretching things a tad, I’d say. Because of the money it stands to make, and the requirements of being an adult film actor or actress as a profession, plus the ever-present implied threat of being one mistake away from the government closing you down, I’d say a large part of the danger in that kind of work has disappeared. Those who work as strippers, I can’t say with as much certainty, having no experience with those establishments, but I would guess, from anecdotes that I have heard from those who do, the rules are structured generally so that dancers and customers don’t touch, and may not even get close to each other, and the enforcers are vigilant people who won’t hesitate to give someone the non-refundable boot (and possibly bar them from attending for some amount of time) if they look like they’re going to get frisky. In each of these environments, though, I acknowledge that these are professionals working in a licensed and regulated environment, with oversight and means of recourse if things should get out of hand. Where I think the poster is most concerned about are those places that are unlicensed, unofficial, and quite illegal. In that environment, though, there’s no easy method of exacting justice when things go wrong, and no oversight body that will make examples of violators in a sufficiently nasty way that others will think very hard before putting someone else in that position. In situations like rape or violence, usually the victim, or the victim’s survivors, have no way of bringing the power of the constabulary down on their assailants, to have their charges and investigations taken seriously, or even worse, they’ll get sixty lashes for reporting their rape because they were engaging in something that was illegal at the time the crime was committed. That occasionally the police are the perpetrators of these assaults only makes things worse. Of the very real dangers described in that post, I suspect a large amount of them would disappear and there would be a sharp drop the statistics about prostitutes being the abused, the vagrant, and the addicted if all forms of sex work were legalized, even if then placed under a draconian regulation system. With the ability to exert force back, and probably with a few well-publicized instances where someone who assaulted a licensed worker got the return blow in the form of a hefty fine and jail time, the problems would lessen. At least, I think that would be true. There might even be a beneficial splash effect that the culture becomes more open about sexuality and changes their attitudes away from the size-comparison power contest into something more equitable and enjoyable for all parties involved.
Winding down for tonight, Evel Knievel was one lucky S.O.B., with all the injuries he sustained throughout his career and life. Perhaps he inspired, in some very small way, Claire Markwardt, who despite breaking her leg forty-five feet from the end of the state cross-country meet, crawled across the finish line. It’s being played up as a story of guts, heart, and the determination to finish, but it could also be just as easily a story of stupidity in making a bad thing worse, just to prove a point. Because the damage was fixable, and it looks like a full recovery will be made, it’s a heart story. If she were confined to a wheelchair after this, it probably would have been a stupidity story. How easily the balance tips from one to another.
Last for tonight, though, is a really fine obituary. That it’s for Robert Anton Wilson only makes it better. I think having a life where an obit like that could be written meant that you succeeded with the time that you had. And for all we know, just to screw with him, R.A.W. got reincarnated, probably against his better judgment, somewhere else in the world.
