“With all the technology that we have at our disposal, both in preventing and fighting wildfires, this
worrisome trend can be reversed if proper action is taken.”
Right. Bet you can reverse global warming too. Go ahead. Try it. Please.
“Our constituents have been limited in their ability to go outside and safely breathe due to the
dangerous air quality the wildfire smoke has created. In our neck of the woods, summer months
are the best time of the year to spend time outdoors recreating, enjoying time with family, and
creating new memories, but this wildfire smoke makes it difficult to do all those things.”
Oh poor babies. That’s not the case here in Canada. Nope. Not at all.
And yeah, never mind the loss of trees, the increase in carbon emissions (and, then, further increase in warming, leading to further fires), and the loss of lives. You can’t recreate outdoors, enjoy time with family, and create new memories. That’s what’s important. Got it.
“Canada has been a friendly neighbor of the United States and the states we represent …” Excuse me? What states do you represent? Are you sure?
“We look forward to your response.”
Okay, here it is: You want fewer forest fires? Reduce your fossil fuel emissions. That’s what’s largely causing global warming, which is increasing the number and severity of forest fires.
So why don’t you go ahead with that and in the meantime, we’ll see if we can change the direction of the wind for you.
“I can’t remember the last time I asked a medical student in tutorial group a question that was answered without looking at a screen.”
And this:
“We have a 1M master solution, we need to make a 50 mL of buffer that has that component at 10 mM, how much do we need to add?”
Blank stares, followed by reaching for calculators (and in more recent times phones). I stop them immediately and tell them:
“Do it in your head”.
They can’t. I tell them the answer (500 microliters), then we move to the next component, which also has to be at 10 mM, but the master solution is 5M.
“How much do we need to add”?
Blank stares again. Nobody can figure out to just divide the already arrived at answer for the 1M master solution of 500 by 5, no that is too hard. They start doing the calculation from scratch…
That was the already preexisting condition to which AI is being added now…
The takeaway? Always check your prescription dosage labels yourself.
A compassionate and frightening and optimistic near future that’s right here and almost right now.
There are so many whole paragraphs I wanted to copy … p62, p238, p269
“Things are gonna get so much worse in the years to come. More fires. More floods. More trauma, and that means more of this shit, people lashing out, looking for someone else to blame because they can’t punch their ancestors in the face for failing to act a hundred years ago.” p269
“There’s some stuff we can’t change. The heat we’ve sunk into the ocean? it’s gonna melt the ice caps. No one’s gonna repeal the second law of thermodynamics. Habitat loss is going to keep pushing animals into new territories where they have no predators—and hwere no one has any resistance to the diseases they carry. …” p269
The Blue Helmets are just amazing.
Read it. Just …. read it. Boomers to Zoomer. Read it.
“…sex is a biological fact while gender is patriarchal fiction; the gender system is a hierarchy, not a binary; persons taking on a “gender identity” affiliate themselves with sexist stereotypes, not any innate bodily reality; it is wrong to perform medical experiments on children in the service of “congruence” with regressive cultural ideals; males are not female and remain members of the dominant sex class regardless of how they “identify,” continuing to pose the very same very real threats to women and girls as do their more straightforward (or less deluded) brothers.”
“Put bluntly, “gender” makes feminism impossible.” [but read that whole paragraph, para 5, to see how that’s the summary sentence]
“To bring on the return to a clear-eyed view of the status quo, Lecuona advises that we as feminists quit talking about “gender.” Instead, we’d do well to reacquaint ourselves with the reality-based terminology of our foresisters: sex and sexism, sex roles and sex class, sexist stereotypes, sexual equality, male supremacy and female subordination.” Yes. YES!!
None of these quotes (all from The Unmade Bed by Stephen Marche) are representative of what the book’s about, but they do reveal, perhaps unintentionally, Marche’s subtitle, “The messy truth about men and women in the 21st century”.
“Eventually, David Granger, the editor-in-chief of Esquire, read something I’d written for the Toronto Star and called to ask me if I wanted a column in his magazine.” p42
It’s stuff like that that sends me into a rage. Thinking back to the twenty or thirty queries I sent out, each with five to ten pieces … And I didn’t even get a reply. Except for one, in which I was told that one had to work as a reporter for ten years or so before one is offered a column. (Apparently not.) Marche doesn’t recognize that if the Star piece had been written by Stephanie Marche, Granger would most likely not have contacted him. It’s quite possible Granger wouldn’t even have read the piece. Quite possibly because it would never have appeared in the Star in the first place. The ‘Jane/John’ studies go back decades (what ‘John’ writes it taken more seriously and given higher value than what ‘Jane’ writes, even though they’re identical) and was just recently validated by the Martin and Nicole thing (https://www.elle.com.au/culture/news/male-and-female-email-signature-sexism-experiment-8328/).
“Every fourteen-year-old boy with an Internet connection has seen a woman anally penetrated with a baseball bat.” p110
Seriously? Well, no wonder then. There’s no way women are ever going to be taken seriously, for their abilities and aspirations. Not until pornography is illegal (which is, really, a no-brainer, given hate speech laws). Until then, women, don’t waste your time. (And, men, why aren’t you trying to get it illegalized? Do you not see the damage it’s doing to you as well? Y’all can’t even have pleasurable consensual sex with a real woman anymore.) And, women, I guess it’s fair to say that every time you meet a man, assume something like that is going through his mind. And act accordingly. (And men, don’t you even think of complaining about that.)
“Virtually every feminist scholar and female critic of any kind has to endure outright threats of physical harm.” p152
And y’all wonder why we hate you. Get a clue.
“The typical eleventh grade boy writes at the same level as an eighth grade girl.” p164
How is it then that they become our supervisors?? Ah. Because they can’t see any one of without picturing us giving some dick a blowjob. And it’s because they play by different rules, rules whereby it’s okay to exaggerate, to lie, to cheat, to bribe, to threaten.
“You are a fucking disgrace. You have RAPED someone you claim you love and now dare to be upset that she’s upset about it. Why are you all such dicks? What’s wrong with you? WHAT The ACTUAL FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU? …” p222
“This is how it feels when someone doesn’t stop, I say to him. You don’t like it, do you? You don’t like it at all, you pathetic piece of shit.” p246
“YES, I KNOW NOT ALL OF YOU DO IT, BUT ALL OF YOU CAN DO IT. THAT’S The POINT; THAT’S The FUCKING POINT.
The fear is always there. The threat is always there. Because, really, unless you are a fucking championship kick-boxer or something, if you are ever alone with a man, all he has to do is decide to do it and he’ll be able to. …
If only they could have a day of feeling as scared as we do. Please just let them have one day. Of not having the power, of us having it instead. …” p247
“I wasn’t crazy … You made me crazy.” p252
“You don’t see a problem with a man who probably hasn’t ever been violated getting to decide what counts as a violation? … ” p272
“It’s the violation that’s the violence, don’t you see? It’s knowing your boundaries mean bugger-all that’s the trauma—that anyone can touch you, that how you feel about it doesn’t count. That’s the trauma. That’s the violence. …” p272
Annoyance is the least of it. Especially when it happens in the workplace, it’s distracting; let’s just get the job done.
Then there’s the disgust, the eew factor, of a man jiggling his crotch, for example, while looking at us. We do not find that appealing; we are not aroused by that.
Then there’s the insult: to be always sexualized as if there’s nothing else to oneself.
Then there’s the intimidation: if this, then what next?
Men, do you get all this? When you make sexual comments, when you brush up against us, etc., etc.,?
(Note that ‘compliment’ isn’t on the list. AT ALL.)
In In Our Time, Susan Brownmiller, the author of the ground-breaking Against Our Will tell what it was like, the second-wave feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Highly recommended.
p2 re jobs for men and women
p5-6 what it was like before abortion was legal
“Women the world over are required to modify their behavior because of things that men fear and do.” p13
p35-39 the Miss America event
(I was reading this chapter the day I paddled past a group of young people having fun on the beach, one young woman wearing a thong ‘bathing suit’ – I almost pulled over to say something, but my god, where to begin; a week later, I paddled past the same spot, similar group, the young men in board shorts—not codpiece thongs—having lots of fun splashing around and swimming, the young women almost naked and very limited in their movements, walking across the sand in tiny steps as if they’d just learned how to walk, waving their hands as they stepped into the water as if they were afraid … and I got so fucking angry … it was all for nothing, the 60s and 70s, what those women did …it’s like we need to start women’s liberation all over again, start consciousness-raising groups again) (read Alix Kates Shulman’s Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen)
“The personal is political! Housework is political. Abortion is political. Standards of feminine beauty are political. Women’s oppression is political. Sexual satisfaction is political. A re-evaluation of male-female relations is political.” p45
Ruth Hershberger (Adam’s Rib, 1948) must have felt the same way about the 1950s. Again and again and again … how many times do we have to ‘discover’ all this shit??
about Naomi Weisstein, Ph.D. from Harvard, first in her class, “wound up in the tiny psychology department at Loyola after a humiliating round of job interviews punctuated by ‘Who did your research?’ and’ ‘How can a little girl like you teach a great big class of men?’ p51
the same old same old … Women saying simply “Women must take control of our bodies … We must define our own issues. We will take the struggle to our homes, to our jobs, to the streets.” and the men went berserk, screaming “Take her off the stage and fuck her!” “Take off your clothes!” “I’ll go to the streets with you. Down an alley!”
Again with the sexualizing us to reduce us. (Which is why it is sooooo annoying when women voluntarily sexualize themselves.
In the 1970s, Good Housekeeping, Seventeen, and so many others were run by men. In The Ladies’ Home Journal, more than half of the articles were written by men. p83-4
So if you read these magazines, you’re listening to a man telling you how to look, how to act …
So articles you’d never get to read … “How to Get a Divorce”, “How to Have an Orgasm”, What to Tell your Draft-age Son”, “How Detergents Harm our Rivers and Streams” …
“… men speak to woman through the bias of their male supremacist concepts” p85
[…the magazine’ purports to serve the interests of mothers and housewives” but doesn’t provide free daycare facilities on the premises for its employees’ children. p85
And still, 55 years later, so many ads in women’s magazines degrade women.
And still, 55 years later, so many “celebrity articles [are] oriented toward the preservation of youth…” p86
In 1971, an abortion ban challenge, Abele v. Markle, the judge ruled that the 850 plaintiffs lacked legal standing because they were not pregnant and thus had “an inusiufficient personal stake in the outcome” p118 (but read the whole chapter)
unfuckingbelievable.
Roraback had to actually argue that all women of childbearing age had a direct personal stake in the outcome.
…the classic Women’s Liberation position: “Pregnancy to a woman is one of the most determinative aspects of life. It disrupts her body, it disrupts her education, it disrupts her employment, and it often disrupts her entire family life.” p130
“… the internal damage to people’s psyches that resulted from years of conforming to low expectations” p145
“Lester Bernstein, my old boss in Nation … I’d thought he had understood my frustration and boredom. But now he inquired with puzzled sincerity, ‘When you worked here, Susan [Brownmiller] did you have ambition?’ / For two years not a week had gone by without my asking if I could ‘do more’. He hadn’t noticed.” p145-6
So they’re not cruel. They’re just clueless?
Even so, that doesn’t absolve them. If you are in a position of responsibility, you’d better NOT be clueless.
re Shere Hite’s The Hite Report – the all-male sales department hated the book so much, it got a small first printing p254
And another thing (from Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes): the guy who considered his football game to be far more important than knowing whether or not his girlfriend was pregnant. Not unusual. Most men worship football.
Guys, especially jocks—you have been brainwashed. It’s a fucking GAME. A game of tag with a game of catch. To see which side ends up with the highest score. That’s all.*
Compared to any one of being pregnant, giving birth, and having complete responsibility for the survival (and, hopefully, the flourishing) of another human being, your little football game is not even on the same scale. To think otherwise suggests a disconnect from reality akin to psychosis.
Why don’t women say more, a lot more, about how fucking important it is? How consequential?
Some do. And get dismissed. Because, same old same old, anything a woman does must be both unimportant and inconsequential.
And the others? They’ve been drugged by their bodies to forget, or at least minimize, the pain: of pregnancy (a condition that lasts for nine months compared to a mere ninety minutes); of giving birth (a condition that can last for days and can easily be more painful than tearing your ACL, several times) (yeah, the baby tears its way out). And they’ve been similarly brainwashed, not to inflate but to minimize the consequences (goodbye bladder control and fifteen years of plans and aspirations).
*Unless you’re of the 1% of high school players who end up playing pro. Then it’s a job; you get paid. So, consequential. But need I point out that far less than 1% of women get paid to be pregnant? And those who do get paid get maybe $20,000? For the nine months of being pregnant and the twenty-four hours of giving birth. Compared $5 million. For 14 games. That’s about $350,000 for an hour and a half. Yes, there’s the training. But women are pregnant 24 hrs/day. Men don’t train 24 hrs/day.
Jodi Picoult’s excellent novel, Nineteen Minutes, got me thinking, yet again, about when people (most often males) claim they were “just kidding around” or that it was “just a joke”, what they really mean is “I don’t want to be held accountable for what I just did.”
And it’s appalling that such immaturity persists well into adulthood.
"We License Plumbers and Pilots - Why Not Parents?"At Issue: Is Parenthood a Right or a Privilege? ed. Stefan Kiesbye (Greenhaven, 2009); Current Controversies: Child Abuse, ed. Lucinda Almond (Thomson/Gale, 2006); Seattle Post-Intelligencer (October 2004)
"A Humanist View of Animal Rights"New Humanist September 99; The New Zealand Rationalist and Humanist Winter 98; Humanist in Canada Winter 97
have been previously published in Canadian Woman Studies, Herizons, Humanist in Canada, The Humanist, and The Philosopher's Magazine - contact Peg for acknowledgement details.
ImpactAn extended confrontation between a sexual assault victim and her assailants, as part of an imagined slightly revised court process, in order to understand why they did what they did and, on that basis, to make a recommendation to the court regarding sentence does not go … as expected.
What Happened to TomTom, like many men, assumes that since pregnancy is a natural part of being a woman, it’s no big deal: a woman finds herself pregnant, she does or does not go through with it, end of story. But then …
Aiding the EnemyWhen Private Ann Jones faces execution for “aiding the enemy,” she points to American weapons manufacturers who sell to whatever country is in the market.
Bang BangWhen a young boy playing “Cops and Robbers” jumps out at a man passing by, the man shoots him, thinking the boy’s toy gun is real. Who’s to blame?
ForeseeableAn awful choice in a time of war. Whose choice was it really?
Exile (full-length drama) Finalist, WriteMovies; Quarterfinalist, Fade-In.
LJ lives in a U . S. of A., with a new Three Strikes Law: first crime, rehab; second crime, prison; third crime, you’re simply kicked out – permanently exiled to a designated remote area, to fend for yourself without the benefits of society. At least he used to live in that new U. S. of A. He’s just committed his third crime.
What Happened to Tom (full-length drama) Semifinalist, Moondance.
This guy wakes up to find his body’s been hijacked and turned into a human kidney dialysis machine – for nine months.
Aiding the Enemy (full-length drama and short drama)
When Private Ann Jones faces execution for “aiding the enemy,” she points to American weapons manufacturers who sell to whatever country is in the market.
Bang Bang (short drama 30min) Finalist, Gimme Credit; Quarter-finalist, American Gem.
When a young boy playing “Cops and Robbers” jumps out at a man passing by, the man shoots him, thinking the boy’s toy gun is real. Who’s to blame?
Foreseeable (short drama 30min)
An awful choice in a time of war. Whose choice was it really?
What is Wrong with this Picture?
Nothing. There’s no reason women can’t be the superordinates and men the subordinates. But life’s not like that (yet).
Minding Our Own Business A collection of skits (including “The Price is Not Quite Right,” “Singin’ in the (Acid) Rain,” “Adverse Reactions,” “The Band-Aid Solution,” and “See Jane. See Dick.”) with a not-so-subtle environmental message
Rot in Hell A soapbox zealot and an atheist face off…
