Sep 07 2020

Elizabeth May, Losing Confidence

“If I were inventing democracy from scratch, I would not have invented political parties” (p17). Yes! “Mindless partisanship insists on a team mentality. My team versus your team …” (p17).

“Decisions are made on the basis of public opinion research far more than on the basis of policy analysis by the civil service” (p75). Yeah, when did THAT start to happen?

“If a citizen truly needs the intermediation of a lobby to get the attention of policy-makers in Ottawa … then we have no real democracy” (p173).

And then there’s the FPTP (First Past the Post) system Canada uses. In the 2008 election, “The Bloc won 50 seats with 1.3 million votes, while the NDP won 37 seats with 2.4 million votes. The Green Party won just under 1 million votes … yet won no seats” (p199). ‘Nuff said.

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Aug 29 2020

The Corporation – Joel Bakan

Well worth the read! (A surprising, but not, answer to what the fuck is wrong with our world? How have we gotten to the point of no return?)

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Jul 21 2020

Prayer

Check out https://deadwildroses.com/2020/05/03/the-dwr-sunday-religious-disservice-jesus-is-a-dick/

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Apr 01 2020

from David Brin’s “Detritus Affected”

“Physicians swear a Hippocratic Oath whose central vow is ‘do no harm’. I wonder–how many other professions might do well to set that goal above all others?”

Excellent question.

“Look, see this broken plastic wheel? Part of a cheap toy, circa 1970. Giveaway prize in some fast food outlet’s promotional kiddie meal. Seventy grams of carboniferous petroleum cooked under limestone sediments for two hundred million years, only to be sucked up, refined, press-moulded, passed across a counter, squealed over, and then tossed in next week’s trash.”

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Mar 17 2020

Capernaum – HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Capernaum (movie) currently on netflix.ca – HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

It will stay with you for the rest of your life.

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Dec 29 2019

Opposition to the practice of sexual intercourse

“Interestingly, these two women, Swiney and Elmy, made clear their opposition to the practice of sexual intercourse. This practice has become so sacred that it is almost impossible to imagine any serious challenge being made to it. What we have seen in the last hundred years is the total and compulsory enforcement of that sexual practice upon women so that women are allowed absolutely no outlet or escape from it.

“But at the end of the nineteenth century, there were feminists who were prepared to challenge intercourse. They were prepared to say, for instance, that it was dangerous for women’s health; that it led to unwanted pregnancies or forced women to use forms of technology, contraception, that reduced them simply to objects for men’s use; that it humiliated women and made them into things. Feminists pointed out that sexual diseases transmitted through sexual intercourse were dangerous to women’s lives. They felt sexual intercourse to be a humiliating practice because it showed men’s dominance more obviously than anything else. They believed that this practice should take place only for the purposes of reproduction, maybe every three or four years. I know these are ideas which if you voiced them today would make people think that you had taken leave of your senses. But these were ideas that were absolutely mainstream [at the time]…”

from “Sexology and Antifeminism,” Sheila Jeffreys (italics mine), in The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism, Dorchen Leidholdt and Janice G. Raymond, eds.

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Nov 26 2019

Top Guns

I just read about the 588th Night Bomber Regiment of the Soviet Air Force, consisting of pilots who “flew in stealth mode at night and dropped precision bombs on German targets.  The women pilots were all in their late teens and early twenties, and they flew about 30,000 missions between 1941 and 1945.”  (p89 Kristen R. Ghodsee, Why women have better sex under socialism and other arguments for economic independence, p.89).

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Nov 24 2019

History, the News, Men, Women, Life, Death, Joy, Pain

History, many say, is nothing but violence, war, death …

Yes, because men write it.

If women wrote history, maybe we’d put something else center stage.  Maybe themselves.

And maybe if all that violence didn’t make the front page, there’d be less of it.

And if men became unimportant, then what they did would become unimportant.

But pain, death—it can’t help but be important.

Yes, but there’s been more birth than death.

More joy than pain?

Perhaps.  What I feel when I’m out paddling, the sparkles on the lake, the music in my headphones, it’ll never make the news.  For others, it’s the delight of a child’s giggle.  For others still, the swell of new knowledge gained or an antique restored.  These things do not make the news. 

(But how powerful a new car is?  That makes the news.  Every fucking day.)

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Nov 16 2019

When men are raped

When men are raped, as they often are in prison, does anyone ask them are they sure they didn’t want it?  Does anyone come even close to suggesting they asked for it, they are to be blamed for it?  Is anyone quick to add ‘alleged’ to the report?

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Sep 29 2019

Educating Women to Reduce Over-population. Right. They’re the problem.

So the other day I came across, yet again, mention of the idea that educating women would reduce over-population. (Right. They’re the problem.)  I find that questionable.

If education makes the difference, then why aren’t we educating the men as well?  And if the men are already educated, then clearly education isn’t the solution: they’re still impregnating/reproducing.  (Perhaps advocates of such a solution are imagining that an educated woman is going to tell her uneducated husband or other would-be-impregnator to not stick his penis in her vagina, and the man will say ‘Okay’ and go do something else.)

I suggest that if we want to reduce over-population, we need to get rid of sexism. In a sexist society, men are valued more than women, so people want to have at least one son, so they keep reproducing until their goal is met. No sexism, no pressure to produce male babies, less reproduction.

In a sexist society, women have little control over their bodies, so contraception and abortion are often not easily available. No sexism, no mandatory pregnancy, less reproduction.

In a sexist society, men feel entitled to use women sexually without their consent. No sexism, no rape, less reproduction.


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