October 2nd is Mahatma Gandhi's birthday, which is a national holiday in India called, Ganghi Jayanti. Since 2007, October 2nd is also International Day of
Nonviolence. Would that we had 364 such days and people actually celebrated them and the ideas put forth by Gandhi and other practitioners of nonviolence.
All posts by James O'Keefe
Extradite Polanski!
On "Getting Over It," by Lauren over at Feministe (cited from Boing Boing):
What
does rape do to you? Afterward? It changed me; there is before and
after. Before, a child, playing with Barbies, looking sideways at boys,
wondering. After, confusion. Depression. A litany of fuck-ups and
fuck-its, whatevers, mistakes, trusting no one, least of all myself.
Before, sex was mysterious; after, miasma. I was tarred as a Lolita. I
was called jail bait.Rape is not the only assault. Around rape is a large segment of the
population that questions the victim, a culture that looks down on
victims for allowing themselves to be victimized, or keep them
victimized, questions about the victim's credibility, questions about
the legacy of rape and how bad it is, because how bad is rape really?
Rape, because various levels and forms of sexual assault are systemic
and pervasive across all societies, exists alongside one's experiences
of unwanted touching, wanted touching, sexual objectification, sexual
desire, sexual harassment, incest, love, leering eyes, cat calls,
roaming hands, consent, confusion, tits, vagina, rectum, penis, mouth,
rape and not-rape, all of it loaded, all of it veering at rape's ugly
legacy, co-mingling, the legacy that tells us to be more careful, to
dress more conservatively, to BE BETTER AT BEING VULNERABLE, or BE MORE
POWERFUL, or BE MORE FEARFUL, or GET OVER IT ALREADY. Rape leaks into
healthy, consensual experiences. It lingers. It pervades.
There is more at the Boing Boing post about Polanski using alcohol and a Quaalude to make it easier to rape her, a link to her testimony clearly indicating that she said no and a quote from Polanski that everyone wants to have sex with girls. This guy is amazing. Perhaps someone should give Polanski these tips when he is back in jail:
Sexual Assault Prevention Tips Guaranteed to Work!
1. Don’t put drugs in people’s drinks in order to control their behavior.
2. When you see someone walking by themselves, leave them alone!
3. If you pull over to help someone with car problems, remember not to assault them!
4. NEVER open an unlocked door or window uninvited.
5. If you are in an elevator and someone else gets in, DON’T ASSAULT THEM!
6. Remember, people go to laundry to do their laundry, do not attempt to molest someone who is alone in a laundry room.
7. USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM! If you are not able to stop yourself from
assaulting people, ask a friend to stay with you while you are in
public.8. Always be honest with people! Don’t pretend to be a caring
friend in order to gain the trust of someone you want to assault.
Consider telling them you plan to assault them. If you don’t
communicate your intentions, the other person may take that as a sign
that you do not plan to rape them.9. Don’t forget: you can’t have sex with someone unless they are awake!
10. Carry a whistle! If you are worried you might assault someone
“on accident” you can hand it to the person you are with, so they can
blow it if you do.And, ALWAYS REMEMBER: if you didn’t ask permission and then respect
the answer the first time, you are committing a crime- no matter how
“into it” others appear to be.
Shutting down Kula Ring
I recently found the site Just For The Love Of It
that does pretty much what I wanted to do with my Kula Ring project. It does not do all that I wanted to do, but since they are further along, it just does not make sense to keep Kula Ring around taking up my thoughts and limited attention, if only to worry about not doing it.
So, I am
officially shutting Kula Ring down and will keep the site around as
long as I want to pay for the domain name. The decision took me all of two days to make, and allows me to concentrate on other projects that I have been thinking about.
I suggest that folks who want to give others the gift of their time and need a tool to help them find folks to give their time to, and more, should go to Just For The Love Of It.
A quote that made me laugh
"I laugh when I hear the humanists whining about the reduction of people
to ciphers. What makes them think the destruction of men complete with
tricked-up names is any less inhuman than their destruction as a set of
numbers? I have already said that the obscure antagonism between the
would-be progressives and the reactionaries boils down to this: should
people be smashed by punishments or by rewards? As for the reward of
celebrity, thanks for nothing!" – Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 15 (Roles), Section 5.
More seriously:
"When people are overtaken by joie de vivre they are lost to leadership
and stage management of any kind. Only by starving the revolutionary
masses of joy can one become their master: uncontained, collective
pleasure can only go from victory to victory." – same as above, Section 6.
Congratulations to the German Greens & Pirates
Congratulations to the German Greens for increasing their support in the German Federal elections from 8.1% to 10.7%. It is a shame they will remain in opposition, but that they will have more MPs to advocate for Green values.
Also, congratulations to the German Pirate Party for receiving about 2% of the vote in the election. While not the 5% they needed to get MPs in the Bundestag, still quite a respectable showing for such a new party. Keep up the fight!
BTW, there is an interesting discussion about the election at Matthew Yglesias blog.
New ways to measure progress
Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, at the request of the French Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, put out a report on alternative methods for measuring economic performance. Such methods include Gross Domestic Product (GDP) statistics, but the report calls for including social and environmental factors.
Herman Daly and many others in the Ecological Economics community have been calling for better measures of our economic, social and environmental progress for over twenty years. Indeed, Redefining Progress already releases its Genuine Progress Indicator each year, though at a three year delay.
Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns rightly points out (via Naked Capitalism) that GDP is an inadequate measure of our economic state. Rather he wants to be sure that our economic statistics include not just income (GDP), but debt. I completely agree with him and hope that such revised metrics, note the plural, include measure such assets as our environment, the health & education of our people and other non-market debts and assets.
Hopefully this report will put a pressure on the world's governments to devise and track metrics that better reflect our economic, social and ecological progress. Until then, we should create and track our own community indicators.
Nader’s Novel
Ralph Nader has a novel out: Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us! Here are Doug Henwood's take & io9's take. I wish it were satire, but apparently it isn't.
A bit of trimming
Fall is here and with it the cold. I am in the process of cleaning and trimming the miniatures I want to prime before it becomes too cold out doors to do it. This includes:
- 1 Minbari Sharlin
- 2 Brakiri cruisers
- 4 Brakiri Halik frigates
- 2 Shadow Hunters
- 6 Shadow scouts
- 1 Shadow cruiser
- 8 stands of Shadow fighters
- 8 stands of Vorlon fighters
- 8 stands of Minbari Nial fighters
- 9 stands of Narn Frazi fighters
- a whole bunch of Mauridian & Deisho from Ravenstar's Cold Navy line.
With any luck, I'll also finish trimming 2 Shadow Omegas. A bit under half way done so far.
Also, I ran a game where the Shadows try to run a Torvalus blockade. We had to cut it short due unexpectedly. I'll post the pictures I shot with my cell phone soon.
Sacrifice
A few bits on sacrifice from Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life, (Chapter 12) which I am reading now:
"… the master-slave dialectic implies that the mythic sacrifice of the
master embodies within itself the real sacrifice of the slave: the
master makes a spiritual sacrifice of his real power to the general
interest, while the slave makes a material sacrifice of his real life
to a power which he shares in appearance only."
and:
"The refusal of sacrifice is the refusal to be bartered. There is
nothing in the world of things, exchangeable for money or not, which
can be treated as equivalent to a human being. The individual is
irreducible. He is subject to change but not to exchange. Now, the most
superficial examination of movements for social reform shows that they
have never demanded anything more than a cleaning-up of exchange and
sacrifice, making it a point of honor to humanize inhumanity and make
it attractive. And every time slaves try to make their slavery more
bearable they are striking a blow for their masters."
This book and Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War are the two books I am striving to finish of late. Sigh… the Sicilian Expedition, about which I am reading, was yet another case of imperial overstretch. Not like our current follies.
Noble lies or Glad we got that out in the open
Irving Kristol, "godfather of neoconservatism", died on the 18th. A friend blogged about this quote from Kristol:
"There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people.
There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate
for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and
truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion
that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a
modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work."
Here he is expounding on the need for "Noble lies". Glad we got that cleared up. Nice to know the "grandfather of neoconservatism" thought it was ok for elites to lie to us lowly citizens. Its for our own good after all.
Considering the last eight years of lies: Iraq has WMDs, we need to bail out the fat cats on wall street who save the economy, the planet isn't warming because of our emissions of CO2, housing prices will keep going up, the rich deserve their wealth, I'd rather some truth please.
The Reason magazine article, don't worry they are libertarians, that reports the previous quote has this little Kristol gem as well:
"If God does not exist, and if religion is an illusion that the
majority of men cannot live without…let men believe in the lies of
religion since they cannot do without them, and let then a handful of
sages, who know the truth and can live with it, keep it among
themselves. Men are then divided into the wise and the foolish, the
philosophers and the common men, and atheism becomes a guarded,
esoteric doctrine–for if the illusions of religion were to be
discredited, there is no telling with what madness men would be seized,
with what uncontrollable anguish." (cite).
Seems to me that the Golden Rule of "do to others what you would like to be done to you" is pretty universal. Whether given from a god, gods, or just something we developed in our long evolution, it doesn't much matter. However, Kristol seems to believe "he who has the gold makes the rules". How very Machiavellian of him. I'll leave out the Dante reference.