Shades Of Grey

Sad news from Omaha

2007-12-05T15:50:00.000-08:00

Just a quick note to everyone who has seen this report of the shootings in a mall in Omaha. Eight dead. Five more wounded. Fortunately, my family and I are okay. There was a nerve wracking hour where I couldn't get ahold of my wife, but it turned out she had a lesson to teach after she was done teaching classes for the day, so she was still at work and not out Christmas shopping like I was worrying. The wife of a friend of mine was right outside Von Maur, the store where the shootings occurred, when it happened. Scary stuff.

I've written in the past about working a second job at Radioshack several years back. That store is in the same mall that the shootings happened in. Scary stuff.

My deepest sympathies go out to the families who are missing loved ones tonight. Our thoughts are with you.

Charts and gaffes

2007-12-01T21:57:00.000-08:00

Look quick, folks, because this gem from the Associated Press's Liz Sidoti isn't going to stick around for long. Nonetheless, I think it throws a light on the current state of the media, national politics, and the intersection thereof:

DUBUQUE, Iowa - Mitt Romney loves statistics. The former venture capitalist pores over charts and grafs. He analyzes situations and data from every angle. It's little wonder, then, that as he campaigns for president, the Republican sometimes shows his wonkish side.

He pours over charts and "grafs." Indeed.

I suppose the only consolation here is that for once this is happening to someone who I have no intention on voting for, but damn. From the same article:

Romney's style contrasts with that of his top rival in Iowa.

Mike Huckabee is the easygoing ex-governor of Arkansas who charms his audiences with homespun stories of growing up in a family of modest means while sprinkling in broad policy stances under the themes of patriotism and core values. The former Southern Baptist minister tends not to dwell on the details of policy matters, choosing instead to tug on his audiences' heart strings.

Conversely, Romney's pitch is heavy on policy — and details.

Can we get any more glowing praise for not knowing jack shit about policies? Because that is basically what the criticism is here. Sidoti seems to be saying, "Romney seems to know a lot about the job he is after, and I hate how stupid that makes me feel in comparison." This is the same kind of bullshit peddled about Gore that got Dubya elected the first time around.

You can find a screenshot here in case they've fixed the article.

Greenwald on Ron Paul

2007-11-15T16:31:00.000-08:00

Verbatim Glenn Greenwald:

I'm really uncomfortable with judging someone by the support they attract.

Wow. Really? That's a pretty major philosophical difference between him and me. In the very least it's a overly general principle that doesn't hold up well in practice.

Greenwald is responding to flak he's taking for a couple posts he has written about Ron Paul. His stance seems to be that he respects for Paul for being a principled conservative.

For a long time now, I've heard a lot of people ask: "where are the principled conservatives?" -- meaning those on the Right who are willing to oppose the constitutional transgressions and abuses of the Bush administration without regard to party loyalty. A "principled conservative" isn't someone who agrees with liberals on most issues; that would make them a "principled liberal." A "principled conservative" is someone who aggressively objects to the radicalism of the neocons and the Bush/Cheney assault on our constitution and embraces a conservative political ideology. That's what Ron Paul is, and it's hardly a surprise that he holds many views anathema to most liberals.

Greenwald makes a good case that Paul believes in his principles. For what it's worth, I think Greenwald is right and Paul probably does really believe in the principles he espouses. But c'mon, just how much credit am I supposed to give a guy for doing what he believes is right? Shouldn't that be the baseline expectation? This strikes me as the same thing as congratulating a guy on helping his wife out with the housework. Perhaps most men don't, but we really shouldn't flip our lids when we find a guy who who takes out the trash every once in awhile. Really, that should be the baseline expectation. Glenn Greenwald is falling all over himself to point out how principled Ron Paul is without really considering for a moment just what Paul intends to accomplish with those principles.

Actually, that seems to be another problem that Greenwald has. He doesn't actually believe that Ron Paul is really as extreme as all that:

Part of the dynamic of an unconventional candidacy is that it can become a repository for a whole array of disparate, unrelated groups. The lack of ideological familiarity enables many people with unconventional (even extremist or bizarre) political views to read into those candidacies whatever they want to see -- even if it isn't really there -- and to use the candidate as a proxy for their otherwise ignored and stigmatized causes. That was true to some degree for Dean, and is probably true to a much larger extent with Paul.

As someone who grew up chest-deep in far right wing conspiracy theories, I'm pretty damn good at decoding their language. It frankly scares me Greenwald, as obviously smart and well read as he is, can't see it, but perhaps my experiences give me an edge. I actually met the Montana freemen and spent a few days with them. I shook hands with Bo Gritz. I knew Ron Greisacker. Though I've been thankfully far away from that scene for many years now, I know it when I see it, and what Dave at Orcinus reports is exactly in line with how it operates.

But if you run through the broad array of kooky theories about the federal government promoted on the far right, you can find any number of Ron Paul's positions -- particularly regarding the gold standard, the Federal Reserve, the IRS, and the United Nations -- floating about there. Notably, Paul also played a significant role in Congress' ongoing failure to confront the growing problem of conspiracy-driven tax protests by diverting the blame to the IRS itself.

But that's who Ron Paul is -- a "constitutionalist" who deals in conspiracy theories and extremist anti-government beliefs. It's who he always has been, and who he is now. It isn't just an accident that Paul very recently spoke to a group with troubling racial ties, or that he attended a Patriot Network banquet in his honor in 2004, or that he gave an interview to a conspiracist magazine the same year. Hell, he's been operating within those same circles since 1985.

Absent in those quotes, but mentioned elsewhere in Dave's post, are references to the New World Order, the Trilateral Commission, and the European Currency Unit. To anyone who has spent some time in the company of conspiracy theorists, the language is unmistakable.

And yet perhaps it shouldn't surprise me that a lot of people don't see it. That's the thing about these conspiracy theorists. They don't come right out and say "I hate black people and Mexicans." At least, most of them don't. They tend to be really nice people. My grandpa was one, and if you'd read his letters to the editors ranting angrily about the Jewish Conspiracy, well, you'd be shocked at how many people loved the man for his deeply caring and generous nature. But just because he didn't call himself a bigot doesn't mean he wasn't one. The same goes for Ron Paul. Just because he's a True Believer doesn't make his policies somehow more admirable.

I suspect that Glenn Greenwald has trouble with the conspiracy theorists because the things they say can almost make sense when taken individually. Smaller federal sphere of influence in favor of states' rights? It sounds like something that reasonable people might disagree about. Ending gun control? Merely an extreme version of a popular idea. Shuttering the U.N.? People have been talking about this for years. Compounding the problem is that the worldview of a conspiracy theorist is quite a bit different than ours. Though we on the left often say they talk in code, the reality is they've been using these phrases so long that they have actually come to believe their own rationalizations. States' rights as an end is what many of these people actually believe in. They don't think of it as a means. If you ask them which rights they think the states would better represent, you'll get a litany of grievances committed by the federal government, and most of it vague. What you won't hear is anything about white power.

Given the language they use and the fact that they believe their own bullshit, I can see why someone who hasn't been around it a lot might have trouble with it. But that doesn't change the fact that the origin of these ideas came from racist and sexist ideas, and that those ideas are still at the core of the movement.

The real problem comes when putting all the conspiracy theorist ideas together in a big picture. These are people who really, truly believe that things were Better Back Then, that there was a time when the country was on the right track, but now it isn't and everything has been ruined. They want to dial back the clock and recapture the good ol' days. They don't use the words "racist" or "sexist" or "homophobic," at least not unless they are making fun of people who are being too "P.C." No, they just think of these as the natural order of things. And restoring that natural order is exactly what their platform is intended to do.

Margo Howard does polyamory

2007-11-12T23:12:00.000-08:00

Dear Margo probably isn't the first place a progressive thinks to turn to for advice. Or maybe it is; truth be told, it isn't exactly the kind of thing I keep in my RSS reader and I normally remain blissfully unaware of the world of bite-sized expostulation. But it was featured in the Most Popular section at Yahoo News, and since that is something I keep in my RSS reader, it so happened that an article titled Kind of Like Unofficial Polygamy made its way across my eyeballs. I'm a sucker for anything that hints at subverting the dominant monogamy paradigm, so naturally I had to read it. I must admit, I tend to shy away from the word "polygamy," but apparently so does Margo:

DEAR MARGO: I am a very happily married woman with a problem: well-intentioned friends and family. My husband and I are polyamorous and not ashamed of it. We have wonderful girlfriends who are special and a part of our family. The problem is that people assume we are on the verge of divorce, etc. Other than an indelicate "Butt out," is there any way to get them to see that we are really happy and stable? We've been married for five years.
--- HAPPILY POLY

(For square readers like me who might need a trip to the dictionary, I will save you some time. "Polyamorous" is the name for multiple sexual relationships within marriage -- in this case involving both spouses.)

DEAR HAP: You may not be ashamed of it, but you have to know that this arrangement would strike most people as being somewhere between odd and morally wrong, it being quite far from the norm. I am not sure why you felt the need to breeze it around that you and your husband have "wonderful girlfriends."

Because you have, however, essentially invited people to "butt in," you are a little bit stuck in terms of asking them to butt out. I guess the only way to prove yourselves happy and stable is for you two to continue to thrive with your, uh, wonderful girlfriends.
--- MARGO, BEWILDEREDLY

Hrm. Yeah. I mean, I have no idea why she would feel the need to talk about her life with her friends and family either. Clearly if she and her husband choose to live their lives differently than other people, they should at least have the decency to hide it from everyone. But no, HAP dares exit the closet, brazenly wreaking havoc on the normative model of monogamy. How dare she flaunt her happiness so? How dare she attempt to live her life free from jealousy? Thank the Christian god that HAP has friends who know how to put her in her place. And thank you, too, Margo, for reminding everyone of the most venerable of all American values: that it is shameful to be different.

I wonder whether Margo would give the same advice to a gay couple who was having trouble getting their family to stop telling them that they were living in sin. "You may not be ashamed of it, but you have to know that a lot of people find this arrangement morally wrong. You probably should've stayed in the closet. But since you chose to come out, you should expect to take a lot of flak. In fact, you probably deserve it. Fag." Since I don't read her column often, I don't really know. Perhaps Margo would say these things, or at least something very similar. Though surely if she did, it wouldn't be nearly so direct -- my guess is she'd use some well placed quotation marks to seed doubt as to whether the any gay relationship could really be so wonderful. Or maybe she'd opt for a few verbal land mines such as um or uhhh, as in "your, uh, wonderful boyfriend." Yeah. Right. *wink* *nudge* I bet he's real wonderful, right guys?

I've always been captivated by this kind of column. When I was ten, I read them avidly, and nodded wisely at the sage advice dispensed so succinctly. I grew up, and eventually I realized that most situations in the real world are never quite so simple. But for that very reason I never quite lost my fascination with the Ann Landers-esqe advice columns. I've always wondered what it is their authors get out of them. Surely Margo knows that she isn't helping the individual who is writing in. The paper doesn't get printed until well after the syndicate's deadline. In my younger days I resolved this apparent dilemma by imagining that Ann Landers must have also replied individually to the original supplicant. It bothered me to think that there were people so desperate for help that they were writing to a stranger for advice. Such a person must be at the end of their rope; I imagined them waiting weeks for a reply. It made me feel better to think that Ms. Landers would do everything in her power to hasten her answer back to them.

As an adult, I understand that columnists like Margo know full well that the person with the problem is almost beside the point. One of the keys to effective writing is to write to your audience, and Margo is writing to the vast number of readers of her syndicated column. Margo answers as the voice of our society. The point isn't to help an individual with their problem, but rather to reaffirm to the vast readership what kinds of things are -- and more importantly, are not -- acceptable behavior to our culture. In this case Margo makes it pretty clear. Polyamory is "unofficial polygamy," and polygamy is odd at best and probably immoral.

I find it fascinating that Margo felt the need to spell it out to everyone that 'polyamory' is just another word for 'polygamy.' Never mind that it isn't -- there are subtle distinctions that are important to the polyamorous community. 'Polyamory' means 'many loves,' and to them the emotional attachment is the difference. The terms "nonmonogamy," "open relationship," and "polygamy" are all commonly understood to mean relationships in which both partners are free to have sex with other people. But for a lot of these relationships, it is against the rules for either partner to forge a deep emotional bond with another person. Polyamory is different. Such bonds are permitted and even expected. But Margo chooses to ignore the finer points and focus instead on the sexual aspect of these relationships. She doesn't let HAP define the terms of her own relationship. Polyamory, the headline makes clear, is unofficial polygamy -- a word loaded with negative associations. Its very mention conjures up images of cult-ish Mormons marrying off preteen girls to men with multiple wives. This is why it is so important not to allow HAP to get away with calling her relationship 'polyamorous.' By re-framing the narrative as polygamy, Margo reinforces in the collective conscience of our cultural the idea that any kind of sex with multiple partners inside a marriage is immoral.

Once you understand how polyamorous people approach their relationships, it isn't so hard to understand why HAP has chosen to share with her friends and family that she and her husband have girlfriends. And even if you never comprehend polyamory, just a tiny bit of empathy goes a long way. If I were the cultural gatekeeper penning the reply, I might have written this:

DEAR HAP: You may not be ashamed of it, but you have to know that your arrangement with your husband is one that most people don't come across every day. It may take your friends awhile to understand that although your marriage is different than theirs, it is a positive force in your life. In the mean time, try explaining to your friends that you and your husband are doing fine. Tell them that if the situation ever changes, you'll be sure to let them know. You'll be politely sending the message that their friendship means a lot to you, but they have nothing to worry about.
--CHARLIE, SUPPORTIVELY

Yaaaaawn .... what time is it? Wha... ? Did I oversleep or something? Shit.

2007-11-01T19:19:00.000-07:00

So uh ... It's been two years and um... I'm thinking about doing this "blogging" thing again.

I really thought I was over it, you know? That I was a better man for having blogged, but that I'd had my say and done my part, and all without getting fired from my day job to boot. But see, lately I've been hearing The Voice again. I'm sure most bloggers probably recognize what I mean. It's how we perceive the world. Something interesting happens, or maybe something not-so-interesting, and The Voice automatically starts up in the back of your mind, framing a blog post. You hear The Voice write your introduction and you think Oooh, that's good. And then: I see how I could close the post strongly, and I could tie in to that other topic. But the transition is going to be tricky. And, Is that enough content? Gonna be a short post today. And when you're really crazy, you start thinking about how you already wrote two fluff posts this week, and damn it, your ten readers aren't going to give a shit about this, they want content baby, but where to find it? I ask you, where to find the damn content? And everyone else already said it better than I did, and I don't feel like writing today but *weeps* must ... post ... must ... write ...

And then somehow you manage to finish the post, even though The Voice is a fairweather friend who tends to wonder off right as you get to that tricky transition part. And what's next? Why, now it's time to find another idea for a post, of course! Because if there's one thing worse than having the entire world framed viewed through the lense of how you might possibly write about it later, it's feeding the beast that is your blog.

But I dunno, I dunno... It's been years since I had my fix, which is approximately infinity in blog-years, so I might have a thing or two that I want to talk about after all. A few things have changed here. I've had some experiences I might want to share. And also, it's getting nigh on election time, and that's always fun. So I dunno.

I might bring this thing back after all. See if I can shake the dust off the ol' text editor. See how long I can keep it going. Try to rekindle my feminism, which never really went away, but damn it, it's so easy to slip back into bad habits when you aren't constantly analyzing yourself and the world around you.

Okay, so here's the deal I'm gonna try to make myself: I might write a post every once in awhile. If I have something to say. When I feel like it. And if I don't, I'm not going to feel guilty about it. Did you hear that, My Guilty Conscience?! Neener neener neener! You can just fuck off, Guilty Conscience, okay? Okay. Okay.

Okay.

This feels pretty cool. I think I could get used to this. Again.

Happy Birthday Evan!

2006-05-31T21:57:00.000-07:00

Today was Evan's fifth birthday. Now I have a five year old. It sounds crazy to say it, but it's true. He's going to be going to kindergarten this year -- I can't say that without feeling both immense pride and trepidation.

Notice the strategy of grouping the candles. He certainly understands how to stack the odds in his favor.

This is the very first time he has ever put together a Lego set by himself. I had to leave the room because I just couldn't keep my big mouth from offering advice that he simply didn't need. Fortunately, Caren was there with the camera to document the process. He is very proud of this car. Also, you can't see it in these pictures, but he let his sister help open his presents.

It's the Red Ranger, need I say more? Yes? He's the Red Ranger from Power Rangers: Mystic Forces, because he has a cape. If he didn't have a cape, he'd be the Red Ranger from Power Rangers: Space Police Division. Yes, I know these things now*.

Happy birthday, Evan. I love you.

____________
* Actually, I thought it was "Special Police Division," but Caren has corrected me. Should I be ashamed or relieved?

With friends like these, who needs enemas?

2006-05-30T18:29:00.000-07:00

Exhibit A. This Reuters article about a group of pedophiles in the Netherlands who are forming their own political party. I wish I had the energy to be outraged, but frankly I'm having trouble getting worked up over it. I'm quite disgusted with, you know, pedophiles. But insofar as a group of people I strongly disagree with forming their own political party goes, I'm finding it hard to care much when we can be pretty darn sure their group is going to be too small to make any significant difference. I mean, seriously, let's see where they get running on a platform of pedophilia. If anything, I would expect the outrage that will inevitably ensue to hurt the pedophiles.

So what does make me mad? Enter...

Exhibit B. This quote from the same article:

The Netherlands, which already has liberal policies on soft drugs, prostitution and gay marriage, was shocked by the plan.

Pardon me while I do a double take. Since when have liberals ever been supporters of sexual assault? In what world does gay marriage have anything to do with legalized prostitution?

Let's be clear. This isn't an opinion piece. This article is presented as an though it were an informative piece about an odd political party in the Netherlands. Unwary readers will be under the impression that it is unbiased. But make no mistake, this is a conservative piece. "Soft on drugs," indeed. You make it sound like that's a bad thing.

Where's the so-called liberal media when we need it?

Men in feminism: A followup

2006-05-28T20:16:00.000-07:00

Punkass Marc disagrees with my last post that takes the position that men can claim the title of feminist. He lists several reasons. First, he thinks that men, accustomed to male privilege as we are, have such a strong desire to dominate any debate we enter that it is only natural for us to insist on being included in every group, including feminists. Second, he feels that by claiming full membership status, we are also implicitly claiming the right to serve in a leadership position in the feminist movement. Marc thinks it would be better if we called ourselves "pro-feminists," or perhaps "feminist supporters," so that we can indicate our support for the movement without also implying that we are qualified to lead it.

Regarding Marc's first point, I think it's true that men are used to dominating the debates we enter*. Insofar as we should be aware of it, I agree with him. No good can come from shutting out valuable participants in any conversation, and that goes double when it comes to men dominating a discussion about feminism -- a movement in which men's participation simply isn't as important as women's. However, I disagree that a man calling himself a feminist is automatically dominating the debate or making feminism about men. Calling oneself a feminist is dominating the debate, but calling oneself a "pro-feminist" isn't? Frankly, I don't see the difference. When it comes to turning a discussion about feminism into a discussion about ourselves, the labels we choose for ourselves and each other aren't nearly as important as how we behave when actually engaging in discussion or debate. As a precautionary note, Marc's point is well taken. But as a reason not to call oneself a feminist, I think it falls flat.

Marc's second problem with men calling themselves feminists is that by claiming the label, we would be claiming full status as feminists, and thus implicitly claiming the right to lead the movement. This strikes me as an odd argument. By registering in the Democratic party, do I thereby implicitly claim the right to lead it, too? I would say no, but even if your answer is yes, what does that really mean? I can't become a leader of the Democratic Party without a whole lot of other Democrats deciding that it seems like a good idea to follow me. Likewise, any man who is under the mistaken impression that he is going to take over the feminist movement by fiat is in for a rude awakening. Leaders derive their power to lead from the people they are leading. In my experience, clueless men who attempt to explain to feminists how feminism should work are quickly set straight. The idea that any man would be able to assume a leadership role that he hasn't earned is not only insulting to the autonomy of feminists, it also isn't borne out by experience.

Both of these arguments strike me as being somewhat anti-feminist. They both share the hidden premise that feminists just won't know how to handle men who are bold enough to call themselves feminists.

In addition, I'm not especially fond of the terms Marc puts forward as alternatives. The first time I heard someone call himself a "pro-feminist," what I heard was "I myself do not agree with the tenants of feminism enough to claim the label, but I support the gist of what they're trying to do." I suspect that this is how most people unfamiliar with the inner workings of the feminist movement would interpret the term, too. The only way most people will ever know that a "pro-feminist" or "feminist supporter" is the same thing as a feminist, only male, is if they end up in the movement. But as I said in my first post, what you call yourself doesn't matter to me nearly as much as how your words and actions support feminism.

On that score, from the little I know about Marc, he strikes me as a good ally.

* I am well aware of the irony of seeing two feminist/pro-feminist men trade trackbacks about what constitutes dominating the feminist debate.

Men in feminism

2006-05-28T13:15:00.000-07:00

I've had the seeds for this post in my head for a long time now. It wasn't until The Nut suggested I write about it that I actually got serious about it. The topic is Men in Feminism, and you'd think that as a man who identifies as a feminist, this would be an easy thing to write about. Unfortunately, that isn't the case. Partly that's because any time a man writes about such feminist topics as the very definition of feminism, well, it's a narrow tightrope to walk. But it's also because the very act of addressing this topic seems to give voice to the idea that there is some question as to what men's role in feminism should be, and that seems a little ridiculous to me.

So let's get that out of the way up front. Do men have a role in feminism? Absolutely. Can men be feminists? I think so, and I consider myself to be one. Whether you agree with the former depends on what you believe the goals of feminism are. Whether you agree with the latter depends on what definition of feminism you are working with.

As for myself, I define feminism as a subset of humanism. Among other things, humanists believe that pursuit of happiness, freedom, and progress (including cultural, economic, and ethical progress) is the highest goal of all people. Feminism is the ongoing struggle against sexism in our culture. As a humanist, I believe it is my obligation and responsibility to also consider myself a feminist. Men's role in feminism, then, is largely the same as women's: we must identify sexism wherever we see it, and do whatever we can to eliminate it.

Ultimately, regardless of whether you are a man or woman, whether you identify yourself as a feminist is a lot less important to me than whether your words and actions support the goals of feminism, by which I mean helping women overcome the oppression of sexism. That's why Chris Clarke's statement that he is not a feminist doesn't bother me as much as it might. Before he disavows the label, he explains in detail exactly where he stands on various issues relating to sexism. As far as I can tell, if Chris were a woman, he would consider himself a feminist. But to him, feminism is a liberation movement. Because he's a man, he explains, that label isn't his to claim. I'm happy to accept Chris's support for the cause.

But I have to admit, although Chris's statement doesn't bother me as much as it could, it does bother me. It reminds me common disclaimer used to start so many sentences, "I'm not a feminist, but..." In fact, most of his essay could easily be rewritten to use that form. Chris explains his reasons for it, and I have no reason to doubt that he is sincere. And yet, I can't help but think of the different context in which I usually hear that phrase. Most of the time when a person starts a sentence with such a disclaimer, they go on to express a feminist idea. So why is the disclaimer necessary? Because "feminism" is seen as a dirty word by many in our society, including both men and women.

It's an odd thing, that. Feminism has been so successful that most people wouldn't dare to be caught being overtly and unapologetically sexist. It is only because it is so important to express feminist ideals that the "I'm not a feminist but" disclaimer is so common. And yet, its existence also reveals that it is widely unpopular to be labeled as a feminist. The very fact that the phrase is so common says a lot about how far we have to go in fighting sexism. It's one thing to be seen as overtly sexist, but it's another thing entirely to be seen as an active supporter of women's rights. When otherwise stellar supporters of feminism like Chris decline to call themselves feminists, I fear it only gives one more excuse to the men who routinely make it clear that they certainly don't wish to be known as supporters of feminism.

Of course, it's not like Chris just made up this idea that men can't be feminists. Unfortunately, there are plenty of feminist women around who agree. I'm probably lucky to have had my first contact with real feminists be Amanda, Bitch Ph.D., and Lauren when she was blogging at Feministe. These feminist bloggers didn't have any problem with Ampersand calling himself a feminist, which helped me realize that at least some feminists have no problem including men in their ranks. As to the ones that do, I'm perfectly comfortable agreeing to disagree. Still, when it's all said and done, it seems to me that by claiming men can't be feminists, the only thing that is accomplished is to waste a lot of energy arguing semantics. Assuming that we share the common goal of promoting equality of the sexes, it seems like a pretty silly thing to artificially divide an otherwise united group of people.

I said earlier that men's role in feminism is largely the same as women's. I believe that this is true on a large scale. But there are also many things that feminist men are uniquely positioned to do. One of those things is to actively speak out against the rape culture in our society. When men are talking amongst themselves about a rape, it is almost always the case that the character of the victim is questioned. This usually includes some combination of the details of what she was wearing, where she was at when she was raped, who she was with, and her sexual history. But none of these issues are relevant. The only thing that determines whether a woman was raped is whether the woman consented to sex. By speaking up against those conversations when we have the chance, we men can combat the idea that rape is a woman's fault and a woman's problem. Rape is crime almost exclusively committed by men. Only by speaking out can we begin to foster an environment that holds men accountable for their actions.

Update: Punkass Marc disagrees. You can read my response to his post here.

Monogamy and the Naturalistic Fallacy

2006-05-27T11:58:00.000-07:00

The Nut pointed me to this article on monogamy at Generative Transformation. In a lot of ways, Brandon Peele's blog reminds me of my own. Brandon's blog is a chronicle of his personal growth. I often think of Shades Of Grey in the same way, though when I write my posts, it is never with that purpose in mind. I consider myself a liberal, and so does Brandon. And apparently we write about the same subjects -- I've written in favor of nonmonogamous relationships here and here. While I really like Brandon's introspective nature and willingness to question the status quo, there are more than a few things wrong with his post on monogamy.

He starts by asking the question: What is the point of having strong urges, such as an "instinct to mate with virtually every female I see," if he is not to indulge them? It's already apparent from his phrasing that his exploration of this question and its related issues will be deeply entrenched in the Naturalistic Fallacy. Of course, Brandon believes in the existence of a higher power, so perhaps that shouldn't come as much of a surprise. It is very difficult to reconcile the belief that things are the way they are because that's how it is supposed to be with the observation that many people are hurt by the "natural order."

To answer Brandon's question, there is no point. Evolution, in the biological sense, does not have a purpose. True, if humans didn't have a biological instinct to mate, the species wouldn't propagate, but don't make the mistake of thinking that because we exist there must be a greater reason for it. Evolution is not directed. Just as there is no "Natural Law" stating that creating homo sapiens was the purpose of evolution, there is no law of nature dictating that a person should or should not indulge in his desire to have sex. It is fallacious to look toward one's biology for answers about one's morality.

Brandon also wants to know why having sex with multiple partners is incompatible with the norms of our society. This is a question that I am sympathetic to. In the past I've been an advocate of normalizing nonmonogamous relationships. My position isn't that I want monogamous relationship to disappear from our society, it's that I want to get rid of the assumption that every committed relationship must be monogamous. However, Brandon attacks the problem through the lense of naturalism.

My questions is, is marriage/monogamy natural? Is it a convenience of modern society put in place to counter streets full of bastards and orphans and provide for a stable, predictable and submissive populace? Is it an evolutionary imperative?

And again:

Men, much moreso than women it appears, are easily taken beneath deck to operate from their limbic or reptilian brain, not their neocortex or complex human brain. The limbic system is often called the reptilian brain because it first appeared in evolution in reptiles and is responsible for our emotional drives, especially relating fear and sex instincts.

You can probably see where this is going:

So what can we do? Is marriage as an institution doomed? We don’t have to do anything and no it’s not doomed. But feel free to join me in telling the world to fuck off with respect to how it thinks we should and shouldn't act. Let us obey only ourselves, our inner compass, our inner warrior. As men we need only keep in mind these things:
Hold our spouse's best interest in our hearts, aka Golden Rule. It would suck to have another dude put his dick in your wife. Guess what? She feels the same way.
...
This is all fine and good, but what about those marriage vows? Women are nuts for vows. Most men can't even remember them. We hate to give up our autonomy - to listen to anyone tell us what and what not to do once, much less let someone set the vision for the rest of our lives in this manner.
I don't understand why we need all these rules. It's not like they don't get broken everyday. Why set something up for failure? Why can't we just align intentions? Just agree to work towards a common vision for the world, your family, your marriage, etc. and see which actions, including infidelity fall within this vision.
...
Isn't a marriage about trust? Isn't trust the foundation of love? If there is trust, then there need not be a covenant. The desire to anchor and tie oneself down to an ascribed way of being is not an action of love, rather fear, the need for security.

These quotes certainly don't do anything to quell my suspicion that this entire discussion is a complicated way to rationalize cheating on one's spouse. Part of the problem, again, is a heavy reliance on the Naturalistic Fallacy. Brandon sees that we have a society that is structured around monogamy and assumes that because that's the way things are, that's how they should be. But he also sees that men in our society claim the right to play the field, and once again assumes that because that's how it is, that's how it should be. When he's being honest with himself, he knows that monogamy isn't the optimal situation for him. So the question is how to reconcile his observations with his beliefs. And he does it by blaming women for his problems.

To be fair, he doesn't actually blame women so much as the way women are. Women, according to Brandon, are naturally more interested in long term commitments than men are, it's part of their biology. But regardless of how you justify it, the net effect is the same: Brandon believes that he is being held back by womanly vows. He thinks we men should learn to be more manly by listening to our "inner warrior." We shouldn't feel it necessary to be bound by our promises, because that's against the natural order. But women should be bound by a different set of rules entirely, because "it would suck to have another dude put his dick in your wife," and anyway, they aren't built the same as us. Under the system that Brandon seems to be advocating, it's okay for men to be jealous when their partners sleep with other men, because men own their women's sexuality. But only because women want to be owned.

Creating different sets of rules for different classes of people is the classic recipe for oppression. And as Amanda recently pointed out, the Naturalistic Fallacy is a favored tool of oppressors everywhere. Brandon needs to get out more. Men aren't the only one who want the freedom of having multiple partners. The sooner our society stops oppressing women while simultaneously pretending that it is only natural that we should do so, the sooner there will be more women comfortable with admitting that they would like to have sex with multiple partners.

But the other thing about Brandon's post that makes me feel like he is rationalizing cheating is that, well, he pretty much says so himself: "Just agree to work towards a common vision for the world, your family, your marriage, etc. and see which actions, including infidelity fall within this vision." Far from condemning lying to one's spouse, he says that honesty in relationships can be optional. That's something I just can't get behind, and at times Brandon seems to agree: "Isn't a marriage about trust? Isn't trust the foundation of love?"

Of course, if you want trust, you certainly wouldn't condone lying to your spouse, which is what infidelity is.

Brandon ends his article with this:

To be in love is to be free. Are you free in your love?

After his admission that he would not like it if another man slept with his girlfriend, I must admit that this ending perplexes me. He wants the freedom to have sex with whomever he wants without granting the same freedom to his partners. It seems to me that if his girlfriend were to ask the same question, she would answer in the negative.

Excuses masquerading as an explanation, and an announcement of sorts

2006-05-24T20:49:00.000-07:00

Yes, until my weak offering at lunch, I hadn't posted since, um, the beginning of April. Inconceivable*!

My thanks go out to Orange, E., and Feral Mom for letting me know I'm missed. Thanks also to The Nut, who has continued to give me ideas to blog about even in the face of my extended absence, and who says I shouldn't feel the need to apologize. Well, I do, so here it is: I'm sorry I haven't been writing.

But to the excuses!

I moved. That's right! I live in a new apartment now in the appropriate part of town for my children to attend Crestridge Elementary. Huge thanks to my father-in-law, Dennis, without whom I never would have managed to move in just one weekend. The fact is we weren't planning on being completely moved until this weekend. We had planned on moving boxes and smaller items last weekend, and moving the heavy stuff this weekend. But as you can probably imagine, the whole "hey wanna use your three day weekend to help me move" line wasn't too popular with the relatives. So when Dennis let us know he was bringing his trailer up, we jumped at the opportunity. Trust me, it's much better this way.
I've been busy. Yes, that sounds like a pretty lame excuse. However, it is in actuality a pretty lame segue into my announcement. You see, I've been working on a project. Please indulge me while I tell you about it.

You know how sometimes you'll link to a news story, and after a few days it disappears? Yahoo News comes to mind. The stories at Yahoo stick around for two weeks, then they are deleted. If you link to them (as I frequently would, if they didn't disappear), eventually your blog's archive is full of dead links. Which makes your blog's archives considerably less useful.

Enter Long Lasting Links**, my project for the last few months. My site allows you to create an account and begin archiving URLs. When you archive a URL, it doesn't download every link on the page. It only saves a copy of all the same files that your web browser needs to display the site. Once a URL has been archived, you get a permanent link to that page in the archive. Unless you decide to delete a link, it won't ever go away.

I think this site will have many uses. Blogging is what I had in mind when I came up with the idea, but I think I'll be surprised to see how it gets used.

So that's what I've been up to. I know, I know, that doesn't mean I can't throw a blog post up every once in awhile. Mea culpa.

* "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

** I know, that link doesn't work yet. I just spent the last hour on the phone with GoDaddy.com trying to get my domain up and running. You want some advice? Don't register your domains at GoDaddy.com. They don't know basic DNS concepts, and for a registrar, that's unacceptable. At this point, I'm going to punt on getting it set up and try to get it fixed tomorrow. But I want to go ahead and make the announcement anyway. I'll let you know when there is more to see.

A weak offering after weeks of silence

2006-05-24T09:46:00.000-07:00

One could argue that is has been months, really. I'm going to make the obligatory excuses-masquerading-as-an-explanation later tonight, but for now, I'll beg my readers for mercy with some topical humor:

Oh, the irony! And from the very people who would see English become our national language, no less...

A poem

2006-04-05T08:44:00.000-07:00

In honor of Tom DeLay's decision to resign from the House of Representatives, and also because April is National Poetry Month, I thought I'd share a poem I ran across in The Guardian. It is, unfortunately, unattributed, and a quick trip to Google didn't turn up the author. But since it's such a good twofer, I want to share it anyway.

They buried the politician today
The crowd it jeered and rang.
But as for me, I wept
For I had hoped to see him hang.

An update on the situation with Unapologetic Atheist

2006-03-30T09:05:00.000-08:00

I have confirmed through someone who wishes only to be known as a reliable source that most of the allegations against Richardson as reported by the Lawrence Journal-World are true. (See my previous post for my initial reactions.)

My source has confirmed that Richardson was well aware of his HIV+ status. He has had it since 1995 and has most likely known since about 1998.

My source also confirmed that he was arrested in Louisiana, and that the arrest resulted in dropped charges. Richardson left the state as a direct result.

Finally, my source also says that there will probably be more charges against him, and explained to my satisfaction how the first woman to press charges found out about his HIV+ status.

There is no doubt left in my mind that he is guilty. I am very hopeful that he will be nailed on these charges, and I think that barring any stupidity with the judge or jury or whatever, such as people thinking that women who contract HIV just get what is coming to them, there is an excellent chance that he will be convicted.

Just, whoa.

2006-03-29T19:31:00.000-08:00

If you bother to examine my blogroll closely, you might notice that the entry for The Unapologetic Atheist is gone. There are several reasons for that. One of the reasons is because, well, he deleted his blog.

Another important reason is because he has been charged with two counts of knowingly exposing another to HIV.

It would be an understatement to say that I'm stunned. And furious. It's probably important to note that in our legal system, people are presumed innocent until proven guilty. But it's also true that I never expected anyone on my blogroll to even be accused of anything like this. And I can't help but notice that his blog has been deleted, which doesn't make him look particularly innocent. His Yahoo profile is gone, too.

So perhaps Rob Richardson is innocent, and perhaps he isn't. Either way, I can't help but notice that at least one anonymous commenter associates my site with his. It therefore seems appropriate that I should address the situation.

It should go without saying that knowingly and intentionally exposing someone to HIV isn't ever, ever okay. I'm not saying that HIV+ people should never have sex. I'm saying that they have a moral obligation to inform their partners of the additional risk that HIV presents. A woman who doesn't know that her partner is HIV+ certainly wasn't consenting to what she thought she was. If her partner didn't know, it's a tragedy. But if he did, it's sexual assault.

Frankly, despite my desires to remain neutral about Richardson's particular case, I must admit that it's hard given the facts of the case. His HIV+ status is apparently not contested, or his accusers would have no case. Likewise, there would be no case if he could prove that he received the diagnosis after the sexual encounters, so I have to think that he must've known. And I find it extremely unlikely that two different women would both report the a nearly identical story. Take all that together with what many of the comments on the Lawrence Journal-World article that imply some very dodgy behavior on Richardson's part, and... Well, like I said, it's hard to remain neutral.

If the facts are what they appear to be, Richardson deserves strong condemnation. The damage that would be done to his causes -- to my causes -- is considerable. His actions, if the allegations are true, confirm all the worst stereotypes about atheists. He gives feminists a bad name. He gives liberals a bad name. Most of all, he provides fodder for the lie that atheists are incapable of being moral.

The worst part is that Richardson should have known better. About a year ago, he blogrolled Shades Of Grey. In a fit of morbid curiosity, I discovered that you can still see that post courtesy Google's cache, at the very bottom of the page. One post above that, he wrote this:

It really gets my goat when people who are notorious for their hard-line, unflinching hatred of those who are different (uh, I meant, those going against God's will) are coming off looking like the paragons of virtue, and the people who are supposed to be the progressives are lashing out like toddlers who didn't get their candy.

We're better than this. We're better than people like Coulter, Kristol, and Buchanan. Now start freaking acting like it, goddamnit!

...

What this boils down to is: stop getting mad and lashing out blindly. Start fighting rationally and thoughtfully.

Yes! I agree! It is sad when someone who should know better makes the far right seem like paragons of virtue. So it seems absurd that I should ever have to say something like "Don't knowingly expose others to HIV."

UPDATE: I fixed the link to the Lawrence Journal-World article. Also, I have an update regarding the status of the allegations. You can read it here.

And now for something completely different

2006-03-21T20:43:00.000-08:00

Have you been wondering how you could destroy the Earth? I don't mean with patriarchy or George W. Bush or nuclear weapons (and please, I'm begging a god I don't believe in, let those last two things remain unrelated). I mean actually destroying the Earth. Well, wonder no more!

It's true, I'm hard on teachers

2006-03-20T07:03:00.000-08:00

I want to pull out a recent comment that Angel left me on this post about an article in USA Today titled For once, blame the student. Angel thinks I'm too hard on teachers and don't give enough credit to students. (Her comment also touches on this recent post about picking up my kids from preschool.)

Angel writes:

OMG! I am so sick of this. Charlie, you get some kudos from me for your obvious thoughtfulness on women's issues, but you have a serious blindspot when it comes to teachers. What gives?

In one of your posts, you are unhappy with a teacher because she is not "acting like she wants to fix the problem" of your son's behavior. She shouldn't be expected to fix the problem. Your son is your problem. The way other people have raised their sons is their problem. Now the divergent views have collided and you blame the TEACHER? Out of anyone, she's the only one who is NOT responsible.

Also, you posted up an article written in USA Today about how kids do not have a strong work ethic. You comment that it's "teachers" who should "inspire a strong work ethic in the kids". WHAT??? You've got to be kidding. First of all, with that attitude, you pretty much prove what the author of the article is saying about how parents are enabling their kids to get out of doing work. If it's all the teacher's fault, then that lets both parents and students off the hook.

Second, these are high school kids the author is discussing. The Jesuits said, "Give me the boy until he is seven and I'll give you the man." The implication is that a person's character is pretty much set by the age of seven. Establishing character is clearly the PARENTS' responsibility not the teachers', especially not in high school. A high school class should be: kids come in, teacher teaches subject, kids walk out. Work Ethic 101 is not offered in school for a reason-- that's the parents' job.

I think Angel is right that I'm often too hard on teachers, especially teachers of primary and secondary education. It's a dirty secret of mine -- though considering Angel's comment, perhaps it isn't much of a secret. I try to be very aware of it and usually I tend to avoid writing about education issues because of it. She caught me on a week when I happened to blog twice about it without realizing it.

It's not that I'm unsympathetic to the difficult job teachers are tasked with. My wife teaches piano at Omaha South High School. I watch her constantly brainstorm about ways to improve her lesson plans. I see her agonize over her students almost every day. When she has students with who could be so good if they would just try, I'm the one who hears the too familiar refrain about them not living up to their potential.

I'm sure a large reason that it sounds so familiar is because I was that student in high school. I should've had A's, but I didn't work as hard as I might have, so I mostly got C's instead. It certainly wasn't that I was incapable. You'd think that would only increase my understanding of what teachers have to deal with, but apparently it isn't so. (It does, however, increase my embarrassment. The same lazy attitude continued for the one year of college I managed to complete, and truthfully that's being generous -- I'm can't remember my grades for that second semester, though honestly I'm pretty sure I don't want to. Sometime between now and then I realized that I should take every opportunity to learn as much as I can from every situation. Just imagine what I'd learn from an environment designed specifically to help me learn things.)

So perhaps it's bad form, but I'm going to call for a mulligan on the USA Today article that caused Angel to call me out. When I first commented that perhaps it is teachers who should work harder to inspire the students, I was thinking of my high school chemistry teacher, Mr. Davidson. He was excited about chemistry and knew how to inspire students to try. I'll never forget his look of disappointment when we didn’t understand a concept. I remember him teaching us a particular way to line up electron shells using the periodic table. When we finally understood it, he laughed and told us that they didn't teach that until Chemistry II at Kansas State University. And a few years later, at KSU myself, I passed Chem I without cracking open a book.

In my mind, Mr. Davidson is the gold standard of teachers, and there are a number of reasons that that probably isn't fair. For one thing, I believe to this day that he had a gift for teaching that probably isn't very common. Also, science is one of my favorite subjects. He had an automatic head start with me that, say, my English teachers didn't have*.

But back to Patrick Welsh's USA Today op/ed. I think, having reread the article with Angel's criticism in mind, I can get behind a lot of what Welsh is saying. As I've tried to make clear here, I'm the poster child for failed work ethic in high school students. I wish desperately that something had managed to unlock the desire to learn that was finally unleashed a few years too late. A lot of my original criticism probably comes from that thought.

Having said that, I want to add a major caveat, or perhaps it's more of a word of caution. I firmly believe that to get good results, teachers must be allowed to hold students to high standards. One of the major problems with the No Child Left Behind legislation is that instead of encouraging students to learn, it encourages teachers to pass students -- at any cost. Even without NCLB, there is an enormous amount of pressure from administrations and parents for teachers to lower their standards to help students pass. So I am all for holding students responsible for their failures. But it does not good to "blame the students" without also making damn sure we are supporting the teachers. It seems to me that instead of looking for somewhere to lay the blame, we should work to create a supportive environment in which we identify problems and then try to solve them.

About the story of picking up my kids and hearing that Evan was fighting, I stand behind what I wrote. But when you think about it, it's a different situation for a number of reasons. For one thing, they're preschoolers. The teachers don't have a lot to work with as far as actually teaching goes. For another thing, perhaps I didn't make it clear enough in that post, but I'm trying desperately to be on the teacher's side on this one. It's just that I don't feel like they're really letting me. I need their help to be able to help them. And what is going to help me is to give me more complete information about the problems Evan is experiencing before they expect me to get upset with him.

Regardless, Angel's comment is still valid. I am very hard on teachers, often too hard. I will continue to try to keep a leash on that tendency. But it's nice to know that if I slip up, there are people out there who aren't afraid to point out my shortcomings.

* A story to illustrate just how pathetic I was in high school: In my senior year, I took Mrs. Stratton's newspaper class. She was another great teacher, one of my favorites, in fact. But for some reason, perhaps because it wasn't a science class, I didn't try especially hard for her. When my wife worries about students not performing up to their potential, I think back to newspaper class with Mrs. Stratton. I think I wrote three articles all year, and I'm pretty sure that caused her the same grief that my wife experiences. For the most part I completed my assignments, and I did a lot of other things for the newspaper, like layout work. But I did everything in my ability to avoid actually writing articles for the paper. Instead of, you know, using my ability to actually write. Ten years later, I write a blog and wish that I'd taken advantage of the opportunities that Mrs. Stratton tried to provide for me. I try not to think about what my writing would look like if I had approached my classes with the idea that I was going to make an actual effort to improve myself.

This is what eBay was made for

2006-03-20T05:12:00.000-08:00

Might I interest you in a new timepiece? (Be sure to check out the description.)

Anatomy blogging

2006-03-19T20:35:00.000-08:00

Evan: Mommy, do I have a spine?
Rosana: (answering Evan) Nope!

Watch as David Brooks stars in "Backhanded Attacks on Feminism"

2006-03-19T13:52:00.000-08:00

If you have a New York Times Select account, you can read David Brooks' latest, an article titled All Politics Is Thymotic. In it, Brooks makes a guise of arguing that the main driving motivation of politicians is Plato's thymos, the hunger for recognition. But much like John Tierney's promise to enlighten us about the desires of women, I'm suspicious of any article that opens with a promise to tell you "what men want." Brooks doesn't disappoint.

He writes ten paragraphs that say a lot of things that I can mostly agree with. I think he's right that men want recognition. (I'd argue that that holds true for women as well, but that's because I'm me and he's David Brooks.) Brooks says things like:

If I had the attention of the world's politicians for one afternoon, I'd lead a discussion on the nature of the thymotic urge. I'd point out that if politicians weren't consumed by a hunger for recognition, none of them would agree to lead the miserable lives they do. I'd point out that in the thymotic urge, selfishness and selflessness are intertwined. Men compete for personal glory. But thymos also induces them to sacrifice for causes larger than themselves.

I'd point out that if you see politics as a competition for recognition, many things become clear. The economic and literary backwardness of the Arab world has set off a thymotic crisis, as Arab men lash out to make the world pay attention to them. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is not only a squabble over land; it's intractable because each side wants the other to recognize its moral superiority. Democracy still has good long-term prospects in that region because it's the only system that meets rising expectations about individual dignity.

There is something here that could be the foundation of a good point. Much like the idea of Richard Dawkins' memes, there are probably situations where it would be helpful to consider political situations as a series of interactions centered on thymos. And yet, much like Dawkins' memes, it doesn't really tell the whole story. Certainly a large part of politics is the hunt for personal recognition, but there are also times when politicians act according to their principles, whether that makes them popular or not. (See George W. Bush's entire second term as an example.)

But despite the title, all of Brooks' talk about the politics of thymos is really just a fancy way to tell feminists to shut up. In his last three paragraphs, Brooks writes:

If I had those politicians for an afternoon, I'd point out that even though the thymotic urge drives so much of public life, we really don't talk about thymos anymore. I'd add that when you read the ancient political philosophers on thymos, they treat it as a male trait. But over the past century women have been expressing their thymotic urges more and more, and people over 40 have a complex about female thymos that people under 40 generally don't have.

I'd ask them to read Harvey Mansfield's new book, "Manliness," which is two books in one. First, it's a subtle exploration about the virtues and vices of the thymotic urge. It's also a series of troublemaking generalizations about the differences between men and women.

Over the next few weeks, Mansfield and his feminist critics are going to brawl — thymotically — over his assertions. I'm not as impressed by Mansfield's generalizations as he is, but he'll have one advantage: he understands the nature of thymos, which shapes this fight, and so much of our political life.

Brooks first tries to cover himself by saying that he isn't impressed by Mansfield's "troubling" book and pointing out that popular support for women's rights has come a long way in the last 40 years. But the entire essay up to this point has been nothing but a defense of Mansfield's ideas. When it finally comes down to it, Brooks admits that half the book is worthless. But instead of resoundingly condemning the worthless parts, he excuses them and makes a preemptive strike against the feminists for daring to speak up.

I can't help but notice the irony that an essay about the destructive nature of the hunger for recognition is replete with stories of how much better the world would be if only Brooks had the ear of the politicians for a day. But when Brooks has an opportunity to do some real good by denouncing sexism on a national stage, instead he chooses to imply that any criticism of leveled at the theory can only be explained by the feminists' desire for individual accolades. In Brooks' world, there are no principled arguments against sexism to be found, only the thymotic pursuit of glory.

Brooks' essay would have benefited from a more nuanced discussion that admitted that sometimes the concept of thymos just doesn't apply. But of course he couldn't afford to make that admission. It would have destroyed his backhanded attack against feminism.

Thanks to Orange for passing on the article.

What's a little fighting among friends?

2006-03-18T17:14:00.000-08:00

Thursday night, Caren had parent-teacher conferences, so I had the rare opportunity to pick up Evan and Rosana from their preschool daycare. It's always a special treat. Usually Caren does the picking up, so when I walk through their classroom door instead, they are about as excited to see me as they ever get. Unfortunately, my enjoyment of Thursday's childcare transfer experience was marred by a report from Evan's teacher.

"Evan had a rough afternoon," she said in an oddly happy voice as I walked through the door. I sighed.
"Uh oh. What happened?"
"He started a fight. And he also threw some things." I sighed again. Caren gets reports like this at least once a week. Sometimes more.
"Why?" I asked. His teacher paused.
"Well, I think maybe some other kids were egging him on." I hesitated.
"Well, which is it?" I asked. "Did he start the fight, or did other kids egg him on?" She paused again.
"I'm not sure," she said finally. "I didn't really see it. But he was definitely throwing things. I saw that."
"Uh, okay. Thanks." Yeah. Thanks for nothing.

It doesn't help that I'm especially irritated by her tone of voice. She seemed all too happy to report that Evan had been acting up. Instead of acting like she wants to fix the problem, she seemed to be relish the act of telling me that my son was acting up. But when pressed for details, she had no idea what was actually going on. How is it that she admits that she's not really sure what happened, and yet she is very sure that it was my son who started the fight?

I can appreciate that she wants me to talk to him about not fighting. And I really want to be on her side and help make her job easier. But what I say to him is going to be different depending on the situation that led up to the fighting. If Evan hit someone with little to no provocation, that's one thing. But if kids were teasing him for ten minutes before he finally lashes out in frustration, that's quite another. The idea that the circumstances made a difference has obviously not occurred to anyone.

This is very frustrating. I suspect this is another case of "boys will be boys," and after all the time I've spent trying to get that idea out of my children's heads, well, I hope you'll understand when I say that it's pissing me off. I suspect that the teachers are letting the boys say and do whatever they want short of actually throwing punches. In fact, I know this is the case, because Evan tells me that one of their favorite games is "fighting." From his descriptions, it sounds more like it would be more accurate to call it roughhousing. But as anyone who has ever had little kids knows, roughhousing among a group of three- and four-year-olds can escalate into a brawl rather quickly.

The teachers are creating a no-win situation by allowing the roughhousing to happen. For one thing, the kids call it fighting. While I am in full agreement that roughhousing isn't actually fighting per se, I still find it hard to understand why you'd want to send kids the message that it's okay to "fight." The other problem is that when I've asked Evan to not participate in these "fights," the result is that he's singled out as the only boy who doesn't do it. He was starting to be teased by his classmates for being different. As a person who found it very difficult to make friends when I was little, that seemed to be leading down a path that I didn't want to see him go down, so I relented and told him it was okay to roughhouse as long as he made sure to stop if anyone was getting mad or sad.

Frankly, I'm having a hard time believing that Evan could really be giving them such a hard time. He's a sweet little boy, and it usually takes very little effort to get him to fall into line. I'm one of the lucky few parents who have a kid who you can simply ask not to do something. If you explain why, most of the time he'll agree with you and you'll see a noticeable change in his behavior going forward. When I asked him not to participate in the fights, I suggested that if the boys decided to fight he could say "C'mon guys, someone is going to get hurt. Let's do something else instead." Two days later, he came back to me and told me that when he'd tried it, they just ignored him and fought anyway. When I asked him what he said, he repeated what I'd told him almost word for word, and perfectly mirroring my pleading tone of voice. The fact that teachers are having so many problems with him leads me to suspect that they aren't trying very hard.

Though it's frustrating, I'm trying to keep in mind that he only has about two more months of preschool to go before we get to summer break. Over the summer, we're moving, and then Evan will start kindergarten and we will find a different preschool for Rosana. I'm hopeful that the greater structure of a kindergarten classroom will eliminate most of the free time the kids currently fill with roughhousing, and the problem will solve itself.

In the mean time, I guess boys will be boys, just as preschool teachers will be unwitting tools of the patriarchy. Whether I like it or not.

Call it anything but rape

2006-03-17T08:42:00.000-08:00

Yesterday there was a story in the Omaha World Herald titled Omahan accused of sexual trickery. Because the World Herald doesn't keep their stories online for more than a few days, I'm going to reproduce it here in its entirety:

A 21-year-old Omaha man was arrested Tuesday after being accused of tricking a woman into having sex with another man.

The investigation began after 1 a.m. at Bergan Mercy Medical Center, where the 31-year-old woman sought treatment.

She told officers that she was in the dark basement of a northwest Omaha home having sex with a man whom she knew, said Omaha Police Sgt. Teresa Negron.

The 21-year-old man left the room and told a different man to return to the woman and pretend to be him, Negron said.

The woman had sex with the second man, not knowing that he wasn't her original partner, Negron said.

The woman came to realize that she was having sex with a different man, said something to him about it, and he ran away, Negron said.

The first man was arrested on suspicion of being an accessory to a sexual assault. The other man fled before police arrived.

Who the hell do these men think they are? This makes me so angry that I can't even write a coherent sentence. When a woman gives you permission to sleep with her, you don’t become the owner of her pussy. She doesn't become your property, some sort of fucktoy to share with your friends.

And since we're talking about it, what the hell, Omaha World Herald? "Sexual trickery?" No, these men are accused of rape. I'm beside myself with rage that you could write an entire article about two men who plot to sleep with a woman without her consent and fail to call it rape. If you want to know why rape is so common, look no further than this yourselves. You portray rape as some kind of practical joke, as though the two men should be patting each other on the back. "We sure pulled a good trick on her, didn't we? Too bad the old bitch doesn't have a sense of humor."

I'm tired of it. I'm so tired of feeling shocked and stunned every time I find out that one of the women close to me has been raped. I've lost track of the number of times it has happened, and every single time it is emotionally exhausting. Not a week goes by that I don't learn another friend was raped. I'm sick of everyone who enables it. I'm fed up with anyone who promotes this rape culture and then pretends that they aren't part of the problem. I'm tired of supposedly respectable organizations like the Omaha World Herald refusing to call rape what it is.

Rape is an ugly word. But it's an even uglier act. These men don't deserve to be branded with anything less.

Wherein I prod facetiously at Blogger

2006-03-17T07:11:00.000-08:00

Orange Tangerine must be extra spicy hot today, because everytime I try to go there, Blogger tells me that it's Forbidden.

An open letter to Shawn

2006-03-16T06:05:00.000-08:00

Dear Shawn,

I've been meaning to write this letter for quite a long time -- it's been many years now. You see, I owe you a long overdue apology for the way I treated you when I first found out you were gay.

I'm sure you remember being outted in high school. Michael was just getting comfortable with his sexuality as a normal part of himself. He was basking in the glow of being out of the closet for the first time in his life. He was so excited, in fact, that he dragged several of his friends out of the closet with him. And you were among them.

Looking back, I have mixed feelings about my memories of Michael. On the one hand, I completely understand his desire to bring people out of the closet with him. I bet he was excited. He was feeling how great it was to accept himself for the first time in his life. He knew how good it felt, and wanted his friends to feel it, too. He wanted you to be able to experience that excitement with him.

On the other hand, it was certainly not his place to make those kinds of potentially life altering decisions for you. We were living in Wamego, Kansas -- need I say more? The place was so conservative that I didn't believe that racism still existed -- seriously, I didn't believe it. But how would I know? There were no black people worth speaking of in our town. There were no atheists or gays or Muslims or hispanics or anyone except white Christians, really. Those words didn't describe real people. They were just abstractions. And it's easy to hate an abstraction when it doesn't represent a real person.

But for purely personal reasons, I'm also grateful that Michael let your secret slip. You see, Shawn, you were the first gay man I ever knew. Now, looking back, I realize that that probably isn't true. I probably knew lots of gay people without ever knowing anything about their sexuality. But you were the first person who was real to me. You were the first real person I knew who was gay.

I must confess that the intervening ten years have caused me to forget what it was that we said to you, exactly. But I'll never forget your reaction. I'll never forget the note you wrote to us; the one you wrote from your room shaking and in tears. I can imagine the kinds of things we had said. I think we wanted you to get checked for HIV or some stupid shit like that. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that we told you that homosexuality was wrong in the eyes of the Lord. I remember that a couple of us acted particularly shitty, as though it was scandalous to have to change into our choir tuxedos in front of you. And I remember that when you heard us saying that, you spat back a stinging retort: "Do you think I'm going to rape you or something?"

You and I have been out of touch for quite some time. So I guess I can't be sure, but I know that if our positions had been reversed, I would have harbored a lot of resentment towards you and the other people who forced such a negative experience on me. It has occurred to me that I might have been a part of the first real hate that was ever directed at you because of your sexuality. The thought makes me sick.

Shawn, words cannot convey the shame I feel at these memories.

I want you to know that there is nothing you can say that will ever lessen my shame. Don't think I'm writing this to get your acceptance so that I can stop feeling bad about it. Your acceptance would be welcome, but it won't change what I did. Frankly, I don't ever want to lose that shame. It makes me a better person.

I'm writing because I want you to know that you made a difference in my life. I wanted you to know that the pain you experienced at my hands didn't amount to nothing. I can't speak for everyone else who participated in that nasty bout of bigotry, but for myself, I want you to know that you contributed to a sense of cognative dissonance that eventually helped me to realize how big of an asshole I'd been. You helped me see gay people as human beings instead of abstractions for the very first time. You helped me realize that the narrative that I'd been taught -- the nauseating story that gay people chose to live a life of sin because, I dunno, they preferred to be evil, or something -- was stupendously wrong.

So again, I'm sorry I reacted the way I did. I was a stupid little 16 year old who didn't have enough life experience under his belt to even know what he was doing. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm ashamed, and I'm sorry.

It took a long time, but I'm happy to be able to say that I'm a different person now. Perhaps one you'd even like to get to know. A guy can never have enough friends, especially friends who accept you for who you are, and who know your secrets -- if indeed it even is still a secret.

With all my friendship (if you want it),

Charlie

It doesn't stop with abortion

2006-03-15T07:30:00.000-08:00

On Friday, Orange wrote a great post on South Dakota's attempt to ban abortion which inspired me to write this rather emphatic comment. I thought I'd repost a slightly revised version here.

Orange detailed several medical reasons why South Dakota's law would impact her were she living there, and then ended with this:

I know most of my readers are pro-choice, but there may be a few of you who don’t object to South Dakota’s abortion ban and its lack of an exception for preserving the woman’s health. Such a law sends the message that my life isn’t worth it, that my life and health don’t matter, that an embryo has more right to a full lifespan than I do. I beg to differ. If you don’t support a woman’s right to choose abortion, if you think preserving a woman’s health isn’t a good enough reason for abortion—tell me why you'd want me to die early.

Orange's conclusion got me thinking about the recent history of the women's rights movement. Women's rights in this country have generally been on a downward slide since Phyllis Schlafly and her cronies helped kill the Equal Rights Amendment, which read:

SECTION 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
SEC. 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
SEC. 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

It boggles my mind to think that standing in opposition to equality is a tenable political strategy, but there you have it.

We've probably all read state senator Bill Napoli's (R-SD) repugnant statement on just what it would take to warrant an abortion. If there is anyone reading this who is still anti-choice, here's another choice quote of his, this time in support of shotgun weddings:

When I was growing up here in the wild west, if a young man got a girl pregnant out of wedlock, they got married, and the whole darned neighborhood was involved in that wedding. I mean, you just didn't allow that sort of thing to happen, you know? I mean, they wanted that child to be brought up in a home with two parents, you know, that whole story. And so I happen to believe that can happen again.

You see, these people aren't content to outlaw a woman's ability to control her own body. They want to force your daughter to marry her rapist. They want to make sure she stays at home with her rapist's child. They want to take away her right to control how many children she has. Eventually, they'll go after her right to vote, and after that they'll clamor for the good ol' days when women were property owned by men. And if at any point you decide enough is enough, any more would be going too far, they'll call you a liberal and a traitor and say that you aren't a real Christian and quote 1 Timothy 2:11-12 and Deuteronomy 22:28-29.

And when they've got women's rights under their thumb, they'll go after science education: first biology, of course, but also astronomy and geology and physics. And next up after science will be founding cities and even entire states on their particular conceptions of morality.

But you know what? That's not quite right. They won't go after these one at a time. There's no point in waiting when you can attack all at once. Which is exactly what we're seeing.

So you don't support a woman's right to choose? Well, first they came for women's rights...

Hilarious

2006-03-14T21:08:00.000-08:00

It would appear that South Park's parodies of scientology have upset the delicate Isaac Hayes:

NEW YORK - Isaac Hayes has quit "South Park," where he voices Chef, saying he can no longer stomach its take on religion.

Hayes, who has played the ladies' man/school cook in the animated Comedy Central satire since 1997, said in a statement Monday that he feels a line has been crossed.

"There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry towards religious beliefs of others begins," the 63-year-old soul singer and outspoken Scientologist said.

"Religious beliefs are sacred to people, and at all times should be respected and honored," he continued.

And what do the creators of South Park have to say about this?

"South Park" co-creator Matt Stone responded sharply in an interview with The Associated Press Monday, saying, "This is 100 percent having to do with his faith of Scientology... He has no problem — and he's cashed plenty of checks — with our show making fun of Christians."

...

Stone told The AP he and co-creator Trey Parker "never heard a peep out of Isaac in any way until we did Scientology. He wants a different standard for religions other than his own, and to me, that is where intolerance and bigotry begin."

I look forward to a future episode explaining how Chef is the latest victim of Chuck Cunningham syndrome.

Quick hits

2006-03-10T18:44:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday, USA Today published an opinion article by Patrick Welsh titled For once, blame the students in which Welsh writes:
Failure in the classroom is often tied to lack of funding, poor teachers or other ills. Here's a thought: Maybe it's the failed work ethic of todays kids. That's what I'm seeing in my school. Until reformers see this reality, little will change.

Here's a thought: the kids are with their teachers for a large part of the day. Until the teachers know how to inspire a strong work ethic in the kids, little will change.

It turns out that Kansas is not, in fact, as flat as a pancake. It's actually flatter.

This is by far my favorite post of any that I first discovered though the Koufax awards. It came about during one of the regular three month flair ups of where-are-all-the-women-in-politics, and it is perhaps the single best article I've ever seen written on the subject.

At The Dark Wraith Forums, I ran across this gem from MSN Money that explains that our economy isn't as rosy as the Bush administration would like you to think. Money quote*:
In fact, reading this article, you will conclude that there's no way out, short of running the printing presses.

Now that is a scary thought.

Until recently I was against a la carte cable. I fear that people generally won't want to pay for the channels I like, such as the various Discovery Channels, the Science Channel, and NASA TV. But then Digby pointed out that Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell don't like a la carte either, a fact that quickly changed my mind. The televangelists are worried that they will go out of business because nobody will buy their TV programs. That sounds pretty good to me.

Frankly, I don't watch TV that much anyway -- not even the channels I listed above. While I'd hate to see them go, I wouldn't mind sacrificing them for the greater good.

Here's something else that occurred to me. A la carte can't be good for the 24 hour news networks in the long run, either. The networks ratings often fluctuate. Under an a la carte system, when one network's ratings start declining and another's starts rising, it only makes sense that people will jump ship from the dying network to its stronger competitors. As that happens, the inevitable result will be consolidation, which means there will be less pressure to compete with each other and more time to vet their stories. If I'm right, in ten years there will be only one giant news networks instead of the proliferation of smaller ones we have now.

Hey, a guy can dream.

If you haven't heard it already, go grab Willie Nelson's Cowboys Are Secretly, Frequently (Fond of Each Other) off of iTunes. It's a great song.

* Yes, that was a pun. Please forgive a poor blogger his vices.

Missouri: Show me the Christianity

2006-03-05T13:32:00.000-08:00

Notice to atheists, agnostics, Muslims, Buddhists, and all other non-Christian citizens of Missouri: though all religious beliefs and disbeliefs are equal under the Constitution of the United States, some are more equal than others. Missouri is about to pass House Concurrent Resolution No. 13 to officially recognize Christianity. The text of the resolution reads:

Whereas, our forefathers of this great nation of the United States recognized a Christian God and used the principles afforded to us by Him as the founding principles of our nation; and

Whereas, as citizens of this great nation, we the majority also wish to exercise our constitutional right to acknowledge our Creator and give thanks for the many gifts provided by Him; and

Whereas, as elected officials we should protect the majority's right to express their religious beliefs while showing respect for those who object; and

Whereas, we wish to continue the wisdom imparted in the Constitution of the United States of America by the founding fathers; and

Whereas, we as elected officials recognize that a Greater Power exists above and beyond the institutions of mankind:

Now, therefore, be it resolved by the members of the House of Representatives of the Ninety-third General Assembly, Second Regular Session, the Senate concurring therein, that we stand with the majority of our constituents and exercise the common sense that voluntary prayer in public schools and religious displays on public property are not a coalition of church and state, but rather the justified recognition of the positive role that Christianity has played in this great nation of ours, the United States of America.

I'm pretty sure this doesn't legally qualify as a law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, but that's only because a resolution isn't a law. Though it's technically legal, it certainly violates the spirit of the First Amendment.

If I'm laughing, it's only to keep from crying. That the elected officials of Missouri believe it is necessary to protect a religious majority's rights is just laughable. Thanks to their larger numbers, the majority can look out for themselves. It's the minority who really needs your help. You want to be helpful? Pass a resolution condemning religious intolerance against atheists. Now that would be useful.

Not only is Resolution 13 stunning in its unnecessity, it's also factually inaccurate. Far from recognizing a Christian God, the forefathers of our nation specifically amended the constitution to ensure that the people's right to believe in whatever they want was protected. Furthermore, they most assuredly did not use the principles of Christianity as the guiding principles of our nation. This should be obvious to anyone who bothers to think about it even for a moment: the First Amendment specifically protects the rights of the people to violate the First and Second Commandments. Insulting your parents, though rude, is not a crime. Adultery is not a crime. Not only is coveting not criminal, it is the very basis of capitalism. The only commandments that actually have a corresponding law are the commandments against murdering and theft, and possibly bearing false witness, if you count perjury. Almost every civilization in history has had similar laws.

The resolution purports to claim that Missouri is only following in the traditions of our nation's forefathers. But a perusal of the writings of the founders of this country suggests otherwise:

Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess and to observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us. - James Madison, A Memorial and Remonstrance

...the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion. - The Treaty with Tripoli, signed by President John Adams and ratified by the senate without objection

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. - Thomas Jefferson, Letter to the Danbury Baptists

I could write about this for hours. Instead, I'll finish with some brief points.

The resolution expresses a desire to continue the wisdom imparted in the Constitution. But the Constitution does not mention God at all except to forbid laws respecting the establishment of a religion. While this resolution does not go quite that far, it leaves me with the uneasy impression that the Missouri House would consider it if they could.

Elected officials who, in their official capacity, recognize one religion to the exclusion of all others are most assuredly not showing respect for those who do not share their religion. This resolution is an act designed to affirm one religion while excluding all others. It serves no purpose but to divide the people.

If I were living in Missouri, I'd be writing letters to my representative to ask what gifts, exactly, have been provided by their god. I'd want to know why they feel it necessary to go against Madison's advice and deny an equal privilege -- in this case, the affirmation of one's religious beliefs by the legislative body -- to the people whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence they believe they've found for the existence of their god and his gifts.

Though it doubtlessly provides many positives, Christianity also comes with many negatives. This resolution ignores them while claiming that it is only common sense that one should do so. This only serves to reinforce the too prevalent idea that Christianity should be off limits for criticism.

Hat tip to The Green Knight for bringing this to my attention.

DJNME

2006-03-03T10:04:00.000-08:00

(Hi, it's a nut from Welcome to the Nut House. Like last Friday, Charlie and I are switching for the day in order to celebrate our blogiversaries and today it's mine. Don't forget to check out his great post on Tierney, too.)

I’ve been a single mom since Peanut was 6 months old. I tell people that I was actually a single mom as soon as the kid was born and sometimes they get it, sometimes not so much.

To steal a clichéd line: I never knew you could love someone so much within just 5 minutes of meeting.

Peanut slept on my chest for the first 3 weeks of his life because I couldn’t get up fast enough (and sometimes at all) when he cried. I kept everything right next to the couch for easy access* because no amount of crying could wake the Ex up, seriously.

I believe that led to Peanut very quickly becoming a mama’s boy, refusing to let me out of his sight for long periods of time. Whenever the Ex got up with him at night, Peanut refused to go back to sleep and instead would keep the Ex awake. I would go out with friends some Saturday’s and Peanut would wake up almost as soon as I left the house, keeping the Ex up until I returned. When I would get home, I could pick that little man right up and we’d both fall fast asleep.

Having said that, it’s no surprise he’s a mama’s boy now, but it can be so tiring.

Yet I digress.

Peanut’s birth is when the real problems began for me and my Ex. Peanut was born in August, I officially told my Ex I wanted a divorce in November and in February of 2000, I moved in with my parents just 45 minutes north of Richmond.

Being a single mom is perhaps the hardest job I’ll ever have to do in my lifetime. To have someone completely dependent on you for everything; that little person causes you to panic when your car doesn't work or keeps you from quitting your job when your boss is a complete jerk and you can't take it anymore.

There are some days when this kid is lucky to be alive, especially as he gets older. I once knew a woman who would tell her son, “I brought you into this world and I can take you right back out of it.” I never realized how true that was ‘til Peanut was born.

You see, when you’re a single mom, there is no one to relieve you of the 2 hour feedings, the crankiness, the sick baby. There is no relief when you are at your wits end and you think you’re going to throw the kid against the wall either. I had to learn to step away pretty fast because, given my mom’s history, I was afraid of what would happen if I picked him up while angry. There is no one to take shifts with or whose wages you can lean on when you have to take yet another day off work because the baby has yet another ear infection and can’t go back to daycare until he’s been on the meds for 24 hours.

Oh, I’ve had boyfriends. I’ve made the mistake of letting Peanut call someone else daddy.** I’ve had experiences that let me know what it must be like to have a partner who’s willing to be the dad in the true sense of the word.

Yet none of them have stuck. Two years after leaving my husband I decided to go back to school at the ripe ‘ol age of 26. I took a part-time job on VCU’s campus so I could easily go to school full-time during they day, allowing some semblance of a normal schedule and routine for us both.

Perhaps not a day went by wondering if I could handle school, work, a toddler and commuting. I remember sitting on the bed, before Peanut was born, asking myself if I knew what I was doing. It was too late by then of course. Many times I considered giving Peanut to his dad while I finished school but I usually smacked that thought right out of my head considering how horrible a “father” my Ex was to begin with.

Many days I woke up not wanting to be a mom. I wanted to be back to my carefree life, sitting on the beach all day eating grapes or cantaloupe while reading a really good book. Now we can’t get near water without Peanut diving in, scaring the shit out of me with his lack of fear for something so much bigger and powerful than him and my fear of water doesn't matter because I would rather Peanut be safe and enjoy himself rather than be denied his greatest joy.

These days I think horrible thoughts less and cringe more, mostly because we're in a routine now. Also, Peanut is getting older and more autonomous everyday, fighting his way into independence much to my chagrin. Don't get me wrong, there are still many days when I want to knock the kid back into last week or "take him out," sometimes there are days when I just don't want to be a mom anymore. Then there are days when I dream about moving wherever I want, traveling the world and how much easier life in general would be if I didn't have this leech attached to me, sucking on my life.

When people found out I was going to school while raising the little munchkin, they'd start fawning over me, showering me with, "Oh Nut, I don't know how you do it. You must be a strong woman." "Congratulations! I'm glad to hear you're doing it because I couldn't." "I don't know how you do it Nut, I couldn't." One of my favorite professors, who now has 2 girls and still has her husband, told me on more than one occasion she didn't know how I could do it because it was hard enough and she had a husband (both are professors here).

I also wonder about Peanut because his father does not take an active parenting role in his life whatsoever. He didn't come up for the spelling bee, he doesn't ever come up for Parent Teacher Conferences, he didn't even come up for the assessment meeting last year, when I was worried Peanut had ADD or an emotional/behavioral disorder (which he kind of does but it's getting better). Lately, R. has been into playing Halo2 online more than calling his son nightly like he used to.

Peanut regresses greatly when he visits R., becoming a whiney mumbling little shit. He does this because R. coddles him. R. dresses him, feeds him, lets Peanut still sleep in the same bed with him and Peanut is now 6 1/2. Once, R. told me that he didn't set any rules for Peanut because I was too strict and he lets Peanut "be free" and "be a kid." Once and only once R. tried telling me he knew what it was like to be me, single parents extraordinaire. When Peanut is around R., he becomes extremely disrespectful to everyone and everything, rude and generally a kid no one wants to be around; everything that I rail against during the 2 weeks at a time Peanut is with me (when he comes back he tries it with me for all of 2 seconds. In the summer it's even worse).

I say this because there are studies galore out there that say single moms need to find good male role models for their sons. I personally think I'm doing just find without a positive male*** in our lives mainly because I don't want my son to grow up to be like his father and so far I think I'm winning but the truth will be told once Peanut's Jr. High years get here.

This June Peanut and I will move out completely on our own for the first time ever and, if I thought being a single mom was hard before, I'm sure I'll be in for a real surprise then.****

Btw, when I finished reading Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott, I felt so much better.

* I had an emergency c-section and the bed was way too stiff for my very sore belly. The couch conformed to my body and was much more comfortable. R. would even sleep on the floor next to me, Peanut in a bassinet, and still not hear the kid cry.

** Yeah, that was really stupid. It took me realizing that I'd kick some other woman ass if Peanut ever called her mommy to stop that real quick.

*** My dad lives in this same house but I wouldn't count him as one considering he wasn't much of a dad to my sister and me. Sure he paid the bills, but we don't really have any kind of relationship with him which has become increasingly more evident as I get older. An example would be when he suggests I do things like look up the rights of Afghan women on the internet to prove that he was right, they wear the burqa because it's their religion, not state law. Or when he looks up from the newspaper and says, "Hey Nut, did you know women in Saudi Arabia can't drive?" This was just 3 or 4 weeks ago.

**** And just so you all know, my parents were not live-in babysitters, they only help me out with clothes/groceries when I absolutely need it, I'm in charge of procuring all of our food/toiletry/clothing needs, etc. Every once in a while my mom is super nice and pays for a knitting class for me or helps me get yarn for my new obsession. I just get to live there rent free while I attend school and wait to move out.

More talk about abortion

2006-03-01T21:14:00.000-08:00

If anything good can be said to have come from South Dakota's attempt to challenge Roe v. Wade, it's that the blogosphere is once again talking about abortion. It would seem that most of the time bloggers are as keen as anyone to avoid the topic. Perhaps that is merely a reflection of the blogosphere's tendency to chase after the popular story of the hour en masse, but I suspect it is also because most people tend to think that abortion as an issue has been talked out. People seem to think that pro-lifers have said everything they have to say, and pro-choicers have said everything they have to say, and it's pretty much all been said for at least 20 years now. With a situation like that, what's the point in bringing it up?

The problem is that I don't agree that everything has been said. There are some very persuasive arguments being made in favor of keeping abortion legal that to the best of my knowledge have only come up fairly recently. Granted, I really don't know the history of these arguments. Perhaps it is the case that these arguments have been making the rounds for 20+ years. But if that's the case, then it's even more imperative that we talk about them even louder, because I can tell you this much for sure: I hadn't heard them until recently. If these arguments have been around for years, the right people haven't been making them.

Which brings us to Lance Mannion's post from last Friday that argues that the main problem with abortion laws is that we really can't decided when life begins. Lance's post is basically a rerun of the same old pro- and anti-abortion arguments that have been making the rounds for the last 20 years.

Lance writes,

No argument for unrestricted abortion holds water unless it includes the argument that at no point is a fetus anything more than a parasitical accumulation of tissues taking up space in a woman's body.

When this is your starting point, you've already conceded a large portion of the battle. In fact, Lance is wrong when he says that any argument for unrestricted abortion must include this argument. For example, I could point out that even if I concede that a fetus is a person, it still isn't right to force the woman carrying a fetus to donate her body to care for it. Just like you can't force someone to give blood to save a dying person, you can't force a woman to carry a pregnancy to term against her will.

Lance goes on to argue that it is morally wrong to abort a pregnancy once the fetus can feel, think, and respond in kind outside the womb. He points out that we don't really know when that happens, then continues,

And that's the pro-choice argument's basic premise. We don't know. Not exactly. All we know is that at some point around here (gesturing toward a calender) it's a baby. Anything we do or say about it before then is just guessing.

The question is, who should make the guess?

For thirty-five years, as a nation, we've agreed that the guess should be left up to the woman who has to live with the outcome of the guess.

...

At some point, yes, [abortion is murder]. But when? You don't know. You're guessing. So am I. Your guess is as good as mine and our guess is no better than the woman who is actually pregnant. Since we're all just guessing, but it's her body and her life depending on whose guess wins, shouldn't she have the first and final guess?

So far I don't think I've said anything that isn't obvious to most pro-choice people.

Here's where I go off the reservation.

What if the mother is guessing wrong?

What if the fetus becomes a person earlier than she supposes?

This is why Lance's original assumption that arguments for legal abortion must address the issue of personhood is such a big mistake. The entire conversation gets derailed from the start, and all we end up with is the same tired stalemate that we've all grown tired of over the last several decades.

I wonder if Lance would call someone's refusal to donate blood an act of murder. Think about all the people on dialysis machines who die every year. Am I a murderer because I have two kidneys? Obviously, I am not. We don't consider it a murder when someone refuses to donate his body toward the support of another person. So why should abortion be any different? The question of when a new life "starts" is nothing more than a red herring that does nothing to advance the discussion.

A converstation with my three year old

2006-02-26T18:58:00.000-08:00

Rosana: Daddy! I just took a bath!
Me: Mmmm, you smell good!
Rosana: Thanks! Hey, why you not play the spaceship game?
Me: Because I'm writing an essay for my blog instead.
Rosana: Why??
Me: I'm writing about abortion and why we should keep it legal, so that when you grow up you can have that option. Though I hope you never need it.
Rosana: <with an innocent smile> Oh!

Somehow, I hadn't ever thought of it in those terms until the words were coming out of my mouth.

Breasts

2006-02-24T07:30:00.000-08:00

(Note: Charlie and I are celebrating his 1 year Blogiversary by posting on each others blog today. Next Friday we will be doing it again for mine.)

The below is a story I wrote for a fiction class I took last summer, surprising the hell out of myself yet thoroughly enjoying the creative process (which I didn't realize existed in me). Do keep in mind that it's my first (and so far only) attempt at a fiction short story so do be kind. The title of this post is also the title I gave the story.

As she sat in her car, Felicia wasn’t sure how she was supposed to feel: angry for her new lease on life? Sad because she might die and miss seeing her sons grow up, graduate from high school, marry and possibly have children? Or could she be both. She was definitely scared because now she had to go home and tell Jack the news. He was a great husband, but one never knows what the outcome will be in a crisis such as this.

She rode with the windows down and savored the warm air as it licked her face, recording how her hair felt as the wind whipped it into a frenzied state. Often she dreaded the long drive home, but not today. Today she was thankful because it gave her a chance to collect her thoughts and rehearse her lines. Christina Aguilera’s song, “Beautiful,” came on the radio and Felicia sang loud, all the while wondering if being beautiful also applied to cancer patients.

Felicia saw the Hooter’s billboard, an indication her exit was coming up. Most days Felicia ignored the blonde hair, blue-eyed woman who extended her large breasts over the highway for thousands of passersby to see, but she was not having a good day as far as breasts were concerned. As she drove passed she mumbled, Just wait. It could happen to you, too, some day.

She got off at her exit and began to prepare herself for the onslaught of little people who would demand her attention once she walked in the door. They would not care if she had just been told bad news. They expected a happy mommy who would scoop them up and love them unconditionally despite their selfish pleas for attention.

As Felicia turned into the driveway, she pushed the button to signal the garage door to begin its heavy ascent. Turning off the car she paused before getting out, admonishing herself for being such a wimp, “I can handle this. Jack is a good man. We’ll be fine.” And with that, she got out and walked into the house where three beautiful boys waited for her.

They pounced when she entered as if they were cats who had patiently been stalking their prey. They circled around Felicia as she tried to walk further inside the house, shouting, demanding her attention all at once, each trying to be heard over the other.

“Mom, check out this new robot I designed!” said Jack, Jr.

“Heeyy MOM! I saw these really cool looking birds on the way home and they flew like
this,” said Mekai as he waved his arms up and down, trying to be the bird.

Little Basil just stood there with his arms crossed and a deep frown on his face.

Felicia got on her knees so she could see him better. “What’s wrong B?”

“They keep pushing me out of the way when I wanna talk to you, too.”

“Well, I will be more than happy to hear whatever it is you wanna tell me after I say hello to
daddy, okay?” She looks at the other two and says again, “Okay?”

All three boys nodded their dark auburn heads with freckled noses and swished their way into the living room as Felicia watched in a silence permeated with sorrow.

She was still watching when Jack called her into the kitchen. Felicia found him there, washing off vegetables she assumed were part of dinner. She stood in the doorway admiring how his fit body moved in his slim khaki pants and crisp Cotton Candy Pink work shirt. My, how he still manages to give me goose bumps every time I look at him, she said to herself. Fatherhood suits him well and he wears this identity proudly, a thought that reassured her somewhat.

She had met Jack in college while both were studying architecture. He liked creating and developing something new, she liked molding what already existed. Felicia began to work part-time at a small firm after Makai was born, enabling her to still be home with the kids yet have a modicum of independence. Jack worked full-time but still had a flexible schedule so on occasion he picked the kids up from the babysitter on his way home. He had wanted to share in this responsibility because he liked seeing how happy the kids were to see him at the end of the day. It was something they both looked forward to on the bad days.

Jack stopped washing dinner and turned around, a smile flashed as he noticed Felicia leering at him from the doorway. Chuckling, he said, “It’s gonna have to wait ‘til they,” pointing to the boys rumbling in the living room, “are in bed.” Felicia laughed as she walked over to give him a kiss hello and receive a giant hug. Today she needed it.

Looking up at him she asked, “How was your day?”

“It was okay, nothing worth writing home about. How was yours? How did the boob-smooshing appointment go?”

“My day was okay before the appointment but I’ll talk about the why’s when the boys go to bed, okay? So we can chat without any interruptions?”

She was sure the look on her face belied the true anxiety she was feeling inside. He and the kids seemed so happy and content, why spoil the mood? She needed this moment for her internal scrapbook.

While Jack finished dinner, Felicia went into the living room to see what Jack Jr., Mekai and Basil were up to. This was one of the best rooms in the house because of its lived-in look with the walls painted a light olive color and barely yellow trim. The boys’ toys were strewn about in moments of forgetfulness; large cozy chairs, the kind you could lose yourself in, settled in corners near the fireplace and two large picture windows void of curtains or blinds took position on the east wall, allowing the morning sun to announce its presence each morning unhindered.

Felicia remembered her honeymoon when she looked through them; back to when, seventeen years ago, they had stayed in a resort hotel on the east coast of St. John’s. The sun would wake them each morning as it rose slowly, the ocean reflecting its intensity as if it were a large mirror. Felicia relived that moment now as she walked into the room to say her official hello’s to the boys, the evening sun from behind the house casting shadows on the lawn.

Basil was drawing on sheets of colored paper, rearranging the various hues picked from his box of crayons to make images similar to those of Matisse and even Picasso. Makai and Jack Jr. were engaged in a war-like drama with their army men. These weren’t the green shaped men with plastic platforms for feet. These men had become popular since the War on Iraq began. They had a skin tone and wore cammie’s while holding their radios or M16’s. Felicia sat on the large sectional, a shade similar to saffron, watching them, devouring their sounds.

Jack Jr. was the oldest at nine. He was in fourth grade and proud of it. Felicia’s olive skin tone and dark features combined with Jack Sr.’s calm relaxing demeanor worked well in his position of big brother. When Jack, Jr. saw Felicia come in and sit down, he again brought out his robot picture, a proud grin spreading across his round freckled face.

He ran over saying, “Mom, see? I copied it from a book with lots of other pictures of robots.”
“Yes, I do. It’s well done Jack. I’m proud of you,” she said as she gave him a hug.

Happy with her approval, he sat back down to resume playing ‘war’ with Mekai.

Only now, seeing his chance, Mekai jumped up while flapping his arms as he had done earlier when she had first come through the door. Mekai was 7, in second grade, and could be a terror. Felicia laughed as she remembered the time he had zipped through the mall pretending to be Flash, telling those he met along the way he was the “fastest man on the planet.” Which is what he was also doing now, zipping about the living room imitating the birds he had seen.

Basil, at four, was beginning to live up to his namesake. He was fiercely loyal and hated being left behind by his bigger, more capable brothers. He began walking before the usual twelve months, eager to join his brothers in their battles or games of hide-n-seek. Basil was tenacious and she had no doubt that this would carry him far in life. He sat through his older brothers antics, patiently creating his masterpieces until it was his turn. But Basil didn’t want to show her anything new or imitate wild birds. He climbed into her lap and sat there, rested his head on her shoulder and began to play with her long hair. This was what she was going to miss.

Felicia sighed. She was proud of her life and all that she and Jack had accomplished together. They had three beautiful boys and a house that faced the ocean, just as she had always dreamed of having, along with an extended family that couldn’t always be considered good, but were tolerable. Yet she couldn’t help but think of death since, after all, the doctor had said there was a seventy-five percent chance death could be her outcome.

Felicia was shocked back into reality when the kids rushed up madly and dashed out of the room: Jack had announced it was time for dinner. Getting up from her place on the couch, she ambled toward the kitchen, placing one foot in front of the other as she stretched her arms long and wide. Felicia could feel an intense anger beginning to boil, only to be fueled as she watched her family unfold in front of her. She had to put this new emotion on the shelf quickly because she wanted to enjoy the boys’ tonight. It wasn’t their fault their mother was going to die.

She took her place at the oak table located in the kitchen’s eating area. Each chair was chosen to bring character to the room, though she abhorred those cushions that tied to the backs. They always seemed to be in some hideous shade of green or had flowers plastered in an indistinguishable pattern that gave you headaches. The day they picked out the table and chairs, she had told the Ikea saleswoman to make sure the cushions were left behind.

They served themselves, Felicia helping Basil since he wasn’t big enough to lift the heavy spoons filled with mashed potatoes. As they scooped food onto their plates, the boys argued over who had more veggie meatloaf and then who could eat the asparagus faster. Felicia listened and now felt as if she had acquired patience from Mary herself. Calmly she reminded them of their simple mission to put food in their mouths first and to argue second.

Dinnertime was Felicia’s favorite meal because it forced them to sit and face each other, something that wasn’t done often enough when she was growing up because her mother worked two, sometimes three jobs, just to feed Felicia and her sisters. She appreciated everything her mother had done for her now, but she didn’t want her boys to grow up as she had, missing their mother. Of course, she reminded herself, all was for naught now. They will miss their mother, but in the finality of death and this angered her.

After dinner, Felicia helped Jack clear the table and clean the kitchen. He was one of those people who cleaned as he went so there wasn’t much mess to pick up. Then he sent Jack, Jr. to the shower in the master bathroom and Felicia sent Mekai to the bathtub in the guest bathroom. Basil brushed his teeth while his older siblings disinfected themselves. He was put to bed first without a bath because tomorrow was a stay-home day; he could take a bath in the morning when his brothers were at school.

Later, with Basil in bed and Jack, Jr. and Mekai bathed, dressed and teeth brushed, Jack’s favorite part of the day had finally arrived: reading them a bedtime story. He did this while Felicia went into the master bedroom, shutting the door behind her.

With one hand still on the knob, she brought the other up to pinch the bridge of her nose, squinting behind a headache. She knew Jack would join her after he was done reading to the boys. This new anger was begging to be let out, perhaps leading to the now throbbing headache.
Sighing, she let go of the door and moved her liquid feet, dazed, toward the king-sized bed. Eyeing the quilt that was given to them by her mother-in-law only a few months earlier, Felicia’s temper flashed and the anger that had been simmering propelled her as she tore the quilt from the bed. Disgusted with its show of hideously vibrant lavender and dust pink roses, she felt them mocking her and reminded Felicia what she would miss if she did indeed die.

She grabbed her shears and had already set about reducing the quilt to scraps when Jack opened the door.

Just as he crossed the threshold, he stopped mid-stride, mouth falling open, Jack asked, “What are you doing Fe?”

No one else referred to her by this name; Fe was only what he called her and no one else. Surprisingly, she had liked it when he had used it on their first date, so it stuck.

Sitting on the floor, her legs crossed invisibly underneath the pile of cloth and cotton batting, she said, “What does it look like I’m doing?”

Sensing an anger he hadn’t detected earlier, Jack said, “Okay. You are cutting up the quilt my mom gave us, but why?”

“Because it doesn’t belong with us. It’s not our style.”

“Fe, what’s wrong? Talk to me Fe,” pausing to add, “What did you find out this afternoon?”

“It really does suck. It laughs at me now, reminding me of what I will never be. And it’s not our style because it’s too…too…prissy. We’re not like that.”

Now Jack was puzzled. Again he wondered what Felicia had found out at the doctor’s that afternoon.

Felicia resumed cutting and ripping the quilt, loving the sound of the splitting material. Somehow it calmed her, soothed her dangerous anger that she was now beginning to realize existed. Of course it did. She was being forced to leave her children and husband behind.

She noticed Jack was still standing above her, staring. He had turned on the overhead light, the one she preferred not to use because it flashed out a grotesque color, turning everything yellow as if it were stained with years of nicotine dust.

Waving her hand in the air in an attempt to get his attention, she snapped, “Could you turn the overhead light off please and turn on the lamp in the corner?”

Jack did as Felicia asked than sat down beside her. He knew she would tell him what was wrong in her own time. Felicia needed to come to him when she was ready, it’s the way she’d always been.

When Jack, too, launched dutifully into hacking his way through the fabric, Felicia began to cry. Not a desperate sobbing complete with gulping hiccups, but a small, teary, melancholic cry out of a deeper sadness of something not yet lost. Jack moved to her side, containing her in his warm safe embrace. He wasn’t sure what had happened to cause this moment of destruction, but it must be big.

Sensing his confusion, Felicia took Jack’s hand in her own, guiding it to her right size B breast so he could feel the lump, too. Surprised and scared, Jack pulled Felicia closer still, tighter, knowing instinctively that this was what she had found out today and what they must now deal with – together – even if it quite literally meant, “’til death do us part.”

Happy blogiversary to me

2006-02-24T06:30:00.000-08:00

Shades Of Grey is one year old today! To celebrate, the nut from Welcome To The Nuthouse agreed to trade blogs for the day. Well, actually, two days. Welcome To The Nuthouse turns one next Friday, so we'll be doing it again then. But if you want to read what I wrote today, you'll have to go there to see it. But before you go, make sure you read the one she posted here first.

Break out the ~~champaign~~ champagne! Three cheers for another year of blogging!

The reason South Dakota is getting away with it

2006-02-23T09:05:00.000-08:00

I've seen a lot about the Port Authority scandal, and while I agree with Glenn Greenwald that it has a lot of potential to act as a catalyst for the warrantless wiretapping scandal, which is an issue that actually matters. And that's good, I suppose. I wish I could get more excited about it. But to be honest, this whole idea of playing politics to win back support for your party just doesn't do a lot for me. Frankly, it's just more of the same. At blogs like Glenn's, the issues that really matter take a backseat to the win-at-any-cost strategy, as though winning is even possible without a frank discussion and strong stance on the issues. As though it's worth winning when you don't have a strong stance on any issue of significance.

Much has been made of Kos's willingness to throw out so-called "women issues" because of his belief that it hurts the Democrats' chances of winning elections. But frankly, I think Markos gets way too much credit for damaging women's rights. The fact is Markos is one of the few bloggers willing to directly speak his mind and admit that "women's issues" just aren't important to him. And every time he does it, there's another big uproar among those of us who think that women's rights are just a different way of saying human rights. His willingness to speak directly goes a long way toward undoing the damage that he would otherwise inflict. It creates a target for people's ire.

No, Kos isn't the problem. The problem is the people who pay lip service to women's rights, but don't actually follow up. People like Kevin Drum, who whose recent mention of South Dakota's almost certain to succeed attempts to pass an unconstitutional law that would ban most abortions. Kevin's one and only post on the subject spends five paragraphs talking about campaign finance reform, and then ends with this hard hitter:

And in other state news, South Dakota is about to ban abortion in the hopes that John Paul Stevens will die soon and a new George Bushified Supreme Court will uphold their shiny new uterus regulation legislation. Yet another reason not to bother taking a vacation to see Mount Rushmore.

And in other state news, Kevin Drum mumbles something in favor of women being treated like full, live human beings with all the rights that implies. And look! Just like that, Kevin covers his ass to ensure that nobody can say that he doesn't care about women's rights. Except that, he doesn't. At least not very much. Given the amount of time he devotes to it, that comes across pretty clearly.

If it hasn't been completely obvious up to this point, this post is about the pending battle for a woman's right to her body that South Dakota is apparently so proud of started.

Don't get me wrong. I understand that Greenwald and Drum are actually attempting to fight the same battle I am by using different tactics. The problem is that those tactics actually aren't any different than the ones progressive pundits and politicians have been using for several years now. And they aren't getting us anywhere. It does no good to argue convincingly that your opponent has flaws if you don't simultaneously present a vision of the alternative.

So instead of relegating the news of abortion to a single paragraph -- a single sentence, really -- I'd like to see some of the following points mentioned:

Even if you grant that a fetus should have the same rights as full human being the law would force women to use their bodies to support another human being. Such laws do not exist anywhere else. For example, nobody is forced to donate a kidney to a dying man in order to save his life.

The proposed law would punish doctors instead of the women who actually buy abortions, which implies that women do not possess moral autonomy

The proposal harms minorities and poor women more than white middle class women, because women with money can still travel out of state for an abortion, and because "emergency D&Cs" have historically been available to white women

The proposed law is distinctly religious in nature, using non-medical terms as "conception" instead of "fertilization," and ignoring the medical definition of pregnancy

There are people writing about all of this and more, in haunting detail. If you can't figure out what to say about it, try sampling this not-at-all comprehensive roundup of links that I found through a cursory examination of the blogs on my blogroll:

The Set-Up at Bark Bark Woof Woof

Forecast: frigidity in South Dakota at Bitch Ph.D.

Innocent Life at Digby's

Keep An Eye on South Dakota by Jill at Feministe

Welcome To South Dakota: Bring Your Own Coathanger! by Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money

Women in South Dakota are to become Dehumanized Birthing Chattel-- Nothing More! at Pseudo-Adrienne's Liberal-Feminist Bias

South Dakota women might as well die for fucking by Amanda at Pandagon

http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2006/02/south-dakota-abortion-bill-passes.html by Shakespeare's Sister

Your baby's daddy is your daddy and I don't care by tbogg

I hope this helps. Now help me get the message out.

Please.

Except that it isn't a joke

2006-02-20T05:30:00.000-08:00

Didja hear the one about the leader of the free world who trusted science fiction novelists more than actual scientists?

In his new book about Mr. Bush, "Rebel in Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush," Fred Barnes recalls a visit to the White House last year by Michael Crichton, whose 2004 best-selling novel, "State of Fear," suggests that global warming is an unproven theory and an overstated threat.

Mr. Barnes, who describes Mr. Bush as "a dissenter on the theory of global warming," writes that the president "avidly read" the novel and met the author after Karl Rove, his chief political adviser, arranged it. He says Mr. Bush and his guest "talked for an hour and were in near-total agreement."

"The visit was not made public for fear of outraging environmentalists all the more," he adds.

And so it has, fueling a common perception among environmental groups that Mr. Crichton's dismissal of global warming, coupled with his popularity as a novelist and screenwriter, has undermined efforts to pass legislation intended to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a gas that leading scientists say causes climate change.

I can just see it now...

Bush: Thanks for coming in, Mr. Crichton. ... Can I call you Michael?

Crichton: Sure!

Bush: So, Michael, what do you think of this whole 'global warming' thing?

Crichton: Well, I think it's a conpiracy by the leftist environmentalists.

Bush: I knew it! That's what I always thought, too!

And meanwhile, glacial ice in Greenland is falling into the Atlantic at twice the rate it was in 1996...

I gotta get out more often

2006-02-19T13:36:00.000-08:00

I don't make it to the right side of the blogosphere very often, but I'm definitely going to have to make a point to go there more often. In my reading about Richard Cohen's declaration that nobody needs algebra, I came across this gem. I'm tempted to call it a microcosm of what's wrong with our country, but that's probably giving it too much credit.

For the most part, I’m pretty dismissive of the pundit class. Most odious among them are the ones who still carry the torch for liberalism — Krugman, Herbet, Dionne, Oliphant, etc. But there is one who has hit it out of the park with a recent column: Richard Cohen. The column goes straight after the cult of numbers that rules so much of the thinking in the left-wing wonk and chattering classes crowd. These are the people who attack Bush because of the budget deficit (as if we didn’t have one under Clinton) and question the numbers behind Social Security privatization. The people who think that their number-crunching ability gives them greater wisdom than the guidance the president gets from a Higher Power. Mr. Cohen writes
Most of math can now be done by a computer or a calculator. On the other hand, no computer can write a column or even a thank-you note — or reason even a little bit. If, say, the school asked you for another year of English or, God forbid, history, so that you actually had to know something about your world, I would be on its side. But algebra? Please.

I would add there’s one other thing that a computer doesn’t have: faith. No amount of number crunching can ever substitute for that.

Mr. Cohen has written some other good pieces recently as well. He was one of the first to take on Patrick Fitzwhackjob’s jihad against the Bush administration and the free press.

This is why I want Fitzgerald to leave now. Do not bring trivial charges — nothing about conspiracies, please — and nothing about official secrets, most of which are known to hairdressers, mistresses and dog walkers all over town. Please, Mr. Fitzgerald, there’s so much crime in Washington already. Don’t commit another.

Cohen is that rarest of breeds. A self-described liberal who dares to stray off the Daily Kos/Howard Dean talking points and speak common sense every now and then.

He has just received the highest honor the loony left blogosphere can bestow: Duncan Hack’s “Wanker of the Day”. If one is to be judged by the idiocy of one’s critics, then Mr. Cohen should get a medal.

I have read all 108 comments in search of any sign that this was a parody, but as far as I can tell the author meant exactly what he said.

It may be true that I'm only laughing to keep from crying, but at least I'm laughing really hard.

Parenting, women's choices, and mommy drive-bys

2006-02-18T11:30:00.000-08:00

Via Pandagon, I saw this post by Molly of Molly Saves The Day. Overall, I agree with the point raised. However, I do take issue with one of the examples she uses.

First, the positives. Molly writes that because of societal pressures that come along with them, many of the "choices" presented to women aren't really choices at all. She uses an example of a journalist in her hometown whose job was made successively less desirable after she returned from maternity leave. Molly rightly argues that given the pressure the journalist faced, her eventual decision to leave her job and stay home with her child wasn't really a choice.

So far, I'm in complete agreement with Molly. However, I am less enthusiastic about the next part. Molly writes:

John and I love a local Vietnamese restaurant here in town. Great pho, a fabulous clay pot pork dish, and summer rolls to die for, with no entree more than $7 unless you delve into the seafood. My kind of place.

When we went there last week, though, we saw an unlikely sight. A party of nine, two couples with five kids of ages 6 to about 10. The kids all sat at one end of the table while the adults sat at the other. The first thing we noticed is that the adults were all chowing down on appetizers while the children stared at empty plates and poked each other with chopsticks. They were bored — as any kids would be. The parents talked among each other but never to the children, except to admonish them when they behaved badly.

A few minutes later, just after we’d ordered, the entrees were brought to the table of 9. The adults had some of the yummier dishes served at the restaurant. The children, on the other hand, were each issued a bowl of plain white rice vermicelli and a cup of soda.

Let it be known that I am no stranger to the plight of the picky eater. My sister was one, and many times we went to a Chinese restaurant only to hear her order plain rice with plain broccoli. But I got the feeling there was no way 5 out of 5 children would opt for plain noodles, with no sauce or condiments.

My assumption was proven right a few minutes later, when the oldest of the children asked her mother if she could try a bite of the mother’s dish. She was told that no, she couldn’t have any, but if she finished her current bowl of noodles, she could have more noodles.

At this point, John and I were absolutely flabbergasted. The kids, now loaded to the gills with the carbs from their unadorned pasta and sugary soda, were starting to get testy and irritable. The parents continually ignored them as long as possible and only talked to them if they’d done something really bad. When one child intentionally spilled her soda, the mother left it to the waiter to clean up.

****

I like children. And I love seeing good parenting in action — the problem is, when you see good parenting, it’s often hard to notice it. When you see bad parenting, it’s hard to ignore. I do not know whether those mothers stayed home with their children or not. But I know this much: even if they did, it wouldn’t do those kids any good. An average daycare provider would pay more attention to each child than these parents did.

It's tempting to agree with Molly's conclusion here. At first glance, this seems to be about as obvious a case of bad parenting as you're likely to come across. And Molly is certainly right about one thing: when you see bad parenting, it is hard to ignore it. The problem is, it's impossible to reliably identify bad parenting based on a two hours spent in a restaurant. Furthermore, it's interesting to note that everyone seems to have their own definition of just what "bad parenting" is.

Where Molly sees bad parenting on behalf of the adults in the party of nine, I see confirmation bias and a lack of imagination in Molly. We simply don't have enough facts to know what is going on in this situation. As an example, take the girl who asked to taste her mother's food. As Ogo points out in the comments, it could be that the little girl is allergic to something in her mother's dish. Or maybe it's something completely different: maybe three of the kids genuinely like the white rice vermicelli, and the other two insisted on ordering what their cousin ordered. Perhaps the girl's mom even reminded her that the last time she tried it, she didn't like it. And who would blame her mom for not wanting to let her eat anything else when she knows her daughter constantly pulls that same trick and wastes food? It's no wonder the kids wanted to sit close to each other: they have missed their cousins since they moved away last year. In fact, this is the first time the two families have seen each other in over a year. The Vietnamese venue was chosen as a concession to the adults to celebrate their reunion. And apparently the choice paid off — except for a spilled drink and a little restlessness, the kids were very well behaved.

Obviously I have no idea if either of my constructed narratives are right. But that's exactly the point: we don't know what is going on, and yet there are a large number of people unwilling to give parents the benefit of the doubt. Molly adds more about the family in the comments. She mentions a borderline-abusive father as one example. But for everything that Molly adds, I can imagine a scenario that turns the whole thing into a big misunderstanding.

It's easy to see why negative assumptions about other people's parenting style are so prevalent, especially between parents. It is very easy to think, I've raise my kids a certain way, so I know that way works. And when you see parents who are apparently not raising their kids the way you did, it's tempting to think that they're doing it wrong. But this assumption misses the important fact that all kids are different, and what works for one kid — or one family of kids — may fail disastrously for others. The reality is that you simply cannot learn enough about a parent in one shopping trip or dining experience to know whether that parent is doing a good job or not.

Furthermore, this judgmental attitude against parents* contributes to the very phenomenon that Molly writes against. The attitude seems to suggest that if a person cannot be a perfect parent all of the time, they shouldn't have children. It says that there is only one way to raise a child, and that women who dare to deviate from this path should be punished for their insolence. Such judgmental posturing implies that because having a child is a choice, parents who choose to have children should be prepared to sacrifice their entire lives for their kids. And yet, Molly's original point was that women should not be forced into such a sacrifice.

That happens again when Molly suggests in the comments that a sitter could have been hired for the same price as feeding the kids. I share Mythago's incredulity that one could find a babysitter for so cheap. But even if I'm wrong and it is possible to find a babysitter for four kids for $20 in some areas, that really only serves to further damage Molly's argument:

Most people, however, understand that when the idea is phrased as “full-time childcare,” it refers to all aspects of taking care of a child, good and bad. It also describes it as work (though not work people in this society are paid particularly well for).

What does it say about the value our society places on childcare if $20 is the going rate to watch four kids for two hours?

I'm disturbed by just how little has to actually happen for a parent to be deemed a "bad parent." As far as I can tell, the parents from Molly's story haven't done anything nearly bad enough to be worthy of that distinction. They let the kids sit together. They let the waiter clean up a spilled drink. I can tell you from experience that bland food is something that a lot of kids prefer. And despite suggestions to the contrary, the kids were pretty well behaved, one spilled drink and chopstick notwithstanding. If that's all it takes to be judged a bad parent, well, I'd hate to run into you in public when my kids are having a bad day.

The bottom line is that while it is very easy to pay lip service to the concept of supporting a woman's right to choose how to raise her family, it is much harder to actually do it in practice. Sometimes it means supporting her decision not to have kids at all. Sometimes it means supporting her decision to have a family and also a career. And sometimes it means giving her parenting skills the benefit of the doubt when she's at a grocery store with a screaming child at naptime.

* * *

* I must admit that all this talk of attacking "parents" seems a little disingenuous to me. Let's be honest: at the current point in time, more parenting responsibilities are handled by women than men. Because parenting is widely assumed to be a mother's responsibility, an attack on "parenting" is a subtle way of attacking a mother.

Note I'm not saying that parenting responsibilities should be handled by women, or even that it is right that such assumptions exist. I'm just saying that when such assumptions exist — and they do — attacking "parenting" is really an attack on "mothering" in disguise.

A blogrollin' we shall go

2006-02-16T18:41:00.000-08:00

Happy Furry Puppy Time With Norbizness. And this may be the last time I ever type the full name of Norbizness' blog.

Faux Real. A new blog from a woman who writes from the heart.

Creek Running North. Chris Clarke is an amazing writer. And he comments at all my favorite blogs.

Unclaimed Territory. This is Glenn Greenwald's blog. He's only been blogging for three months, and already it's becoming one of my favorite political blogs. I found him via Michael Berube, but if my politics were of the right wing persuasion, I might have found him via Powerline or Little Green Footballs. It seems he's been attracting attention from both sides of the fence with posts like this one.

Tbogg. You've probably read it, so you already know he's funny. Now he's on my blogroll, and I am funny by proxy.

Moving to the right: why it will never be enough

2006-02-16T18:32:00.000-08:00

Since the political blogging can of worms has already been re-opened, now seems like as good a time as any to talk about the phenomenon of Democrats moving to the center, and why it is a bad strategy. To help me explain it, first I'm going to talk about some of the key differences between liberal and conservative philosophy. Entire books could be written about what I'm about to represent by a few paragraphs, so please forgive my overgeneralizations. Though a lot more could be said about both liberals and conservatives, it is a key difference in approach that I'm looking at.

Liberals are often called "progressives." That word says a lot about how we approach the world. Our political goals stems directly from our sense of social progress. We liberals are usually known for looking at the world not only how it is, but also how it could be. Because of this, we aren't usually ones to rest on our laurels. When we consider something to be broken, we want to fix it. Progressives can usually be counted on to favor some kind of governmental reform. For example, right now most of us favor the creation of a national health care plan.

By contrast, conservatives gravitate toward the traditional. The root of the word conservative is "conserve," and what they are attempting to conserve is their traditional way of life. Taking the attitude "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," conservatives tend to look upon the liberals' desire for change with suspicion. Often, they regard such changes as an attack on their way of life. This is the source of the persecution complex that so many conservatives seem to have.

As I said above, both of these definitions are quite overgeneral. Nonetheless, I think there is a large element of truth in both of them. And I will take them a step further to explain why moving to the center is not a good strategy for Democrats.

Just as there are is a large spectrum of progressives ranging form the far-left all the way to the barely-left-of-center, conservatives each fall into a range that starts with the mildly conservative and goes all the way to the far- and radical-right. But unlike the forward-looking progressives, conservatives prefer a traditional way of life. And just how far back a conservative prefers his traditions to go depends in large part on where he falls on the political spectrum.

And now it starts to become clear why moving to the center is not a winnable strategy for a progressive politician. If you are a Democrat, moving to the center means moving to the right. But how far should you go? Nothing short of completely abandoning your principles will ever move you far enough to the right to completely satisfy your opponents. There will always be conservatives who are complaining that liberals are still ruining their conservative way of life. A Democrat moving to the center is conceding ground while not forcing conservatives to do the same. In fact, the Democrat isn't any closer to the center than when she started. The only thing she has succeeded in doing is moving the center further to the right.

This explains why moving to the center used to mean giving up a few political goals, whereas now it means co-sponsoring the suppression of dissent in the form of an anti-flag burning amendment. It also explains a large part of why our country continues its slide to the right.

I can only hope people wake up to this phenomenon and stop it soon. I shudder to think where we will end up if we don't.

Coretta Scott King, rest in peace

2006-02-06T16:20:00.000-08:00

Coretta Scott King died last Tuesday. I must admit that unlike some, I don't have a special story to share about her. But since she was known for continuing her husband's work, and because I missed Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and didn't get to say what I wanted to say then, perhaps it will be a fitting tribute to both of them to say it now instead.

On Martin Luther King, Jr. day, for the first time as an adult, I took the opportunity to read about Dr. King and his contributions to our society. In a sense, I didn't learn anything new. My education growing up explained what he stood for and hit on the major events of his life. But as an adult having seen bigotry and racism first hand, I realized for the first time just how immeasurable King's contributions were.

Indeed, if you're my around my age and haven't studied King since grade school, I highly encourage you to take a few hours and reinvigorate your knowledge of the man. You might be surprised at what you learn. You'll almost certainly be inspired -- if there is one thing I realized, it is that our society sorely misses inspirational voices like his today. So read the Letter From Birmingham Jail in its entirety. Listen to the complete I Have A Dream speech -- it's only 16 minutes long.

And if you are tempted to think that the fight for civil rights for blacks in the 1960s has very little direct relevance to our society today, think again. Take this excerpt from Letter From Birmingham Jail:

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.

When I read that, I can't help but notice that it applies equally well to the LGBT community's struggle for the right to marry. Denying homosexual's marriage cannot be justified by saying that we have all agreed to marry only members of the opposite sex. It is unjust because we deny the right to choose family members, inheritance, and shared property to those for whom the choice to marry a member of the opposite sex is no choice at all.

On MLK Day I was looking at my last.fm profile, which is a catalog of all the music I listen to through the computer. I was somewhat startled to see the I Have a Dream speech had also been cataloged. (In retrospect, it isn't much of a surprise, the software can't tell a speech from a song, after all.) Perhaps the most inspiring event of the day was when I clicked on the link that shows Top Tracks by Martin Luther King, Jr. and saw that I'm not alone: hundreds of people have listened to the same thing. Hundreds may not seem like a lot, but it's pretty big when you consider that not a lot of people have the cataloging software installed.

That number will only continue to increase. Perhaps there's hope for us after all.

UPDATE: Fixed the links to last.fm.

Blogging and the Democratic Party

2006-02-04T21:50:00.000-08:00

I was talking to Melissa last night, ranting about how politics have been depressing me. This is part of the reason I've made a deliberate effort not to blog politics recently. But she convinced me to set my reluctance aside, at least this one time. So I'm going to talk about the Democratic party. I intend to say some things that I think a lot of people haven't quite understood yet. So listen up.

I'm getting very tired of hearing that our issues can't win with the American public. A lot of people are acting as though the fact that conservatives are in power right now means that a slim majority of Americans are themselves conservatives. I actually can't stress how utterly and resoundingly wrong this idea is. High ranking officials in the Democratic party, I'm talking to you. The fact is, most Americans identify strongly with liberal values. For example, they want control over their bodies. They believe in the the freedom of speech and the right to protest. Just like we self-identified liberals, their sense of morality is offended by the idea of poor people dying from treatable illnesses because they couldn't afford health care.

So when I see things like this Reuters article, titled "Bush to seek Medicare cost savings," whose first paragraph is this --

CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) - President Bush will propose reining in Medicare payments to hospitals as he seeks savings in one of the largest U.S. entitlement programs, an administration official said on Saturday.

-- I hope you can understand why I get a little upset. How did it ever get this bad? Have you forgotten your own liberal values? Because the day I read that it is permissible to find "cost saving" in Medicare is the same day that most Americans have been allowed to forget that Medicare payments translate directly into poor people not dying. Most Americans don't want people to die. So you see, when conservatives say Bush is "reigning in Medicare payments to hospitals as he seeks savings," I should hear it said that Bush is "contributing to the needless deaths of many Americans by cutting hospital care for the elderly, poor, and needy, all the while calling this a 'savings.'" And don't even get me started on the use of the phrase "entitlement program." It has actually reached the point where conservatives are allowed to portray money spent on saving lives as wasteful. It's not that Americans have gradually become more conservative. It's that they are focused on their day to day lives, and if we -- if you, the elected and appointed officials of the Democratic Party -- don't constantly remind them why it funding Medicare is worth their tax dollars, they will forget. And then they will think that "reining in payments to see saving on one of the largest U.S. entitlement programs" sounds like a damn good idea.

You'll recall that I said I intended to say something that I haven't heard said yet. I find it interesting that up to this point, I haven't said anything that hasn't been said a million times before all over the liberal blogosphere. No, these are hardly original thoughts, and that brings me to point number two: You, high ranking Democratic officials, are ignoring your base.

I'm going to say it again, because I think this is an important point. Democrats are ignoring their base. I've read a lot of bloggers recently who have come very close to saying that, especially Peter Daou (and especially in this post). Daou acknowledges that there is a disconnect between the Democratic Party and liberal bloggers. But even Daou describes a system where the Democrats tell a network of bloggers what to points to hit. I'll tell you what I think: Daou has it exactly backwards. It is backwards for two reasons: One, because he is assuming that blogs have a lot more power than they do. I think it has been quite well demonstrated that this isn't the case. The stories that we bloggers focus on generally don't catch on with the public at large until the mainstream media deigns to pick it up. In a few rare cases, we have been able to make that happen. But the vast majority of the time, we can't. Daou's system might be effective at getting the word out to other bloggers, but it would do very little to raise awareness of the issue to the mainstream public.

But there is another bigger reason that Daou has it backwards: we liberal bloggers represent the Democratic Party's base. Think about it. What constitutes the base of a party if it isn't the people who care enough about the issues to write obsessively about them almost every single day? Consider this as well: if my little rant above -- the one about liberals who have let Americans forget why they should care about liberal issues -- didn't contain anything new, it is only because liberal bloggers -- the base -- are already providing a consistant message. And that is the very thing the Democrats have been accused of not being able to do.

If I'm right and liberal bloggers really do represent the base of the Democrats, this tells us a couple of things about what kind of results we should expect given certain behaviors of the Democratic Party generally. For example, as they move to the center on issues that are important to their base, one should naturally expect support for the party to fragment. Indeed, that is exactly what we have seen. It makes sense, then, that because the base sits considerably to the left of the party itself, if the Democrats were to move to the left on the issues, they could reasonably expect greater success. Note that this is in direct contrast to Daou's theory, wherein the Democrats continue to do what they are already doing to determine what issues should be emphasized, and then use blogs as an additional way to get the message out.

Also note that there is no reason to expect us to lose popularity by moving left. In fact, we should actually gain it, because the day-to-day process of moving to the left will force our elected officials to explain themselves, and as I've already mentioned, most Americans share our liberal values. (And if you still aren't convinced, think about it this way: The Republicans have been forced to carry out most of their goals under a veil of deception. They already know that we have the ideological upper hand. We are the only ones acting unaware of this fact.)

I'm certainly not claiming that liberal bloggers themselves are the base of the Democratic Party. The set of people in the party's base is much bigger than the set of liberal bloggers. But I think it is safe to assume that liberal bloggers represent the base fairly accurately.

I'm also aware that it is often claimed that it is hard to get the liberal blogs to agree on anything. I think anyone making that claim has drastically misunderstood what blogging is about. If we all agreed perfectly, there would be nothing more to write about. Perhaps more importantly, blogging is a process by which we bloggers grow. When I write something, someone else reacts to it. Sometimes they leave me comments and I rethink my position. Just as often, someone publishes their thoughts on my post, highlighting my post's flaws and suggesting a different way of approaching the same issue. The disagreements are not unlike a social or philosophical version of the scientific method: mistakes are uncovered so that they may be corrected. The fact that we liberal bloggers have reached anything like a general consensus on so many diverse issues speaks volumes for our process. The fact that we don't all march in lock step isn't a weakness. It's one of our greatest strengths.

The only thing left is for someone in power to recognize the potential.

UPDATE: None other than Peter Daou himself writes in with this:

Hi Charlie – someone sent me a link to your post, which I think has some interesting points. However I think you’ve misunderstood my ‘Triangle’ concept. If you read the first essay in the series, you’ll find we agree on the role of blogs.

http://daoureport.salon.com/synopsis.aspx?synopsisId=147a2536-4de0-4716-9cc0-6c681e095ffd

And to think I was just saying that one of the strengths of blogging is being told when you're wrong. Peter is right, I had not read back far enough to completely understand his Triangle concept. The link he provides gives an excellent introduction, but the general idea is very close to what I just said: bloggers are only one leg of a triangle. The other two legs are the media and the party establishment. Without participation of the other two legs, the power of blogs is greatly diminished.

I misunderstood Daou's Triangle to mean that information flows only one direction. In fact, his premise is that with a successful triangle in place, information and cooperation would be free to flow in all three directions. Mea culpa.

I'm not dead yet

2006-02-02T14:56:00.000-08:00

I think I'll go for a walk! I feel happ-eeeeeee!

Ahem.

Caren and I are pretty sure we've found an elementary school, so thank you all for your advice in that endeavor. For those who care, it is called Crestridge Elementary. It's the local magnet school. It has a wide variety of ethnicities, as this picture testifies. It also has a passable library, seems very clean, and has a great curriculum that highlights other cultures. Teacher to student ratio seems decent. The only disappointment is that music classes are only twice a week, but it seems that we can't really do any better in that regard if we want to stay in the OPS school district. We're quite pleased.

We also think we've found a new apartment. It's a little smaller than our current place, so it'll be a somewhat tight squeeze. But it features rent that is about $100/month cheaper than what we're paying, and it features washer and dryer hookups, which is simply a necessity to the person who does most of the laundry*.

When last I blogged, I mentioned some particular computer problems that were plaguing us at the time. Well. I'm happy to report that the computer is finally recovered, after much effort and no small expense. I had narrowed the problem down to either the motherboard, processor, or memory. Since replacing any one of them generally requires replacing the other two, we went ahead and pulled the trigger on a specially priced combo I found at pricewatch.com. Actually, we pulled the trigger twice, because the original vendor shipped us the wrong parts the first time via a much slower shipping method than I had requested and paid for. Several tortured calls later to barely decipherable support representatives identifying themselves variously as Eric, Spenjamin, Eric, and Brandon**, and the incorrect inventory was back on its way to Florida. In its stead, I installed some perfectly good hardware from CompUSA. It was more expensive, but it was also exactly what I asked the sales clerk to sell me.

So anyway, I'm back, sort of. I've been really busy at work, and I've also been hard at work on a personal project that I hope to reveal here soon. To atone for my recent absence, I offer you this portrait of my son, Evan, drawn by my daughter, Rosana. She has titled it "Evan with a penis." I do hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

* To be perfectly clear, I am not the one who does most of the laundry. Also, I should probably note that she would likely have a minor quibble with the implication that she only does most of it.

** Seriously, how stupid do I look? There is no way that four people with heavy eastern accents have such American names. And the probability against two of them both being named Eric seems astronomical to me. I'm not even kidding about "Spenjamen" -- I made him spell it for me.

A question for my readers

2006-01-11T20:47:00.000-08:00

Blogging is a little slow around here right now because my computer has acquired the habit of spontaneously rebooting itself. Sometimes it will go for hours with nary a wayward reset, and sometimes it won't go five minutes. Unfortunately, my efforts to narrow down the cause of the reboots have led me to believe that I am dealing with a hardware problem. But never fear! Replacement parts are on the way. Indeed, I am assured that they will be here no later than Monday. (Incidentally, the estimated day of arrival is itself somewhat vexing. I paid for second day delivery, yet the parts were shipped via UPS Ground. It is trying my patience, especially with geeky dreams of new hardware dancing in my head.) If I'm a little light on content for the next few days, well, at least I have an excuse this time. But rest assured I will make every effort to continue my recently-reacquired habit of posting in a more timely manner.

But now I'm going to change the subject. I have a question for you.

My son will be starting kindergarden in a little over six months. Caren and I are getting excited about it, but we also find ourselves facing a choice that neither of us are especially prepared to make. In the small town where we grew up, there was only one school. When it was time to go, everyone in town went to the same school. As you can probably imagine, the situation here in Omaha is quite a bit different. There are lots of schools, both public and private, for our kids to potentially attend. Omaha divides the public school district such that where you live determines where your kids will attend elementary school*. Since we have already ruled out private schools, the choice would be made for us...

...except that we're planning on moving to a different part of town this summer for a variety of reasons, one of which is the opportunity to choose which school our kids will attend. So we get to choose, which is good. But neither Caren nor myself have ever had any experience with choosing an elementary school. And that's where you come in.

We know that diversity is very important to us, and we know that we will be able to determine a school's diversity fairly easily. But beyond that, we are having a hard time figuring out exactly how we should go about this. I know we can schedule walk-throughs, but what should we look for? Are there standard questions we should ask? Also, I'm a little nervous about the whole thing because I've noticed that the schools with the best diversity are also the ones that people tell us are bad schools that should be avoided. But what exactly is a "bad school"? I'm not sure how much I trust such a general assessment. Caren teaches music at one of the so-called "bad" high schools, and she's never had any problems with her students. I have more than a little bit of suspicion that "bad" schools get that designation more from unconscious racism than any kind of academic consideration. Just how should one go about determining whether a particular school is "bad"?

I'm sure a lot of this will be obvious when I read your answers. But I feel like I've already let time get away from me -- when the heck did my kids get so old, anyway? And believe it or not, it didn't occur to Caren and me that we didn't know how to do this until we started actually trying to do it. So I'm hoping that some of you have dealt with this before.

So that's my question: How did you do it? Leave your answers in the comments, and thanks in advance!

* Actually, Omaha has cooperative zones. We can choose to send our kids to the school in the zone where we live, or we can send them across town to one other zone that partners with ours. I wouldn't even mention it except that I know there are a handful of people in Omaha who read this blog. The greater point is still true: If we are willing to move, we can choose which school our kids will attend.

Two more for the blogroll

2006-01-08T09:16:00.000-08:00

Welcome, Alas, A Blog and I Blame the Patriarchy. The former was the one I'd forgotten the last time I updated the blogroll. In fact, it should've been added a long time ago. The latter is a blog I didn't fully appreciate until recently. They're both excellent reads, though I admit chances are high that you already know this because you already read them on a regular basis. I'm better off late to the party than never showing up, though, right?

With apologies to Twisty, I blame the patriarchy

2006-01-07T15:36:00.000-08:00

I've been aware of Twisty's blog I Blame The Patriarchy for quite awhile now. Though most of the other bloggers I read rave about her, I must admit that when I'd read her in the past, I had mixed feelings about what she had to say. Sometimes, I absolutely loved it. But other times I would react very negatively to her ideas. Still, with all the glowing recommendations, when I found myself with some spare time the other day I decided to give it another shot.

All was going well until I read her recent post Kill Pill, which starts:

A while back, among a few facetious yet poetical lines written on the perils of chick-Viagra, I noted that women who are disinclined to submit to dudely impalement every 2 hours hardly suffer from a disease that warrants pharmaceutical intervention, and that any pill devised to make girls horny is obviously just a designer roofie and a sick ploy of the patriarchy to keep the sex class in thrall.

My reaction was negative and immediate. That's bullshit, I thought to myself. Twisty just doesn't understand. But as I planned a blog post in response, a funny thing happened.

You see, my initial reaction was emphatic because of personal experience. My wife and I have rather mismatched libidos. When it comes sex, I'd like it to happen quite a bit more often than she would*. We were married at the ripe old age of 20, and as you can imagine, both of us had plenty to learn about the other. Our mismatched sex drives caused plenty of problems, especially early on.

The response I began composing in my head went something like this: But lots of marriages suffer from mismatched libidos! If Twisty really knew how much of a problem this can be, perhaps she'd reconsider her opinion. Sure, a drug to enhance women's sex drive could certainly be abused. But it could also be really beneficial! Fortunately, my problems aren't anything that my wife and I can't work though. But imagine if it were worse: Imagine a heterosexual marriage where the woman had practically no interest in sex. Assuming the man had a normal sex drive, isn't it safe to assume that at least sometimes the woman would be interested in taking this pill? And if indeed her interest were genuine, how can one say that she is being oppressed?

As I thought this, I noticed to my dismay that my argument had plenty of problems. For one thing, it bears striking resemblance to the "how could I hate gays when one of my best friends is gay" argument, which was enough to give me pause. I have to admit that just because some women might want to take the libido enhancer, it doesn't automatically follow that the libido enhancer isn't oppressive. In fact, my argument also bears resemblance to another one that says makeup can't possibly oppress women because, after all, some women like makeup. Of course makeup in itself isn't oppressive. But lots of things that come along with it are, especially the almost universal expectation that a woman is required to wear it in public.

I also realized another thing. What happens when you reverse the tables? What if a female libido enhancer is not found, but a drug to decrease the male sex drive is found instead? The end result would be the same, right? But when I thought of it in those terms, my immediate reaction was almost as negative as my reaction to Twisty's post. And why shouldn't it be? After all, there's nothing wrong with me.

And that's the rub, isn't it? Because just as there isn't anything wrong with me for having a high sex drive, there isn't anything wrong with a woman who has a low sex drive, either. The fact that I would react negatively to treating a man's "problem" but not have the same reaction to treating a woman's is Twisty's entire point.

But that still leaves the original problem unresolved, doesn't it? What are couples who actually have these problems supposed to do? Just learn to live with it? Get a divorce? None of the options are satisfactory.

But then again, that isn't really the original problem anyway. If you take a step back, you'll notice that part of the problem comes from the assumption that neither partner is allowed to go outside of the marriage for sex. That assumption is a holdover from the old days when marriage was a means of property transfer. Back then, it was assumed that men didn't need to go outside the marriage because men could demand sex from their wives whenever they wanted it. Women were just property. Their needs didn't count. The problem of mismatched sex drives in a marriage is only a problem because of the patriarchal origins of marriage. And if this problem with no solution upsets you, well, I'm pretty sure I know what Twisty would say: I blame the patriarchy.

So what's the conclusion here? One part of it is that try as I might, I can never completely expunge from myself the gender biases that our society builds into each of us. (Why that should even come as a surprise I don't know. I am a benefactor of male privilege every day of my life.) I've also come to appreciate Twisty far more than I did before. I hope she never ceases to make me feel uncomfortable every now and then. She makes me think, and that can only make me better.

But for the other part of the conclusion, I go once again to Twisty (this time from this post in October):

See here. The patriarchy I blame isn’t people, it’s a system. It is a hierarchical system of dominance at the gilded pinnacle of which pink-faced male captains of industry luxuriate, and at the rat-infested bottom of which poor brown women die screaming in filth and penury. In between are sub-hierarchies, but one constant obtains across all class, cultural and geographical lines: within any given hierarchy, women are consistently relegated to the lowest possible status.

And the rich white guy outranks everybody.

So check this out: I’m blaming patriarchy, not impugning the feminist credentials of women who, for whatever reason, decide to get married. Or carry tiny handbags. We all do what we gotta do.

And perhaps that's what I had been missing. Patriarchy-blaming isn't meant to take choices away from people. If a drug comes to market that enhances women's libido, the women who choose to use it aren't the problem. But just because women do choose to use it doesn't mean that no problem exists. It doesn't mean the biases that make us think of a woman's low libido as a problem aren't oppressive. We all do what we gotta do. But that's no excuse not to acknowledge the oppression.

* * *

* I think it's worth mentioning that it isn't always the case that men have a higher sex drive than women. In fact, of all the monogamous heterosexual marriages in which I've been privy to this information, women have a higher sex drive than their husbands about as often as it happens the other way around. Admittedly, I don't have any hard data on this, and 'anecdote' is not the plural of 'datum'. But the greater point here is that it is misogynist to automatically assume that it will be the woman who has to shoulder the burden of the problems created by any such mismatch.

Ten reasons gay marriage is wrong

2006-01-07T13:27:00.000-08:00

I got this list from Scott Kurtz's online PVP comic strip, of all places. He in turn received as a forward in his email, so apparently it's going around. I thought I'd share it here.

Ten Reasons Gay Marriage Is Wrong

1. Being gay is not natural. And as you know Americans have always rejected unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.

2. Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.

3. Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because, as you know, a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.

4. Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn't changed at all; women are still property, blacks still can't marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.

5. Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed. The sanctity of Britany Spears' 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.

6. Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn't be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren't full yet, and the world needs more children.

7. Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.

8. Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That's why we have only one religion in America.

9. Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That's why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.

10. Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven't adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.

From my inbox to your eyes

2006-01-06T15:16:00.000-08:00

Date: Wed 1/4/2006 11:27 PM
From: mail@cia.gov
Subject: You visit illegal websites

Suuure I do. Spammer.

As promised, some follow up thoughts on polygamy

2006-01-05T23:29:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I referenced this post by Amanda and said that I wanted to post my thoughts later. Ladies and gentlemen, this is that post.

Amanda quotes from Marci Hamilton's God vs. the Gavel, who argues that the argument that is commonly put forward in favor of same sex marriage is inadquate when arguing for the legalization of polygamy. Because they both expand marriage rights, so the common argument goes, the two are roughly equivalent. But Hamilton argues that in fact, they are not. Though I quoted it in yesterday's post, here again is Amanda's summary of Hamilton's argument:

At first glance, the two arguments--one in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage and one in favor of legalizing polygamy--seem basically identical, which is to say that the people advocating for these changes feel that the marriage laws as they stand discriminate against them. But Hamilton argues that if you take a realistic look at the way religion factors into these arguments, then you start to see a much different picture emerge, because both controversies have someone arguing that their religious beliefs should dictate the law, but with same-sex marriage it's the opponents who are arguing this and with polygamy it's the proponents. If you start with her basic argument that it's antithetical to the 1st Amendment to allow law to be dictated by religious belief over other concerns like the greater social good, it's clear that these two reform movements are completely different--same sex marriage proponents are using a social good measure for their arguments and polygamy proponents are arguing that social good isn't a factor because their religious belief trumps it. To keep it simple.

Hamilton has a reason to want to keep these arguments separate. She argues that those in favor of polygamous marriage are most often members of certain religions who are using polygamy as a tool to oppress women. Because it is an argument from religion, and because the result is bad, polygamy shouldn't be legalized.

I do have a problem with this reasoning, and part of it comes from the definition of polygamy. Amanda quotes the United Nations' Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women:

Polygamous marriage contravenes a woman’s right to equality with men, and can have such serious emotional and financial consequences for her and her dependents that such marriages ought to be be discouraged and prohibited.There is a glaring hole in this argument. The implicit assumption is that all polygamous marriages consist of one man with several wives. But Mormons are not the only people who want polygamous marriage legalized. In fact, because most religions teach that polygamy is morally wrong, most of the arguments in favor of polygamy are strictly secular. And if secular arguments exist -- and they do -- then it doesn't make much sense to argue that we should ignore the arguments from social principles on the grounds that some people favor the same outcome due to religious beliefs.

I find it hard to trust Hamilton's argument here. It seems that she'll go to any measure to stop an existing abuse of women. While I applaud her goal, I think she's painting with too broad of a brush and ignoring some very real collateral damage that will occur as a result of her attacks.

Gay marriage vs. polygamous marriage: An introduction at Pandagon

2006-01-04T09:10:00.000-08:00

Amanda at Pandagon is on fire. She's been writing all sorts of great things lately. One in particular that she posted caught my eye. This post is about the intersection between the fight to legalize gay marriage and the fight to legalize polygamous marriage. Here's an excerpt:

At first glance, the two arguments--one in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage and one in favor of legalizing polygamy--seem basically identical, which is to say that the people advocating for these changes feel that the marriage laws as they stand discriminate against them. But Hamilton argues that if you take a realistic look at the way religion factors into these arguments, then you start to see a much different picture emerge, because both controversies have someone arguing that their religious beliefs should dictate the law, but with same-sex marriage it's the opponents who are arguing this and with polygamy it's the proponents. If you start with her basic argument that it's antithetical to the 1st Amendment to allow law to be dictated by religious belief over other concerns like the greater social good, it's clear that these two reform movements are completely different--same sex marriage proponents are using a social good measure for their arguments and polygamy proponents are arguing that social good isn't a factor because their religious belief trumps it. To keep it simple.

I highly recommend reading the whole thing -- it's a very thoughtful article. Hopefully I can write a longer response later this evening.

Late thoughts on Mirecki

2006-01-03T23:08:00.000-08:00

Though I'm late to the Mirecki thing by about a month, I want to weigh in with my thoughts nonetheless. I've seen it written about in a couple of the blogs I read, and though most of the articles are really good, from time to time (and especially in comments and on listservs) I've seen Mirecki's actions defended and represented in a favorable light. I have mixed feelings about that.

For those who don't remember or never knew, Dr. Paul Mirecki is a professor at the University of Kansas. He announced his intentions to teach a religious studies class on Intelligent Design via the Society of Open-Minded Atheists and Agnostics listserv. The text of his announcement was relayed to the local media via someone who was lurking on the list, and it soon became a national story. Eventually, Mirecki was forced to cancel the class, and then to step down as the chair of his department. In between, he was beaten by some people who didn't approve of his ideology. Fortunately, he was sustained only minor injuries.

No one worth listening to would argue that the beating was justified, and I'm certainly not going to, either. I don't care who it is or what is being said, vigilante justice is not an appropriate answer to words. The violence was wrong, and I am in no way defending it.

Nonetheless, I am concerned about some of the defenses of Mirecki's actions that I've heard coming from some of us on the Left. Since I haven't seen it anywhere else, perhaps it is worth quoting the full text of Mirecki's email that started the whole mess:

To my fellow damned,

Its true, the fundies have been wanting to get I.D. and creationism into the Kansas public schools, so I thought "why don't I do it?"

I will teach the class, with several other lefty KU professors in the sciences and humanities. Class is:

REL 602 Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationisms and other Religious Mythologies.

Tuesdays 7:00-9:30pm. Smith Hall room 100. Open to undergrads and grads. Enrollment limited to about 120. 3 credit hours.

The fundies want it all taught in a science class, but this will be a nice slap in their big fat face by teaching it as a religious studies class under the category "mythology". I expect it will draw much media attention. The university public relations office will have a press release on it in a few weeks, I also have contacts at several regional newspapers.

Of course, I won't actually be teaching I.D. and creationisms, but rather I'll be teaching ABOUT I.D. and creationisms as modern mythologies, indicating that these ideas have no place in a public school science class, but can certainly be analyzed in humanities classes for their function in society. Basic approach is my usual: anthropology with a focus on religious thought and behavior.

Any ideas for textbooks, guest lecturers and panels would be appreciated. So far, six faculty have eagerly signed up to lecture. I can probably pull Chancellor Hemenway into this also, especially in the light of his public comments supporting evolution.

Doing my part to piss of the religious right,
Evil Dr. P.

The defense of Mirecki that has me bothered goes like this: Mirecki's email was to a private listserv, which means that this issue is about freedom of speech. Because a professor's speech is being interrupted, it is also an issue of academic freedom.

First, though I'm splitting hairs, I'd like to point out that this wasn't on a private listserv. In the very least, SOMA has allowed non-members to join for quite some time. Though I've never been a member of SOMA, I've been on their mailing list for over a year (which is how I came by this email in the first place). Further, even if the listserv was a private list, it hardly matters, because whether it was written in public or private hardly has any bearing on whether it is an issue of free speech.

But besides that, whether Mirecki should be allowed to express his opinions about religion isn't the real issue here. The real issue is whether it was appropriate for someone in Mirecki's position to say the things he did in an official capacity. And it isn't.

Is it any wonder this story garnered national attention? Mirecki said he and "several other lefty KU professors" would teach the class. If there is a better way to fuel the Right's paranoia machine, I can't think of what it is. Mirecki's email appears to validate every critic who has claimed that our institutions of higher learning are biased against conservatives. Mirecki continued by saying that the Religious Right would consider the class a "nice slap in their big fat face," and that the purpose of the class was to piss them off. I do not believe it is appropriate for any university or other institution of higher learning to be teaching anything that exists primarily to piss off a large group of people.

Though it is bittersweet, ultimately I'm glad that Mirecki stepped down as the department chair. Canceling the class was also the right thing to do. But it's also an unnecessary shame. If this whole endeavor had been carried out in a high minded fashion, we would have another tool to at our disposal for the teaching if critical thinking. And if there is one thing our nation is in desperate need of, it is a strong dose of critical thinking.

A few more changes. I do hope you like them.

2006-01-03T17:34:00.000-08:00

I've removed my Blogger/Haloscan comments javascript trickery for the time being. It turned out to be not nearly as clever as I'd hoped. It caused more problems that it solved. So for now the old comments are gone. I still have a few tricks up my sleeve that will hopefully allow me to get my old comments from Blogger into the new Haloscan system, and if it works out, I'll let you know.

But it did have an upside: it helped me to finally get off my ass and fix some of the problems with my Blogger template that had slowly been accumulating. While I was there, I also changed some things that were working as I'd originally intended, but which had grown to irritate me. And if you can't stand looking at your own blog, you know something is wrong.

The blogroll has moved from the right to the lower left to make more room for reading the posts, which hopefully is why you come here. Also, it gives more room for the title of the posts, which in my browser had sometimes been wrapping in a very irritating fashion. I also moved the date and time, centered some stuff, and made the permalink a little more obvious. And I moved my name to the top of the post instead of the bottom, because I've found that it can be a little irritating when visiting a new blog to have to scroll all the way down to find out who is doing the writing. Also, I got a little fancy with my blockquotes. It seems to be all the rage these days. [UPDATE: And I made the comments links visible from the permalink! And I changed it so all links launch in a new window! Yay me!]

I also added Sadly, No! to my blogroll. I know there is at least one other blog that I had intended to add, but I can't for my life think of what it was. I'm sure it'll occur to me at work tomorrow, or some other time when I can't change it.

There are a few more changes I'd like to make. The nosce te ipsum seemed like a good idea at the time, but now it just seems pretentious. I'm trying to come up with a good tagline for this blog, but I'm drawing a complete blank. Any suggestions?

Welcome to the new year, and a C.S. Lewis review

2006-01-02T21:49:00.000-08:00

Welcome to 2006! Anyone care to take any wagers on how long it'll take me before I forget and write "2005" on some date or other? (Bonus: Guess how many times that has to happen before someone cracks a tired joke about this-and-such a document being dated a whole year ago!) This does not bode well for me. I'm pretty sure I was still writing 2004 up until a couple of months ago.

I had planned on going out with a friend this evening, but as day wore on, I realized that I was having trouble motivating myself to do even the most basic human activities, like taking a shower.

And mostly that was because I was having a hard time putting my book down. Fortunately, I was freed from the siren song of literature at about 8:30 this evening by virtue of having finished my book. As it so happens, I've actually managed to read no less than three books in the last two days. I must admit that this is the first time in quite some time that I can lay claim to that accomplishment. Unfortunately, as the title of this post suggests, the feat is somewhat diminished by the fact that the books in questions are the first three books of The Chronicles of Narnia. A few weeks ago I managed to see the first Narnia film*, and Narnia has been on my mind ever since.

I've had a soft place in my heart for the book version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe for many years now. My dad read it to me when I was young. It was my first experience with a book that contained no pictures, and I would guess that it had a lot to do with for my lifelong interest in fantasy and science fiction. It definitely cemented my love of reading. I had always assumed I would read it to my kids, too, when they reached an age where they had a sufficient attention span. But after seeing the movie, and then reading PZ Myers' take and the accompanying comments, I wasn't so sure anymore.

I can't say I had the same problem with the movie that many of PZ's commenters seem to have. I know it's a Christian allegory, and I'm not really going to fault it for that. That's partly due to my impression of the books as a kid: I had no idea it was a representation of Christianity. In fact, all the references to "Sons of Adam" and "Daughters of Eve" made me vaguely uncomfortable. As a six year old Hutton Gibson-style Traditional Catholic, I was fairly sure these books were probably upsetting God.

My disappointment in the movie wasn't due to the religious content so much as the execution. I felt like it didn't have the same magic that I remembered from my childhood. I was irritated that the movie made Susan into an unlikable character. (In the last book of the series, it is revealed that Susan doesn't get to come back to Narnia, which has by that point has become an allegory for heaven.) Okay, we get it, Susan is a bad person who doesn't get to go to heaven. But do you have to beat us over the head with it? Similarly, the movie added a bunch of unnecessary sexism in the form of banter between the Beavers. And I thought Aslan's voice was a little weak. When Mufasa sounds like a bigger badass than Aslan, you have a problem on your hands. Wasn't James Earl Jones available? But despite all of this, I couldn't help but wonder if perhaps my memory was failing me. Would The Chronicles of Narnia hold up on a reread?

It turns out that the answer is a lot more complicated than a simple "yes" or "no." The tone of the books lends a charming atmosphere that is missing from the movie. But although the Beavers weren't annoying in the book, it turns out that the sexist rewrite of their dialog only serves to replace the sexism that was cut out from other places. For example, Father Christmas explains to Lucy how she is to use her gift:

"And the dagger is to defend yourself at great need. For you also are not to be in the battle."
"Why, Sir," said Lucy. "I think--I don't know--but I think I could be brave enough."
"That is not the point," he said. "But battles are ugly when women fight."

Because if there was any lesson C.S. Lewis learned from World War II, it was that wars aren't ugly when men fight them.

Another downside to the books is that they get a lot worse as the series goes on (at least if the first three books are any indication). Part of it is simply the plot device: now that I do know that it's a Christian allegory, it's hard to get too worked up over anything bad that happens. I know that at some point Aslan is going to show up and put everything right. But part of it is that C.S. Lewis' biases seem to come out stronger and stronger with each successive book. The third book's opening paragraph manages to get in a dig at vegetarians and other "very up-to-date and advanced people."

So I'm ultimately not sure whether I'll be reading this book to my kids when their attention span permits it. Probably it won't matter. By that time, they'll already have seen the movie.

* * *

* Because one of my friends is almost completely deaf, we saw Narnia in a theater equipped with closed captioning. It is the only such theater in all of Omaha. I don't mean that it is only one complex of theaters that support closed captioning. I mean that, in all of Omaha, there is exactly one screen in one theater that is capable of showing closed captioned movies. Now. That might make seem like it makes sense to you, if you, like me, hadn't been to a closed captioned movie recently. You might think that most people don't want to have to deal with the subtitles. And if closed captioning were the same as subtitling, that might be fair. But it isn't. The one single closed captioned screen in Omaha works by adjusting a mirror-like device that fits in a cup holder so you can see the words that are being displayed on a LED ticker above the projector. And having seen it in action, I'm having a hard time understanding why every new theater doesn't come equipped with this. One screen?! I hope you like what's playing.

Update: Fixed some typos pointed out by my lovely wife. Thanks, hon!

The real war on Christmas

2005-12-20T06:31:00.000-08:00

I trust that Bill O'Reilly is on the case:

The Topeka-based Westboro Baptist Church, which holds anti-gay protests around the country, came [to Port Charlotte High School in Florida] Monday to oppose the school's recently formed Gay Straight Alliance. About 25 members held signs bashing everyone from gays to soldiers, who they believe support a pro-gay America, and Santa Claus, who they believe is a pagan idol. [Emphasis added]

Fortunately, the article goes on to describe how counterprotesters soon outnumbered the hate group.

The switch to Haloscan

2005-12-19T22:01:00.000-08:00

Shades Of Grey has officially switched to Haloscan comments. This change has been made thanks to the suggestion of Orange, who wrote me to say

You want to score some brownie points with me? How about turning on the option for a pop-up window for viewing (not just posting) comments? I hate getting taken off the main page when I want to see comments, and your blog always foists that on me.

In fact, I do rather want to score brownie points with Orange. My guess is I'd score more points if I posted with greater regularity, and frankly that probably goes for all of you. But hopefully you can find it in your heart to accept this peace offering. And I, in turn, hereby promise not to leave you hanging for entire weeks at a time.

What will happen to the old comments? Never fear, dear reader! Through the miracle of modern javascript, the old comments will remain in blogger using the crappy broken template that Orange so rightfully derided.

Assurance, indeed

2005-12-19T07:51:00.000-08:00

      "She'd rather sit there and watch a kids show than talk to me," I sulked. It was nearing midnight on Saturday evening, and I was sitting at Clancy's nursing a beer and complaining about my crappy day to my friend Sarah. "It's like she's mad at me. Except I'm not actually getting that vibe..."
          If I was being honest with myself, I would have realized that a large part of the crappy mood was due to the fact that I was sitting in a bar bitching to someone else about my wife. So much better to have been talking to Caren and possibly working out whatever was wrong instead of complaining about it. But I was tired and frustrated, and Caren had been ignoring me all day.
          "Maybe," Sarah offered, "she's just tired?"
          I grunted. "Maybe. I dunno. I really don't know what it is. And at this point, all I know for sure is that I'm frustrated. Hey, what time is it?" I checked the time. "We really outta get going." It was later than I'd meant to be out. But it was still early enough, I hoped. Perhaps if I hurried, I could catch Caren before she went to bed.
          She was asleep when I got home. I swore silently to myself.

*   *   *

          When I woke up, it took me a few seconds to remember why I'd been upset. As it all came back to me, a sense of embarrassment came with it. I went to bed upset because Caren was asleep by midnight? Ugh. I thought about getting up and checking my email. Instead, I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep.
          It wasn't too long before Caren came and sat by me on the bed. I interpreted her look to be somewhat apologetic. Presumably, we were about to have the conversation that should've happened last night.
          "So, um," she stuttered, "I took my last pill yesterday." Even though she only takes one pill, it took me a moment to realize that she was talking about her birth control. "Normally, I start bleeding just before the last pill. And there's usually a little bit of spotting throughout the month. But this month there's been nothing."
          The world reeled. My daughter ran into the bedroom and tried to engage me in what would probably have been cute conversation in almost any other context. Her older brother poked his head around the corner and showed signs of following her. Displaying my legendary parenting skills, I requested that they both return to into the other room and watch cartoons. With the kids gone (except maybe one! a helpful voice in the back of my mind pointed out) and the world reeling, I stalled for time.
          "So that would mean you got pregnant the last time we had sex?" I asked. From my wife's reaction, it was immediately obvious that I was, in fact, missing the point.
          "Does it matter when it happened? It could have been a week and a half ago. It could've been as long ago as a month."
          My mind continued to reel. Shit, I thought, We can't afford this. Shit shit shit. We just got rid of our crib and high chair and a ton of other baby stuff. There isn't enough room in our car for another car seat; we would have to get a bigger car, and it would probably be a used minivan. (Even though it was a very minor thing, my shoulders sank a little bit lower at the idea of having to drive a minivan.) Neither of our cars are paid off yet; we'd lose a ton of money if we did a trade in now. I could kiss our five year plan to get out of debt goodbye; with another kid it just wouldn't happen. I didn't even need to ask whether Caren would consider an abortion. I knew it was out of the question. Plus, like all marriages, ours has been through some rough times. Caren and I have agreed in the past that our relationship probably wouldn't survive another surprise child. That unspoken thought was the elephant in the room.
          "Well," I said slowly, "I'm not sure how we could afford it. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it's doable, I just can't think of how yet." Caren agreed, and my mind raced. I thought of my friend from Radioshack. She has four kids and makes far less money than we do and somehow manages to pay rent and put food on the table. I raced to come up with anything that would allow us to save money. We could get a lower rent apartment, something we already intended to do when our lease expires this summer. (Shit, I thought, if Caren is pregnant, I'll have to do most of the moving. I did that the first time Caren was pregnant, and it wasn't fun without kids.) We could, I dunno, cancel our cell phones. And turn off cable and Internet. That's not enough, I thought desperately. How the fuck did I let this happen?
          "Regardless of the outcome of this, I should get a vasectomy."
          "Does insurance cover that? How much do they cost?" she asked.
          "I don't know. But for the sake of argument, let's just assume it doesn't, and let's say they cost a lot, say, $3000. Even if we have to pay that out of pocket, that's still so much cheaper than having another kid." Caren took up the thread.
          "And if we do decide we want another kid sometime down the road, we could always adopt. It'd be kinda nice to have a kid without having to be pregnant. And if we ever actually feel like we could afford another kid, we could certainly afford the costs associated with adoption," she said.
          I felt the panic begin to well up again, and I immediately stifled it and shifted back into practical mode.
          "So, we don't actually know for sure you're pregnant yet," I offered. "Wanna take a pregnancy test?"
          "It costs $15, and if we just wait, we'll know for sure by Tuesday."
          "Yeah, but don't you think $15 is worth peace of mind? If it comes up negative, we can forget about it. And if it's positive, we'll know for sure and can start planning."
          "No, we won't," she replied, "because false negatives are pretty common." I paused as I realized I didn't know much about the accuracy of home pregnancy tests either way.
          "What about false positives?"
          "They happen, but not nearly as often. At least, that's what I've heard." I considered this information. And I considered the tide of panic that was threatening to flood my mind.
          "Well, if you take the test and it comes back positive, at least we can start to plan. And if it's negative, we can rest a little easier, even though we know either way it could be wrong." She thought about this.
          "I suppose you're right," she smiled. "You're being more rational than I am. I'm certainly not feeling rational right now." Good, I thought. At least one of us is fooled.
          "Okay," I said. "I'll get in the shower, and then I'll go buy a pregnancy test." I smiled.
          "And I'll go make breakfast for the kids," she replied. "Then I'm going to exercise, then I'll take a shower."
          It's good to have a plan.

*   *   *

          Before I left, I caught Caren as she was heading to the shower.
          "Is there a specific brand I should look for? Are some more accurate than others?"
          "I dunno," she replied, "I used EPT the first time. The second time I didn't even bother taking a pregnancy test. I just knew." Somehow that wasn't reassuring.
          I got in the car and headed for the store. I was still feeling panicky, but being in the car made me feel like I was taking action, which in turn made it easier to quell my fears. At least for a few blocks. I thought again of talking to Sarah the night before. I grabbed my cell phone and dialed her number. She didn't answer.
          Damn it! For the second time in twelve hours I swore silently to myself.
          The phone began buzzing. It was Sarah. I answered it.
          "Hey. Remember last night, when I said it was like Caren was upset with me, except I wasn't getting that vibe? Yeah, well, I figured out what it was."
          "Really? When? Last night or this morning?"
          "This morning."
          "What was it?"
          "It was -- " I cut off as my phone began vibrating again. I pulled it away from my ear and checked the caller ID. "Hey, can I call you right back?"
          "Sure!"
          I answered the incoming call. It was Caren.
          "Come back. I'm not pregnant."
          Hallelujah!! The thought echoed through my mind and reverberated through my entire body. Have ever there been five happier words than these? I laughed as the flood that I'd been holding back overwhelmed me. But this time it wasn't panic, it was relief.
          "I'll be home in a minute."
          I hung up and immediately dialed Sarah's number.
          "You'll be glad I took that call. This story just got a lot better."

*   *   *

I've seen Mona call it the Crimson Tide of Assurance. That description has always made me laugh, but I don't think I've ever quite appreciated the reassurance it brings as completely as I do now.

It's fortunate that this happened. Caren and I weren't sure that we were ready to do something so drastically permanent as a vasectomy. When we had considered it in the past, we had agreed that though it was hard to imagine wanting more in the future, there were certain scenarios where it would be understandable if we changed our minds. But it’s funny how a perceived bullet-dodging can change your perspective.

It's also fortunate that my insurance provider, like most insurance providers, does cover vasectomies (or as they put it, "elective sterilization procedures"). Without insurance, vasectomies cost between $650 and about $1100, at least here in Nebraska. But even if I had to cover that expense out of pocket, it's no worse than the mechanic's bill for a nasty car problem.

So in the spirit of the pro-choice worldview, I shall be exercising my choice and undergoing a vasectomy forthwith. Because I have no shame, you can expect some vasectomy blogging in the same spirit as the colonoscopy blogging to which I have already subjected you.

Does anybody know the efficacy of home pregnancy tests? I'm sure google will eventually direct people to this page, so I think it would be nice to know. Having dodged our bullet the biological way, I'm too lazy to look it up, but if you happen to have that information at your fingertips, leave a comment and let me know. Thanks!

Happy wishes for the holiday, and two other points

2005-11-24T08:25:00.000-08:00

Here's a big Happy Thanksgiving to those of you who celebrate it. And even if you don't, I hope you have a great day. I'm remote blogging from my mom's house in Topeka, KS, where I'll be until Saturday-ish. (We haven't completely nailed down our plans; it could be Sunday before we return.)

In the mean time, there are two points of interest that I'd like to mention. First, I'm reasonably certain that I did not have any conversations with Bob Woodward regarding Valerie Plame's status as a CIA agent.* In fact, I'm fairly sure I have never had any conversation with Bob Woodward whatsoever. I must admit that given recent events, I'm not regretting that in the least.

Second, I saw via Orange Tangerine and Welcome To The Nuthouse that December 1st is Blog Against Racism Day. As fate would have it, I was already planning on writing a post about racism anyway, so I already have a topic in mind. So really, this special day for racism blogging allows me to feel like I'm participating in something important while simultaneously practicing a favorite hobby of mine: procrastination.

I know I said there were only two points, but I do appreciate your willingness to indulge me in one more: Sunday is my birthday. I'll be 27. (And you know what they say about 27, right? Eight nine thirty.) I mention it only as an explanation for why I won't be posting until Monday. But I do promise to come back with something substantial next week.

So until Monday, please have a wonderful and safe weekend.

* I know I'm late to this party. But allow a poor blogger to indulge himself, won't you?

They say it's cathartic

2005-11-15T22:16:00.000-08:00

Shakespeare's Sister asks, do you have an unkindness that you regret? Oh boy, do I ever. I have several; and perhaps that's normal. Her story was from high school about a boy named Charles. For some reason, it reminded me of a story of my own.

I wasn't very popular in gradeschool. In fact, it isn't an exaggeration to say I had no friends. Looking back, I'm pretty sure I know why that was. It's complicated and I probably wouldn't be able to get it to come across right, but suffice it to say that for all I was acutely aware of what the other kids thought about me, I wasn't at all aware of how I was coming across to them. I'm sure there are similiar kids in every school. I was the one who nobody was playing with on the playground.

Well, not the only one. There was this other kid named Robbie, and if such a thing were possible, he was actually less popular than I was. He got all kinds of crap from just about everyone. The other kids liked to say that Robbie smelled. As far as I could ever tell, he didn't, but I suppose that doesn't stop little kids. Robbie and I hung out sometimes, because I was desparate to play with somebody, but most of the time I shunned him like everyone else did. I was afraid that being seen with him would hurt my already low chances of befriending the other kids.

Sometime in 3rd grade, Robbie moved away, and it was no big deal. Honestly, I don't even think I noticed he was gone until one day in 4rd grade, our teacher announced that we'd be getting a new student. But the student wasn't new. It was Robbie. You could feel the ripple of revulsion and excitement ripple down the room. The next day, Robbie started.

I don't know where he'd been for a year, but that boy had changed. He smiled a knowing smile at me, and I could see in his eyes that whereever he'd been, something had happened. He'd found a respect for himself he didn't have before. He had a certain confidence about him. He was cool, and he knew it.

But apparently the other kids didn't, because the teasing resumed immediately, and it was worse than it had ever been before. Maybe the kids had just taken the intervening year to learn how to become all the more vicious. Or maybe they thought they had to punish him for daring to find self respect. Whatever the case, it seemed Robbie attracted the ire of everyone.

And a weird thing happened: people started treating me nicer. Instead of laughing at me, they would laugh with me. It seemed to me that with all of their hatred directed at Robbie, they had none left over for me.

I'd love to say that I didn't realize what was happening, but I did. And I'd love to say that I realized that people like that aren't worth having as friends; that Robbie was the one who deserved my friendship. But I didn't. What happened instead was that I continued trying to convince the other kids that I wasn't like him. I remember when a rumor went around that Robbie had a crush on one particular girl, I agreed with her that he was pretty gross. If it seems like such minor shit now, try to remember back to gradeschool and how we lived and died by that kind of thing. You know that old saying, Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me? It isn't true.

He didn't finish fourth grade with us. In just a couple of months, the teacher was telling us that he wasn't coming back. She didn't say where he was going, and I didn't care. In fact, I remember feeling a sense of panic: without Robbie to act as the target of everyone's ire, would they all turn on me again?

And they did. Just as I had feared, the other kids were free to attack me instead. Things settled back to the normal routine.

Which I guess I deserved. That summer my mom told me that Robbie'd had to leave school because of a mental breakdown. Sorry, Rob. You deserved better, and I should've been there for you.

Cross posted in the comments at Shakespeare's Sister

Kids in public

2005-11-10T21:18:00.000-08:00

So Shakespeare's Sister wrote a post about kids in public. I don't disagree with her often, but when I do, I go big. And I don't think I could object more strenuously this post:

It’s not that I don’t like kids, it’s just that if I wanted to be around them 24/7, I’d be a parent myself.

...

You know what I’d love? For people who have children to stop drudging up the old “people who don’t have children always think they’re experts on childrearing” canard every single time a childless person has an opinion on anything remotely related to children or parenting. When a dosey old spinster aunt looks down her patrician nose and sniffs, “If I had a child, he wouldn’t ever behave like that,” as the kid wails after conking his head on her glass coffee table, it’s a fair thing to say.

However, when someone suggests that a screeching two-year-old, whether screeching from pain or pleasure, doesn’t belong in a café, it’s not a fair thing to say. It implies that the childless are so bereft of the requisite knowledge to parent that we don’t even know that the volume of children’s voices can’t be controlled every minute of the day. Of course we know that. It may, in fact, be one of the primary reasons we don’t have children. The thing is, I think most parents who launch that condescending attempt at opinion-trumping know that we’re not dumb enough to believe their kids are squealing because of bad parenting. It’s just easier to hide behind that deliberate misconstruence than address what we’re really saying—that their kids are squealing in a café because their parents are bloody selfish.

As I said, I disagree with this post and almost everyone who has commented on it. The tone of the post (and most of the comments) says that children are not valuable members of our society. One person went so far as to specifically state that people have a right to be away from children while in public.

And to those people, I say this: In fact, you do have the right to be away from children. You have that right in your own home. But you don't have that right in public, because children are not "squawk-boxes" -- they're human beings. They are people. People who have not yet mastered the skills necessary to be quiet at all times, yes, but people nonetheless. They have as much right to be in a public space as you do.

Speaking of canards, you know what I'd love? I'd love for people who have chosen not to have kids to stop pretending that hearing a kid throw a temper tantrum one time is the same as being "around them 24/7." It isn't. If you encounter a kid at a cafe, you sure as hell aren't around them 24/7. You're around them for an hour or two, tops. Considering the fact that you will go home and spend the rest of your day sans children, I don't see why you're complaining. You seem to think that kids shouldn't have meltdowns around you, and that you shouldn't have to deal with them even for a moment because it is unpleasant.

Adults who take their children into public aren't being irresponsible. There is no right that says that public spaces should be free of people who annoy you. It happens all the time with adults, and you don't seriously argue that there should be "no asshole zones." A lot of people don't like to see the disabled, but if someone argued that disabled people shouldn't be allowed in certain areas of public because their mere presence causes people discomfort, you'd rightly decry it. It's pretty much the same thing with kids.

Bond ... James Bond

2005-11-03T20:23:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it's hard to work up the energy to be outraged over everything that deserves that kind of attention. Alito, the ongoing prison scandal (with secret prisons this time!), and almost every other aspect of the Bush presidency... I don't have the energy tonight.

So instead, I took a cue from Shakespeare's Sister. Earlier this week she said she needed to see things get blown up, so she went and saw a movie. That sounded about right to me too, so tonight it was James Bond in For Your Eyes Only.

My son summed it up thusly:

"Daddy, I liked that movie. All the boys have guns, some of the girls have guns, there are good guys, and bad guys, and good girls."

I guess if you've seen one, you've seen them all.

On raising a family

2005-10-31T19:34:00.000-08:00

I belatedly stumbled across this article over at Lance Mannion's blog. My initial thought was to pull a major parenting drive by and rip Lance's parenting technique. Then I thought better of it. I realized that, really, there are a lot of different ways to raise your kids that probably all work relatively well. It's important to realize that what works for my kids (or perhaps, what I think will work for my kids) isn't going to work for everyone else's kids.

So instead I'm going to use Lance's post as a jumping off point. What I'm writing here isn't a critique of Lance, simply my perspective on things.

Lance writes:

One of the things that drives me berserk is listening to people who don't have kids brushing aside the concerns of parents on things like video games, TV shows, pop music, and pop culture in general.

"If you don't like it, turn it off!"

First, you turn it down. Doesn't do me any good to not play certain music in my car if you have your windows down and your CD player cranked up.

Also, you could watch your mouth in public. Sailors, at sea, under enemy fire, curse less.

And what's with the t-shirt? You're a grown person! Dress like one.

That's the problem with the Turn it off/Don't let them watch advice.

That is indeed the problem with the "turn it off" advice. In fact, that's why I think it's important to remember just what it is we're trying to accomplish here: We're trying to raise our kids to eventually live in the real world. If you think about it, it doesn't make much sense to try to censor this stuff from our kids. Or if you prefer, to "protect our children." However you phrase it, it amounts to the same thing: trying to keep our kidsfrom knowing about stuff. I'll be honest, I'm not a big fan of this line of reasoning. I'm a little suspicious whenever someone starts implying that knowledge is bad. Knowledge isn't bad. Face it, someday your kids are going to be grown, and when they are, you'll hope they figured this stuff out a long time ago.

Can you think of a better time to teach your kids why you don't approve of a certain kind of music, or use of language, or style of dress? Encountering these things in public shouldn't be viewed as the corruption of youth. Instead, look at it as an educational opportunity. The time to start instilling your values is now.

On the other hand...

... I had always told myself that I wouldn't care what kind of language my kids used. It is a little silly, I maintained, to be offended, for example, by the word "fuck." What is there to be offended about? Mostly we are offended because we have made a collective choice as a society to be offended. In essence, it is a tautology: It is offensive because we are offended; we are offended because it is offensive. It would make a lot more sense if we could all simply agree to stop being offended. And how to do that? By choosing not to be offended yourself. So naturally I won't care if my children swear. And it all sounded very good in my head.

And then I heard my very little son say, "Damn it!" Right at that moment, I knew my quaint little theory wasn't going to mean much to his kindergarden teacher.

So granted, yes, there are good reasons to be concerned about the things Lance mentions. Mostly, though, it isn't because these things are inherently corrupting. It's because society forces our hand to a certain degree. To be successful in our society, or in the very least to avoid being stigmatized, our children must have an understanding of what society disappoves of. It doesn't matter that I'm not offended when my preschooler says fuck. What matters is that he'll still get in trouble at school.

Still, I can't help but think that our society tends to think things are hurting kids when they actually aren't. TV? Comic books? Movies? Rock music? Video games? By and large, these things aren't hurting kids. All too often I see these various mediums stereotyped and demonized, as if the only video game on the market is Grand Theft Auto. Let's remember that there is a large amount of diversity in the video games that are available. The same holds true for movies, and music. And books, for that matter. I suspect that most of our tendancy to demonize these things comes about because we tend to distrust what we don't understand. Our grandparents demonized our parents' rock and roll music. Our parents demonized Dungeons and Dragons. As parents, we distrust the current generation of video games, which are much more realistic than the Pong and Pac Man we were raised on.

I should also reiterate that my personal theory of childraising -- to expose my kids to everything and use the things I disapprove of as a teaching device -- likely wouldn't work for everyone. In fact, I'm lucky to have two kids who happen to respond well to it. I can explain to my son why I don't like something, and he understands, and he's willing to apply his understanding. My daughter doesn't listen quite as well, and is just a tad more willful. Predictably, I've had slightly less success when using this technique on her than I have when using it on my son. Nonetheless, I am fortunate that my preferred childraising method works for my children.

I understand that Lance isn't really criticizing my propensity to use the word "fuck" in spoken language so much as he is venting about the difficulty of raising kids. Likewise, I'm not trying to be critical of the choices he makes, but rather hoping to offer a different perspective on the same topic.

More thoughts on Halloween

2005-10-31T19:28:00.000-08:00

As my wife and I were escorting our two young trick-or-treaters home from an hour of societally sanctioned begging that resulted in one full bucket of candy for each child, I began ruminating about the commercialism of the holiday. What does it say about the state of capitalism in our country, I wondered, that we expect random strangers to give our kids candy when we knock on the door? Indeed, what does it say that people who wish to abstain from this corporate holiday are forced to become hostages in their own homes, turning off the lights and sitting in the dark for fear of disappointing the young children who would inevitably come knocking on their door otherwise?

As I listened to our children's buckets of candy drag on the ground, I shared these thoughts with my wife.

          "I suspect I'm going to turn into a crotchety old man as I get older."
          "Why is that?" she asked.
          "Because I'm not sure I like the idea of being forced to give out candy to strange children every year," I replied.
          She snorted. "You have to pay your dues, man. It's just like Social Security, but in reverse. When you were young, people gave you free candy. Now it's time to pony up."

You know, she has a point.

Obligatory scary Halloween post

2005-10-31T17:42:00.000-08:00

In 2001, Judge Alito authored a decision in Saxe v. State that declared unconstitutional a public school district policy that prohibited harassment against students because of their sexual orientation or other characteristics.

The policy focused on harassment that had the purpose or effect of interfering with a student's educational performance or creating and intimidating, hostile or offensive environment.

Alito reasoned that the policy was unconstitutional because it could cover what he called "simple acts of teasing and name-calling."

Now that's scary.

Hat tip to Shakespeare's Sister for the link.

Read 'ems: Plenty for everybody

2005-10-30T20:08:00.000-08:00

Here are a bunch of links that have been sitting in my inbox. Some of them go all the way back to the beginning of the month, so I'm obviously never going to get around to writing a full post about them. And so, without further adieu, I bring you...

Confining Criminals After Their Sentence Has Been Served. Austin Cline writes about the immorality of confining sex offenders after they have served their sentence.

The Green Knight wants to know whether you have a utopia, and if so what it looks like.

Linnet, one of my co-bloggers at the Big Brass Blog, writes that the antiabortion movement isn't only antiabortion: it's also anti-sex and anti-female.

Here's a disturbing article about a principal of a Catholic school who demanded that all students remove their blogs from the Internet or face expulsion.

Another article on Christan Exodus. I'm very troubled by this group. They're trying to move followers of their fundamentalist sect of Christianity to South Carolina in order to declare it a Christian state. Obviously, they don't represent the mainstream Christian. But if Rosa Parks recent death has reminded us of anything, it is that small groups with very singular goals can accomplish a lot.

An excellent opinion piece in Michagan State University's college newspaper that explains how the concept of an afterlife can actually be harmful to an individual and society.

Just in time for Halloween, Unscrewing The Inscrutable delivers a chilling look at the worst case scenario of the avian flu.

Here's DarkSyde on dkos with an interesting post about the bubonic plague and HIV.

No athiests in fox holes? Au contraire, mon tres bien frere. An editor's mea culpa.

From an LA Times Op-Ed piece by Norm Stamper, the former police chief of the Seattle Police Department, we learn that Stamper favors the legalization of all drugs.

From the Huffington Post comes There is No God (And You Know It).

Fred Clarke at Slacktavist tackles those irritating Support Our Troops ribbon magnets. This is the best word I've seen on this yet.

Make your own Bush speech!

The Camel Toe, which I found most notable for it being an equal opportunity offender.

Harken, O thou incompetent tax-collector, for you will be cast onto a steaming dung-heap! Yes, it's the Biblical Curse Generator.

With friends like that

2005-10-30T17:57:00.000-08:00

Although there is no shortage of topics that you might actually care about, instead I'm going to indulge myself and write about my weekend thus far. If Blogger had categories, I'd file this under "My Entirely Unexceptional Personal Life."

I went to a Halloween party last night. It was fun, even though practically everyone else was dressed up and I wasn't. It would be entirely unworthy of mention, except for three things. First and foremost, I had a really good time. I even danced, and as my friends are well aware, that never happens without large quantities of alcohol. By coincidence, that brings us to point number two, which is that I consumed an entire six pack of Boulevard Dry Stout in just under two hours. (Upon finding that link, I realize this isn't really that big of an achievement -- it has a relatively low alcohol content. Nonetheless, there was dancing, so it must have sufficed.) Granted, Boulevard Dry Stout is no Cutthroat Porter, but it'll do in a pinch. And besides, the party was in the opposite direction from the liquor store that carries the imports.

And that brings us to Notable Point Number Three, which is that the party was at Gina's house. Gina is a friend of mine who I met while working at Radioshack. By coincidence, she was also present the last time I ever spent an evening with Matt, who was once a close friend of mine.

At one point in time, Matt and I, along with another friend, Ryan and his wife Amber, were inseparable. We were such good friends that Matt and I even started software development business together, hiring Ryan as our sole employee. Even when the business failed after a year, our friendships managed to survive.

So it came as quite a shock when, a few months after I moved to Omaha, the seemingly rock solid friendships did indeed fail. At first, it didn't seem like the problems could possibly be that big of a deal. Things were rocky, but I was convinced that it wasn't anything we wouldn't get through -- we had already been through so much. I made every effort to patch things up, and in fact, it appeared to be working as first Amber and then Matt took jobs in Omaha. Things were looking up...

Then one night not long after, when my wife was visiting relatives in Kansas, I invited Matt and his wife to join Gina and me at a bar. I don't remember much about the night, except that I started to talk about my recently acquired philosophy of secular humanism, and that I tabled that conversation when Gina arrived. I also remember that I made a special effort to make Gina feel welcome, because nobody likes to feel like the outsider.

After that night, I never heard from Matt or Ryan again. It was only recently that I learned from a mutual friend that Matt had become convinced that night that I was flirting with Gina. He'd concluded that Gina and I were sleeping together.

So how did a formerly great friendship go so wrong? Perhaps a better question is, who cares? With friends like that, so the saying goes, who needs enemas? They had their reasons, I guess. Their reasons were, apparently, completely wrong. But the most important thing that I try to remember is that I don't want friends like that. A real friend, I try to remind myself, wouldn't drop another friend without warning on nothing more than a hunch. A real friend would in the very least confirm his suspicions. And give his friend a very frank talking to, if those suspicions ended up being correct.

Which, of course, they weren't. And in any case, neither Matt nor Ryan tried to have that conversation.

So of course, yes, I know that I don't want people like that as friends. But while it's one thing to know it rationally, it's another thing entirely to understand it emotionally. And there are a lot of things that can and do set me down the path of missing those once deep friendships. Things like seeing the trailer of The Ring Two and remembering inside jokes about the first craptacular movie that only they would understand. Things like going camping without them, and remembering the time we got our cars stuck at Lake Tuttle. Things like pondering which tastes more like chocolate: spinach or lettuce?

And when I start to think of those things, for some reason, the Jim Croce song Photographs & Memories comes into my head. Though it's about lovers, somehow it feels appropriate:

But we sure had a good time
When we started way back when
Morning walks and bedroom talks
Oh how I loved you then

Summer skies and lullabies
Nights we couldn't say good-bye
And of all of the things that we knew
Not a dream survived

Photographs and memories
All the love you gave to me
Somehow it just can't be true
That's all I've left of you

Yesterday, that familiar melancholy mood settled over me. A friend made the trip to Omaha to see us, and after my portion of his visit came to a conclusion, I dropped him off at Ryan's house so he could see them, too*. The projector in my head began playing back the reel of highlights from a past friendship, and as usual Photographs & Memories was the soundtrack.

But it's a funny thing; on my Jim Croce CD, after Photographs & Memories comes Rapid Roy the Stockcar Boy. And just like the CD, the melancholy seemed to lift almost as quickly as it had come, thanks largely to Gina's Halloween party. What poetic justice, that it would be Gina's party that would cheer me up!

So thanks, Gina. My wife and I had a great time. It's good to be reminded of who your friends are.

* Both Matt and Ryan live a few blocks from me. When old friends visit us in Omaha, they have to split their time: first they visit me, and then they visit Matt and Ryan. Isn't that stupid? Unfortunately, it wasn't my choice, so there isn't much I can do about it.

I heart Fitzgerald

2005-10-29T07:18:00.000-07:00

I think I really, really like Patrick Fitzgerald. From the transcript of yesterday's press conference:

Let me then ask your next question: Well, why is this a leak investigation that doesn't result in a charge? I've been trying to think about how to explain this, so let me try. I know baseball analogies are the fad these days. Let me try something.

If you saw a baseball game and you saw a pitcher wind up and throw a fastball and hit a batter right smack in the head, and it really, really hurt them, you'd want to know why the pitcher did that. And you'd wonder whether or not the person just reared back and decided, I've got bad blood with this batter. He hit two home runs off me. I'm just going to hit him in the head as hard as I can.

You also might wonder whether or not the pitcher just let go of the ball or his foot slipped, and he had no idea to throw the ball anywhere near the batter's head. And there's lots of shades of gray in between.

You might learn that you wanted to hit the batter in the back and it hit him in the head because he moved. You might want to throw it under his chin, but it ended up hitting him on the head.

And what you'd want to do is have as much information as you could. You'd want to know: What happened in the dugout? Was this guy complaining about the person he threw at? Did he talk to anyone else? What was he thinking? How does he react? All those things you'd want to know.

And then you'd make a decision as to whether this person should be banned from baseball, whether they should be suspended, whether you should do nothing at all and just say, Hey, the person threw a bad pitch. Get over it.

In this case, it's a lot more serious than baseball. And the damage wasn't to one person. It wasn't just Valerie Wilson. It was done to all of us.

And as you sit back, you want to learn: Why was this information going out? Why were people taking this information about Valerie Wilson and giving it to reporters? Why did Mr. Libby say what he did? Why did he tell Judith Miller three times? Why did he tell the press secretary on Monday? Why did he tell Mr. Cooper? And was this something where he intended to cause whatever damage was caused?

Or did they intend to do something else and where are the shades of gray?

And what we have when someone charges obstruction of justice, the umpire gets sand thrown in his eyes. He's trying to figure what happened and somebody blocked their view.

As you sit here now, if you're asking me what his motives were, I can't tell you; we haven't charged it.

So what you were saying is the harm in an obstruction investigation is it prevents us from making the fine judgments we want to make.

The man has principles.

Because only whores enjoy sex

2005-10-28T20:40:00.000-07:00

Here's a choice quote from Mike Adams writing for Townhall.com. In response to the Orgasm Awareness Festival being held at UNC, Adams wrote this:

Jessica Polka, an executive board member for the co-sponsor of the event, was recently quoted as saying that “We also have the goal of trying to work toward fighting the social stigma against female sexuality.” In other words, she wants college women to become whores without being ostracized.

How exactly did we get from fighting the stigma against female sexuality to accepting money for sex? There is a big difference between prostitution and enjoying sex. (And while I'm on the subject, perhaps someone should tell Adams that *gasp* prostitutes often don't enjoy sex -- it's just a job to them, honey.) In fact, Adams is demonstrating exactly the social stigma that the orgasm festival exists to address.

I admit it: I'm delighted by the irony created in the juxtaposition of these two sentences. If it weren't for diatribes like this one, there would be no need for orgasm festivals. Adams and people like him are what make these events necessary.

A tip of the hat to Lauren at Feministe.

Presidential accountability

2005-10-27T16:43:00.000-07:00

Everyone seems to be quoting Ezra Klein's recent article in The American Prospect that explains why George W. Bush can do no wrong in the eyes of so many Americans. But somehow, it the significance of it didn't hit home until I read The Green Knight's take here:

Klein refers to this weird response as an example of the Bush "cult of personality," but that's not quite right. Klein comes closer when he observes that, for people like Lopez,
[T]he belief in George W. Bush is beginning to take on a religious subtext: Even when Big Things go wrong, like floods, plagues, and earthquakes, you can take comfort in knowing that they were temporary detours in a benevolent, carefully examined master plan. This isn't political analysis or pop-psychology, it's theology.

Yes, it is -- but it's a form of redemption theology, and a perverse one. All that you have to do, all that Bush has to do, is wait it out until a mistake is in the past, and presto! not only did the mistake never really happen, but the recovery from the mistake is all the more proof of God's miraculous work.

This is a chilling explanation of exactly why it's so dangerous to mix Church and State. It isn't that Americans don't believe that Bush has made mistakes. It's that they actually see the mistakes as proof that Bush is following God's will. Of course, if you take success as a sign from God, and you also take failure as a sign from God, there isn't anything that will change your mind, is there?

Update: I fixed the spelling on Ezra's name. Ack!

Breaking News

2005-10-27T06:42:00.000-07:00

And -- surprise! -- it isn't Karl Rove's indictment. Harriet Miers withdraws her nomination. I can't really say I'm sad to see her go -- she was obviously unqualified. I'm a little nervous about who we're going to get next, though.

Calling myself out

2005-10-26T22:41:00.000-07:00

For the record, I just wrote this post once. Then my computer spontaneously rebooted itself before I bothered to, you know, save it. I was about 30 seconds from posting it, and I really liked how it was turning out. So I'm a little irritated right now, and I'm not going to be nearly as detailed as I was. Argh.

A few days back, I pointed out this shirt to Orange. Being a lover of language, I thought she would appreciate the intentional misuse of the word "your" instead of "you're." In fact, I still think that part of the shirt is pretty funny.

But the problem is the full text of the shirt, which reads "Your retarded." She replied that while she is a huge fan of mocking apostrophe misuse, she could do without the word "retarded." I was a little embarrassed, and I agreed that "retarded" only served to detract from the humor. Then I came across this essay by Michael Berube about slurs against the intelligence. And then Orange sent me a link to the same essay, which somehow made me feel like a bigger asshat than I did in the first place.

Because this followed closely on the heels of my recent post calling out Patrick for unintentional sexism, I thought it would be a little hypocritical of me if I didn't point out that I'm guilty of the same kind of behavior. Patrick posted his joke about catfights only after considering the negative connotations it might carry. If I'm being honest, I have to admit that somewhere in the back of my mind, I was aware that the word "retard" was likely to offend some people. But neither Patrick nor I acted on those thoughts.

A single instance of unintentional sexism and/or bigotry probably isn't as important as how a person reacts to having it pointed out to them. I've learned something ugly about myself. I've discovered that I'm not nearly as sensitive to the feelings of the mentally handicapped as I'd like to be. This probably isn't a problem I can solve in a day, but this insight is a good first step toward getting it fixed. A good second step is to become more sensitive about the language I use -- yes, and the language I laugh at.

The ever eloquent Michael Berube says it better than I can, so I'll give him the last word.

After all, dear reader, it’s not as if the English language is hurtin’ for terms of abuse. If you truly believe that someone is acting unwisely or thinking incompetently, you can draw upon thousands of words that speak about performance rather than capacity, which is far more appropriate anyway (as Chris Clarke has eloquently pointed out). That “moron” you revile might just as easily be a jerk, a jerkoff, or a jackass; the “idiot” in the adjacent car or adjacent voting booth might instead be a fool, a wuss, a sap, a chump, a poltroon, a schlemiel, or a patsy. Even as you read these words, thousands of people are just begging to be called scoundrels, prigs, and coxcombs. Why, there’s even an entire Shakespearean Insult Server available online for those of you who want to hurl especially colorful and vivid forms of contempt and contumely upon your adversaries, so there’s really no excuse for failing to take full advantage of the opportunities afforded by this rich and complex language of ours.

Fitzmas Bingo

2005-10-25T16:56:00.000-07:00

With Fitzmas just around the corner, it's time to get your Fitzmas Bingo card. Here's mine:

I think I've got a real shot at the bottom row. Too bad there's no Scooter Libby on mine, though. That would be a lock.

Hat tip to Rox Populi

Still fuming over pharmacists

2005-10-25T13:51:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I said that there was a lot to get upset about in this story about pharmacists refusing to fill birth control prescriptions. Here's some more odious opining from a representative of the Catholic Church:

"We have all kinds of compassion for a rape victim - in that case, Plan B is OK, the church has no problem with it," said Ron Johnson, with the Arizona Catholic Conference, which supports the right of any health-care worker to refuse to dispense emergency contraception and lobbied hard for passage of the Arizona law to allow it.

Let's see if we can clarify that position a little bit. In Johnson's view, the Catholic Church has no problem with emergency contraception in the case of rape. Presumably, it does have a big problem with EC if the sex was consensual (again, according to Johnson). Essentially, the Church condones the use of EC if it feels sorry for you. But if they think you deserves to be punished for having sex, they have no problem withholding access to EC.*

This is indefensible. Try and tell me this isn't about punishing women for having sex. Go ahead and feed me line about supporting the culture of life. You'll only end up embarrassing yourself.

* Admittedly, this is only Johnson's view. It certainly doesn't represent the view of all Catholics. Nonetheless, I can't help but think that this view of things isn't all that uncommon to Catholics. Or at least among the vocal Catholics.

Another Pharmacy Flare-up

2005-10-25T10:56:00.000-07:00

Just about nothing makes me madder than pharmacists who refuse on moral grounds to fill birth control prescriptions. Having said that, I'm going to take a deep breath and try to write calmly. It won't be easy, because there is a lot to get mad about in this article.

*deep breath*

Okay. Let's start here. If you've followed this debate at all, you're probably aware that the compromise championed almost without fail is to allow a troubled pharmacist to refuse to fill a prescription as long as the customer is provided another means of obtaining the drugs in question. Normally this means that it will be filled by another pharmacist on duty, or that the prescription will be transferred to another pharmacy.

But as I wrote here, this isn't a valid compromise:

Where does this leave rural areas? Shall we leave out the large percentage of people who live in small towns with only one pharmacy? When there is no competition, the free market is not a viable solution.

Another way of putting this is that it fails Immanuel Kant's first moral imperative: "Act as if the maxim of thy action were to become by thy will a universal law of nature." In other words, what happens when all the pharmacists refuse to either stock the drugs or fill the prescriptions?

Enter Tucson, AZ.

Although it is safe, effective and legal, emergency contraception - the "morning after" pill - can be hard to find in Tucson.

After a sexual assault one recent weekend, a young Tucson woman spent three frantic days trying to obtain the drug to prevent a pregnancy, knowing that each passing day lowered the chance the drug would work.

While calling dozens of Tucson pharmacies trying to fill a prescription for emergency contraception, she found that most did not stock the drug.

When she finally did find a pharmacy with it, she said she was told the pharmacist on duty would not dispense it because of religious and moral objections.

How many more concrete examples do we need before we wake up and realize that this isn't a viable compromise? In fact, it isn't a compromise at all. Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. A pharmacists right to practice his religion ends where it becomes forcing his belief on me.

Sexism Saturday, Part 2

2005-10-22T16:22:00.000-07:00

Sexism is the topic of the day, apparently. Patrick from Yelladog is guest posting at Shakespeare's Sister. He wrote a good post on Maureen Dowd's recent OpEd column in the New York Times (no direct NYT link because I'm not a subscriber). Dowd comes down hard on Judy Miller, her editors, and the Times itself. Like Part 1 of Sexism Saturday, my beef with Patrick's post is fairly picky. At the end of his article, Patrick writes:

I have a good friend who is married to a woman who cannot say no to a stray cat. They share a two bedroom apartment with six cats. It's not the happiest situation, not for the people and definitely not for the cats, but these were cats that were going to be put down or were just wandering the streets, so at least they're not dead. However, since cats are territorial, there is some friction, and there is one cat who is The Boss. Every now and then, The Boss has had all he can take, and he goes from room to room finding each of the other cats and smacking them around. My friend described it as "Guess what!?? It's 'Everybody-gets-an-ass-whippin'-day!'"

As I wrote in the comments, I think comparing Maureen Dowd's disagreement with Judy Miller to a catfight only serves to minimize Dowd's opinions. Patrick disagrees. He thinks that had the imagery been that of dueling wombats or tapirs, it would've been equally funny. Patrick says that the description came to mind only because his friend has cats and not wombats.

And that may be the case. Nonetheless, if you saw two monkeys fighting at a zoo and then wrote about how much they reminded you of your two black neighbors, you'd be rightly accused of racism. Likewise, when someone compares disagreement between women to a catfight, don't be surprised when I call you out for sexism. Especially when you acknowledge that the sexist nature of the comparison occurred to you before you posted it.

I have to wonder, would Patrick have used the same analogy if the disagreement had been between Paul Krugman and David Brooks? Though I can't say for sure, I tend to suspect the comparison wouldn't have occurred to him. Regardless, if he knew that his paragraph had an ambiguously sexist connotation, I think he should've changed it instead of risking misinterpretation.

If catfight wasn't widely understood to mean women fighting, then the imagery would've been appropriate. As it is, the word carries a negative connotation. Depicting someone as the winner of a catfight simply isn't normally understood to be a compliment.
Patrick invites me to interpret him any way I like. In fact, I would like to interpret this as a mistake and misunderstanding. But he makes that difficult when he also claims that I have highly tuned sensibilities. By this I understand him to mean that he thinks I'm being overly sensitive to this issue. It is just such an attitude that allows women to continue to be marginalized. Is it any wonder that people keep asking where all the women bloggers are?

Sexism Saturday, Part 1

2005-10-22T15:15:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, an online comic strip by Scott Kurtz called PVP ran this cartoon. It is part of a recent story arc involving the character Brent finding out that his girlfriend might be pregnant. Brent falls asleep and begins dreaming that he has a daughter. He and his fictional daughter converse about Brent's fears of being a father. In this cartoon, his daughter tells him this:

You know how to raise a son. Just raise him like your dad raised you. But you have no idea what to do with a girl. A son's love never changes. But one day I'm going to grow up and fall in love with another man and break your heart.

To be fair, I don't think Kurtz is being sexist on purpose. Nonetheless, a hint of sexism has found its way into his cartoon. And it is especially interesting given his blog's admission that the storyline is inspired by his recent reflections on whether or not he would ever make a good father. I have two problems with the quote above. The first is that I don't agree with the idea that a person can know how to raise a boy, but have no idea how to raise a girl. What special considerations exist for one gender that doesn't exist for the other? Though I should probably write more about this, I find the second problem more interesting.

Kurtz says that a son's love will never change, but a daughter's will. This is puzzling when you consider that a son is just as likely to fall in love when he grows up as a daughter is*. So why does he think that his daughter is replacing him, but his son isn't?

This speaks volumes about the sexist assumptions built into our society. As Kurtz unintentionally shows, there is an expectation that it should be harder for men to watch a daughter get married than it is to watch a son. Built into this assumption is the idea that men should be jealous of their daughter's boyfriends. This jealousy mirrors closely the jealousy of monogamy in that it implies that you can only love one person at a time.

It is especially interesting since Kurtz acknowledges later in the story arc that people can, in fact, love more than one person at a time. But he only applies his insight in a limited manner. He points out that parent can love her child without diminishing the love she feels for her spouse. He doesn't seem to realize that the insight applies equally to a daughter's love for her husband and her father.

The whole thing makes me wonder: Does Kurtz think his wife replaced his mother? It's a scary thought, and I certainly hope he doesn't. And if not, then why does he think his daughter's husband would replace him? While it is often hard to watch our kids grow up, most of us agree that we want our children to become self-sufficient adults. We don't want to be acting in the same parenting capacity when our children are 20 as we are when they are 7. Presumably, by the time his daughter is preparing to get married, she will have already grown up and moved out of the house. So how is he being replaced?

In short, he isn't. Such fears are founded on patriarchy, which just goes to show that sexism hurts us all. Even when the sexism is subtle.

* Of course, another assumption is a son will fall in love with a woman, and a daughter will fall in love with a man. Don't even get me started on what happens if the son or daughter ends up being gay. It's just one more reason that gender shouldn't play a large role in how you raise your children.

4 8 15 16 23 42

2005-10-21T06:37:00.000-07:00

So hundreds of players played the Lost numbers in Powerball for the $340 million jackpot. I'm trying to wrap my head around this. Obviously, by playing the lottery at a time when even thousands of people who normally don't buy tickets are playing, they're showing that they do, in fact, believe in luck. But the Lost numbers are supposed to bring bad luck. So by playing the Lost numbers, they're showing ... what? That they don't believe in luck after all? Are they just trying to be ironic?

I don't get it.

A moving essay by PZ Myers

2005-10-18T22:20:00.000-07:00

I'm in the middle of writing a post with more substance, but unfortunately it's getting late and words aren't coming to me any longer. In my stead, here's a post from way back in April from a guy who really should be on my blogroll, PZ Myers:

Maybe, though, while we are personally unacknowledged, there will be some trace left in the genes of several times great grandchildren, or in a few words preserved in a library, or in some tiny nudge we've given history. That's all I aim for, that I can sow a seed that will in turn sow a seed that will sow a seed that…and so it goes. That's enough.

Please, read the whole thing. It's moving, and the quote doesn't do it justice.

News from the world of stem cells

2005-10-17T10:44:00.000-07:00

This is good news, sort of.

Two new mouse experiments may show how to obtain human embryonic stem cells without ethical hurdles, a step that could allow federal funding for such research, scientists reported Sunday.

But let's not fool ourselves: It isn't great news. Instead of spending their time unlocking the secrets of stem cells, scientists are forced to waste time looking for new sources of the cells. But we already have sources. Plenty of them.

Embryos that are already being legally destroyed are not allowed to be used for scientific research. This really isn't much different than if people were not allowed to donate their organs out of fear that people would then raising children for organ farms. Or if people weren't allowed to do research on cadavers for fear of encouraging people to kill others for a fresh supply. It's like telling people they can't donate their baby's organs* because it might encourage people to kill their babies.

If you think about it, this is a frightening precedent. Logically, a person who wants to prevent frozen embryos from being destroyed likely wants to prevent those embryos from being created in the first place. If this were taken to it's ideological conclusion, it would mean the end of in vitro fertilization as a means to help women stuggling with infertility.

I don't know about you, but that's not a world I'm excited to live in.

* Come to think of it, can a parent donate their deceased baby's organs? I'm actually not sure.

A good way to start the day

2005-10-17T05:03:00.000-07:00

I love driving in to work while it is still dark outside. Part of it is the lack of traffic, but mostly it's that I'm much more of a night person than a morning person. Somehow, the darkness fools me into feeling more awake. As I got out of my car upon arriving to work this morning, I looked up to admire the stars, and I was startled to see a small sliver of darkness covering the left hand side of the moon. I knew the moon was supposed to be close to being full, but I honestly wasn't sure how close. But what surprised me was that the shadow didn't look like a normal lunar phase. It looked for all the world like the shadow of a partial lunar eclipse.

Sure enough, that's what it was.

I went out for another look.

Sneering at big families

2005-10-13T21:32:00.000-07:00

If you read the same blogs I do, you've probably come across a thing or two about Michelle Duggar, the Arkansas mother who just gave birth to her 16th child.

Over at Shakespeare's Sister, commentors have expressed dismay over the Duggars' decision to have so many children. Responding to a comment that the Duggars' decision is "wildly irresponsible," one commentor said:

I'll second that! I read this story yesterday and it made me want to hurl. No one has any right to bring that many kids into the world, and then just keep having more and more and more. How, I'd like to know, are they going to pay for all these kids to have a decent college education?

I must admit, I'm kind of taken aback by this attitude. Partly it's the expectation that everyone deserves a college education. For some careers, a college degree is indespensible. For others, it's highly advisable to have one. But people can certainly hold down a steady job without going to college. Perhaps I'm biased here -- I have a career in software development, and I have no college degree. I'm certainly not arguing that a degree isn't beneficial. I'm just trying to figure out where the expectation that parents should pay for their children's higher education comes from.

The other thing that confuses me is that we of the liberal persuasion tend to argue just the opposite: that people should have the choice on just exactly how many kids they bring into the world, and at what times. Isn't that the whole point of being pro-choice? Sure, most of the time we are defending a woman's right not to have a baby if she doesn't want to. But choice works both ways. If a woman wants to have an exceptionally large family, and has found the means to pay for it and make it all work out, shouldn't we be defending that choice instead of showing disgust for it?

I should add that I'm a little dubious of this family's rationale to have this many children. To wit:

"We both just love children and we consider each a blessing from the Lord. I have asked Michelle if she wants more and she said yes, if the Lord wants to give us some she will accept them," [Jim Bob Duggar] said in a telephone interview.

But then, I would be dubious: I'm an atheist. Though I'm not personally swayed by their logic, that doesn't mean that I don't support their right to live by their values and have the kind of family they want, regardless of it's size.

So that's my opinion as of right now. What do you think? If you disagree with me, leave me a comment and tell me why.

Cultural activism from the bench

2005-09-29T17:57:00.000-07:00

I've heard numerous people, ranging from friends to bloggers and even the First Lady, express hope that Bush will appoint a woman to the Supreme Court to replace Justice O'Connor. I agree, but only to a point. This Associated Press article about state district judge Lauri Blake in Texas highlights exactly the kind of woman I don't want to see on the SCOTUS.

SHERMAN, Texas - A state district judge has ordered a 17-year-old drug offender barred from sex as a condition of her probation. Judge Lauri Blake made the ruling that bars the girl from having sex as long as she is living with her parents and attending school.

It is one of several unorthodox rulings Blake has imposed since she was elected 10 months ago in the 336th District Court covering Fannin and Grayson counties.

She has also prohibited tattoos, body piercings, earrings and clothing "associated with the drug culture" for those on probation.

Wonderful. I'm not holding my breath for a rousing cry of judicial activism from the Right. Remember: Judicial activisim isn't bad if it gets you what you want. Judge Blake apparently fancies herself protector of the culture. She abuses her judicial power to censor what she disapproves of, and in the process reveals her prejudices. Tattoos, body piercings, and -- God help us -- earrings? The indesputible signs of a drug addict!

I am of the opinion that a seventeen year old is probably getting to the age where she is old enough to make her own decisions regarding her sex life. Granted, she's still legally a minor, and she's still living with her parents. Perhaps a case can be made that her parents should be involved in the decision. Nonetheless, there is a huge difference between parents laying down the rule of the house and a judge restricting basic human rights as part of probation. As Orange said to me, it's similar to the judges who ordered women to get Norplant or go to jail. It smacks of the whole right-wing, control-women's-sexuality obsession.

I'd rather see a white man who supports women's rights on the Supreme Court instead of a woman who doesn't.

I can't get this out of my head

2005-09-27T16:50:00.000-07:00

It's generally considered impolite to notice differences in race. I wouldn't point a guy out by saying, "It's that black guy over there!" That's probably why I think this is so funny:

http://users3.ev1.net/~rootstudio/fyadhaus/meatloafanhoochies.swf

That is all.

'Tis Talk Like A Pirate Day

2005-09-19T13:18:00.000-07:00

Arrrrrr, matey! 'Tis International Talk Like A Pirate Day! In celebration, here are two jokes stolen (read: pirated) from One Good Thing.

A pirate walks into a bar, and he's wearing a big belt buckle in the shape of a ship steering wheel. The bartender says "Hey, I really like your belt buckle!" The pirate replies "Arrrrr...its drivin' me nuts!"

And the second:

Q: Whom did the pirate vote for in the Haitian election?
A: ARRRistide.

Q: Wait. Why did they let a pirate vote in the Haitian election?
A: Remember, the nation was taking its first halting steps toward democracy, and balloting procedures were rather chaotic. The pirate just slipped in somehow. Arrr.

Depending on how you count it, I suppose that was three. Arrrr.

Coming soon

2005-09-09T17:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was too tired to write coherently, and tonight I will have guests. I have several posts in the queue for this weekend: why I think it's important to talk about religion, a post about faith, and (if you're lucky!) some thoughts on our president.

For now, might I suggest this Harper's article? It has some good things to say:

The fact that the boom never came and Iraq continues to tremble under explosions of a very different sort should never be blamed on the absence of a plan. Rather, the blame rests with the plan itself, and the extraordinarily violent ideology upon which it is based.

Don't you dare

2005-09-07T22:12:00.000-07:00

Both houses of the California legislature has passed a gay marriage bill today. Good news, right? No judicial activism here, just good ol' elected lawmakers makin' laws! What could possibly go wrong?

The legislation could be vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has expressed an acceptance of gay marriages but said it's an issue that should be decided by voters or the courts.

"He will uphold whatever the court decides," spokeswoman Margita Thompson said Tuesday after the state Assembly approved the same-sex marriage measure, 41-35. -- Associated Press, via Yahoo! News

Uh, wha...? Oh wait, I see. If gay marriage is legalized through court decisions, that's judicial activism, but if elected officials pass the laws, the problem is rogue legislators. Yes, it's all so clear to me now. The strategy is this:

Find a potential hurdle

Rationalize until it can be used as a barrier

I weep for our nation to think that people can and will be taken in by this. When legislators make laws, the issue has been decided by voters. This is what it MEANS to be in a representative democracy. If you're going to veto one law because "the issue should be decided by voters," then you have to veto EVERY law for the same reason. If he vetos this law, Schwarzenegger will be rejecting a fundamental principle of our system of government.

And don't even try to tell me that the problem is that 60% of the California voters don't support the law. Need I remind you that Bush the Younger held office without the popular vote? I didn't hear much screaming about it then, so let's not conveniently grow a conscience now, okay? I can just hear it. It has nothing to do with the gay, and everything to do with the process. Right. You're not fooling anybody. I'll tell you what. If the voters don't like the way their representatives are voting, they can do what we all do: Elect someone else.

Don't you dare veto that bill, Arnold. Not for that reason. Not while trying to look like a supporter of GLBT rights at the same time. Don't you dare.

Update: It looks like he is going to do it.

Update 2: I've learned a few things. First, the California state constitution says that voter referendums cannot be overridden by the legislature. Second, you may recall that in 2000, Proposition 22 was passed 61% to 38%. It states that "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."

So I don't like it, but it looks like Arnold is right on this one. This is an unconstitutional measure that will have to be decided by the people or by the courts.

Shameful

2005-09-07T21:42:00.000-07:00

We were dropped off near the airport and managed to catch a ride with the National Guard. The two young guardsmen apologized for the limited response of the Louisiana guards. They explained that a large section of their unit was in Iraq and that meant they were shorthanded and were unable to complete all the tasks they were assigned. -- Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky, Our Experiences

To anyone who is still willing to say that we did as well as we could have; to everyone still unwilling to take the blame all the way to the president: Stop it, all of you. Your credibility is gone.

Thanks to Bitch, Ph.D. for the link.

What religion has to say about Acts of God

2005-09-07T17:28:00.000-07:00

The other day, Charles left a comment to my post on hurricane Katrina and how it relates to the philosophers of our day. Charles, a fellow Omaha blogger, is himself a philosopher. He's also Christian -- a Mormon. Though Rob cautions me that discussing religion with the religious is like trying to nail Jello to a wall, I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt whenever possible. Plus, there are many arguments in Charles' reply that I have never written about in this blog. At the risk of losing a reader and/or starting a firestorm, this seems like a good opportunity to rectify that situation. I have high hopes that my readers can understand the difference between a discussion of religion and a personal attack.

In his first comment, Charles suggests that some so-called "Acts of God" aren't really caused by God at all. He says that most natural disasters "are more often results of natural consequences." In reply, I challenged him to distinguish between the two. I'll take his response one piece at a time.

Your question is interesting and I'm not sure there is a solid answer. I know many different people would probably answer it in different ways.

I give Charles credit for admitting that there isn't an obvious answer. But having admitted that the answer isn't solid, I don't understand why he thinks someone should believe that any natural disaster is caused by God. For myself, the lack of solid evidence is damning to the hypothesis that any natural disaster is caused by God. In fact, it would be more damaging to God if he did cause natural disasters without supplying us with an objective means to distinguish between those of natural origins and those that are supernatural.

Charles is right when he observes that many people answer this question in different ways. That's why some groups believe that the hurricane is caused by our nation's recent actions in Israel, others see it as a punishment for abortion and/or Mardi Gras, and others still believe it to be a reaction to homosexuality. It would seem that there are as many interpretations of God's use of natural disasters as there are interpretations of God.

In fact, this suggests another, more general question. Why should I believe in Charles' god as opposed to, say, the god of Islam? Or the god of the Catholics? Or the Baptists? Or the Summarians? What evidence is there that makes one god more plausible than another? Once again, the answer is that there is no evidence. This lack of evidence is forces me to discard the God Hypothesis.

I would probably say that a true act of God would be something contrary to what we know about the world around us.

Then certainly no "Acts of God" are really acts of God. There is nothing about a hurricane, flood, earthquake, or tsunami -- or any other natural disaster -- that fits that criteria. There was a time when these phenomena were not understood. Then, it made a certain kind of sense to attribute them to a god. But certainly that time has long since past.

Furthermore, I strongly disagree with the notion that if we don't have an explanation for something, it makes sense to attribute it to a deity. Consider that at one time, we had no idea what caused earthquakes. Now we have developed models that give the probability of a given region experiencing an earthquake of a given magnitude over a given period of time. Our understanding of hurricanes is even better: we can predict with a high degree of accuracy the regions likely to be affected, and we can do it days in advance. Had we been happy with God as an explanation, we would never have developed the science to save lives.

If a person is going to insist that God is responsible for these natural disasters, the subtle implication is that it is wrong to try to study them. If God sends a hurricane as a punishment, we are contradicting his divine will by studying meterology. A god that has so little respect for the human lives it created is no god worth worshipping.

But it shouldn't be contradictory to something specifically outlined by God.

Which is again a problem. How do we know what is specifically outlined by God? There is legitimate debate about that question even among Christians who agree that God exists. Even if God exists, there is no objective way of determining the answer to that question.

Flame on.

Updated for clarity

Joe.My.God.

2005-09-07T17:14:00.000-07:00

This blog is so going on my blogroll. It's a great read -- especially if you're a guy like me who supports gay rights in principle but has never had the opportunity to be around the "gay culture." (I imagine there are as many "gay cultures" as there are gay people. Nonetheless, this blog gives one man's perspective. And Joe knows how to tell a good story.)

Might I suggest the Terrence series? You can find the first part here.

Hat tip to The Unapologetic Atheist for sending this my way.

A short list of aid that FEMA refused or held up

2005-09-05T21:33:00.000-07:00

I keep reading various reports of aid offered to New Orleans that has been held up or refused all together. I finally decided to keep a list. I'll update this as I learn about more. If you know of anything I'm missing, leave it in the comments.

A tax-funded, state-of-the-art medical team

The USS Bataan

Wal-mart trucks full of ice and water

The water tankers from the US Forest Service

A specially trained and self-sufficient relief team from Chicago

A team of specially trained rescue workers from B.C., Canada

The Red Cross

Bush doesn't order search and rescue helicopters (via Kevin Drum)

A citizen flotilla of 500+ rescue boats

Amtrak's offer of trains to help evacuate victims

Experienced firefighters

The Coast Guard's fuel

Morticians

Electric generators

First responders urged not to respond

The last six are thanks to Shakespeare's Sister. I don't remember where I picked up the rest of the links.

It's all about the oil

2005-09-05T17:47:00.000-07:00

The Green Knight, discussing what hurricane Katrina tells us about our reliance on oil:

There is no example in history of a civilization being destroyed by terrorist gangs. None. But many civilizations have been destroyed by outstripping their resources and suddenly collapsing. It happened in Sumer, it happened to the Incas, it happened (some argue) to the Romans. There is no reason it can't happen to America.

This is almost certainly not the end, and I don't mean to suggest that it is. But it may be a foretaste. If we're smart, we'll learn the key lesson: we can no longer organize our lives around cheap plentiful oil. There is no cheap plentiful oil anymore.

Nonmonogamy and infidelity

2005-09-05T13:21:00.000-07:00

In last Thursday's post on monogamy vs. nonmonogamy, I defined monogamy like this:

When I talk about monogamy, I'm talking about the practice of having only one sexual partner for a period of time. I'm not talking about the practice of marrying only one person at a time. I'll save that discusson for another day. For the purpose of this essay, let's assume that marriage is between exactly two consenting adults.

This is a decent definition of monogamy, but I think what is missing is a definition of nonmonogamy. For the purpose of this essay, when I talk about a nonmonogamous relationship, I mean a serious relationship in which all parties involved consent to having multiple sexual partners. I'm not talking about a relationship in which one partner has multiple sexual partners without the other's knowledge or consent. I'm also not talking about casual sex between several partners who do not have a long term commitment to each other. Also, according to the working definition, a person can be in a nonmonogamous relationship without actually having more than one sexual partner. One partner's permission to allow the other to have other sexual partners is all that is required for it to be considered nonmonogamous. This definition is especially important when discussing infidelity.

I said in last Thursday's post that non-monogamy is often associated with infidelity. I probably should have made that a stronger statement. Non-monogamy isn't just associated with infidelity, it is often mistaken for it. In actuality, they aren't the same thing. Though I implied as much in my last post on this topic, this deserves a more thorough discussion.

It's a testimony to just how deeply ingrained the idea of monogamy is that nonmonogamy is often mistakenly described as "permission to cheat." But that definition rests on a set of assumptions that don't apply to nonmonogamous relationships. It assumes that sleeping with more than one person at a time is always cheating, which in turn assumes that monogamy is the only valid way to structure a serious relationship. Nobody who is considering nonmonogamy is likely to agree with either of those assumptions.

That does not mean that there is no infidelity in nonmonogamous relationships. It is simply a matter of what one is unfaithful to. In most monogamous relationships, there is an assumed promise between both partners that each will have sex only with the other. With such an assumption, it is easy to see how sex becomes the focus of infidelity. But in a nonmonogamous relationship, both partners recognize that it is not the sex itself that is wrong, it is the broken promise. "Cheating" is anything that breaks a promise to one's significant other. Though it is true that without a promise of monogamy, sex with a multiple partners is not necessarily cheating, it is also true that monogamy is not the only promise that one can make in a relationship. For example, you could agree that sex with new partners is okay, but sex with an ex-spouse isn't. It could be that sex with people outside the relationship is okay only when using protection. One could promise to discuss any potential sexual partners before engaging in sex with them. Or it could be that it is okay to sleep with anyone you like as long as you inform your significant other of it soon after the event. In each of these scenarios, sex itself isn't considered cheating. But a broken promise is.

There is an added benefit to discarding the automatic assumption that all relationships should be monogamous. It forces people to discuss what they expect from a relationship. How many relationships have been damaged because one partner believes flirting is okay, but another believes it is cheating? I'm willing to bet that this kind of mismatched expectation is more common than we usually think. How many cheaters have justified their infidelities by saying something isn't "technically" cheating? Is it okay to look at porn? How about personal ads? When does flirting cease to be flirting? All relationships, monogamous or otherwise, would benefit from a greater level of communication. Anywhere we can reduce the assumptions we make about how we should each live our lives will only facilitate this greater level of communication.

FEMA's decline

2005-09-05T10:14:00.000-07:00

In this post on FEMA's response, I tried to explain how the attitude of Michael Brown, director of FEMA, contributed to the inadequate response to hurricane Katrina. Paul Krugman takes it a step further and says it far better than I did. Here's an excerpt:

Several recent news analyses on FEMA's sorry state have attributed the agency's decline to its inclusion in the Department of Homeland Security, whose prime concern is terrorism, not natural disasters. But that supposed change in focus misses a crucial part of the story.

For one thing, the undermining of FEMA began as soon as President Bush took office. Instead of choosing a professional with expertise in responses to disaster to head the agency, Mr. Bush appointed Joseph Allbaugh, a close political confidant. Mr. Allbaugh quickly began trying to scale back some of FEMA's preparedness programs.

You might have expected the administration to reconsider its hostility to emergency preparedness after 9/11 - after all, emergency management is as important in the aftermath of a terrorist attack as it is following a natural disaster. As many people have noticed, the failed response to Katrina shows that we are less ready to cope with a terrorist attack today than we were four years ago.

Read the whole thing here.

Supernatural Selection: Creationism's Latest Evolution

2005-09-05T09:22:00.000-07:00

Here's a link for you.

I hereby appropriate the phrase "supernatural selection" for my own purposes.

On Spirituality

2005-09-04T23:06:00.000-07:00

My friend Rob, the Unapologetic Atheist, lost a friend in a senseless tragedy in New Orleans. Having survived the hurricane, Rob's friend was shot and killed while defending his bait shop from looters.

As you can imagine, many of us expressed our condolences in the comments. Probably because it mentioned me by name, one comment in particular caught my eye. Rather than hijack Rob's comment thread, I thought I'd respond to it here instead. For context, this is what I wrote to Rob:

What a senseless loss. I truly feel for you.

Back when I was a Christian, there was a prayer that meant a lot to me. It was The Prayer of St. Francis:

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
O, Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

I can't tell you the number of times I said that prayer and felt immediately better. When I became an atheist, this prayer took on a new and equally powerful meaning to me. How could I explain the very real transformations I had thought this prayer had provided without relying upon an external deity? I realized that the changes were coming from within myself.

I hope you can find in yourself something that helps you feel comfort. And if there is anything I can do, please let me know.

Joe Visionary responded to my comment. He wrote:

To Charlie and Rob and the many others who have turned away from God: religion has lost a lot with your moving on.

You all seem still to be deeply spiritual, even it you don't have a church.

Perhaps simply emulating Christ's love for His fellow man is the most important message anyway. That's what New Orleans needs now.

I'll admit my initial reaction to this wasn't very charitable. By calling Rob and I "deeply spiritual" and suggesting that we are emulating Christ's love, he implies that we are both Christians -- even though we think we're not. My gut reaction was to rail against this. I'm not spiritual, and I'm certainly not emulating Christ's love, I thought. Who needs that kind of backhanded compliment? It certainly didn't seem like the kind of thing someone who chose "the Unapologetic Atheist" as his moniker would want to hear having so recently lost a friend.

But as they say, it's the thought that counts. I don't think Joe was trying to insult us. I think it was intended as a compliment. I can't speak for Rob -- I'm don't have any idea how he took Joe's comment -- but for me, I will take it in the spirit intended. In fact, considering the vast differences in our respective philosophies, it is quite a compliment indeed.

Whether I consider myself spiritual or not depends a great deal on how you define spirituality. When I look at the stars and try to imagine the vast distances between, I'm filled with a sense of awe. When I think about the meaning I assign to my own life despite my belief that it has no intrinsic meaning, when I ponder the existence of morality despite the lack of any obvious source of absolute right and wrong, then I feel something that could be described as spiritual.

Normally, I don't call it that. That's partly because I don't believe in spirits any more than I believe in gods. But it's also because I used to be Catholic. I understand something of the nature of spirituality in the sense that they mean it -- or at least the way I meant it -- and I don't think it would be proper to describe what I am now as spiritual. I say this as a matter of respect. I recognize the differences between spiritual people and naturalists. Though it is always important to seek common ground, I think those differences can be important, too. I see no reason to blur the line unnecessarily.

Jesus, a tsunami, and a hurricane walk into a bar

2005-09-03T17:53:00.000-07:00

Just the other day I was thinking about the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, in which an estimated 90,000 people died of the combined effects of a devastating earthquake, tsunami, and fires. It is said to have inspired Voltaire’s Candide, and it was a strong influence on the European Enlightenment. I was wondering, with several recent natural disasters on our nation’s collective minds, why aren’t we seeing more religious people resurrecting the question of evil?

Publius at Legal Fiction didn’t let me down. Here’s an excerpt of what he had to say about that:

Back in high school, I had a good analogy that I picked up from some Bible camp (I think) that I would use when I was challenged about this. Here it is – a man gathers a bunch of wood and brush that he plans on burning. Before he burns it, he sees that a bird is building its nest on the brush. Before it can be completed, the man destroys the nest. The bird tries again, and the man destroys it again until finally the bird builds it safely in the tree. The lesson of course is that our knowledge is incomplete and what we perceive as bad may actually be the best thing for us. It’s a variation (sort of) of Plato’s cave.

That was a comforting story, but now, at the ripe old age of 28, it seems like a strained attempt to provide meaning to meaningless acts of destruction. I mean, can you really defend the Holocaust with the argument that we simply don’t know how it fits into some larger and greater good? Can you defend the tsunami that way? And if so, what can’t you defend? After all, couldn’t God have prevented the bird from building the nest there in the first place? I guess I’m just saying that it’s hard to see why anyone would feel that God is particularly deserving of praise as they watch a poor Mississippi mother crying frantically on CNN that her sons are missing and repeating their names again and again in the hopes that someone out there might help – while the audience can only look on impotently in horror and tears.

In the end, I just wonder if it isn’t more comforting to think that we really are adrift in an amoral universe subject only to the purposeless shifting of tectonic plates and hurricane paths. Surely that is more comforting than thinking about a being who actively wills such destruction or allows it to happen.

Read the whole thing here.

And after thinking about it for a little while, I realized that there is one key difference between the natural disasters of 1755 and the natural disasters of today. In 1755, Portugal was a Catholic nation. Catholicism was in full swing, and everyone believed themselves to be doing God’s work. Presumably if an entire nation (with perhaps a few exceptions) already believes strongly in the same God, a disaster would be more likely to shake that faith. Contrast that to the United States, where the many fringe groups are free to believe that they, personally, were spared because of their holy righteousness.

Nonetheless, I am pleased to see that there are still some people that are willing to ask the difficult questions regardless of how unpopular the answers may be.

Send glue and swimsuits

2005-09-03T15:18:00.000-07:00

Son: <concerned, serious voice> The alleys are supposed to keep the water out. But the alleys are broken, and the water is in.
Me: The levees? Yes, the levees are broken.
Son: Yes, the levees. <sudden inspiration> They need to glue them back together. Would that be a good idea?
Me: Well, I’m not sure about glue, but yes, they do need to fix the levees.
Son: I’m not sure how to fix them.
Me: I’m not sure either.
Son: <another inspiration> They need their swimsuits!
Me: <laughing> I think they just need to get out of the city for awhile. There are people trying to help them get out.
Son: But daddy, what if they run out of glue?

Perhaps glue and swimsuits aren’t the answer. A donation to the Red Cross would probably be better.

Outrageous

2005-09-03T13:27:00.000-07:00

If you have found yourself wondering about the situation in New Orleans and how it could’ve possibly gotten so bad, I think you’ll find the director of FEMA’s recent comments to be insightful.

The director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Thursday those New Orleans residents who chose not to heed warnings to evacuate before Hurricane Katrina bear some responsibility for their fates.

Michael Brown also agreed with other public officials that the death toll in the city could reach into the thousands.

"Unfortunately, that's going to be attributable a lot to people who did not heed the advance warnings," Brown told CNN.

"I don't make judgments about why people chose not to leave but, you know, there was a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans," he said.

Of course! It’s all so obvious to me now! The hundred thousand or so people who stayed should’ve just gotten in their cars and driven somewhere else. Yeah, Greyhound had suspended operations in New Orleans on Saturday. But so what? If they didn’t have a car, perhaps they should have considered simply chartering a private jet to leave. You know, I’ve always been suspicious of people who don’t own cars. They’re probably some kind of hippie tree-hugger environmentalist liberals. They had it coming.

I’m outraged by the blatant disdain Brown exhibits for the people he is charged with helping. He can’t seem to fathom a world where people just don’t have the money to leave. He doesn’t understand that there are people in nursing homes who have nobody to take care of them. He doesn’t understand that many of these people had nowhere else to go.

Sure, if Brown had nowhere else to go, he probably could’ve just lived in a motel, but for how long? Days? Weeks? Months? And at what cost? Let’s say a family did just up and leave. What now? Do you suppose the Astrodome is taking just anybody who shows up at the door and says, Hey, I was in New Orleans last Saturday, but now I don’t have a home? Or do you think that they’re probably only taking the people who come from officially sanctioned channels? Staying in New Orleans was an implicit acknowledgment that they were likely to need financial help in the coming days. And now they have to put up with Brown’s attitude of disdain, too.

Months ago, I wrote that sometimes economic class is mistaken for intelligence. Brown’s comments are a disappointing example of this. I expect more from the department of our government whose job it is to handle disasters. I expect them to treat disaster victims like human beings who are worthy of help. Is it so much to ask that the federal agencies tasked with distributing welfare aren’t composed of people who feel contempt for the welfare system?

With those kind of people in charge, is it any wonder that relief was slow in coming?

Hat tip to Orange for pointing me in the direction of John Scalzi’s post on this topic.

Update: Pam's post at the Big Brass Blog confirms that the Astrodome is indeed only accepting refugees from the official relief effort.

Friday blogrolling

2005-09-02T15:41:00.000-07:00

This list has gotten pretty long. Whoops! In alphabetical order:

Avant Game. Honestly? I'm just keeping my eye on this one, but I do find them intriguing. I could use an RSS reader, but I'm old fashioned and like to actually click through and see the blog. I tend to use ye olde links to remember who I like to visit. So they're on the list.

Gone Feral. I found this through Orange Tangerine. She hasn't posted in a little while due to a recent move, which just goes to show you how long it has been since I read it. As an introductary post, might I suggest Turdgate '05?

Jonna's Blog. This is my sister, the one whose adoption story I wrote about a little while back. I kept thinking that she really wasn't going to continue blogging, but considering the fact that she's been more consistant than I have these past few weeks, I'd say that was hardly a fair assessment.

Mona's Barbaric Yawp. Mona is a regular commentor around here. I don't even know how to describe her blog. I did like her description of feature creep in software development, which can be found here. You will also find lots of posts and discussions like Poems About Teen Testosterone. Would that I were half as entertaining!

Rationally Speaking has been on the blogroll since I started this, but it is worth noting that Massimo Pigliucci has switched from a monthly column format to an honest to Max blog.

I've been meaning to add Suburban Misfit since July when she posted this about running into a long lost friend on MySpace. Something similar happened to me almost immediate after she wrote about that, and I was able to adapt the graceful way she handled her situation to fit my particular circumstances.

I hope there's something new here for you to read! I'm working on about three different posts right now, but they won't be up tonight. That's because tonight is a poker party at Fransesco's with some local computer nerds. Hopefully tomorrow I'll have some more thoughts on monogamy for you.

By the way, what the is that Flag option at the top bar that blogger adds to everything doing there? There is something about it that just isn't sitting right with me. Any opinions on that?

For the record

2005-09-01T19:54:00.000-07:00

Modern, Cool Nerd
60 % Nerd, 73% Geek, 34% Dork

For The Record:

A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.
You scored better than half in Nerd and Geek, earning you the title of: Modern, Cool Nerd.

Nerds didn't use to be cool, but in the 90's that all changed. It used to be that, if you were a computer expert, you had to wear plaid or a pocket protector or suspenders or something that announced to the world that you couldn't quite fit in. Not anymore. Now, the intelligent and geeky have eked out for themselves a modicum of respect at the very least, and "geek is chic." The Modern, Cool Nerd is intelligent, knowledgable and always the person to call in a crisis (needing computer advice/an arcane bit of trivia knowledge). They are the one you want as your lifeline in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (or the one up there, winning the million bucks)!

Take the quiz. (Like you haven't already.)

As promised, a discussion about monogamy

2005-08-31T23:41:00.000-07:00

I promised I would talk about monogamy vs. non-monogamy. That’s a pretty big topic, so it’s probably a good idea if I make this a series. It is probably important to say up front that non-monogamy is an odd subject for me to talk about. I am, after all, in a monogamous marriage. For a first hand account of non-monogamous relationships, you should probably read Bitch Ph.D. or The Unapologetic Atheist. Nonetheless, it’s a topic I’ve thought about a lot.

I’m always a little hesitant to write about it, though, because I’m afraid that people will think I’m attacking all monogamous relationships. I’m not. I have nothing against monogamy per se. It is a good choice for many people, perhaps even for most people.

Now is probably a good time to define terms. When I talk about monogamy, I’m talking about the practice of having only one sexual partner for a period of time. I’m not talking about the practice of marrying only one person at a time. I’ll save that discussion for another day. For the purpose of this essay, let’s assume that marriage is between exactly two consenting adults.

As I said, I am not attacking monogamy. If I’m attacking anything, it is the assumption that monogamy is always the best choice for everyone. As I wrote before, that assumption is so strong throughout society that most people don’t even seriously consider other options. In fact, non-monogamous marriage is such an uncommon idea that it makes most people feel uncomfortable to even think about it. The word “monogamy” is often associated with “fidelity,” and for most people it carries positive connotations. Non-monogamy, on the other hand, usually carries with it the negative connotations of infidelity.

It’s an odd thing, that. It seems pretty obvious that people everywhere are somewhat intrigued by the idea of non-monogamous relationships, even if they don’t think of it in quite those terms. Recently, some of the bloggers I read were discussing their “freebie lays” – celebrities who would warrant exemptions from monogamy should the right opportunity present itself. Granted, it’s only a game; a fantasy. It’s a different way to talk about who you find attractive and why. But I can’t help but thinking that part of what makes it more fun than a normal “s/he’s so hot” conversation is the chance to tempt yourself. What if I really did sleep with her? It makes me wonder: If it weren’t for the mostly unquestioned assumption in our society that monogamy is the sole option for serious relationships, how many people would prefer a different arrangement?

One problem with monogamy (and here’s where I start to sound like I’m bashing it – honest, I’m not) is that it promotes jealousy. When a boyfriend or girlfriend is paying too much attention to a member of the opposite sex, it isn’t uncommon to hear, “If I’m jealous, it only means I love you,” as though jealousy is a measure of the magnitude of love. But that phrase is also familiar to many victims of domestic violence. If we reject it in the latter situation, shouldn’t we also reject it in the former? Jealousy is a negative and destructive emotion. Love has no need of it.

Another problem with monogamy is that it is a socially accepted way to treat people like property. There is a possessive element to a monogamous relationship that is often expressed, “I want you all to myself.” Like jealousy, this is usually considered a positive emotion. Assuming that my spouse would prefer to have additional sexual partners, I fail to see how preventing her from having what she wants is something to be desired. It implies that I have ownership over her, or at least over her sexuality.

But in a sense, it really isn’t fair to talk about monogamy promoting jealousy or possessiveness. Neither are intrinsic properties of monogamy. Instead, these traits mostly manifest themselves due to the particular way it is implemented in our society. They follow easily from the assumption that monogamy is the best fit for everyone.

And it is this jealousy-free and unpossessive sense of monogamy with which I have no problems. Whereas the possessive monogamy says “I want you all to myself,” an unpossessive monogamy says, “I give myself to you.” This is the romantic ideal of monogamy towards which most of us strive. But a gift isn’t much of a gift at all if it isn’t freely given. An unpossessive monogamy is much harder to achieve when we automatically assume that any serious relationship will necessarily be monogamous.

And that is a very important point: By embracing non-monogamous, committed relationships as a legitimate choice in society, we simultaneously enrich our traditional monogamous relationships. Though you might enjoy flowers on your anniversary, it is still better to receive flowers for no reason. In the same way, though monogamy may be very fulfilling for many people as it currently exists, it could be even better if you knew your spouse had a choice to be with many people, but chose to be with you exclusively.

Next time, I’ll talk more about non-monogamy, and how it relates to cheating.