Expect updates to be more sporadic than usual around here — I’m off to Convergence for four days of happy chaos. By the way, I just noticed that Amanda Marcotte will be attending — you’re really missing a maelstrom of godless, science-packed, feminist-fueled wildness if you aren’t coming. Party on, dudes & dudettes.
It’s disgraceful how people are getting distracted by games and wasting their time and the time of others. We must end all frivolity. Beginning with crossword puzzles in the 1920s.
Everywhere, at any hour of the day, people can be seen quite shamelessly poring over the checker-board diagrams, cudgelling their brains for a four-letter word meaning "molten rock" or a six-letter word meaning "idler," or what not: in trains and trams, or omnibuses, in subways, in private offices and counting-rooms, in factories and homes, and even – although as yet rarely – with hymnals for camouflage, in church.
Oh, I remember my shiftless grandmother, who’d work the fruit season in Yakima picking apples and then spend the winter working at the cannery in Seattle, and as a widow had to raise 6 kids and later a horde of grandchildren, and who in the evening would spend hours unwinding with stacks and stacks of crossword puzzles. She should have gotten another job, I guess.
I also get a hint of an attitude from the article that they were really concerned that the proles had interests beyond working.
Of course, the newspapers themselves had by now got in on the act, publishing crosswords and by some accounts relying on the puzzles for newsstand sales. Hypocrisy, following scaremongering and berating the British public for not toiling every hour God sends. Who’d have thought it from the press?
Of course, now the concern is that they might be enjoying sex.
I like this one: Theologian Chess.
In Theology Chess, the theologian has the entire chessboard to himself and only one piece: God. Whenever the opponent (who has no pieces) asks a question about God, the piece may be moved to a different square in any direction with no restriction on distance. This may be done infinitely until the questioner gets up and leaves.
Federal Judge John Heyburn has struck down the state’s prohibition of same-sex marriage. And he makes a marvelously clear and reasonable dismissal of the homophobes’ arguments.
The Court will begin with Defendant’s only asserted justification for Kentucky’s laws prohibiting same-sex marriage: “encouraging, promoting, and supporting the formation of relationships that have the natural ability to procreate.” Perhaps recognizing that procreation- based arguments have not succeeded in this Court, see Bourke, 2014 WL 556729, at *8, nor any other court post-Windsor, Defendant adds a disingenuous twist to the argument: traditional marriages contribute to a stable birth rate which, in turn, ensures the state’s long-term economic stability.
These arguments are not those of serious people. Though it seems almost unnecessary to explain, here are the reasons why. Even assuming the state has a legitimate interest in promoting procreation, the Court fails to see, and Defendant never explains, how the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage has any effect whatsoever on procreation among heterosexual spouses. Excluding same-sex couples from marriage does not change the number of heterosexual couples who choose to get married, the number who choose to have children, or the number of children they have. See Bishop v. United States ex rel. Holder, 962 F. Supp. 2d 1252, 1291 (N.D. Okla. 2014) (“Marriage is incentivized for naturally procreative couples to precisely the same extent regardless of whether same-sex couples (or other non-procreative couples) are included.”). The Court finds no rational relation between the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage and the Commonwealth’s asserted interest in promoting naturally procreative marriages.
The state’s attempts to connect the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage to its interest in economic stability and in “ensuring humanity’s continued existence” are at best illogical and even bewildering. These arguments fail for the precise reasons that Defendant’s procreation argument fails.
Over the last few days, I’ve had a ‘conversation’ with a Muslim creationist on Twitter. He’s claiming that the embryology in the Quran is accurate and specific, and amusingly, he’s citing this article on the web to support his claim, saying that it is on his side. He starts off with some criticisms — he doesn’t like the tone, it’s not sciencey enough — but he says that it confirms that the “Quran is more specific and very different in the level of detail then Greek”.
There’s an amusing bit where it suddenly sinks into his thick skull that I’m the author of the article.
That’s not going to stop him, though. Watch. He still insists that I wrote the opposite of what I actually wrote.
Robin Marty proposes to do in-depth investigative reporting on the stresses on family planning clinics.
Clinic Stories is a 12 part series that will look at 12 different clinics or cities in the country, telling the history of legal abortion through location and the people inside and outside it.
Each Clinic Story will be an intensely researched, longform article anywhere between 5000 and 10,000 words, detailing the history of the clinic and its role in the movement, tracking laws that it has challenged, protesters it has faced, anti-abortion and pro-abortion rights groups that have worked for it or against it, and where it fits into the greater history of the last four decades of the abortion rights movement. It will include interviews with current and former workers, escorts and even those who have worked to shut those clinics down.
Robin is writer with a fine track record who has been fighting for abortion rights for years, and this should be a very good addition to our knowledge. She’s looking for support — this is going to take time and effort to do well — so she’s asking for donations. Help her out, it will be worth the investment.
Read this account of a man slipping away into madness. It’s not about melodrama or violence, but about an ordinary person drifting towards paranoia, cutting off all contact with his family, and acquiring strange obsessions in place of normal human relationships. It’s harrowing and tragic.
The story also points out the social and legal difficulties in handling these cases. The man is clean and presentable, he can engage coherently for periods of time, and he will tell you that he is not sick — which means everyone is helpless to deal with his problems, and for good reason.
Once, the man’s family might have handled the situation by having him involuntarily committed to a psychiatric institution. For decades, it was a routine and simple procedure: If a doctor agreed that the patient had a mental illness, he could be institutionalized even against his will.
The problem was that it was a process with few safeguards, and during much of the 20th century, all kinds of people who didn’t belong — from free-thinking women to gay people, minorities and rebellious children — wound up locked in hospitals where abuse was common and conditions were often bleak.
So the system changed, with one catalyst being a 1975 Supreme Court ruling that effectively restricted involuntary commitment to instances when a person becomes a “danger to self or others,” a phrase that now appears in one form or another in state laws across the country.
Keep that in mind next time someone declares that labeling someone “mentally ill” is a good response to a problem.
