It was an intimate moment. I was bent over a table, pantsless, and I heard the snap of the rubber gloves, the squelchy sound of the lubricant, and then the sudden penetration and pressure — “Wow,” she said, “that’s huge“. And now I can scratch “impress a woman with my prostate” from my bucket list.
Not feeling at all well, and I’ve got no reserves for anything outside of doing my job. Go browse around those other blogs on FtB, ’cause I’m about to crawl into work and exhaust myself with labs and lecture, and then I’m going to crawl home again and curl up in a small ball of misery.
Don’t worry, I’m not stupid, and have made an appointment to see a doctor tomorrow.
It was a painful 50 minutes, but I listened to the entirety of Peter Boghossian and Stefan Molyneux patting each other on the back, in this video, Feminists vs. Atheists: The Death of Rational Discourse. I think you can tell from the title that there is not much hope for rational discussion here, and from the two speakers, you know it’s going to be awful. What I did was listen while I was engaged in some other work, and just extract a few paraphrases of the conversation now and then, when they said something particularly tiresome.
And really, that’s what it’s all about: reciting cliches at each other without thought, repeating bogus accusations we’ve all heard a thousand times before. These are not people who think very deeply about much of anything.
So what I’ve done below is scribble down the general tenor of the discussion. This is not a transcript. I’ve included some time points so if you really want to, you can go back and check on all the context.
The Republicans now control congress. That means nothing will get done for the next couple of years as the conservatives try to roll back slight progressive gains, and liberals struggle to keep them in check. You can just ignore us for a while, World.
Except for the drones and the bombs and the aircraft carriers, that is.
Both Dana and Adam are quite right, that the self-appointed leadership of the atheism movement have a record that leaves quite a bit to be desired on the equality front. But I would not say they’re as bad as the Christian Right. Behold, Rachel Alexander, responding to the recent catcalling video:
Did you know there are Six SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN ways women can be more attractive to men? Would you be surprised that they’re all about looking slender and youthful and smiling a lot? I kind of gagged at the suggestion that they’re supposed to use less makeup, because the natural look is in, and they should wear bright red clothes.
Russel Brand apparently has an autobiography out; I haven’t seen it, nor am I at all interested in reading it, but Nick Cohen has. It’s titled Revolution, and this sort of says it all about that.
His book tells us much about him and little about the rest of humanity. Brand says that he is qualified to lead a global transformation, not because of the quality of his thought, but because he has transformed his private life. “I may not have overthrown a government. But [I have] navigated myself from one set of feelings where drinking and drugs were my only solution to a state where I never drink or take drugs.” It is perhaps too easy to reply: “Well, bully for you.” I accept that freeing yourself from addiction and finding inner peace can have more beneficial effect than any political programme the powerful can implement. But Brand is offering his Beverly Hills Buddhism as a political programme, not a self-help guide. Everything is corrupt, his theory runs. All politicians are the same. Reforms won’t do, and no one can expect him to relinquish his fortune until there has been “systemic change on a global scale” (a useful condition that last one).
The systemic change that means the most to Brand is an embrace of meditation and pantheism. The greatest villain of Revolution is not a super-rich financier but Richard Dawkins. Brand denounces him as a “menopausal” proponent of “atheistic tyranny” because Dawkins denies the existence of the supernatural. He pulls a succession of shabby tricks to bolster his claim that religion does not authorise oppression. Anyone who claims that Jesus, Allah, Krishna or the fountainhead of any other religion endorses homophobia instead of the “union of all mankind” is “on a massive blag”, he says. Brand has to ignore Leviticus’s edict that the punishment for men who sleep with other men is death, St Paul’s hysterics about lesbianism and the hadiths that have Muhammad saying that the punishment for sodomy is death by stoning. In other words, he has to ignore several millennia of real and continuing religious repression, so he can make his spiritualism sound emancipatory rather than cranky.
Warning! Big animated gif below the fold, or you can go to NatGeo and watch the movie there.
