yayyyyyy God

[phishtaper]

and dont none of you bitches ever forget that!!!

meow.

[SaggyBalls]

Talks about sides working against oneanother, the realization that there are great opportunities for the sides to come together and learn something and help one another, bickering, bringing up points that have little direct value, making up but still failing to compromise or concede when some perspectives on wisdom are more appropriate...

Dude i wasn't bashing you. I was making one of my entirely tedious generalized observations to sum up a few tones and directions of the thread.

Just cause I make a joke at the joke (i thought) you made.

Get all fired up if you really have to but I'm not trying to make it happen.

While I agree that there are some unfortunate grabs for power and affluence and that it's at the neglect of those who can't really help themselves...

...but moreso I think that much of it isn't entirely sinister. I'm glad that you're bringing up some different perspectives on 'religion' and trying to tie them into the 'right wing agenda' but maybe you can explain them further, or post some links because in heated discussion, quick jabs have little lasting value.

Maybe I'm wrong, but maybe i'm not, so instead of just brushing this all aside, I'm really curious how you piece it all together.

I want to believe it's all a big plot tied together with a series of little plots...because i want to have faith in humanity as being clever.

Part of me things it's just laziness and fear coming together that's holding us back.

We stand at a great time for Humanity where religion and secularity can learn a lot from oneanother and prosper.

Sure there was some islamophobia in the thread earlier, but it felt to me like more poking fun than really bashing muslims. I felt that we bash everyone fairly equally...well except for the jews, which is kind of unfortuante since i think there's always room for more creative use of marx brothers photos.

Edited November 24, 2008 by Guest

[Thorgnor]

I don't think it's a "conspiracy" per se, and I've said that I don't think the hidden "right-wing agenda" is very hidden. Moreso it's that I don't see the conservative ethic of leaving people to their own devices as being a positive and harmonizing factor in society.

The jabs are just fun. But the right wing agenda is so closely related to a particular set of religious ideologies that I don't think that it is capable of progressing past them. They are the traditional foundations of the party. There are policies that they represent that are great for certain situations, but I am afraid of condoning the rest of their ideas.

The whole righty lefty thing is about as useful as the good bad debate.

I stand mainly on the premise that they unintentionally villify minorities, social and visible, as outside of the Canadian norms. There is no national outrage over the issue of the declaration of intention for Quebec immigrants, which is totally Islamophobic. I feel this is two solitudes working together.

The conditions for many Aboriginal Canadians continue to worsen under their watch due to a feeling that these people should help themselves, it seems. Many Conservative MP's have been found saying ridiculously racist comments in the recent past, including comments regarding natives during the campaign. I also feel that this government has done nothing to help with poverty, almost typically in line with "The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism", as if things hadn't progressed since the 1800's. Myths of meritocracy are often couched in religious tones and they find their birth in the ideas of "worthiness" and "calling" found in early Protestantism. The idea that if we just work hard we'll have what we need has been proven false if systemic situations prevent participation of diversity, the Liberal party is guilty of this too.

I'd like to state for the record that I'm no communist and disagree with the implications and assertions of it's inevitability made by Marx. However, the basis of Capitalism is in a type of exchange pioneered by early Protestants and was intimately informed by the religious views of the people. Liberalism is another idea which is born from religion, but as a reaction to intolerance and oppression. Humanism was the "religion" of secular thinkers and it had it's flaws. Not the least of which was the assumption of a Unilinear form of human evolution, which placed certain societies at stages of evolutionary development, from savage to civilized. At the time religious thinkers were actually far more "equitable" in their goals.

Often conservative politicians play on a fear that we will loose our way of life if we make too many concessions. This is in fact a way of NOT changing the status quo.

The status quo does not offend those who represent tradition, it cannot, they also represent legitimate power. They can only be offended by affronts to tradition. In our society this has resulted in such malicious bullshit as "reverse racism" a way of saying that white power has been undermined, or "FemiNazi's" the idea that somehow a Feminist agenda of equality is totalitarian mind-control... strangely Birdy referred to these kinds of fears of the left-wing, although I'm guessing they were said more to teach me a lesson than to explain what she actually thought.

I realize that I am concretizing the thoughts and ideas of the political Right as if they are all the same, which is not true. But the basis of the ideas are old and the core camps are often quite bounded.

What I meant to say through all of this is that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. But this statement is very explanatory. It not only states that intention is not enough to justify the results of our actions, but that it doesn't matter how good we think we are, we may do harm. The most interesting and telling section of the sentence is that it accepts the Christian hell as the punishment. Threats of hell are the cultural boundaries of Christian authority.

They would like us to accept them as the legitimate power, while we remain good citizens by doing what they consider normal. This kind of thinking does not leave you "at odds with the law" but instead a "bad person". Intending to follow the rules is not enough, you're belonging is determined by the figures of authority.

I'm not ready for all that.

Edited November 25, 2008 by Guest

[SaggyBalls]

The status quo does not offend those who represent tradition

I have always thought the same, but have been entirely confused by it, as merely putting in the minimum accepted effort, it isn't really doing one's fellow man any genuine service - it merely fulfils a task - an obligation - while the true essence of Christianity is to put in a genuine effort and 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you'...

If 'I am the way' meant that Jesus was merely courteous and civil, then that water he turned into wine would've tasted more like piss...and the story probably wouldn't have been told quite the same.

When countries and lives are led behind rules and guidelines rather than an ethos from the heart for everyones' benefit the tales of saintly people get overshadowed by misunderstanding and disappointment.

Is this sort of the gist of what you were getting at?

Something I must have drank left a bitter/sour taste in my mouth too.

[Birdy]

strangely Birdy referred to these kinds of fears of the left-wing, although I'm guessing they were said more to teach me a lesson than to explain what she actually thought.

No. Camille Paglia says it much better than me.

Check out these links for further clarification:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_Paglia

http://privat.ub.uib.no/BUBSY/nomore1.htm

[SaggyBalls]

uh oh.

[Birdy]

uh oh?

whole new can of worms?

[Birdy]

maybe this is better (rather than assume I'm all for Paglia):

PLAYBOY: Are you a feminist?

PAGLIA: I'm absolutely a feminist. The reason other feminists don't like me is that I criticize the movement, explaining that it needs a correction. Feminism has betrayed women, alienated men and women, replaced dialogue with political correctness. PC feminism has boxed women in. The idea that feminism--that liberation from domestic prison--is going to bring happiness is just wrong. Women have advanced a great deal, but they are no happier. The happiest women I know are not those who are balancing their careers and families, like a lot of my friends are. The happiest people I know are the women--like my cousins--who have a high school education, got married immediately graduating and never went to college. They are very religious and they never question their Catholicism. They do not regard the house as a prison.

PLAYBOY: But what about the women who stay home and are still suffering?

PAGLIA: The problem is the alternative handed to them by feminism. I look at my friends who are on the fast track. They are desperate, frenzied and frazzled, the most unhappy women who have ever existed. They work nights and weekends and have no lives. Some of them have children who are raised by nannies.

PLAYBOY: What's your point? Do you want women to go back to the home?

PAGLIA: The entire feminist culture says that the most important woman is the woman with an attached case. I want to empower the woman who wants to say, "I'm tired of this and I want to go home." The far right is correct when it says the price of women's liberation is being paid by the children.

PLAYBOY: Are you siding with the far right?

PAGLIA: No. What I'm doing is pointing out the bind the women's movement has created not only for women but for the culture as well. Children are abandoned. There is no doubt that it's better for kids to have contact with mothers for those early years. When I go to work in the morning, I see black women and Hispanic women pushing strollers filled with rich, white babies. These women provide the best human contact that those kids have. So we have gone back to the mammy. It's Gone With the Wind again.

PLAYBOY: What's a better solution?

PAGLIA: Women should be free to choose. For the ones who decide to work, child care should be provided. The problem is that only large corporations can afford to have on-site day care. Mothers can visit their children during coffee breaks and lunch, which is wonderful. Other women are in difficult positions, and the feminist movement offers nothing except scorn if they choose their children's well-being. Of course, the other thing the women's movement has done is caused a destructive division between the sexes. Men are in a terrible position.

PLAYBOY: Do you support the men's movement?

PAGLIA: I think it's absolutely necessary. It's no coincidence that Tim Allen's book is vying with the Pope's for the top of the best-seller lists. He is one of the voices of men who are looking to define masculinity in this age. Robert Bly does this, too. We have allowed the sexual debate to be defined by women, and that's not right. Men must speak, and speak in their own voices, not voices coerced by feminist moralists. Warren Farrell, in The Myth of Male Power, points out how much propaganda has infiltrated the culture. For example, he says that the assertion that women earn so much less than men is bullshit. The reason women earn less than men is that women don't want the dirty jobs. They aren't picking up the garbage, taking the janitorial jobs and so on. They aren't taking the sales commission jobs that require you to work all night and on weekends. Most women like clean, safe offices, which is why they are still secretaries. They don't want to get too dirty. Also, women want offices to be nice, happy places. What bullshit. The women's movement is rooted in the belief that we don't even need men. All it will take is one natural disaster to prove how wrong that is. Then, the only thing holding this culture together will be masculine men of the working class. The cultural elite--women and men--will be pleading for the plumbers and the construction workers. We are such a parasitic class.

I began to realize this in the Seventies when I thought women could do it on their own. But then something would go wrong with my car and I'd have to go to the men. Men would stop, men would lift up the hood, more men would come with a truck and take the car to a place where there were other men who would call other men who would arrive with parts. I saw how feminism was completely removed from this reality.

I also learned something from the men at the garage. At Bennington, I would go to a faculty meeting and be aware that everyone hated me. The men were appalled by a strong, loud woman. But I went to this auto shop and the men there thought I was cute. "Oh, there's that Professor Paglia from the college." The real men, men who work on cars, find me cute. They are not frightened by me, no matter how loud I am. But the men at the college were terrified because they are eunuchs, and I threatened every goddamned one of them.

PLAYBOY: Do you think that feminism is antisexual?

PAGLIA: The problem with America is that there's too little sex, not too much. The more our instincts are repressed, the more we need sex, pornography and all that. The problem is that feminists have taken over with their attempts to inhibit sex. We have a serious testosterone problem in this country.

PLAYBOY: Caused by what?

PAGLIA: It's a mess out there. Men are suspicious of women's intentions. Feminism has crippled them. They don't know when to make a pass. If they do make a pass, they don't know if they're going to end up in court.

PLAYBOY: Is that why you've been so critical about the growing number 6f sexual harassment cases?

PAGLIA: Yes, though I believe in moderate sexual harassment guidelines. But you can't the Stalinist situation we have in America right now, where any neurotic woman can make any stupid charge and destroy a man's reputation. If there is evidence of false accusation, the accuser should be expelled. Similarly, a woman who falsely accuses a man of rape should be sent to jail. My definition of sexual harassment is specific. It is only sexual harassment--by a man or a woman--if it is quid pro quo. That is, if someone says, "You must do this or I'm going to do that"--for instance, fire you. And whereas touching is sexual harassment, speech is not. I am militant on this. Words must remain free. The solution to speech is that women must signal the level of their tolerance--women are all different. Some are very bawdy.

PLAYBOY: What, about women who are easily offended and too scared or intimidated to speak up?

PAGLIA: Too bad. You must develop the verbal tools to counter offensive language. That s life. Feminism has created a privileged, white middle class of girls who claim they're victims because they want to preserve their bourgeois decorum and passivity.

PLAYBOY: You're expecting girls to stand up for themselves in a culture that discourages them from doing just that?

PAGLIA: That's right. We must examine the degree to which we coddle middle-class girls. There is something sick about it. The girls I see on campuses are often innocuous, with completely homogenized personalities, miserable, anorexic and bulimic. The feminist movement teaches them that it's men's fault, but it isn't. These girls go out into the world as heiresses of all the affluence in the universe. They are the most pampered and most affluent girls on the globe. So stop complaining about men. You're getting all the rewards that come with the nice-girl persona you've chosen. When you get into trouble and you're batting your eyes and someone is offending you and you are too nice to deal with it, that's a choice. Assess your persona. Realize the degree to which your niceness may invoke people to say lewd and pornographic things to you--sometimes to violate your niceness. The more you blush, the more people want to do it. Understand your part of it and learn to parry. Sex talk is a game. The girls in the Sixties loved it. If you don't want some professor to call you honey, tell him.

[SaggyBalls]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womanism

[Thorgnor]

Wow, what year is that Paglia article from?

Some of what she says is total nonsense. The anti-racism movement has long passed ideas of tolerance as sufficient for creating a harmonious society. Tolerance is about putting up with abnormal things, celebration is about recognizing and appreciating the diversity out there. While I agree that she represents a different level of threat to masculinity in different situations she doesn't see that as affecting others behaviour toward her. The mechanics are maintaining their masculine power by helping her, she is no threat, that's different in the academy and her colleagues sensitivity to this is interpreted by her as weakness. There's nothing celebratory about calling educated men eunuchs. And there's little hope for Feminism and femininity to coexist if she feels free to construct masculinity for the men she meets. She does not recognize that those who meet her do so under different contexts.

I do agree that earlier Feminisms, such as that of twenty or so years ago, failed to take into account the meanings made by women and instead they mistook what women do as being what women are. She makes the same mistake with manhood however.

Edited November 25, 2008 by Guest

[Birdy]

The interview was in 1995.

I think she makes the same mistake with manhood because the mistake has already been made with feminists. She doesn't say she supports the idea of the men's movement, she says it's absolutely necessary. Like a counterbalance.

I do agree though - nothing is celebratory in calling men eunuch's.

Edited November 25, 2008 by Guest

[Deeps]

Frankly, we've elevated this thread WAY beyond the Muslim-Phobic bullshit that started it... but it managed to shut that up too, so I'm kinda happy.

Muslim Phobic?

How is pointing out that people don't feel responsible for their actions when they commit atrocities in the name of their God muslim phobic?

I grew up in Mississauga dude ... with the bulk of my friends growing up in muslim and hindu households.

If I were around during the fucking crusades I'd have the same commentary.

Spare me the lumping in.

[Kanada Kev]

[SaggyBalls]

the term is 'Islamophobia'

[SaggyBalls]

what an awesome cartoon!!!

[SaggyBalls]

Kosher food: Non jewish people have no idea what these symbols are, and don't know that corporations pay jewish groups to have the right to put these symbols on their labels just to keep kosher keeping jews buying their products.

If you buy mass produced goods then you probably pay about $10 a year to these groups.

What would happen if most people knew about this?

Would they buy local?

Would they be angered?

Would they not care?

What do these groups do exactly?

[d_rawk]

If you buy mass produced goods then you probably pay about $10 a year to these groups.

Would they not care?

Ding

[Birdy]

Some might.

[SaggyBalls]

That's millions of dollars just in Canada.

Edited November 25, 2008 by Guest
millions of dollars of profit

[d_rawk]

If I understand correctly, what we are saying here is that: food producers / packagers, in the interest of reaching the widest amount of consumers (profit) pay for review and certification of their products to make that market accessible.

It hardly seems to be the arm twisting exploitative practice that it is made out to be in the post.

Technically I pay '$x amount per year' for those same companies to advertise to, say, teens too.

Or guarantee and label products as uncontaminated by nuts.

[Thorgnor]

Fucking religion' date=' forever and always a means to remove individual responsibility and thus promote absolute inhumane acts.

[/quote']

Deeps, I think you are over simplifying it. It's more people interepting the religion for their own good, rather than the religion itself being bad.

Now read the other fifteen pages again and see why it's not cool too say that an entire people deserve to live under unjust tyranny because you feel uncomfortable with their actions. And then think about why you're afraid that they might be a threat to your way of life. You wouldn't have put them down if you didn't have a stake in maintaining Western dominance over them. Whether you want to recognize it or not, bashing religion is a form of bigotry. Just because you hang out with Muslims doesn't mean your every opinion of Islam is without cultural bias. Your opening post shows dramatic misunderstandings of the entire Muslim world, and linkiing a mess in Iraq with Islam is like saying Isreal is bad because they're Jews (which it is <----joke). It absolves the Western world of having destabilized the situation and of continuing a Neo-Colonial agenda of expanding Capitalist development at any cost.

[hamilton]

In Deeps' defense, I don't think he meant to single out Islam in his bashing of religion, just that the particular example that he chose happened to be a Muslim one. I mean, he did say, "fucking religion" not "fucking Islam".

[Thorgnor]

Fair enough, the impact remains the same in this climate, imo.

The more religious a person is the less culpable they believe they are. God tells them to do everything and well the Islamic God isn't adverse to violence so it serves that the Middle Eastern version of extremism is to blow eachother into oblivian.....lovely....fuÇk it God told them to do it so I guess it's justified.

To be honest I was speaking moreso of The Cham's comments re; social darwinism... I guess I just missed the orginal boat on this thread.

Edited November 26, 2008 by Guest

[d_rawk]

Oh, bless snopes! The Kosher Nastra. Turns out the "Jewish hidden tax" conspiracy concern is ubiquitous.

[SaggyBalls]

per product you buy it's not a lot of money, but add up the market and it's a lot of money.