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Showing posts from October, 2014

Recent comments at Salon.com Oct. 31

Original Article: We must abandon Bill Cosby: A broken trust with women, black America WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2014 9:17 PM Rex Harrison contessakitty SarahWestofToronto Maybe. But some art we've left by the wayside for good. Progressives have always wrestled with what you're wrestling with, and not always come to your conclusion. All great art gets produced during periods of latitude, where all of a sudden latitude, transgression, "the new" isn't just stomped on but allowed some life. This is why all great art sings so much ... it's all conveys human promise.  But there is a psychological limit to how much anyone who feels the need to stigmatize and hate can realize, and eventually all their "truths" begin to seem insufficient -- "someone" is still watching over them. This could still be the fate of Shakespeare.  And if he goes, thank you so much, Mr. Shakespeare! But along we go on this great human ride, embracing different vo

Recent comments of mine at Salon.com (November 2014)

Original Article: Jian Ghomeshi to #Gamergate: Our culture’s toxic masculinity crisis on display TUESDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2014 2:08 AM HappyJack Interesting response. Seriously disturbed people are seriously disturbed because they were assaulted or apocalyptically abandoned, early -- when they were new to life, extremely vulnerable infants/children, and their brains hadn't yet figured how much they were going to allow for the conscious "you" to control. This means problems with an insufficiently loved mother -- because if two caregivers were heavily involved in a child's life, we're talking progressive neighbourhoods in New York, not locales for mental disturbance of the kind that lead to delight in raping and killing another human being. So the pattern I'd recommend looking for in the various ways disturbance gets "expressed": one, someone who when revenged upon means revenge against the terrifying mother; two, someone when attacked means rev

"Fury"

Fury Very few people who find themselves on a battlefield are ever actually new to it. When you see in a movie like “Fury,” warriors that are having to function even as people by their side are being blown apart, where who they are mostly is crazily vulnerable to death, they are not people who’ve discovered some new capacity in themselves. These are not people who’ve gotten used to blight after having grown up in civilization. Rather, what you are seeing people who are paying part of their very familiar past a close revisit.  That sense of vulnerability, that is, is what they knew as infants and as young children. Crazily vulnerable, obsessed with their own possible extinction, as they were initiated into the world by caretakers who are possessed of demons that have them simply unable to look at their children and feel only love. The child, so attuned to their moods, their intentions, takes in deep their sadism, their intention to hurt, to extinguish them. To survive, c

Elders, back into view

Brittney Cooper wrote:   This past weekend, protestors and activists, including students, clergy, and concerned citizens descended on Ferguson, Missouri, for a weekend of marches, protests, sit-ins, and civil disobedience billed Ferguson October.  […] Of course, many on Twitter, could not understand why disturbing the peace in a private business should be acceptable. The point is – we are no longer standing for business as usual.  […] This nation proclaims Black America backwards, sees us as stuck in the past, declares that our obsession with race –not racism itself – is holding back progress. But really, Black people are the hands on our national clock, controlling the timing of America’s social progress. This time both hands are up, pointing straight to the sky. It is high noon in America. It is the deepest midnight in our hearts.  But, “from the darkness cometh the light,” Lucy A. Delaney proclaimed in the title of her 1891 autobiography. Until those hands move, no longer

Recent comments at Salon.com

Original Article: 5 stupid, sexist things expected of men TUESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2014 7:02 PM @KaizerSozhe but I also know how to take care of business in ways that a lot of guys my age (I'm 36) flat-out don't. You're establishing yourself as an alpha. And after you've done that, you can be a guy who's comfortable talking about his emotions; crying in front of his girlfriends. You admit this is all pretty safely macho.  About the puncher's chance ... are you sure she wouldn't just prefer that you both come out of it safely -- something that might actually be at risk if at that moment you're thinking of the desired finish: he, storm; you, port that breasted him.  The killer look in your eyes ... Hitler had those. He admitted himself that they were his mothers. The origins of male power to brag of, may owe to a maternal source.  Permalink Original Article: 5 stupid, sexist things expected of men TUESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2014 6:46 PM

Recent comments of mine at Salon.com

Original Article: Atheism, Islam and liberalism: This is what we are really fighting about SUNDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2014 2:39 PM Alvin M Yeah, I like that your challenging the idea that ideas and context can somehow make a human being want to f**ck a 9 year old. It's total nonsense. If you were raised out of a loving household, no matter how much your culture's version of the media told you that children's bums are an alternative to your wife, you'd be the oddball that'd be repulsed by it, by your culture, and start finding others like you to begin reforms. Later historians would say you were influenced by a new way of understanding of children that began in the -- century, probably ascribing the change in view to economics or some such.  What does is sexual abuse. And this doesn't mean you conflate sexuality with children, but since the perpetrator was your parents or relatives -- those you need to keep as protectors -- instead that you internalize their vi

Recent comments at Salon.com

Original Article: EXCLUSIVE: Bill Maher on Islam spat with Ben Affleck: “We’re liberals! We’re not crazy tea-baggers” MONDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2014 5:35 PM @MyRealName, sure! I would hope perhaps we'd consider that being educated on the subject isn't necessarily so much the thing as is one's state of mental health. If Affleck reads a desire for righteous war amongst some liberals, even as much as they say they don't want to kill muslims, I'm glad he doesn't abash himself and not speak up.  What's frustrating for Affleck is that liberals have poorly placed themselves to be able to defuse the influence of Maher and Harris. It is very possible that good numbers of cultures out there that historically have been conservative but which have begun to rapidly modernize, evolve, will end up feeling guilty for all that's been trespassed and accrued and suddenly turn puritanical in mass ... what happened to Germany in the 30s. Become a warrior culture of