Letters to the Editor
Canuckistan Bob
Published Letters: 709 Editor's Choice: 66
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Ancient History
[Read the article: Whole lotta love]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Way back in my mis-spent youth, I dabbled in this sort of thing. Back then, nobody had coined the term "polyamorous", although I was starting to hear about "open marriages."
But mostly, at the time, we called it "fucking around" and I'm not sure that anything much has changed, really. There is nothing new under the sun, you know, at least in terms of human relationships.
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Gendering
[Read the article: ABC's of gender]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Finally, some raw meat for our troll pets! Dine away, our scaly anonymous kept animals!
As both an anthropologist by training and child care centre operator by accident (slogan: we take care of children, not days) I can attest that the scardycat anonymouse trolls actually have a sort of dim point. Whatever the social constructs may be, and whatever brain/instinct/sociobiology-crap-theory is going on, there very much does seem to be a drive to differentiate, to gender as it were, as young children develop their identity.
(There may well be biochemically/genetically/hormonally determinants of what direction that takes, but that is such a confused, involved, and possibly unanswerable question, and not really to the point. The point is that kids really want to gender, somehow, on top of whatever other "natural" tendencies are present.)
Genderizing is a very natural and I think deep human instinct; not that this or that kind of behaviour must be male or female, just that there ought to be something or other that separates us, we need to separate ourselves, to be Star or Non Star Bellied Sneetches as it were; without some strangeness or otherness, heterosexual sex just wouldn't work very well, and sorry, if the race has any future, it involves breeders breeding.
I don't think that there is a massive movement for androgyny out there anyway, and though it is a little horrifying to think that "separate but equal" might actually apply, but at a pre-school level, that seems to be what the kids are showing us.
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Ben Dover calling someone a "nut and a bigot"?
[Read the article: ABC's of gender]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]???????
Thank you Tracy, the article was worth it simply for that. I can't stop giggling.
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Re: Note to Canuckistan Bob re anonymity
[Read the article: ABC's of gender]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Dear Mouse/Troll, I guess I hit a nerve there?
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Islamic View
[Read the article: Egypt outlaws female circumcision]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Actually, Muhammed did in fact explicitly rule on this.
Circumcision is obligatory for muslim males, but only honourable/not to be ashamed of for females (the practice appears to have been fairly common in Arabia 1500 years ago). The effect of that was that FGM died a pretty swift death in most of the Arab world, where today it is pretty much unheard of. In my experience Egyptians are rather looked down on as backwards and stupid in many Arab countries, for this among other reasons.
I work with many people from countries that practice FGM, and in my experience it is very much not a patriarchal thing, in that the men do not insist on it and if pressed aren't crazy about it. It is usually the moms insisting on it for their daughters, so for change to happen it must be led by women themselves. And yes, the Christians and animists do it too, it is most emphatically not a muslim thing.
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Darn that Insightful & Perceptive Jerome Corsi
[Read the article: U.S. to merge with Mexico and Canada?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The genius of the man! To have figured out that the neocons and the Republicans and the business elite want to add 30+ million Canadian instant Democrats and perhaps as many as 60 or 70 million Mexican instant Democrats (I'm not sure how their vote would split down, but I would guess a pretty heavy Democrat majority) to the electorate!
Damn. And was so looking forward to ramming single-payer socialized medicine and an open immigration policy down 'merican throats! Also to getting rid of Executive Privilege, secret illegal wire & email taps, Extraordinary Rendition, Git-Mo, and all the other lovely protections god gave the US when he gifted you with the Bill of Rights that GWB so regularly wipes his ass with.
Damn damn damn. Well, back to the drawing board, Pablo. We'll get them yet, and their little dog too!
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Yezidis
[Read the article: "Her face was nothing but red"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Some of the particulars of this particular incident might be useful: it was not a typical Beduin-style "honor-killing" which is actually not all that common in Iraq compared to Jordan or Saudi (though our jihadi friends are working to change that).
The Yezidis are a small and backwards sub-community (or cult, more accurately). They aren't even Muslim. As far as I know they don't practice "honor-killings" per se, which are about protecting family honor. This was about protecting the absolute rule they have against marrying or forming relationships with non-Yezidis, which is strictly prohibited (as are marriages between castes, yes they have castes). Although they speak Kurdish, they are quite adamant about not being Kurds.
The Kurds, generally speaking, are culturally some of the least gender-discriminatory in the Middle East-- there is no burka or purdah or whatever with them, and a good deal less gender segregation (tho still rather a lot by Western standards of course).
The incident was horrific, and made for shocking video, but using it as an example of a generalized phenomena is perhaps a bit misleading. Women in the Middle East face far bigger problems than insanities of a small cult, not least of which is the gender-neutral random carnage in Central Iraq and the non-acceptance of over a million Iraqi refugees who are currently camped at the borders, the majority of whom are women. And as women, they have a great deal to fear from an Islamicist or radical Shiite state, in terms of education, legal rights, public curtailment, and quite likely the return of judicially sanctioned stoning (all areas, incidentally, where Saddam had made a rather amazing amount of progress before he turned into a warlord).
Oh, and last April, apparently in response to the stoning, unknown gunmen (presumably Sunni Kurds or Arabs) stopped a bus at the town of Bashika, seperated out the 23 Yezidis on board, drove them away and shot them execution style. Apparently even the thugs of Iraq hate this kind of thing. Like Josh, you do what you know how to and can, I guess.