Letters to the Editor
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good night.
reach out and hug,
each distraught one,
and get some shuteye,
and really rest. no be dead.
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@LWM
That's some good postin' there, pal! Interesting and provoking.
But provoking in a good way. Thanks.
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How sexual judgments are made
I was glad to see some people mentioned Lacan on a previous thread (talking about Tom Friedman's "phallic gaze"). I have my own understanding of Lacan, which builds on the well-known observation of Barthes regarding the photograph of the Black North African soldier saluting the French flag, and how images in general 'speak louder than words.'
It seems to me that, although a lot of both bourgeois-Freudian and Marxo-Freudian ideas filtered into US popular culture during the 1960s and 70s, the way that the visual mass media actually construct their mass-psychological agenda is more Pavlovian than Freudian. It relies on the creation of conditioned reflexes of shock associated with visual exposés involving sex and violence. These effects proceed directly from the visual register to the tactile register, by-passing the verbal register : one sees the image and feels the shock (in one's 'gut,' rather than one's 'heart,' interestingly enough).
As a result of the continuous repetition of this type of shock effect, a generalised apprehension is built up in the viewing audience. I believe that the visual-erotic imagination is non-dual : that is to say, we identify visually with all parties in a scene depicted (let us say, for example, the seducer and the seducee simultaneously, to use fairly mild terms). However, the mental 'voice-over' which constructs the verbal register (our 'thoughts') is dualistic, and therefore moralistic : it comments on the scene viewed, in such a way as to position the ego as morally unbesmirched, uncompromised by the ambiguities of desire. By 'the ego' here, I mean the self-concept made explicable in verbal terms, in the first instance to the self, but also to any hypothetical police interviewer, psychiatrist, or other authority.
With all this going on continuously, it is a simple matter for television to manufacture and deploy titillating material which at least compromises us on a subconscious level, while obliging us to work out verbal accounts of ourselves that hopefully will leave us clear of any imputed stigma.
And all this, in the background of any discussion of law and sexual ethics...
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A good response to
The ground of liberty is to be gained by inches, and we must be contented to secure what we can get from time to time and eternally press forward for what is yet to get. It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good.
To Rev. Charles Clay, 1790
The impatient nutbars who talk about the "tree of liberty" and the "blood of tyrants".
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@LWM
I bet I know Mona's argument and she's letting ideology trump practicality. It's individual rights above all else, carried to the absurd extremes.
No, you don't, and tho you could click my sig or follow the link I posted earlier, you'll get some recovering-from-addiction site, so you can't read my post on the subject right now. (Or at least could not when I posted this.) Our blog has been all effed up in the server realm today.
Opposition to persecuting polygamists was first argued to me by liberal professors at the University of Wisconsin, in a religious studies (but secular) program. Their arguments changed my mind, not anyone at Reason or Cato.
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Talk About Fashions!
by cutting thro' the cartilage of her nose a hole of one half inch diameter at the least.
From now on, when anybody I know gets a piercing, I'll call it getting "Jeffersoned"
Whoa! Nice "Jeffersons" you got there.
Hey, it works, sort of. Maybe not, huh?
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Mona
Opposition to persecuting
Persecuting and prosecuting are two different things. Please don't conflate them.
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"Persecuting and prosecuting are two different things. Please don't conflate them."
Right, Mooser, because the former never leads to the latter, including ill-considered and illiberal laws allowing prosecution.
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The Quality of Mercy is Not Strained, its Pureed!
It's individual rights above all else, carried to the absurd extremes.
It's like some kind of libertarian suicide pact, to me.
It gives me, when combined with her own statements about herself, a mixture of pity and annoyance which is quite disconcerting.
Or maybe she's just so rich and smart she, and her children, need nothing from the world, and its troubles are only a source of contempt or amusement.
One minute she's begging for fairness, and the next telling us nobody is entitled to it.
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@Mona
You know what, sister, since you felt free to get nice and personal with me (incoherent, projecting) let me return the favor.
You have no idea what fairness or social reciprocity (as liberals understand it) means, because you don't really know unfairness or social abandonment and their consequences. And that is, to me pitiful.
And please, pal, don't spill any more of your personal challenges or misfortunes in a bid for that fairness or reciprocity.
You are, by your lights, only showing how well you deserve them.
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My own profound ignorance
I won't pretend that I can debate the content of the decision or the legal particulars. My own bone:
I just don't understand why anyone, gay or straight, would want to be associated with this barnacled and hypocritical institution. Marriage, is at heart, a religeous institution, it has no real civil analogue. There is no concept of marriage in any culture that is not sanctioned by God. It seemed for a while that in the seventies and eighties that we were realizing just how useless this institution was for men and women, gay and straight, and there was a broad consensus of replacing marraige with civil unions for everyone. That also seemed to be where the gravity of the gay movement seemed to be as well.
I just don't understand where the sudden fire to call partners husbands and wives came from.
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@Mona
Opposition to persecuting polygamists was first argued to me by liberal professors at the University of Wisconsin, in a religious studies (but secular) program. Their arguments changed my mind, not anyone at Reason or Cato.
I don't want to persecute or prosecute anyone. People are free to do what they like. I just see no reason to give the practice a legal sanction at this time. Prove to me that it is progressive, not regressive, that it serves some greater good, and I'll reconsider.