Topics

121

Main / help at democratic underground

Feb 19, 2004, 01:27 PM

I could use a hand at a thread about women outnumbering men on college capmuses.  Interested parties can go here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=113&topic_id=6656&mesg_id=6656

122

Main / Ooooh. Here's a good one.

Feb 05, 2004, 11:04 AM

http://www.msmagazine.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=14;t=002677

Someone's been reading our list.

I especially like the parts about how fathers almost always make out like bandits in custody, support battles.  How come I don't know a single one?

And then there's the comparison of how homeless men have more societal power than homeless women.  Two groups of people who HAVE NO SOCIETAL POWER!!!!  And count them sometime.  There's probably 10 homeless men for each woman.

It reminds me of when I had an apartment in the heart of my local city.  One night there were two bums arguing under my window.

Bum one:  "you're a fuckin' bum!"

Bum two:  "no you're a fuckin' bum!"

Bum one:  "No you're a fuckin' bum!"

you get the idea....went on like that for about ten minutes.

123

Main / David gest. How's this going to play out?

Feb 05, 2004, 10:53 AM

I see David Gest is going to be on Dateline tomorrow night on NBC talking extensively about Liza's violence.  

Any opinions as to how this is going to end up playing out in the media?  I it going to be consciousness raising or is it going to make only a bigger joke out the female violence in relationships?

124

Main / women who defend patriarchy and the patriarchs who love them

Feb 04, 2004, 10:29 AM

please have at it.

http://www.msmagazine.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=14;t=002676

125

Main / messages I never got from movies I watched again

Feb 03, 2004, 03:07 PM

I'm hoping this can turn into an interesting thread.  Lately I've watched a couple of movies that I hadn't seen in many years and got a new deeper message that I didn't get before.  They are messages about socialism vs family.

The Sound of Music.  Go ahead and laugh, but I have a three and a half year old daughter who loves to sing and dance and I knew she'd love this movie -- which she did (mesmerized is more the term), so I bought the DVD.  This is usually thought of as a love story I guess, but to me now it seems just as much about socialism vs the family.

So there are several plot lines going on here.  One is the softening of the Captain by Maria who brings music back into the Von Trapp home.  It really illustrates the whole naturally balancing effect men and women can have on each other when the right pair comes together.  He's dominatingly strict and she's free spirited.  They meet somewhere in the middle and find purpose.  That scene where he first hears the kids singing "the Sound of Music" in beautiful harmony and is immediately transformed actually kind of choked me up.  It helps to have a tiny singer on your lap munching popcorn.

The second plot line is the romance between the oldest daughter Liesle (SP?) and that nerd with the bike, Rolfe.  They're pretty crazy for each other.

Then along come the National Socialists or as we like to call them the Nazis, taking over in the previously free country.  What is their aim?  Well we all know the big picture, but here in the movie, their aim is to remove the Captain from the family and press him into service in the Third Reich.  Sound familiar?  Remove Dad and indenture him to the service of the new collective.  And what of Rolfe?  Rolfe's gone over to the other side.  He's a brown shirted Hitler youth and he now holds his loyalty and the needs of the Nazi collective over any love he ever felt for Liesel.  In the end he even blows his little fag whistle to give away the whereabouts of the woman he once loved.

Edelweiss as a song has a lot more meaning to me as a song than it ever did before.  Bloom and grow forever.

The surviving Von Trapps run a little resort over in Vermont probably just a few hours from me and still put on a concert from time to time.  I may have to go check that out.

126

Main / awkward moment on CNN this morning

Jan 22, 2004, 06:09 AM

I was watching the news and having my coffee this morning and they were doing that segment on CNN where a British talking head comes on to tell us what's in the papers across the pond.  The subject this morning was the inquiry into the alleged suicide of the British official with all the inside information on the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Anyway,  one of the papers the woman held up had on its front page a very small headline relating to this story while in gigantic bold letters was another headline that read something like  "WITNESS SAYS, I SAW WIFE BEATING HAWKING' -- regarding the recent allegations that brilliant wheelchair bound Stephen Hawking has been frequenting emergency rooms with severe injuries lately and refusing to reveal the source of these injuries.  It's been alleged his wife is attacking him.  Check MND for a story on this.  The two female anchors kind of did a double take at the headline with a semi-disturbed and perplexed look on both of their faces.  Of course neither said anything about it.  

Another interesting fact is that if you read the story from the link at MND, you'll see that they suspect the wife of "suffering" from Munchausen syndrorome by proxy.  God, they'll look for any excuse to let a woman off the hook.

127

Main / taking the cake at Ms

Dec 22, 2003, 08:39 AM

check this one out:

http://www.msmagazine.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=14;t=002627

I invested years of my life in the movement, I believed in it that much, but the movement is so fucked up leadership-wise and organizational- and focus-wise right now that those years of my early adult life are in the toilet. No woman who believes in and fights for feminism deserves to find herself in the same situation simply because she believed in feminism as an ideal. Feminism as an ideal is not the problem. The movement itself as it currently operates is the problem.

I wish a woman had warned me that the practice of many leaders is not what they write in books, and that all those years of my life literally would be wasted with no progress made whatsoever on any front in this supposed "movement." That by making sacrifices for the movement I would become ripe for viscious personal attack -- by feminists! In the name of feminism! That I would be treated like shit. That the movement has no apparent focus anymore for its activism except when it comes to discrediting, demonizing, and destroying feminists whose views we do not agree with.

Think of the Ms. boards as one specimen of the current movement. Put in a petri dish, with all the current conditions infecting the movement, we have watched exactly the same things occur here that have happened in the larger movement. Exactly the same things. We have "banned" feminists based on their political views because even though they are feminists we can't tolerate diversity in feminist approaches. We have watched as posters have fled in response to jaw-dropping bigotry and hateful behavior practiced here in the name of feminism, disbelieving what they were seeing and wanting no connection to such behavior. Look at how Women of Color have reacted. Look at how Third Wave feminists have reacted. Banned, or fled. Look at who is in control of these boards now, wearing the name "radical feminists". These are not dynamics specific to the Internet or this particular board. These exact same scenerios have played themselves out in the "real" movement -- what, does the "real" movement include everything BUT actual real interactions of real feminists? These exact same arguments have taken place and have led to the same outcome in the larger movement. Ms. is just a microcosm of the bigger animal.

On the subject of sterile words written in books, so much of feminism today is known ONLY through these books that we have educated posters here not even recognizing that this is indeed one of the movement's venues, Internet though it may be. They would argue that this place and its dynamics isn't real, that these interactions of self-proclaimed feminists who voluntarily come here are not part of what makes up the real movement. The movement is words in sterile books, according to these posters.

You CANNOT understand any movement or politics if you believe that the sterile word alone tells you what the theory is and the politics surrounding it. You cannot read the U.S. Constitution and think you "get" the founding politics of the United States -- the personalities and personal dramas that compelled the politics of the time and the inclusion and nonappearance of various protections in the Constitution. You cannot think you know the dynamics of current politics in the United States just because you can recite the U.S. Constitution verbatim and provide citations. It doesn't work that way. Why on earth so many posters here think that they can grasp the current state of the U.S. feminist movement WITHOUT understanding the internal dynamics and fights and dramas that have brought the whole damn thing to the form it is practiced now is absolutely beyond me. But anyway.

The fact is, many many GenX women today and women of color are indeed feminist -- they just no longer work with the movement. Do we want or need a movement? I don't know. But if we do, and we want it to be effective and not a waste of a woman's life to be part of it, then it needs to change. I don't want any other woman to make sacrifices in her own life and submerge herself in the movement as it currently exists, not with how fucked up the movement is right now. It is to throw away her own life. That is not the way the movement should be. Something is fundamentally wrong with the movement and its leadership right now.

We have to think about these things and realize where some of the most problematic behaviors most of us agree are with us in the movement came from -- and then pinpoint who is fostering this behavior, what leadership examples they have given their followers, and question whether the underpinning theory they have used to foster this behavior is even in accord with basic tenets of the politics they say they espouse, because often it isn't.

[ 12-21-2003, 05:14 PM: Message edited by: Laylalola ]
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From: D.C. | Registered: Nov 2000  |  IP: Logged |

128

Main / Penn and Teller

Dec 03, 2003, 05:29 AM

Anybody seen a new show on one of the cable channels called Bullshit hosted by Penn and Teller?  I've only seen one, but damn it was good.

The episode I saw, they basically goa around and completely debunk much of what the radical environmental groups claim.  One of the most significant people they interview during the show was a former founding member of Greenpeace who talks about how wrong theat movement is now and how it was basically highjacked by a bunch of guess who -- communiists.

For one segment they go around at an environmental rally with a petition to ban the use of "dihydrogen monoxide" which is signed without question by every single person they approached -- every single one -- not a question of what it is or why!  

I really liked the part where they finally reveal to one of the signers that they just signed a petition to outlaw water!!!!

I'd like to know more about these guys.  Anybody?

129

Main / Gloria Allred's Agenda -- MJ's kids

Nov 23, 2003, 10:47 AM

So why is Gloria Allred all of a sudden a children's advocate?  Seems to make a lot of sense on the surface that she wants CPS to investigate him and take his kids away if need be -- I mean this is his second accusation of molestation, not to mention he paid a cool $20 million to stop the charges last time.  To be honest, I don't think he's a fit parent either, but still there's something fishy going on here.  What is it?

MJ had a specific MO when targeting what boys to go after.  The stories on the news keep telling us now that he'd ply the parents with shopping sprees, Lear jet vacations and help with the bills.  According to one story he was even paying the living expenses of the current victim's mom and her boyfriend.  She's not out to protect those kids -- she's out to protect that workhorse of the radical feminist paradigm:  single mothers.

As we're seeing now and will probably be proven over the next year or so, virtually all of the boys he's molested will have come from broken homes where the fathers are out of the picture for whatever reason.  Gloria's trying to pre-emptively stear the public discourse away from the fact that he's bascially been operating a ring of single mother pimps who provide him with a stable of young boys to rape and onto that feminist holy grail of the state as surrogate husband and protector.

We keep hearing generic terms like "the parents" and "the children" when really the accurate characterizations are "the mothers" and "the sons."

Gloria knows this could spell disaster for the feminist paradigm that seeks to remove fathers from families and the two premises that have driven feminism for the last 30 years:

1.  That mothers are inherently better parents

2.  That our society inherently values girl children over boy children

How materialistic and greedy does a person have to be to choose a shopping spree and a vacation over the welfare of one's own children?  Get ready to hear all the arguments about how Jacko fooled these parents and led them to a false sense of trust.  There's no way we'd stand for a father pimping out his 12 year old daughter to a 44 year old man.

130

Main / I know I said I wouldn't, but....

Nov 12, 2003, 08:16 AM

Here's a thread from you know where by a woman who's not only oppressed by men, but by children as well:

http://www.msmagazine.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=14;t=002583

131

Main / Check this out

Nov 07, 2003, 01:51 PM

Recognize any tools of the feminist trade? Find it here:  http://www1.tpgi.com.au/users/tps-seti/baloney.html

CARL SAGAN'S BALONEY DETECTION KIT

Based on the book The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan

The following are suggested as tools for testing arguments and detecting fallacious or fraudulent arguments:

 
*   Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the facts
*   Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
*   Arguments from authority carry little weight (in science there are no "authorities").
*   Spin more than one hypothesis - don't simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.
*   Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it's yours.
*   Quantify, wherever possible.
*   If there is a chain of argument every link in the chain must work.
*   "Occam's razor" - if there are two hypothesis that explain the data equally well choose the simpler.
*   Ask whether the hypothesis can, at least in principle, be falsified (shown to be false by some unambiguous test). In other words, it is testable? Can others duplicate the experiment and get the same result?

Additional issues are

*   Conduct control experiments - especially "double blind" experiments where the person taking measurements is not aware of the test and control subjects.
*   Check for confounding factors - separate the variables.

Common fallacies of logic and rhetoric

*   Ad hominem - attacking the arguer and not the argument.
*   Argument from "authority".
*   Argument from adverse consequences (putting pressure on the decision maker by pointing out dire consequences of an "unfavourable" decision).
*   Appeal to ignorance (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence).
*   Special pleading (typically referring to god's will).
*   Begging the question (assuming an answer in the way the question is phrased).
*   Observational selection (counting the hits and forgetting the misses).
*   Statistics of small numbers (such as drawing conclusions from inadequate sample sizes).
*   Misunderstanding the nature of statistics (President Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on discovering that fully half of all Americans have below average intelligence!)
*   Inconsistency (e.g. military expenditures based on worst case scenarios but scientific projections on environmental dangers thriftily ignored because they are not "proved").
*   Non sequitur - "it does not follow" - the logic falls down.
*   Post hoc, ergo propter hoc - "it happened after so it was caused by" - confusion of cause and effect.
*   Meaningless question ("what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?).
*   Excluded middle - considering only the two extremes in a range of possibilities (making the "other side" look worse than it really is).
*   Short-term v. long-term - a subset of excluded middle ("why pursue fundamental science when we have so huge a budget deficit?").
*   Slippery slope - a subset of excluded middle - unwarranted extrapolation of the effects (give an inch and they will take a mile).
*   Confusion of correlation and causation.
*   Straw man - caricaturing (or stereotyping) a position to make it easier to attack..
*   Suppressed evidence or half-truths.
*   Weasel words - for example, use of euphemisms for war such as "police action" to get around limitations on Presidential powers. "An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public"

132

Main / Let's forget about Ms

Oct 29, 2003, 07:18 AM

I propose we all stop making references to that stupid message board.  I was going there often and posting intermittently, but I've resolved to end my addiciton.  That place is just plain crazy -- I'm now convinced that feminism has become nothing more than the political movement of choice of the codependent personality.

I mean, why do we care?  To read most of the posts is only frustrating.  To see how any sort of expectation of responsibility is characterized as "blaming the victim."  There can be no expectation of meaningful debate, no expectation of changing anyone's views, no expectation for rationalism or logic.  

And they're probably one of the most hateful groups of people I've ever encountered.  Maybe I just need to get out more.... :roll:

133

Main / Speaking of DV awareness month....

Oct 08, 2003, 07:00 AM

I've been checking my local paper pretty much daily along with some of the syndicated columnists like Maureen Dowd and I haven't come across a single story on DV or the month of October as its special awareness month.  Has anybody else?

Anyway, I've vowed to do some letter to the editor writing, so if anyone sees anything, please pass it along.

134

Main / Ben Franklin -- Walter Isaacson

Oct 02, 2003, 01:13 PM

Just wondering if anyone else around here has read, is reading, or is planning on reading the new book by Walter Isaacson, "Benjamin Franklin, an American Life."  

I'm on page 133 so have a ways to go yet, but I'd love to start a discussion if anyone else is reading it and interested.

135

Main / women and guitars

Sep 18, 2003, 06:17 AM

Alright so this is going to be a vapid and insubstantial thread, but I'm posting it anyway.  I've been a pretty fanatical guitar player for about 25 years now and one thing I've noticed is that it's an instrument that almost no women excel on.  The one exception is slide guitar -- you've got Bonnie Raitt, Cindy Cashdollar and a handfull of others, but when it comes to improvised, flatpicked, driving lead guitar i can't think of a single one.  Not to say that there aren't any, but I mean there's a huge gap there!

So we do know for a fact that women can be musically and instrumentally gifted and there are plenty of examples of female virtuosos on many different instruments -- so why the guitar gap?  any insight for me here?

136

Main / A man is raped every 0.88 minutes

Sep 17, 2003, 07:35 AM

Here's the article:

http://mensnewsdaily.com/archive/m-n/mcelroy/03/mcelroy091703.htm

137

Main / Recycled Joke: hippie, molecular biologist and Maureen Dowd

Sep 11, 2003, 11:33 AM

A hippie, a molecular biologist and Maureen Dowd were on a doomed airplane with only two available parcahutes.  It was clear that one might inevitably die, so the three began to make their cases for survival:

Hippie:  Ms. Dowd, you're a great journalist and have so much more brilliant work to do.  Doc, you've perfected human cloning and have so many more valuable discoveries to make.  I'm only 19 with my whole life ahead of me so who knows what I may accomplish someday?  So  we've got two parachutes between three people.  If we strap both parachutes on and all hang on tight to each other, odds are we'll probably survive the fall.

Maureen Dowd:  Well I have a different opinion!  Doctor, since your outmoded linear thought has given us the ability to reproduce without men and everyone knows that the both of you have deteriorating Y chromosomes leading to the extinction of men anyway, it's imperative that brilliant and strong womyn like myself live as long as possible.  I can't take a chance on not surviving the fall just to possibly save the two of you.  I have a duty to live to point out all of the oppression and injustice in the world and to fight for the destruction of the patriarchy!

With that Maureen Dowd ripped the bag from the hippie's hands, threw it over her shoulders and jumped out the door.  The two men could have fought for it and taken it back, but instead hesitated since they were taught all their lives never to physically attack a woman.

Molecular biologist:  Son, I'm 60 years old and you're but 19.  I've done a lot with my life and could probably do much more, but my life has been full and yours is just begun.  Besides with the groundwork I've laid, others will be able to achieve great discoveries.  One parachute will not serve the both of us so you take it and live.

Hippie:  No sweat, Doc -- Maureen Dowd just jumped out of the airplane with my backpack!

138

Main / liberalism & Marxism, conservativism & ????

Sep 09, 2003, 09:46 AM

In the 1970's the model of intellectual Marxism gained influence in liberal politics and within academic institutions.  While most people don't realize it's influence on politics and policy -- especially with regard to feminism -- it has truly changed the paradigm for discussions of any power relationships.

So i have a question.  In conservative circles, was there a new paradigm gaining influence around this time as well?  If so, what was it?