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| Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - - Posts by Arwon |
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Arwon Bazu                   Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6320 days Last view: 6320 days |
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| Why?
Basically for the attitude that "I'm in the military so fuck you all my opinions are worth more". Utter contempt for civilians and you know, the people they work for. Partisan cheerleading disguised as "patriotism". And of course, a touch of good old fashioned fag bashing. The mark of a good military person is humility, devotion to service, self-discipline, and recognising that the diversity of views and lifestyles that democracy represents is actually what they're protecting. That sort of ill-founded anger and hatred is not something desirable in military people... Now it's MY turn to quote something about the military, from a dude on another message board:
Able to separate their job from their politics. That's what soldiers should be. I'm curious, what does this guy think of the ever-increasing anti-war sentiment within the military? Has he ever had to kill anyone personally? Would he beat up a hippie for exp |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6320 days Last view: 6320 days |
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| "This is NOT a swing against the Republican party."
Oh my. That's a new one. The spin machine's in full swing I guess. Also didn't the Republicans take congress in 1994? |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6320 days Last view: 6320 days |
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| One thing has changed though... thanks to electoral redistricting and bipartisan gerrymandering, there are less and less competitive seats available in the congress than there once was. What exactly is the incumbency rate in congress? I know it's some absurdly high percentage point.
It's not a matter of how big the margins in the house are, it's a question of the size of the swing in vote terms. Is it really a "razor" margin when of the seats considered realistically up for grabs, the Democrats won virtually all of them? When nothing went from D to R at all? Didn't they win, against most predictions, enough senate seats to pinch the upper house? Sure it's only one seat, but they still won virtually every realistically competitive senate seat. The mere winning of the senate illustrates that it was a fairly decent swing. I contend that this was a swing towards the large end, rather than the narrow end, of the realistic spectrum of possible outcomes. I mean, who seriously predicted both houses switching? Even if though a swing was expected, this was still a larger than predicted swing against the Republicans (it certainly seems to have suprised the hell out of Bush). How could it not be, given their dismal performance of late? We have a saying here, oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them. What do people on the conservative side of politics gain by minimising the size of the rebuke and making excuses about the supposed conservative nature of all the new democrats, and the "expected course of politics" rather than seriously looking at what's gone wrong over the last few years? How long ago was it that Republicans were crowing about a 'permanent majority'? |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6320 days Last view: 6320 days |
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| Random thing:
According to the Koran, life begins at 60 days after conception, or some exact number like that. That's when the soul enters the body. As for mine, I've decided life begins at the quickening. |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6320 days Last view: 6320 days |
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| The quickening is, medically, when it starts kicking or something. Around the 18 week mark I think. A lot of folk beliefs place the beginning of life around there, I think it's a reasonable way to reconcile the fact that pregnancy starts with a clump of tissue and ends with a baby, without having to jump to the ridiculousness of either extreme. | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6320 days Last view: 6320 days |
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| Of course it's arbitrary. That's the point. Rationality and absolute logic aren't everything--without being ameliorated by common sense they become loopy and rigid.
You use the term "arbitrary" like it's pejorative but arbitrary cut-off lines are widespread and necessary when you need to reconcile two contradictory demands or needs. Age of consent laws, for example, are a sloppy, inexact and necessary reconciling of basic personal autonomy and the need to protect young people. We set an arbitrary numerical value on the amount of a drug that is "for personal use" and the amount that constitutes a "dealer". THere's no reason for the line being exactly where it is, no rational justification... just the need to draw a sensible line. Likewise, an arbitrary cut-off between "abortion is okay" and "abortion is not okay" is necessary to reconcile the competing rights demands of the host woman and the potentiality of human life she supports. When you have directly conflicting rights you need a way to trade them off with each other. I like the quickening because it has a long folksy history and it passes the "common sense" test so central to explaining why what you do to a 2-month old foetus isn't the same as what you do to an 8-month old baby. |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6320 days Last view: 6320 days |
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| I once read a rather stunningly revealing article in a philosophy magazine which pointed out that if you start from a first principle of "suffering is evil" rather than "life is sacred" you come to an extremely different set of moral and ethical principles.
I leave it as an exercise to the reader to follow through the reasoning and ramifications of the two first-principles on a whole range of issues. |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6320 days Last view: 6320 days |
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| Go to San Fransisco, look for Quinn Mallory. | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6320 days Last view: 6320 days |
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| I think the mere fact that we're all obsessed by looks speaks volumes of the effects of the influence of our instant-judgement visually-oriented culture over us all. Media influence is far more pervasive and diffuse than just "people wanting to look like supermodels". We're saturated with images and ideas of every concievable facet of our lives, every day. It's not any one image or idea, it's the sum total of what we absorb from all sources, the sum total of our cultural space ("the media" is merely one HUGE part of those sources and therefore often a cypher for the totality of our socio-cultural environmnet's influences over us). It is a major part of our formative years. They get us while we're young, and we grow up at least partially dependant on these shared norms to help define Ourself, and to teach us how to live in the world around you, how to interact with other people.
Just as in previous epochs the folk stories and popular culture of the day helped set the assumed norms and conventions of those past society, so to does our media do it to us. They ARE our folk stories, our cultural touchstones, our sources of ideas and values and beliefs. Anyone who claims the media isn't influencing how we think and feel simply isn't paying attention. However, the concepts we're being sold are FAR more complex and diffuse and omnipresent than merely "looking like supermodels and Calvin Klein ads". The media's much more multidomensional than that, those ideas are just the tip of the iceberg. We're being sold ideas not just about how to look (and we're even being sold several different models of "how to look" -- consider, say, Natlie Portman and Zooey Deschanel versus your average supermodel or something), but also things like how to act, how to talk, what being masculine is, what being feminine is, what being a friend is, what being a family is, what being successful is, etc. Even when we don't conform to these ideas exactly, we're still defining ourselves against these norms and against these pressures in our rebellion... and we still assume others think more or less in the manners presented to us by mass-culture. Transcending one's cultural norms is very very difficult. For women, since that's the subject of the thread, it's not just "look like a supermodel" being sold to them. It's a whole gamut of values and behaviours and norms. "Be attractive to men" and it's "act like this" and "do these beauty routines" and "be submissive" and "get a career/get a family" and countless others (that last one's hilarious in its skitzophrenia, since we've arrived at the sort of angsty post-feminism which isn't sure what women should be doing, but is sure it's not what they're doing now). So in answer to your question, Taryn, men aren't all expecting you to be super-skinny, but they're probably expecting SOME look or value or behaviour from you. Just like you are of us. (edited by Arwon on 11-14-06 09:00 AM) |
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Arwon Bazu  Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6320 days Last view: 6320 days |
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| Passively allowing something isn't much different to actively causing it, really. | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6320 days Last view: 6320 days |
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| There's actually another eating disorder called Orthorexia, it's relatively new. It's an obsession with eating healthy and being ultra fit and organic and so forth. It's a product of our times, every bit as annorexia.
It's also interesting how frequently self-harm and annorexia coincide, so much so that some think they're different manifestations of essentially the same problem. My own theory is that these disorders are driven by social and cultural pressures, that some people are just susceptable to them... but the precise form they take depends on the nature of the pressures faced. If we had different standards of beauty and behaviour, the disorders would be different, too. |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6320 days Last view: 6320 days |
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| They're poison. Most people recognise this, but they keep happening with even people who think they're a bad idea, because the alternatives are even worse. | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6320 days Last view: 6320 days |
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| Yep, and that's an enormous problem. When we don't put more money into, just as one example, simple, cost-effective, life-saving things such as distributing anti-diarrhea medication, we're basically condemning tens of thousands of children to death every year.
When people get so hysterical and fetishistic over little bits of foetal tissue, the juxtaposition is quite illuminating. |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6320 days Last view: 6320 days |
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| I'm arguing that the equation between preventing potential future lives by killing foetuses, and actual REAL LIFE CHILDREN DYING EVERY DAY BECAUSE OF OUR FUCKED UP PRIORITIES, is grotesque. When people in their comfortable little air-conditioned mini-mall adjacent homes and stick bumperstickers on their SUVs and sit there and tut-tut about the "holocaust of little baaaaybeeez" with barely a cursory glance at the actual suffering, misery and death that befalls millions of children beyond this shiny country-fried bubble world... it speaks of massively flawed priorities. By holding up foetal life to be the equivalent to real children, you debase the suffering and misery of real children.
That's to say nothing of the massive disconnect between hysterical "it's murder" rhetoric and the ACTUAL opinions of these people who say such. I mean, if philosophically one believes that it's truly murder, then one is sitting by and doing nothing but whine as millions of people are being killed. Anyone who believes abortion is murder should be out there bombing clinics, killing abortion doctors and pro-abortion judges, kidnapping women who're going to abort in order to restrain them and force them to have their children, and so forth. They would be practically compelled into joining the baby-liberation underground and assisting in any way they could. This would be heroic vigilantism on par with the French Resistance. Anything less would be complicity in the Holocaust. Equating abortion to killing children makes no sense and is an ugly and callous distraction from real tragedies. (edited by Arwon on 11-15-06 08:23 PM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6320 days Last view: 6320 days |
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| Not everyone in a resistance movement is a killer, most are just the support network for those who do the fighting. You don't have to directly kill. You can harbour people in safehouses, fund them, lie to the authorities, steal things, kidnap people, set off bombs and fires that don't kill people. This is a HOLOCAUST of MILLIONS here, SS, don't be weak... you should be doing everything you can! There are no excuses, if you and others truly believe a holocaust is occurring, for not organising such a movement. LIVES ARE AT STAKE. | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6320 days Last view: 6320 days |
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| That's why you kidnap people planning to have abortions and spirit them away so they can't go get them done and have to have the babies. | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6320 days Last view: 6320 days |
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| Microcredit? Yeah it's interesting, it's been the flavour of the month in Development Studies circles for quite a while. Builds on the work of people like de Soto and totally fits in with the current fashion of believing in the need to help the poor help themselves. Moreover, it fills in a real large gap in the absence of the ability to access small-scale financial services, even things like savings accounts and cheap credit.
I'm not sure this alone is an answer, though... it smells too much of intellectual trend and just being a flabour of the month. There's still some fairly major structural factors stacked against them in terms of the nature of the world economy and the gap between the formal and informal economies. The worry is that things like public health, welfare, city infrastructure and education are going to suffer because of the fashion for governments believing in microcredit so completely. There have also been serious questions raised about the effectiveness of the idea in several respects. Does it reach the poorest of the poor? Does it actually reduce poverty? Are the interest rates excessive? Does it lead to dependency (there are a LOT of repeat borrowers)? As long as it's not used as an argument against other forms of aid and poverty reduction and stuff, it seems quite valuable... let's just not get carried away. |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6320 days Last view: 6320 days |
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| I have no quirks. I am completely normal and quirkless. | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6320 days Last view: 6320 days |
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Originally posted by Pvt. Prinny Uh, dude... you live in Kansas. That's probably got something to do with it. c(: Tarale's right, swimming is one of the best exercises, period. I kinda feel like I should get into it, but, I've never been a strong swimmer and I'm not a big fan of the beach. |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 6320 days Last view: 6320 days |
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| Dr McNinja vs Pirates
This should settle any lingering doubts about the superiority of the Ninja. |
| Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 |
| Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - - Posts by Arwon |
