It's the Stupidity

The headline "PETA to launch porn site in name of animal rights" did not cause me to bat an eye: I'm too used to reports of PETA exploiting women's bodies or comparing having a chicken dinner to exterminating millions of people or doing other disgusting things to gin up some controversy.  If I hadn't felt the need for a chuckle, I wouldn't even have clicked.

And I have to say, I batted an eye this time.

Not over the idea of porn. Over this: "[PETA] hopes to raise awareness of veganism through a mix of pornography and graphic footage of animal suffering."

It's the stupidity that gets me. Is PETA the only group of people who can't see the problem with this?! I can. The two other people in my house when I read the news article can. 

So what's PETA's thought process here? We want to end animal suffering. Hmm, how best to go about it...ooh, I know, let's get more people to start associating animal suffering with sexual arousal!

We can't even use the term "unintended consequence" here, because there's generally an expectation that unintended consequences are things that are hard to impossible to predict. This is easy. If enough people look at your porn site and experience a sequence of "porn picture, porn picture, porn picture, animal suffering picture, porn picture", sooner or later some of them will start to be aroused by the animal suffering pictures. And maybe one or two of them will decide to act upon that by making a little more of it in the world.

I mean, if I wanted to promote Americans putting more of their money in savings, I would start posting pictures online of scantily clad women going into banks with envelopes marked "savings", maybe work my way up to some videos involving women overcome with lust in front of the teller's window as they accidentally overhear the size of the man in front of them's account. Or maybe I'd just some random photos of people making deposits interspersed with a variety of other porn pictures; why go to the work of making themed porn. The point is I'd use sex to promote something I want to happen, not something I want NOT to happen. That's basic advertising. I certainly wouldn't try to get people to associate sexual arousal with the thing I wanted them to stop doing. That's basic sense.

I'm flabbergasted.

Our Days Are Numbered (Arbitrarily)

Numerology claims that days have numbers which give them vibrational energy that can affect things in certain ways. But the numbers that days are assigned are based on our calendar and calendars are (mostly) arbitrary. When you give the day's numerology number any credence, you are privileging our calendar above other calendars--a grossly imperialistic act, to be sure! Moreover, as it's all arbitrary anyway, why not just assign your own personal numbers to the day? Let every day have your lucky number, or assign days particular numbers as you think you need them. To those who would claim that the beliefs of millions who use that calendar give strength to the assigning of date numbers derived from that calendar, I would say that surely your beliefs about the day's number have more effect on your day than the beliefs of anyone else.

1 + 1 + 1 = 4

Uncle Pookie had a good story the other day. Seems some stranger started telling him how the singer formerly and currently known as Prince is Satanic. Her "reasoning" was that Prince wrote a song called "Purple Rain", there is no such thing as purple rain, therefore purple rain is unnatural, therefore Prince is Satanic.

Me: "I don't think doves actually cry, either. Did she mention that?"

UP: "Yes."

You just can't make fun of some people.

Sign of the Times

Out in Los Angeles some members of an Hispanic street gang are being tried for hate crimes for allegedly conspiring to kill blacks. Here's part of their defense:

Defense attorney Reuven L. Cohen told jurors last week that one of
the slayings cited in the charges — the 1999 shooting of Kenneth Wilson — was
not a hate crime but "a simple gang killing committed out of boredom."

See, they didn't kill him because they hated him, they killed him because they were bored.

Oh, well that's a relief.

Wait--no it's not. I'd rather live sandwiched between a family of KKK members and another of Louis Farrakhan's followers than have even one person on my block who's decided that murdering fellow human beings is an acceptable solution to the problem of boredom. Really. The latter is clearly the more dangerous. The racists might hate me (or other people on the block), but they probably don't hate enough to kill and even if they do, it will likely take some grievance, real or imagined, to set them off. With the murder-to-alleviate-boredom guy, everyone on the block is in danger every time there's nothing good on TV.

In a sane society "I killed him because I had nothing better to do that day" could not be considered a defense--no way, no how.

Pharmacies Should Carry Mental Purgatives

It's amazing the amount of mental junk that we carry around. For example, for years part of my brain has been working on the question of why the Figurines commercial had the woman singing, "I love how I look in my gabardines, so I keep myself fit with Figurines." Well, it rhymes of course, but those were '70s style gauchos, and I never heard them called gabardines and who would call them that--no one says, "I love how I look in my twills/crinkle cottons/houndstooths"--so why have it? Would the audience even know what "gabardines" was supposed to refer to if she weren't kicking up her legs as she sang? Or am I just a non-sophisticate who never knew that all the cool people used to call their gauchos gabardines?

I think the part of my mind that keeps worrying over this ancient commercial is the part that should have been trying to get me into MIT. Or at least keep track whether I need to buy more postage stamps or not.

I also wonder if this is something that has only started happening since the advent of mass media, or if ancient Romans used to find themselves unable to enjoy the latest gladiator spectacle because their mind was insisting on going over the odd word choice in that play they saw twenty-five years ago.

Don't Act Surprised

How we present ourselves to others has consequences. They're often predictable.


If you wear a tee-shirt with a motto that insults the viewer of the shirt (e.g., "If my dog looked like you, I'd shave his butt and make him walk backward", "You rode the short bus, didn't you?", "Bite Me") and you then approach someone to ask for help, don't act surprised if they are less helpful to you than they are to people in a non-insulting shirt. Even if it's someone who's paid to help you.


If you sport a bumpersticker that says "Bad Cop! No Doughnut!" and a tee-shirt that says "Fuck the Police", don't act surprised when the policeman who pulls you over for speeding is disinclined to let you off with a warning.


If you're a young woman or any girl past puberty and you wear a miniskirt that you have either designed to have or bought because it had attention-grabbing details (in addition to its attention-grabbing shortness, I mean) and men make crude or stupid comments about your skirt in a lame attempt to chat you up, don't act surprised.


If you're a woman and you wear a blouse that clings to the only parts of your breasts that aren't revealed by your plunging neckline, don't act surprised if some men talk to your chest instead of your face.

Building a Better (?) World Through School Supplies

In Sam's Club yesterday, I saw a large Crayola multipack that advertised itself as being good for teachers and day care owners. The pack contained numerous small boxes of crayons, in three categories: Classic Crayons (of course), Construction Paper Crayons (sure, why not), and Multicultural Crayons (WHAT?! Did I just read that?) No, I am not making this up. Multicultural Crayons. The box claimed they would be good for "teaching diversity".

That last bit gave me a clue what the "multicultural" boxes might contain--I didn't know before; I thought maybe it was crayons named after different cultures or geographical areas--but one box had had its plastic wrap torn off, so I opened it up to check. The "multicultural" boxes contained what were apparently intended to be various skin tones, although as I remarked to Uncle Pookie at the time, "That [the waxy white crayon] isn't a a flesh tone anywhere in the world, outside of certain films set in a largely mythical Transylvania."

Now, this is pretty silly. Look what it says about the mindset of whoever at Crayola came up with that idea: people with different skin colors are so different from one another that they automatically form a whole different culture. Skin color is really, really important in determining who you are, I guess.

Crayola claims these crayons are good for "teaching diversity", but to them diversity apparently just means having different flesh tones. You don't have to tell children that people come in multiple skin colors. You do have to teach small children how to blow their noses, but unless you're living in a small, racially homogenous, and completely isolated community with no television or photos from the outside world, you don't have to tell children that people come in different skin colors. They notice this on their own. And they don't need a special box of "multicultural" crayons to depict these skin colors in their drawings, either. All of those colors are available in any mid-size or large box of crayons.

And why teach "diversity"--which, remember, just means different skin color, not different languages, traditions, religions, clothing, or cultural taboos--anyway? Children already know different skin colors exist. Do they know how to read? Or recognize shapes or add and subtract?

***

(Note: None of the above should be interpreted as an attack on Crayola. They didn't invent this kind of silliness, even if some "ideas" or marketing person there has bought into it. As far as I know Crayola still makes a fine crayon.)

I'm Moving to Texas

You know Texas must be a great place to live, because its state legislators have so little to do they have to invent busy work for themselves.

http://www.abc.net.au/sport/content/200505/s1359862.htm

Apparently one of the most pressing issues in Texas is revealing cheerleader outfits and smutty cheerleader dance routines. I mean, come on.

Look, I'm no fan of the mainstreaming of pornography. I think schoolgirls performing for crowds dance moves that would look more at home in a topless bar is a bad idea, not to mention vulgar, tacky, and immodest. Teen girls--post-pubescent girls--being encouraged to act slutty doesn't disturb me the way children being encouraged to act slutty does, of course, but this is something that, once upon a time, the average American parent wouldn't have wanted their daughters doing.

But why should this mean the government must get involved? That's big government intrusion into the public. And it's not even necessary to solve the problem of smutty cheerleading. If people who dislike being exposed to a bump-and-grind show when all they wanted to do was watch a football game started going to their local principals or school boards and say, "Look, I've been paying to come to these football games for a while, but now I'm thinking about not coming anymore because your cheerleaders' behavior is so vulgar." It wouldn't take many complaints like that for your average school to tell the cheerleading coach to tone it down. A few local newspaper editorials or letters to the editor wouldn't hurt either. Local problems, local solutions. We don't have to run to the state (much less the federal) government every time we have a problem.

The World We Live In

I don't mean to make light of a mauling, but one line in this article takes the cake. The wife of a man who was mauled by chimpanzees says, "One was at his head, one was at his foot. But all that time ... he was trying to reason with them" [ellipses in source.]

Reason with them?!?!? They're chimpanzees! You have to wonder, are these people vegans or just your ordinary, garden-variety idiot?

(Hat-tip to Ace of Spades.)

Menstrual Leave

An Australian union is trying to get Toyota to give its female workers "menstrual leave"--twelve paid days of it a year.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200502/s1300583.htm

Two points:

1.) If your periods are giving you so much pain you have to call in sick, you have a medical problem and need to see a doctor. And if you do not in fact have a medical problem and you are claiming you can't work through a little discomfort, then you are, in fact, a wuss and a whiner.

2.) WTF is going on? We've only just had an MIT professor have a highly publicized attack of the vapors when Harvard president Larry Summers suggested that maybe--just maybe--innate differences in the sexes may explain why there are fewer women at the top levels of science. Nancy Hopkins could hardly bear what she was hearing and had to leave lest she faint, and since then she has had to be apologized to again and again; whether Mr. Summers was required to bolster his apologies with flowers and chocolates remains unclear. What is clear is that here we have an MIT professor letting the world know that women (or one, at least) are too delicate to withstand an open airing of ideas and that in Australia we have another group saying women can't work while they're having their periods. What's next? Segregating men and women in the workplace so that no woman ever need be offended by an overlong glance in her direction by a man? What about paid hot flash leave? PMS leave? Or "my boss likes the other employees better than me and that makes me feel undervalued and ugly" leave? Give me a break.

Campaigning For a Saner Valentine's Day

http://www.timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050114/NEWS/501140348/1003/NEWS02

The Vermont governor opposes the straitjacketed "Crazy for You" Valentine's Day teddy bear. He and others say it is offensive to the mentally ill. Would it be offensive of me to suggest that their getting so worked up about this is a trifle, um, crazy?

Imaginary Friends

USA Today has an article about imaginary friends. (Nod to the Corner.) It's about some psychologists saying kids with imaginary friends are normal and healthy, imaginary friends can be helpful, etc. Who cares, really? I've never thought otherwise and am only interested in seeing this phenomenon discussed. My main question when the topic is raised is not whether some adults think this is healthy, but whether the speaker had an imaginary friend or not and what he/she/it was like. Unless your kid claims his "imaginary friend" is telling him to burn down the house or that it's time to "begin the time of purification" (and he doesn't mean having a bath), you've nothing to worry about; the psychologists in the article say much the same thing.

Of course there are some numbskulls out there who afraid of the imagination. Any kind of fanciful talk, much less an imaginary friend, scares them or at least makes them uneasy. Many of them truly hate it. I'm not necessarily talking about strict no-nonsense, follow-the-dots-in-order, "just the facts, ma'am" type people; some of them are quite all right, even if they do dismiss fanciful, imaginative things as silly. That's just personal taste. I'm talking about the kind of people who, as I said, are afraid of the imagination and may even hate it. The Gradgrinds and fundies who despise fairy tales and, it sometimes seems, any fiction more imaginative than "Dick and Jane". Take a former co-worker of mine, who once said, spitting an unbelievable amount of contempt and disgust into her words, "I HATE Superman. Everybody KNOWS a man can't fly!" She'd probably be right at home with the fundamentalist Christian mentioned in the USA article who thought imaginary friends were the same thing as demon possession.

I know I should feel sorry for these people because of all they miss, but I can't quite manage it. I feel sorry for their children though.