Jennifer Balderama posts this ee cummings quote:
Stolen wisdom: to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
I saw the movie
Robert Jensen, a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, offers one of the best analyses I’ve seen on cultural violence in his essay in the online journal, Feminista. It’s worth linking over to and reading.
Blow Bangs and Cluster Bombs: The Cruelty of Men and Americans makes the connection between pornography and war, explaining that “Pornography and the wars of the U.S. empire both depend for their success on the process of rendering human beings less-than-fully-human so they can be hurt — in the case of pornography to provide pleasure for men, and in war to protect the comfort of Americans.”
Jensen is a member of the Nowar Collective, author of the book Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream, and co-author of Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality.
His pamphlet, “Citizens of the Empire,” is available at
http://www.nowarcollective.com/citizensoftheempire.pdf.
Other writings are available online at
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/freelance.htm.
He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.
A female friend of a male friend contacted me to see if I know of any websites that list male scumbags who lie and otherwise deceive women who meet them over the internet. A Google search only turned up this site, which lists women who have done the lying and deceiving
My mother is crying. Her brother is dying. Well, he
With his usual grace, honesty, and wit, Tom Shugart posted a response to my fantasy of a world with a diminished level of testosterone. He mentions that women are attracted to strong, aggressive, powerful men. In other words, Alpha Males. The kind of Alpha Males that Halley Suitt is writing about.
That is something we women should think about. If we value powerful, aggressive, competitive men (and the genes of those kind certainly were necessary in much earlier times to prevent the bear from eating you), then what we are doing is reinforcing the testosterone-driven tendency of men to strive toward achieving those things. If we bring up our sons to strive to achieve those qualities, we are perpetuating the kind of world in which we continue to find aggressiveness becoming aggression and in which competitiveness leads to violence, and not just physical violence.
We no longer need mates who can kill the bears before the bears kill us and who will pass along genes to give us sons who will do the same. This world needs men with different skills, different values, different genes
My newspaper today has a good article by John Balzar of the LA Times about the fault-ridden plan, which is designed to put more economic power into the hands of those who already have too much. He says:
Yes, America prospers by the enterprise of its individuals. But America gained its greatness with the understanding that individuals do not prosper apart from the fortunes of the nation. Aristotle put it this way 2,325 years ago: “The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control and outnumbers both of the other classes.”
Jennifer Balderama has a really good piece about Martin Luthor King and his messages that relates to this.
Bill Moyers’ NOW on PBS last Friday night covered several areas — including the digital copyright issue and proposed repeal of the inheritance tax — that really reflected just how widespread the divide is going to get if something doesn’t change. The middle class is fast disappearing, and the elite are retreating within gated communities. I wonder how long this can go on before we find ourselves in some sci fi movie nightmare.
Brain research is making it more and more evident that, while our environment and nurturing can make a crucial difference in what kinds of adults we mature into, nature deals us each a very definitive hand, and much of it is in the form of chemicals that our brains produce. If we don
I spent today at a workshop for caregivers on how to take care of themselves. I find that what I really need for myself is a chance to commiserate with other caregivers, so I offered to set up a private weblog for the the 6 of us who took the workshop. I’m hoping that they take me up on it. I know that some Alzheimer patients use weblogging both as a support group and, even more importantly, to have an easily accessible record of what they can’t totally remember. When they blog every day, they have a record of their activities to which they can refer.
I gave the other caregivers my url and Blog Sisters’ so that they can check us out as examples of weblogs. I hope that they notice the link to my E-mail up near the beginning of the sidebar so that they can get in touch with me if they want to follow up.
While most of the bloggers I read are looking for ways to use the Internet and even public weblogging to make money, I’m more interested in it as a tool for individuals who need a support group for some specific reason. That means a private site, and that’s certainly no problem. I was part of a small private women’s poetry weblog, which ran its course; but it worked well for a while.
I’m trying to think of a title. I’ll probably do it through blogger, since that’s the only one I know how to set up. I also know that you can opt out of Google’s system; I’ll just have to dig out the code. Of course, then I’ll have to find someplace to get a Comments feature, since I used YACCS for my old blogger weblog, and I understand that you can’t get that any more. If no one responds, this is all moot anyway. At least I’ve tried.