On Privilege, Sexism, and Anger

I tried several times to write a post about the reaction on the atheist blogosphere to Rebecca Watson's accusations of pervasive sexism in the atheist community. You had better look at her account of it here, but I can summarize briefly. Watson was at a skeptics conference in a Dublin hotel. At 4:00 am she announced that she was tired and wanted to go to bed. As she got on the elevator to go to her room, a man followed her in. During the ride up he invited her to his room. She declined and in a subsequent event recounted this event in order to discuss sexism in the atheist community; the context of that discussion was a talk on sexism in the religious right.

I feel like I have a lot more to say about the words privilege, oversensitive, and overreaction, but in all honesty I can't do it. I'm tired of the whole conversation. I know lots of people who say they are sick of feminism. I'm sick of it, too, but for a different reason: I'm so so so bloody sick of the need for the same basic discussions over and over again. I'm sick of people--mainly men, sometimes women--refusing to listen. I'm sick of people claiming that a discussion about sexism is off-topic (especially when the topic you wish you were discussing was about how it's bad that the religious right is sexist). I'm sick of people taking a conversation about semantics and the history of words--a conversation I think is very helpful and important--to use it as a way of fudging out of the real problems (note: that is a non-atheist example, but the comments are an excellent example of the sort of blindess I'm seeing). I'm sick of people who seem to be trying to give perfect examples of speaking from privilege. I'm sick of people claiming they don't have privilege when what they only seem to lack is superpowers. I'm sick of it all. I want to give it all up.

But more than that, I am furious. First of all, I'm flabbergasted that people don't see how it's a problem to corner a woman in an elevator in the middle of the night and proposition her. If you don't bother to think through how this would look to the woman, there's something really wrong with your methods. This makes you blame-worthy. Not because she felt creeped out, but because you did not do anything to mitigate the possibly creepiness. I'm flabbergasted that this doesn't seem more obvious to people. But as an extention of this I'm furious. Absolutely blood-boilingly angry. All I can see right now is that those who are saying this is not an issue of sexism or is not worth talking about (and, worst of all, that it is an issue of sexism and it's still not worth talking about) are being deliberately obtuse, are outright refusing to listen. Which is why I can't write those posts I wanted to write. Which is why I need to write this post instead.

It's strange. I'm familiar with the discourse around angry feminism. That is, of course feminists are angry; they have an awful lot to be angry about. Asking them to be calm and considered is too much to expect (and not because they're crazy hormonal women but because they have too many legitimate grievances to not be angry). In fact, accusing them of not being "reasonable" continues, albiet unintentionally, a historical line of sexism. But I've never been angry before. Then again, I've never been as interested in gender issues as I am right now. There's a personal history behind that, but nonetheless I am realizing how horribly frustrating this absolute refusal to understand really is. And yet it's clear that anger is not going to help right now. For the first time I think I begin to see the real importance of finding a place for emotion in discourse about such issues, including the academic discourse I am most used to. [Note: most of the feminists in this particular discussion have been very calm, collected, and reasonable. I'm just saying that I'd understand if they were otherwise.]

Part of what infuriates me, of course, is that while all of this is going on in the atheist blogosphere I know that folks in that quarter will still criticize religion for being sexist. I don't know what bothers me more, that people will claim that there isn't a huge sexist issue in atheism and from that position of supposed security critique religion, or that people who know perfectly well that this problem exists still level those critiques against religion. I do know that religious institutions are sexist and have been sexist in ways the atheist community isn't, but I still think that community had better do some serious housecleaning before pointing fingers. Glass houses, eh?

But this is not what makes me most angry. No, what makes me most angry is accusations of overreacting, is the utter failure to listen. That more than anything makes me angry these days, the failure to listen, the utter arrogance required for people to shut out others' experiences in order to hold their own not-very-considered armchair philosophizing. This is a rampant problem, one that promises to make me angry (or forlorn, depending on my mood) again and again and again.

I'm at a loss. I don't know what to do with this anger. One thing I did is go through this post and cut out all of the cusswords. And another thing I'm doing is reflecting on how my education in a liberal English literature department has helped me see past my own privilege, and how other people who have not been as educated to consider things from other people's perspectives may not find it so easy to do so. Another thing I'm doing, hopefully, is letting women who are hurt by this whole issue know that I'm angry on their behalf. But otherwise I don't know how to move forward, how to make all of this OK. I probably can't, and that's what's scaring me the most.

[Edit: I should also point out that I realize I might be unwarranted in my some of my anger. That's what makes it difficult.]

7 Quick Takes (56)

1. I am a student again. I have attended classes. I did some readings. This is strange, and yet not strange.

2. I am a TA. That means "Teaching Assistant," for those not-in-the-know on university lingo, and Teaching Assistants do things like lead discussion groups and mark papers. As a matter of fact, I hold the grades of 20-odd students almost entirely in my hands. I also have to create a 50-minute environment of collegial discussion about literature each week in the seminars. It was absolutely mind-shrivelling terrifying at first, but I'm already getting a feel for it. As a matter of fact I quite enjoyed the first session; some of the kids were quite willing to participate. (I say 'kids' but they're not kids; some are first years, but some already have a BA. And even the first years are at least 17. It's scary, almost, seeing these kids who are adults, or adults who are kids. And then I remember that at 23 I too am hardly an adult. Certainly in many ways I am not an adult, but in few or no ways am I still a kid.)
Take home message: I like this teaching thing, so long as it's not overly formal.

3. I have explored campus and such a little more. Did I tell you that I visited the Museum of Anthropology on Monday? I was surprised that it would be open. There was a cool documentary playing about a guy from a local Aboriginal community who was part of the totem pole tradition; he went to New Guinea and partnered up with another guy there and then brought that guy to BC, where they both carved things. The New Guinea guy's totem pole, carved in Canadian redwood, is in the MoA.
The MoA is extremely cool. I might do a post about it in the future.

4. On the note of exploring, I visited UBC's Botanical Gardens today. Those are also pretty cool. I did the canopy walkway, which was a little nerve-wracking for acrophobic me. The Asian and forest area was sublime (in the sense in which it's contrasted with the beautiful): there was such a sense of vertical space, tall and high and daunting. The other parts--the alpine garden, the Carolinian garden, the physic herbarium--were also interesting. This deserves more exploration.

5. I am getting to know people. This is a good thing. Today I also visited with someone I know from Queen's who currently lives in Vancouver.

6. I, like virtually everyone else, am watching this crazyman in Florida and his hateful book-burning. I, like virtually everyone else, am hoping he will not go through with it. And I, like at least some other people, am concerned about the radical and hateful reactions in the Middle East (the "Death to the Christians" chants come especially to mind).
There seems to be a question of whether Pastor Jones' sulphuric rhetoric is in fact built logically upon his foundational beliefs; that is, whether burning Qu'rans makes perfect sense in a Christian worldview (Leah, if you are reading this and if you believe I am misrepresenting your claim, please let me know). To me it is obvious that Pastor Jones' behaviour entirely contradicts the foundations of Christian ethics, and I am happy that Elizabeth Esther articulated this far better than I could in her recent post about American evangelicism in general and Pastor Jones in particular:

"It often seems to me that for many of these evangelicals, sending a message is more important than being the message. This is why being a Christian in America isn't so much about feeding the hungry and clothing the naked as it is about voting Republican and attending a mega-church."

I suggest you read the whole post, but the gist as it relates to the logically-consistent question is that Christianity is not supposed to be about publicity and belief-control at all, but about showing love and fighting injustice. As Pastor Jones doesn't seem to be much for either, I can't say that his actions are "really" Christian... but that's a tricky concept anyway.

7. I have borrowed The Queer God, by Marcella Althaus-Reid, from the library. Whether I finish it or not is fair speculation, but I took the first step. So far it is not an easy read. Trying to read it simultaneous to watching Battlestar Galactica cannot help. What will help is that, as a grad student, I do not need to return the book until sometime in November. I'm increasingly unsure I will be impressed. But by hook or by crook I will learn more about non-normative options in the general Christian umbrella...

Alright, all, it's time to head over to Conversion Diary, host of this carnival.

Love, Law, and Hate

or,
Concerning This Whole Prop 8 Thing

I must say from the outset that I always thought Prop 8 (for those who don't know, Proposition 8 was a California law that banned same-sex marriage that was somehow voted in with a majority) was a horrible thing. This is not just because it was yet another blow to the equality movement, but because it indicated that a majority of California voters did not have human rights in mind when they made their decisions that day. And this is California, too; it's not quite Washington, but it's certainly not Texas, either.

This means that I was enormously pleased when I heard that a judge has struck down the law. Of course the backlash was no surprise, and I don't give it too much weight. This is how a democracy should work: when the majority start being bigots, the strong arm of the law comes down and snatches their decision-making abilities away until they learn how to use it properly again. Who exactly governs this strong arm of the law is a trickier question, but it seems to be working now. What happens if it doesn't work will hopefully be a question we never have to answer.

Moving on... I was reading what Elizabeth Esther was saying about the issue, and simply had to voice agreement. If the comments were unanimously in her favour I would have just said, "Thank-you." The comments weren't all in her favour, though, and if you know me you'll know I had to contribute to the conversation. In my view, this is not an issue that concerns public safety or governmental structure (and it certainly doesn't threaten the sanctity of your own marriage), so it's not something that we have any place encoding in law. Further, fighting so viciously against same-sex marriage is driving people from the church, which seems to me to be something Christians should be more worried about than same-sex marriage itself. Finally, and most importantly, this issue is, at heart, about love.

That is to say, Prop 8 and the voters who support it are saying that we have some right to determine how other people go about loving those around them. How can we claim to love others if we do not recognize that they feel love for each other? Perhaps God does not acknowledge that their love should result in matrimony, but that is for God to decide and for them to figure out. We (as humans, not Californians, because I am not from California) cannot support legal structures which say who can love whom and how. Of course the issue is not that simple, but I think we ought to be very careful when dealing with any issue so complicated and important as love.

But I would have let my opinions on this issue rest in my comment to Elizabeth Esther's post if another comment had not caught my eye:

In case you can't click on this to make it bigger, I will type out what this comment says:

Brianna said...

You are smart to recognize that many of the arguements the religious use
against gays and lesbians will eventually be used against yourselves.

I will eagerly vote "yes" on any future ban on Christiany or religion should
one appear in my country/region. (Posted August 5, 2010 at 03:20 PM.)

Once again this is something I should not give headspace to, but I reeled for about five minutes when I read Brianna's comment. I was about to reply with something fierce and not pithy at all, but I restrained myself. A large part of me hoped that my fears about atheist fundamentalism were unfounded. The rational part of me was in on this hope, since it seemed reasonable that there were not any or many atheists who actively sought the oppression of religious peoples. In all of my Internet travels, I had not encountered anyone who would use political means to prevent membership in religion. Now I have. These people exist. Or, at least, one does.

I desperately wish that we could dig ourselves out of hate: Christians who hate homosexuals and non-Christians, atheists who hate Christians, anyone who hates anyone. Can all my (few) readers please do me a favour? Can you try to practice love as fervently as possible the next few days? We need it.

(Also, I intend to read more queer theology when I get to BC. I hope that in posting this here I will have greater incentive to go about locating the necessary books.)

Ronald Weinland

My friend in Windsor has called my attention to Ronald Weinland, a man to who my friend has turned for spiritual gui--no, I'm kidding. Mr. Weinland is among that category of people who claim to be the final prophet of God, and my friend is under the impression that he's "an egotistical pr*ck" and "full of sh*t." Mr. Weinland believes that these are the end-times, and that human self-rule will end on Pentacost 2012. Before then, the United States and then every other "Israel" (ie. Christian?) government will collapse, with the sole exception of the British monarchy. Thus he writes books and travels the world "to warn and prepare people for what lies ahead in the traumatic events that will unfold over the few remaining years of this prophetic end-time."

Yeah. OK. In general I try to be pretty open-minded, but my skepticism just cannot tolerate end-time prophecies, especially those calculated to a particular date.

The topic came up while we were watching a Discovery channel show called The Nostradamus Effect, which was discussing the prophecies of the next--and last--anti-Christ. Somehow I wasn't compelled by the evidence they presented. That is to say, I don't think these are the end-times and, if they are, I'm not going to feel all that silly about being wrong.

My friend just asked how much money he's making off of this. "Where," he just asked, "does this money go, and what does he do with it?"

The "Real Christian" Question

[This post has nothing to do with probing my identity. Sorry if this is what you were expecting.]

Lately I've been spending a little time at Atheist Revolution, a blog which is devoted to "breaking free from irrational belief and opposing Christian extremism in America." I originally found it at the Blogger's Choice awards, and have been snooping over there silently to see what the atheists are getting up to these days. It's part of my personal fair-reading policy, though it's also an excellent exercise in keeping my temper and not writing stupid things on the Internet.

A common theme at Rev. Atheist's blog (the url, http://www.atheistrev.com/, always makes me think of an atheist reverend) is discussing why people like Pat Robertson are "real Christians." Or, actually, from what I can tell, the theme is discussing that more than discussing why, but I think I can infer the why easily enough by what Vjack (the author) says. You could likely find a representative post in short order by going through the recent archives, but I'll give you a good one here. I encourage you to go and read it now. It's rather short.

Alright, I hope you've read it. In case you missed it, the article was supposed to be ironic. That is, Vjack does not remotely buy the claim that people who claim to be Christian and then do un-Christ-like things are thereby not Christians. Given the sorts of arguments he has likely been in and given his understanding of what Christianity is, I completely understand where he is coming from. On the other hand, I have heard Christians discuss the idea of "real Christians" and "non-Christians who say they're Christians" enough times to know that they are using the term in a valid way. What we have here is a case of equivocation: one term, in this case "real Christian", has two or more meanings, and these are getting confused. I hope to clear this up.

I can imagine the sort of debate Vjack might be in; Vjack will make a claim like, Pat Robertson and George Bush and Pope Urban II all demonstrate that Christians can be dangerous and stupid, and then his Christian opposite will make a claim like, Those are not real Christians. Vjack will then try to parse what his opponent means, and his opponent will 'help' him as follows: Because these people do things that are not in keeping with Christianity, they cannot be Christians. And this sounds an awful lot like, if a Christian sins, they either immediately become non-Christian or reveal that they never were Christian.

You can understand why an atheist would find this notion absurd. Stated like that, I find the idea absurd. An atheist, especially a rational materialist one, will likely understand Christianity as a sociological phenomenon; a Christian is a member of this movement called Christianity, or this group of individuals, organizations, and institutions roughly known as Christendom. Thus it seems kind of silly to claim that there is some sort of moral identity clause in Christian membership that says that one can only be a Christian if one doesn't do such-and-such and always does this-and-that. If you are part of the sociological movement, then you are a Christian. Of course, some behaviours might strongly suggest you aren't actually a "real Christian"--consulting the priestess of Delphi, for instance, or summoning Satan by burning a Bible--but for the most part, if a person is any sort of Christian, they are necessarily a "real Christian."

There remains the slight concern about how a person becomes a member of this sociological phenomenon, which is thorny and, regardless of what anyone might say, intractable. You cannot simply say that anyone who claims to be of a particular religion is of that religion. I can claim to be Taoist however often and vigorously as I like; if I don't believe that there is a Tao ordering the world, if I take pride in pride, if I shun the local natural world and delight in the cosmopolitan centres, if I have no truck with either the Tao Te Ching or the I Ching, if I am determinedly competetive, and if I think meditation, feng shui, and tai chi are for idiots, then I am absolutely not Taoist. Claiming membership is not sufficient. (Which is to say, Ghandi was not Christian or Muslim, regardless of what he might have claimed.) Membership must instead lie in some combination of beliefs and behaviours, but the requirements are a source of contention even among Religious Studies scholars, who presumably would have the best idea about this sort of thing. Like all sociological phenomena, religions have fuzzy borders.

However, if we can grant that all Christians must agree on at least some basic set of beliefs (the existence and divinity of Jesus Christ, the existence of a Holy Spirit, the value if not truth of the Bible, the existence of a potentially eternal soul, salvation acheived through the Crucifixion, the in-born sinfulness of human nature coupled with the inherent goodness of the soul) and that anyone who professes these beliefs and meets some minimum requirement of Christian behaviour (which may be no more than not worshipping other gods), then certainly there are Christians, under the sociological definition just given, who do profoundly un-Christ-like things. Claiming that these people are not "real Christians" seems utterly absurd if you are thinking of "Christian" in the sociological sense required. Of course they're real Christians; they are real people, and they meet all of the criteria required to be a Christian.

If Vjack's hypothetical opponent indeed did mean that these people do not fall under the sociological umbrella of Christianity, then he would be rather wrong. A Religious Studies scholar* must conclude that people like Pat Robertson are Christians, and real ones, at that.

However, I suspect Vjack's hypothetical opponent might have meant something else entirely, and in this case he could be quite right in his claim.

A Christian** will view Christianity as something other than a sociological phenomenon. (An intelligent one will still see that there is a sociological phenomenon called Christianity and that it overlaps rather a bit with the Christianity to which she claims allegiance, but strictly speaking she is not claiming allegiance to the sociological phenomenon.) Christianity to a Christian is more than just a set of beliefs and institutions, but also a relationship to God and a particular outlook. A Christian identifies themselves as such when they have decided to act like Christ, simply put. I suppose it would be more accurate to say that Christians have decided to try to act like Christ and call on the Holy Spirit for help. To a Christian, being a real Christian means genuinely attempting to share Jesus' worldview and trying to emulate Jesus' ethics.

Under this definition, it is unlikely that a member of the Ku Klux Klan could be a real Christian. Why? Because the KKK espouses hate, and Jesus espoused love. It is necessarily impossible that a person proud of hating could be a "real Christian." That's not to say that a person who hates cannot be a Christian. What I'm saying is that person who thinks that in some circumstances it's good to hate other people, as did the KKK, cannot be Christian. That's part of the definition of a Christian. (The Bible does, at least in the NRSV translation, encourage hating sin, but hating the sinner is not such a good thing.)

Of course, the KKK could talk about believing in Christ and salvation and the Word of the Lord; he could go to church and sing hymns; he could vote for the Christian Right and give to charity; he could be part of the temperance movement and teach Sunday School. Under the vast majority of sociological or academic definitions, he would be a Christian, and if we only were looking at this sociological membership, it would be absurd to claim that he was not a "real Christian." But, so long as he believes that it is good to hate black people, then he cannot in truth be a "real Christian," as a real Christian does not believe that it is good to hate. (Of course, we could always posit the existence of his daughter, who does not believe that it is good to hate but nonetheless attends Klan meetings, burns crosses in fronts yards, and if truth be told hates black people regardless of her desire not to. Whether or not she is a real Christian would be a matter of debate were it not for the fact that it isn't any of our business. It's God's business, and His alone.)

Is this sufficiently clear? To the rational-materialist/anthropologist, it makes no sense to distinguish between real Christians and less-than-real Christians; if a person is a Christian at all, then she is a real Christian. To the Christian, however, there is a huge difference between a person is following Christ and one who isn't, and that has little to do with public identification as a Christian.

Of course, the rational materialist atheist might say, "Sure, they think there's a difference, but I know there isn't. How does this make their claim any less absurd?" Put another, it's fair to ask how the Christian's understanding of the term "real Christian" has any relevance to an non-Christian. I do have an answer for that.

Let's go back to the hypothetical debate between our hypothetical blogging atheist and our hypothetical Christian. The atheist has made some arguement which attempts to undermine Christianity's validity by saying that many Christians are loathsome creatures who molest children and slaughter Jewish people and ostracize people for 'sins' that aren't actually wrong. This argument is trying to demonstrate that Christians are hypocrits and, somehow, that Christians are hypocrits will prove that the tenants of Christianity are false. (Which of course is a steaming pile of manure; that's an ad hominem arguement. However, I have heard this arguement before, so we'll run with it.) The Christian wants to demonstrate that most Christians are not hypocrits, so makes the distinction between real and not-real Christians. The atheist scoffs. But ought she? No. Because the Christian actually has a point here. That is, Christianity the sociological phenomenon may be flawed, but Christianity the religion, the Christianity which is neither more nor less than trying your hardest to be like Jesus and calling on the Holy Spirit to help you do so, that Christianity is a different thing altogether from the sociological phenomenon that shares its name. Which is to say that any judgement derived from the sociological phenomenon is invalid when applied to the "walk of like" Christianity.

I'll give you an example. A scientist somewhere does experiment in which he takes a frog and puts in the freezer. Note that, while doing so, he is wearing a lab coat and lab goggles and has his Ph.D.s in Biology and Astrophysics mounted on the wall behind him. He takes the frog out sometime later and thwacks it on the table, demonstrating that it is as hard as a rock. He then carefully thaws the frog, and it's quite fine. It hops around and ribbits and eats some flies and finds a lady-frog and begets itself some tadpoles. The scientist then writes a paper saying that if we freeze our limbs, we will be able to do more dangerous labour because we will be safe from damage. He cites his frozen frog as proof.

This is not "real" science, obviously. If this is all he ever does, then he is not a real scientist. We know this. A real scientist follows the scientific method, and that's not something this guy does. So he's not a real scientist. Except, of course, for the fact that he's receiving grant money to do this, is employed by a department of science in a accredited university, claims to be a scientist, and is perceived to be a scientist by his peers and students. Sociologically speaking, he is a scientist; as far as the scientific method is concerned, he is not. If we tried to claim that science is somehow flawed because this guy is an idiot and makes ridiculous claims in the guise of proven facts, we ourselves would be the ones making ridiculous claims. In fact, even if 99.9% of scientists were like this guy, we'd still be wrong to claim that science itself is faulty. The scientific institutions might be derailed, but that doesn't mean that science is.

In the same way, claiming that people like Klan members demonstrate that there is something wrong with Christianity is only valid if you're talking about Christianity as a particular sociological phenomenon. This is a different Christianity than the one I am claiming to be a part of; there is overlap, of course, and I am certainly a member of the sociological Christianity, too. But what is not flawed is the religion in which I attempt to be Christ-like and, frankly, people who espouse hate are not a part of that religion. What this means is that you may point out as many problems as you like with the Pat-Robertson Christianity; that bothers me not, for he's not part of my Christianity. In this sense, he is not a "real Christian".

To be honest, I don't think it is often my place to judge whether or not a person is really trying to follow Christ. I cannot get into their headspace and so simply cannot know. For this reason you will not often see me making the real/not-real distinction. But I wanted to outline why this distinction could be a legitimate claim on the part of a Christian and how this affects concerns about making generalizations about Christianity as a whole.

[This post is too long, so I'm cutting it off now. I'm actually truncating the "Why this is important part," because there are a lot of anti-religious arguements that fall down when this distinction is brought to light. But I realize blogs are not the best forum for dissertations, so I will stop going on now. Just one more paragraph and then the footnotes.]

Of course, there's also the issue that the debate itself is derailed, here. Whether a person does horrific things doesn't affect whether or not "their" Christianity--even if it's the very specific kind my hypothetical Christian is endorsing--is a good thing. We don't want to abolish science because the Nazis did real science (ie. following the scientific method) when mutilating people in their Holocaust laboratories. But that's a whole new ball-game.

-----

*I'm not an authoratative Religious Studies scholar; it was my minor in undergrad, is all. I am not claiming to represent the standpoint of such a scholar. Rather, I am saying that from such a standpoint a person would likely draw such a conclusion.
** I suppose it's not quite fair to generalize like this; certainly many Christians will disagree with what I've said. I am being lazy and saying "a Christian" when what I mean is "the sort of hypothetical Christian I'm talking about who could reasonably make the claim that some people professing to be Christians are in fact not real Christians."
***At this point I've voyaged to far into speculation to make any claim that my hypothetical atheist resembles vjack at all. Not that he ever did, more than likely.

eHarmony: Homosexuality and Business

Edit 22 Jan 2013: Ugh. I have pretty much entirely moved my position on this. I won't take it down because I don't feel like that's a responsible thing to do, but I want to state right here that as much as I understand why eHarmony would do what they did, I no longer feel like it's justifiable.

So the whole eHarmony-bigotry showed up a little while ago, but since I was thinking about it today, I decided to write a post about it.

If you aren't aware of what I'm talking about, I'll fill you in briefly: a number of people are upset that eHarmony does not match same-sex couples. There is also something out there about a misleading commercial, but I don't know much about that.

Today I decided to play a game, which I call, "Let's pretend that the organization/company/government/justice system isn't doing what they're doing because they're stupid and mean, but instead have a solid reason for what they're doing from their point of view." I don't think the game will catch on (maybe the name is too long?), but I like playing it.

This is what I came up with:

eHarmony is essentially a business. Unlike most dating websites, it has its customers fill in a questionnaire and then uses your input to match you with a prospective partner. This is more complex, as I understand it, then taking a woman who likes ska, is passionate about the environment, and doesn't care too much about cleanliness, and matching them with a man who also indicated that he likes ska, is passionate about the environment, and doesn't care too much about cleanliness. No, in actuality they've done years of research, and read generations worth of research, to determine what factors contribute to a successful relationship. Due to the money, brains, and plain-old time they've poured into this project, they can boast about extraordinarily high success rates. eHarmony is a marriage-focused business, and so they measure success by the percentage of matches who get married, stay married, and are happy with their marriage. As I said, eHarmony is a business. This is all statistical for them. I am sure they care that their customers are happy with each other; otherwise, they wouldn't be in this business. However, they do need to sell their product (which is the matching process), and so take a particular amount of interest in their accuracy.

Here's the catch. That accuracy relies on expensive, time-consuming, brain-consuming research that has been done exclusively on heterosexual couples. So if eHarmony were to suddenly open the floor to same-sex matching, they wouldn't have a whole lot to go on. I'm no expert on the dynamics of a same-sex relationship, but I'm going to say that the statistics for a heterosexual marriage do not neatly apply to a homosexual relationship. I'm also going to say that eHarmony doesn't have any statistics for same-sex compatability. So eHarmony would be sacrificing their reputation as accurate if they allow for same-sex matching. At least, their accuracy for those couples would be lower, but I'm sure that the eHarmony team is at least nervous that that would drop their popularity. If the percentage of all couples' success (homo and hetero) is several points lower, then fewer hetero people will use their site.

Perhaps you will then say that eHarmony should do that research to get those statistics to get acheive that accuracy. I say, do you remember when I mentioned how expensive it is? Do you remember when I pointed out how much time it takes to accomplish that? I'm sure you'll get the brains for it: queer theory is fairly popular these days, picking up where race theory and, to a lesser extent, feminist theory are starting to peter out. The point, though, is that not only will it take a long time to accomplish this, it will take a lot of money. So when it does come out, eHarmony will have to charge more to cover those substantial costs. Does eHarmony charge everybody more? But why should heterosexual couples need to pay for a service that they don't need, want, or use? But then do the homosexual patrons have to pay more than heterosexual patrons? Consider that the eHarmony team is likely concerned about a lower number of same-sex users compared to heterosexual users. This means that the homosexual patrons would likely have to pay far more than the heterosexual ones if they bear the start-up research costs all on their own, since there are fewer of them to divide it between. You can imagine how well that would go over. Those people complaining now that the service is not available will certainly be complaining that eHarmony makes them pay more for the "same" service (even though the cost in providing that service is at least at the beginning more expensive for the company).

To some degree, all of these concerns will have to be dealt with by eHarmony on a financial level. Can they afford (in terms of both expenses and lost revenue) to offer this service? It's like any company thinking about providing some new product. They have to balance the cost of preparing for, obtaining, advertising, and selling the new item/process/information, with how much they think that item/process/information will bring in. At this point in the game, I'm going to say that eHarmony has decided that, at the moment, they cannot afford to provide the service.

NOW, this does not make it any less disappointing, frustrating, and perhaps embarrassing for homosexual people who would like to use eHarmony. Hopefully, though, this indicates that it is less offensive/insulting than some people seem to make out. And of course I realize that there may also be other factors contributing to this decision, ranging from bigotry to fear to ignorance. But in the end I think that we ought to at least gesture to the benefit of the doubt while still arguing--when reasonable--for respect of people's basic rights.

Someone might here object that even businesses must be concerned with ethics, and I would absolutely and without hesitation agree with that someone. People speak of business being an amoral feild; I, however, think that the phonetic similarity between "amorality" and "immorality" is not a mere coincidence semantically (ie. there is no such thing as amorality, and those who claim to be acting in an amoral feild are most likely acting immorally in a moral feild). Yes, corporations should ensure that they do not do actual harm while pursuing a profit. No, corporations shouldn't shave off bits of their consciences so that they can also shave off expenses. However, consider this: I walk into a 'free-thinking' bookstore (they exist) and then make a fuss when I can't buy a Christian-audience Bible companion there. "It's a book," I say, "so all bookstores should sell it! Not to sell it is discriminatory!" And then you say, "But, Christian, look, they can't reasonably be expected to sell every book in existence. So you can't just walk in there and then get angry when they don't happen to sell a book you want. You can't even get angry when they don't sell any book that fits your lifestyle. It's their store. You can't expect that they simply must sell your sort of book, even if they don't want to or it would damage their reputation as a 'free-thinking' bookstore. That just doesn't make sense." And you'd be right. As far as I'm concerned, it's the same thing here. Yes, I agree it's a shame that homosexual people do not have access to a dating site as comprehensive and reliable as eHarmony. (There are same-sex dating sites, but as I understand it, like any dating site that requires you to do your own profile browsing, they're not as good as eHarmony.) But that doesn't mean that we have any place to blame the company. If they were matching same-sex people with straight people just to be devilish, then, yeah, get angry. If they say, "We don't match same-sex people, not only because they're demon-spawn and communists, but also 'cause it's icky," then, yeah, get very angry. But that's not what's going on here; what's going on is that they are providing a service which doesn't help some people. For the final analogy on this point, it would be like getting mad at an autobody shop because they don't have foreign car parts available in-store. It's a foreign car; how can you possibly expect a domestic garage to stock parts for every foreign car?

Lastly, if this were a government-organization or maybe even a not-for-profit organization (though only a very large one, I think), then that would be a different story. If I went into a store that was commissioned by the Government of Canada to be the Official Bookstore of Canada, and I couldn't find anything on Bible interpretation (or queer experience or Aboriginal spirituality or women's rights or Quebec separatist philosophies), then I'd have a right to complain. But eHarmony is not sponsored by the government, and the government would have to be stone moronic to get into that sort of thing (remember Trudeau on the government's place in people's bedrooms?). It's a privately-owned business, and we have to treat it like one.

So, if you want eHarmony to provide same-sex services, I'd suggest you write them and get your friends to write them, saying that you'd be willing to cough up the extra for said services. If they get enough letters, maybe they will be confident enough of the customer base to provide an "orientation-optional" edition of eHarmony.

Anyway, I Googled the issue and found out that eHarmony implies in some official statements the sorts of things I've said here, as well as giving some (in my opinion) less convincing reasons. This link I'm providing (http://www.pinoy.ca/eharmony/339) also has some on-line commenter opinions which you may or may not want to peruse.

Caveat: I do not want to imply here that I am either for or against homosexuality as a lifestyle. I know that I have readers that will be upset if I indicate that I do not "agree with homosexuality" in some way or another, and I know that I have readers that will be upset if I indicate that I do support homosexuality in some way or another. As far as I see it, your sexuality is between you and God, and no one else. I don't really take the time to formulate opinions on what I think God thinks about homosexuality, and that's the bottom line, as far as my public voice goes. As far as society and politics are concerned... well, I think non-judgementality, equality, and above all love ought to be the standards of our decisions, and that's the bottom line for now.

Last caveat: I am aware that there is more to this issue as regards the commercial, which I have not seen. There may be actually justifiably upsetting things in that advertisement; not having seen it, I don't know. What I am discussing is only the upset about the fact they don't provide the services desired, and why eHarmony is justified in not providing them. If that company has done anything else offensive, please DO NOT take this post as an endorsement of those actions. Obviously if I had a large readership a number of people would do precisely that, even with this caveat, but I am sure that you, my regular readership, will in fact use both your eyes and your brains before you use your fingers (on the keyboard). Thanks.

7 Quick Takes VIII

1. To those who live rural or small-town or small-city communities, the idea of a harvest fair or festival is probably not just an academic sort of thing but more of an experiental one. And I'm not just talking about dressing up for Hallowe'en or eating turkey at Thanksgiving, either, but rather about going to a real honest-to-goodness Fall Fair or Agricultural Fair or Plowing Match or something similarly named.

Well, Fort McMurray has some things vaguely approximating this idea, and one of them is the Country Fair, which has for the last few years been venued by Heritage Park. By now you can guess what that means...

This past weekend I was working at the Park. Because of the events in the Park, the executive director decided to open Chateau Gai Hot Dog Café, our concession stand. Due to the sudden absence of any summer slaves (I mean "summer staff"), I was called to work the whole thing. My Dad volunteered the Saturday, and my Mom volunteered the Sunday. Technically, Dad was there for some of Sunday, too, since we called him in but then didn't need him, so he left again.

On Saturday, my Dad and I ran the barbeque and hamburgers while the girls--Susan and Laura--ran the actual concession stand itself, taking money and suchlike. On Sunday, we didn't have Laura, so my Mom ran the barbeque while I helped Susan in the concession. However, we were worried that it would be too busy for my Mom to handle alone, and called Dad in. It turns out it really wasn't that busy on Sunday. Overall, it was a pretty slack couple of days, considering that I was in fact working. (This all means that I have worked for 12 days straight now. Ho-hum, actually.)

2. I painted some at the Marine Park. I put some aluminum paint on vents and the like, and I put black paint on other things. I also painted the great big auger (which is quite distinct from an augur, even though I would have spelled them the same if I hadn't looked it up just now) aluminum, which I don't personally think was an improvement. It does look new and shiny and eye-catching now, but I think it's eye-catching enough without the shine. Its twisted, snaggle-toothed, rusty, menacing mass was enough to grab my attention on the first day, at any rate.

I wore my knee-pads, of course, and I hadn't been on my knees all the time, but I can still feel the weakness and stiffness and pain in my joints from last week, and I feel it all the more when I'm working on those decks, pads or no. (Sorry for the hypertactic sentence, there.)

3. And on the note of things I did at the Marine Park, I once again rode up high in the Genie with my supervisor to paint things I couldn't otherwise reach. I note this in particular because, as my folks will readily attest, there was a time when I would be too utterly terrified to do it. I am afraid of heights (I know too much about phobias to claim I am acrophobic any more), and yet I am not so often afraid any more.

For instance, I was utterly fine in the Genie, despite the fact that it's basket has a grill bottom, through which I can easily see. It's strange: not only am I unafraid, I get somewhat sleepy, in a contented way. It's the same sort of feeling (though not as strong) as that I get sometimes when I am getting a haircut, or someone for another reason is playing with/working on my hair.

4. I have begun, very tentatively, to work on the virtual museum exhibit that will occupy much of my time for the next six months. When it is completed, the museum will be hosted by the Virtual Museum of Canada. Specifically, it will be part of the Community Memories deal. A good example of an exhibit, like that I would wind up making, is Ava's Story. (Isn't she pretty?) Anyway, I won't be e-curating about Japanese-Canadians in BC, of course, but that is the format of what I'll be doing.

In the end I only installed and messed with the software, looked for computers to work from, and did very very very preliminary research. But I have begun.

5. Let's see, now. There were books in there. I finished Prince Caspian. I started and finished Taran the Wanderer, by Lloyd Alexander. That was a good one, which I had never actually read before. I read all of the other Prydian books as a kid, but not that one. I also started and finished A Wrinkle in Time, and have been chipping away at The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia. I think, for a number of reasons, I will struggle with the latter; some of those are differences in literary-analystical interests and methods (for instance, I think Lewis' biography is of far less importance than the author seems to believe), but others are more personal. The author, as you can tell from the title, is against the whole Christianity thing, and loves the books despite their theological moorings. And I think most of us know the emotional toll anti-Christian sentiment plays on me.

6. And if you didn't know the emotional toll anti-Christian sentiment plays on me, you will soon find out. I had the idiocy of reading the page on Dawkins in Wikiquote. I have no idea what made me go there, but for some reason I did. You know, I've been good lately. I haven't read very many comment threads, I haven't gone scouting out for atheist blogs (I do this looking for some thread of open-mindedness, and so far I haven't found enough to stitch together a hole in your sock), and I haven't been reading the sorts of books that are likely to irk me. But, for whatever reason, I read some quotes from this man.

Atheism in general distresses me, but I don't make a fuss about it because, let's be honest, that's almost the worst thing you can possibly do. I have lots of atheist friends and even if I'd like the 'atheist' part to change, it seems rather important that the 'friends' part remains the same. So I don't make a fuss or attempt conversions or preach or make leading remarks or talk Christianese. Atheism may bug me, but I don't let that influence my behaviour.

But that man (Dawkins, I mean). He just drives me up the wall. I read that page for maybe ten minutes, and I spent the rest of the evening angry, frustrated, scared, and hurt. I had such trouble dealing with it. While I knew that everything he said was wrong, and I could articulate reasons why it was wrong, I still couldn't shake the convincingness of it. He's like that. He's good at these sorts of rhetorical games. He's so f***ing persuasive. Part of the problem is that the man rides on probability and dismisses possibility, and part of the problem is that he tends to isolate things. Everything makes perfect sense in the little nuggets he presents them in, but they tend to look less relevant and less convincing when you realize that he's looking at a very small part from a very narrow angle. In the end, of course, he has it wrong. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't look like a fine piece of reasoning taken on its own terms.

This, I think, is how he gets so persuasive. He says things people suspect or want to believe, and then backs it up with these little philosophical tricks of the light. He adds in a great deal of the sort of dry humour which includes those who believe what he says and utterly degrades those who don't, and he layers on top of that huge piles of self-confidence in his own rightness. The humour and the confidence, though, are only hiding the hatred and arrogance that make up his whole project.

At least, I know there is arrogance and I suspect there is hatred. There is likely also fear and confusion and doubt and love in him somewhere, but I cannot see it and almost do not want to believe it is there.

So anyway, sometime later that evening I was having a shower and outright fretting about this man and his clutch of rabid followers, and I didn't know what to do. I felt I had to do something, but I couldn't for the life of me think of what. I wanted badly to just sit down and give the whole thing up (not that I could have told you what that meant) if it weren't for the fact that I knew that not only the organized church, but also Christianity, humanity, and the whole of existence would cease to exist if I didn't fight.

And then I remembered a few fundamental things. The first was that so long as I believed and lived that belief, then I've done all I was supposed to do. The second was that God would make things OK. I might not understand how he was going to do that, and I might not even be able to recognize the OK-ity of it at first, but in the end all things glorify God. I just have to deal with that, and it's something I do for and within myself. I don't need to "fight"; at least, not here and for this. The third was that all the screaming and arguement and proof and sophistry is not going to move someone who really believes, be it in the existence of God or the non-existence of God. I can provide arguments to weaken Dawkins' hold on people, but in the end these arguements will not win people over to the side of God. Just calming down would be a better bet than to go in swinging. To say, "Yes, I understand what you are saying. Yes, I can see how these things are convincing. And yet, I still believe," might be more powerful than any arguement there is.

So after my shower I was a bit better. But I've still rankled a little here and there for the rest of the week, and my back, just beneath the shoulder blades, still crawls a little with pre-fight or flight tension.

7. This Take requires some background: starting at the end of next week, I will be taking a vacation to my home province of Ontario, visiting three campuses altogether (Sheridan - Oakville campus, Kingston, and St. Clare).
I had been planning on leaving on Friday at 1:00 or so at night. On Wednesday night, I looked an my travel itinerary and noticed something interesting. Due to the obvious error we made, I am actually leaving very very early on Friday, at 1:00 in the morning. Yes. I leave a full 24 hours early than anticipated.

Which actually works out quite well, because I now get to spend a whole other day with my brother. We plan to go see 9.

My employers are fine with it, in case you were wondering.

This means that my next 7 Quick Takes will be written from Oakville, perhaps in the late morning, even.

That is all. My, what a long post for such little occurence.

You know the drill: http://www.conversiondiary.com/2009/09/7-quick-takes-friday-vol-49.html

Choosing Certainty Over Accuracy

OR

Behavioural vs. Cognitive Approaches

OR

More Trends in Modern Foolishness

I was thinking the other day about this, so let's give it a rant.

In my Religious Studies class this past school year I had cause to consider something I learned in my first year Psych 100 course, which in turn caused me to reflect upon general trends in the thinking of popular scientism. (If you've read my blog, I am sure you can already guess that I will be disagreeing with the trends in the thinking of popular scientism.) That's the background.

We read a book by Pascal Boyer (you'll have maybe read his name before in these posts) for my Interpretation of Religion course. In his book, Pascal Boyer claims that people worship statues of saints and pictures of religious people. To the argument that people are not worshiping but revering the statues, he says that there is no difference between worship and reverence (when the word is used in this sense). He says something along the lines of, "Imagine that you replaced the statue with a sign that says 'Pray.' People would be outraged/not think it's the same thing at all." Now, I'm not going to argue that no one worships statues of saints. That would be patently wrong. Some people expressly do. My point is this: Boyer is using a behaviouralist approach. He does not take into account the internal conditions of a person. Religious phenomenon (that is, religious belief and practice, not miracles) is measurable, he says, and what parts of it are not are irrelevant. Thus the internal emotional and intellectual state of the practitioner is irrelevant, except perhaps as it manifests in questionnaires. What is far more important to him is behaviour...so if people respond negatively to replacing a statue with a sign that says, "Pray," then Boyer assumes that they take the statue to be more than just a reminder to pray (which is what most people say it is, according to him).

The crux of the problem is the divide between behavioural psychology and cognitive psychology. Behavioural psychology essentially follows the idea that we cannot know what other people are thinking; we can only know what they are doing. So we learn about human 'psychology' through behaviour alone. We discuss behaviour alone. When we make models predicting behaviour, we do not even do so much as hypothesize or refer to thought processes. Rather, we say, "When this person experiences this stimulus, they produce this response." It is somewhat more complicated, of course, but they only care about behaviour. We cannot discuss thoughts.

Cognitive psychology disagrees. They say that thought processes are quite relevant and, while ultimately unknowably, are at least within range of an educated guess.

Behavioural psychologists are unwilling to make this guess, however. They are unwilling to sacrifice their certainty. They cannot be certain at all about thoughts, but they can measure behaviour and stimuli. They'll stick to their certainty, thanks, and look down on the cognitive psychologists for not doing so. The problem is that cognitive psychologists have proven that, in many cases, their models (thoughts and all) actually produce more accurate results. Behavioural psychology cannot predict certain behaviours that cognitive psychology can.

It's like there's a machine in a box. You stick an object on the conveyer belt, which takes the object to the machine. Then another conveyer belt brings out the object, which has been altered by the machine. Behaviouralists put objects on and try to find patterns with how they come out. Cognitive psychologists do the same thing, but also try to take stabs at how the machine inside operates. Their theories are obviously not certain at all, but often those theories are nonetheless better able to predict how a given object will look when it comes out of the box. Behavioural psychologists are unwilling to deal with the uncertainty, and so get poorer results.

The bottom line, then, is that behaviouralists choose certainty over accuracy. They cannot be certain about thoughts, so reject them from their models. In so doing, they lose accuracy. But it seems to be that their certainty hardly improves. Since we know that their theories are less able to predict phenomenon, I think we can safely say that they have even less certainty in the end. They may not takes guesses at things they cannot know; instead, they make firm theories that they can be certain are inadequate.

Boyer's statue problem is similar. He looks at the behaviour of someone worshipping a statue and someone revering a statue, and concludes that worshipping and revering are the same thing. This does not take into consideration the practitioner's subjective experience, and this could have drastic results for the rest of his theory (turns out it doesn't, but it could have).

Incidentally, I am have an interesting counter-example for Boyer. Say we remove the Mona Lisa and replace it with a sing that says, "Contemplate Renaissance ideals of beauty and gender." If people respond angerly and claim that it's not the same, does that mean they were worshipping the Mona Lisa? No. It means that the Mona Lisa is more than something that gives them instructions to perform a cognitive task, but gave them particular means to do so. Similarly, statues or icons do not only give us the instructions to perform a cognitive task (pray), but also remind us of assorted details concerning the saint or scenario presented, giving us aids to perform these tasks. We are experiential people, and sometimes we need images to help jog our emotions (to sympathy, to joy, to protectiveness, to thankfulness, to joviality). This is what icons do for some people; they rever the icons, which means in the Orthodox Church that the patrons respect the icons and use them as objects through which they can worship the Godhead.

Final note: I have noticed through conversations with the scientistically-minded that permeating the scientific culture is this idea that certainty is somehow an requirement or even ultimate end in knowledge. A lack of certainty gives some mathematical or scientific-type people anxiety crises or makes them uncomfortable with a particular field of thought. Sciences are "ranked" according to certainty (pure mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology OR ...biology, geology, environmental sciences). Oddly, this places mathematics, which isn't actually a science at all, but rather pure rationalism (as opposed to empiricism, under which domain exists science), at the head of the list. There seems to be an idea that, if you are studying something for its own sake and not for its benefits, there is more value in studying something certain than uncertain. To me this seems ridiculous and actually awful. Consider first that much of physics--quantum and, especially, M-theory--is actually theoretically unverifiable, let alone practically unverifiable. Despite it's absolute "certainty," it can neither be proven nor disproven. Consider second that there is actually no reason whatsoever to prefer certainty (or, at least, none that I have heard). Why is uncertainty and ambiguity not something equally worth picking at? Why is knowledge that is certainty inherently more valuable than that which is uncertain? I cannot think of a reason. Perhaps it is more trustworthy, but that doesn't make it more relevant or interesting.

Anyway, that is my rant about behaviouralism vs. cognitivism, and they related topic of certainty.

Now, to bed.

The Love Triangle is Broken?

I remember what I was going to write about!

Archie Andrews has proposed to Veronica Lodge. I know Jon won't care one way or the other, somehow having missed the cultural icon that is Archie Comics. But nonetheless, the news is in: Archie, after 60 years of indecision, has finally picked a girl. Now, it's the first of a 6-part series, so who know's what'll happen between now and then--knowing these comics, I'd say everything reverts to status quo, but I have a suspicion that they just might be finishing the comics for good, and, if they do, they might want to do it with a bang.

I have two things to note about that ending (if it is one). The first is that I'd have prefered that it ended with Archie still unable to pick. I do like endings which continue those essential traits of a character--Capt. Jack Sparrow sailing off on a new adventure, the cowboy moving on to the next town, etc etc. That's not say that I don't like development, but that I also appreciate seeing characters ending in situations that are still dynamic.

The second is that, as everyone on-line has said, he picked the wrong one. I mean, Ronnie! He can pick between the good-hearted, pretty girl next door, and the spoiled, self-absorbed (albiet better-funded) skank. And, frankly, they are exactly equally attractive; I say this because if you swapped their hair and clothes, they would look like the other. They are drawn the same. So in this case, it quite honestly is entirely personality. And Betty's just nicer. Poor, but nicer.

But the real reason I'm interested in this is that it's significantly altered a cultural icon. At least three generations grew up with Archie Andrews and his indecisiveness, and now they've gone and changed it. I've used this as a metaphor for a number of things by now, at least once on this blog. Now they've changed it and my analogy won't work. It's perfect for a number of things: times in which something is used out of turn; times in which someone can't pick between two appealing options; times in which friends remain friends in spite of potentially disruptive rivalries. It's a useful metaphor for many things. And now they've gone and buggered that up. Well, I still intend to use it anyway. I guess I'm just sore that they went and changed my childhood.

They spent too much time discussing it on the news, though. They brought in an expert, even. I suppose it makes sense that there is an Archie comics expert somewhere. It's a cultural force which people surely study. They also called on on-line discussion and reader comments (reader comments? why?).

Anyway, that's it for now. Weigh in if you've got anything to say.

Oh, and last night I rediscovered Lovecraft's love of the adjective.

[Edit 25 Feb 2011: On revisiting this post, I realized I never did indicate that it all turned out to be a literary-alternate-dimension thing. That is to say, we've been given a glimpse of two possible futures, one of which will happen; the trick is that we don't know which.]

The McDonald's Coffee Lawsuit

If you don't read Indexed, and you don't read at least the first comment on Indexed posts, then you may not have seen this:

http://ken_ashford.typepad.com/blog/2009/01/the-truth-about-that-mcdonalds-hot-coffee-lawsuit.html

The Silent Letter

Pet Peeve:

When people are typing and put multiples of a silent letter. For instance, "the story of my lifeeeeee."

What is this supposed to mean?

xkcd Is Delightful(ly Evil)

This would cause a furor, wouldn't it?

See the original at xkcd for the scroll-over.

Incidentally, I am not happy that my student government went and joined that Canadian Campus Alliance thing or whatever it's called. Did you know that student governments which are part of that Alliance cannot support or acknowledge pro-life groups? That's right. It seems that the CCA thinks pro-life=women-hating or abortionist-hating or something. They consider pro-life groups hate groups. I wonder how the campus will respond. How many pro-choicers who would otherwise be on the freedom-of-speech bandwagon if any other group was ignored will in this case either ignore the issue or support the CCA's decision? More than the pro-choice and freedom of speech movements will care to admit, I bet.

Intolerant Atheism

I've had this post sitting unfinished in my posts section for some time now, and I suppose I'll finally actually polish it off a bit and publish it. I was going to make a whole big essay about it, but never mind that anymore.

What bothers me about atheism as it is incarnated on the Internet is its general hypocrisy. I mean, I'd rather you weren't an atheist, but I'm not going to look down on you or like you any less if you are. What is going to make me defensive is if you start explaining why a person should be an atheist or ask me questions that presuppose an atheist framework or mock religion (any religion, actually) or suggest that religion is somehow undesirable or dangerous. What is going to make me actually angry is if you do all of this and then you suggest that religions are intolerant or closed-minded. This is a very common criticism; from what I've read on-line, it's the #2 criticism, following only "religion is irrational." The thing is, if you say any of the things I've outlines, odds are pretty good that you are acting intolerantly as well, participating in the divisiveness that you attribute to religion.

Some people take it even further, though, by publically declaring their refusal to listen. I found this quotation in the comments section of a self-described atheist blog:

"We do not need to find harmony with people who think that the world is controlled by an invisible god - we need those people to grow up."

The post advocated, or at least considered advocating, finding harmony with religious people (ie. the blog questioned the ethics of trying to suppress religious speech; as the author saw it, there is a balance between freedom of speech and protecting children from "brainwashing"). Many of the commenters thought he was being too soft.

But look at that comment. Let's say you are faced with a situation in which other people are doing something you disagree with. Do you decide that what the situation needs is for them to do something different? Do you say, "I am deciding not to do anything to remedy this situation at all in favour of expecting them to conform to my worldview"? Does that make any sense at all? Also, would you not agree that this is an exceptional arrogant, closed-minded, and discriminatory belief system?

I'm not saying this about atheism in general. I may not agree with it, but I wouldn't say atheists are always, by definition, arrogant, closed-minded, and discriminatory. It may sometimes feel that way, but it's certainly not the case. Rather, I am saying that people who express sentiments like that I quoted are being arrogant, closed-minded, etc. when they say such things. This angers me. I try not to be upset by it--unless and until they try to suppress public practices of religion--because it cannot impact my faith unless I let it. Still, though, it sucks being treated like you're subhuman, even if by anonymous strangers on the Internet.

Why "Hermetic Poetry --> Hatred" Is True

Have you heard of hermetic poetry?
No?
Don't Google it. Not yet. I will give you an example, and then you may Google it.

For my American Literature class I have to read some of "Tender Buttons" by Gertrude Stein; this consists of three poems or poetry collections, all of which fall under the genre 'hermetic poetry,' according to the back cover.

Here is an excerpt:

In the inside there is sleeping, in the outside there is reddening, in the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling. In the evening there is feeling. In feeling anything is resting, in feeling anything is mounting, in feeling there is resignation, in feeling there is recognition, in feeling there is recurrence and entirely mistaken there is pinching. All the standards have steamers and all the curtains have bed linen and all the yellow has discrimination and all the circle has circling. This makes sand (From ROASTBEEF, a section of "Food").

That is about the most coherent passage I've found in her poetry. Also witness:

Dirt and not copper makes a color darker. It makes the shape heavier and
makes no melody harder (From DIRT AND NOT COPPER, a section of "Objects").

Also, try to understand this:

A large box is handily made of what is necessary to replace any substance. Suppose an example is necessary, the plainer it is made the more reason there is for some outward recognition that there is a result. ¶ A box is made sometimes and them to see to see to it neatly and to have the holes stopped up makes it necessary to use paper (From A BOX, a section of "Objects").

Do you notice the helpful punctuation? Yeah, neither do I. Also, the plainer what is made? To what result? If you will give me some sort of syntactical coherence, could you maybe give me content? Obviously not.
And it gets so-called better. I'll try to preserve form here.

"PEELED PENCIL, CHOKE.

      Rub her coke.

IT WAS BLACK, BLACK TOOK.

      Black ink best wheel bale brown.
      Excellent not a hull house, not a pea soup, no bill no care, no precise no past pearl pearl goat.

THIS IS THE DRESS, AIDER.

      Aider, why aider why whow, whow stop touch, aider whow, aider stop the muncher, muncher munchers.
      A jack in kill her, a jack in, makes a meadowed king, makes a to let."

That's how "Objects" ends. I wanted to throw the book down the balcony (I was in the library, on the balcony) and then go set it on fire.
If you haven't guessed yet, hermetic poetry is a genre which deliberately frustrates meaning. It comes from being hermetically sealed, in that no air can enter or escape the container. In the case of poetry, you can replace "air" with meaning and "container" with text. It apparently means something to the author and only to the author, who uses symbols only he or she understands. Excellent, eh? What an artistic, creative, avante-garde waste of my time. If a text is not to some degree communicative, then it serves no purpose.

I recognize that this text is serving to make me think about the role of text. Can something constitute a text if it refuses to be communicative? It's the whole "what is art" question, but framed with particular facets of the debate in mind.

Anyway, it seems to serve like a failure of a Rorschach test. Some of it's scary, because it seems to have meaning, or non-meaning, which finally allows to glimpse inside the head of the speaker--and what I saw was disturbing:

Book was there, it was there. Book was there. Stop it, stop it, it was a cleaner, a wet cleaner and it was not where it was wet, it was not high, it was directly placed back, not back again, back it was returned, it was needless, it put a bank, a bank when, a bank care (BOOK, a section in
"Objects").

"Stop it, stop it" made me think of Hollywood-style Multiple Personality Disorder. Then it made me think rape. Then it made me think a schizophrenic or OCD child rocking in a corner, asking her memories to stop it. Not one of those is a particularly fun image, really. I'm now thinking the whole thing's just about a misplaced book, but that's just it. You feel crazy trying to pin this down with meaning. "Jabberwocky" asks you to construct meaning, or elaborate on what shades of meaning are visible in the text. Building a narrative there is fun. "Book" is like a trying to make sense of a funhouse, only the doors in this funhouse can't be opened from the inside and the people in there with you haven't seen the outside world in a while. It's like trying to interpret an acid trip or measure the particles in Frank the Rabbit. It makes just enough sense that you see how messed up it is, and you can't understand, and it's scary.

I know people will read meanings into all of this. But that's just it: they'll be hallucinated readings. The meaning will not be there.

My feelings toward this style of poetry is a little strong, and it needs a strong word. I dislike the concept of hatred--I can smell brimstone when I use that word--so I don't really mean that I hate hermetic poetry. Obviously it fascinates me enough that I ranted about it. But I strongly think it's stupid.

The Cult of Progress Rears Its Ugly Head

Or perhaps one of its ugly heads. This might be a hydra. In fact, I betcha it is.

I have a book entitled SciFi in the Mind's Eye: Reading Science through Science Fiction, edited by Margret Grebowicz. (Uh, Chicago: Open Court, 2007, if you're interested.) In it are a series of essays about a critical reading of science fiction. I read a passage from Harvey Cormier's "Race through the Alpha Quadrant: Species and Destiny on Start Trek" (note to people I spoke to this evening: I mistakenly said it was from the ecofeminist article; that was incorrect). Here's a quotation from that passage: "This throwback to the jungle adventure comics and movies of the 1930s ends when Tasha kills Lutan's original queen, Yareena, in a ritual fight. It may be the future, but though quasi-Africans are beaming themselves through space and making medicines a galactic civilization can't produce, they are still fighting ritual hand-to-hand combats to the death" (18).

Seriously? The author equates technological progress with moral or philosophical progress? I mean, don't get me wrong: I don't think that there is such things as progress one way or another. But I think it's even more ridiculous to say that what passes for technological progress is in any way connected to what passes for moral or philosophical progress. Case in point: the European conquest of North America. Ancient Rome. Ancient Egypt. I seem to recall them committing atrocities against more peaceful and harmonious groups, who also had less technology. And as far as the advancement of pacifist values goes, I think the Amish are pretty "advanced." (I'm going to avoid tripping up on Godwin's Law here, but we all know it.)

Stupid liberalism. Stupid technologism. Stupid stupid-heads.

Google Image Labeler

So I've been playing Google Image Labeler lately. If you're curious, there's a Wikipedia entry (of course). Basically, it's an on-line game that pairs you with an unknown person across the Internet, and you try to match words labeling an image. It's easy to play but takes time to learn, and also helps Google improve their image search accuracy.

Some things I've learned and encountered playing and watching my folks at home play:

1) You sometimes get paired with people who are deliberately unhelpful.
2) Some people will not type in anything for half a minute and then want to pass, after you've put in virtually an entire dictionary.
3) If you put in a very low-pointer, like "blue" or "woman," you can guarantee the other person has put in the same low-pointer, and you'll get only 50 points instead of forcing the other person to try harder and earn 140 points on, say, "amphibian". I'm not sure which is the best tactic.
4) You cannot expect people to know celebrities.
5) You certainly cannot expect people to know semi-celebrities.
6) "Sexy," for any young-ish woman whatsoever, is an almost guaranteed 140 points. Yay to commonly-accepted answers!
7) There are commonly-accepted answers (and not the illegit ones the Wikipedia article mentions), such as "girl" and "tie" and "bikini" and "trees."
8) Some people are very good at realizing that text in the image is fair game and an easy high-points match. Other people are not.
9) Cars, scantily-clad women, unclad women, and poorly executed manga sketches come up a lot.
10) Typing is hard.
11) Plurals are always a good idea. Even when there's only one of an object in the picture. I once matched on 'pyramids' when there was only one pyramid in the picture.
12) The Hensel twins have come up twice for me, and that's strange. Neither time did my partner know their names, nor did their names ever appear in previously matched words.
13) When people are labeling quickly and just putting down what comes to mind, they are actually very biased, race-oriented, chauvinistic, and judgemental. Which makes a lot of sense, considering the filter shut-down.
14) Spelling is trickier than it seems.
15) People are generally not as knowledgeable about animals as I am, but more than I expected.
16) Google apparently has porn on it. All pretty standard, though.


16 things is enough for now. Have fun playing, if you do.

Idiocy

Well, I suppose it was bound to happen. The recent political duldrums in Canada helped make the president-elect of our friends south of the border look much more attractive. The world was finally feeling safe with America as a superpower--no more wanna-be cowboys in the driver's seat any more. The Americans as a people seemed to have made a good decision, and we were all pleased with them.


But that number of people who must have stepped out while the vote happened started talking again. It would mar the pleasure of Obama's victory, except that the elite stupidity of the people with keyboards and an Internet connection has confirmed for me that Obama actually did win. It has a sort of ring of the familiar that tells me this is the same world is was in October, just with the promise of a little more.

On Why Writing My Take-Home Is So Painful

[Warning: this post contains whining about my life on-line. If this does not appeal to you, get off the Internet entirely.]

I'm writing a take-home exam. It consists of three questions, each regarding three thinkers and consisting of roughly four pages, as I cannot exceed twelve altogether. The process has so far been more time-consuming and painful than I had anticipated.

The reason is not limited to the fact that I don't find the topic very interesting. The reason is not limited to the fact that this process consists of lots of skimming through the texts for relevant material. The reason is not limited to the fact that I do not feel like I am in any way contributing to the academic community while writing this. The reason is not limited to the fact that my boredom incites me to eating unhealthily and unnecessarily. These are all contributing factors, but they have not essentially ruined the last two days for me.

No, the reason is that I have no focus, and therefore spend upward of a third of the time allotted for "working" on ridiculous forms of procrastination that are only mariginally more satisfying than the work itself. Had I had the concentration to just finish the miserable question all in one shot--or even in two intensive shots--I would then be able to go and do something I actually enjoy. I could read a book, or work on something creative, or play a game, or whatever. But I could then spend a significant amount of time on some activity that I could walk away from and say, "I'm glad I did that."

Instead, though, I waste time on Facebook applications. What a stupid way of spending the day. I also researched who the Crazy Babysitter Twins are. (They were credited to the Grindhouse flicks, and apparently they're a big deal right now. I suppose if you're willing to do photoshoots like that, you would be.) I also spent better than an hour on xkcd.com. Penny Arcade got some attention, as did the blogosphere (some readers will note comments from me on their own blogs). I watched the fake Grindhouse trailers on YouTube. I am pretty sure I spent time on Wikipedia, but I don't actually recall what I did there. Oh, and I looked up the list of fetishes from the xkcd comic I posted previously. Yeah, weird, I know. But I had to know. You can look it up yourself you want. "Deviant Desires," I think, and throw in "fetish map." A Google search should get you there. The domain name has been removed, but enough people have blogged about it that the original image and some of the content are still available, at least at the time of writing this.

So I theoretically remember everything I did. I can guarantee, though, that I won't look back on today and think, "I am so glad I did that. It satisfied me deeply." No. If I look back on today at all, I'll think, "What a slave I am to the computer. And I abused time so badly. And I pushed my computer to it's physical limits, more than likely. How horrible."

I feel unclean, somehow.

But tomorrow...

I have a study class thing for an upcoming exam. That will get me out of the house and will force me to interact with people I haven't seen for more than a week.

And I have Running and Reading, which will force me to run and discipline children and walk long distances in the cold in running pants.

I will also do more of my take-home. But tomorrow might be worth something. More, at least, than today was worth.

To make up for the unhappiness, I will post some pictures that should hopefully improve everyone's mood.

It Hurts...

...it's so funny. And true.
I'm thinking about this one: http://xkcd.com/481/

But this one will do: http://xkcd.com/513/


Oh, and this one! http://xkcd.com/468/ This sucker's pretty deep nerd. I was proud at first that I got it--you have to have a basic knowledge of the philosophy of mathematics--but then I realized how very very low I've sunk into nerdom that I was proud that I got a xkcd reference that I doubted many others got. It's something I'll have to live with, but...
And everytime I hear Whitehead is still imagine him as a giant pimple.

[Edit 7 Jan 09] Because of the remote possibility of a new democraphic of people reading this blog, I've removed certain elements from comments to this blog. Let's just say I didn't want anyone's feelings getting hurt. It's highly unlikely that it's you we were talking about, so there's no need to be paranoid; also, it wasn't all that bad; you'd probably just prefer you weren't used in the discussion at hand.

The parts of the posts that were fine, and need to be given for the following posts to make sense, are as follows:

Jon Wong says: Ick, while I don't pretend that comic 513 never happens, I don't like it because it gives nice guys a bad rep. I have a hardcore, anti-nice-guy friend (if you can believe it) who can't seem to break out of her extremely set conviction that all nice guys behave like that guy in comic 513.

English Clergyman says: The reason I posted it is because it's something I would have attempted in an earlier, stupider, more selfish and obsessive incarnation. Thus "It hurts". And that guy's not really a 'nice guy.' He's actually just a coward. There's a difference.

My Campus Has Exploded

That investors are apparently not investing in my university at the rate they used to could easily be attributed (I think) to the economic downturn and everyone playing safe and stupid with their money. However, the campus bubble seems intent on blaming it on a number of factors, most of which seem reason enough to withdraw funds. Overall, you see, it seems as though my campus is going insane.

Want to know what happened lately?

[NEGATIVITY ALERT: the following contains little happiness. Do not procede if of a sensitive constitution.]

There. Now everyone will read this.

If you're from the area (or anywhere in the country, apparently), you'll have heard of the Homecoming street party fiasco back in my first year. In September of '05, there was an unprecedentedly large illegal street party on Aberdeen Street, which involved abuse against paramedics (I'm serious), abuse against a police animal (someone punched a horse), trespassing, numerous incidents of public and underaged drunkenness, arrests for selling liquour without a license, lacerations from thrown and shattered beer bottles, and most spectacularly, a flipped and flaming car upon which people danced. Until about 10:30, so I hear, people stayed on the sidewalk, but with cries of "F-ck the police!" students swarmed onto the street itself, which has become the default mode of the Aberdeen Street Party in the years since.

This warranted national news, apparently; people got uncomfortable calls from their parents back in BC who saw their child's drunken disorder in a special edition of whatever their closest major paper happened to be. It was on the cover of the Toronto Star and warranted a full report in the Edmonton Star as well.

Since then, donations have been a little slower coming in.

And since then, campus newspapers CANNOT stop talking about Aberdeen. It's almost as though there isn't anything else to talk about, except the flagrant misuse of student fees and tuition, which is hardly new.

Then, last year, some students in Engineering jackets (read: some Engineers) forced a female, Middle-eastern professor off of the sidewalk and made slurs of some sort towards her. The campus rags wouldn't actually tell anyone anything about the professor, of course, which was acceptable in this case--but it will be less so later on.

There was a students-against-racism rally that year. Someone pointed out that it was a few montsh too late, and then the rest of us pointed out that rallies usually take months or so to plan anyway, and that's when you know you're going to have a rally. When some incident happens, there won't be a rally the next day. Maybe it could have been a little sooner, but this particular student was being an idiot about it, and it seems he set the tone for the rest of the school ever since.

All of this was bad enough, but this year...

1) Some AMS employee left the T4s of ever student who worked for any AMS-affiliated business that year in the hallway, unguarded and unlocked, in a couple boxes label TAX RECEIPTS, for the entire summer. Someone code-named "The Cold Canuck" took one of these boxes and delivered it anonymously to the 'official' student newspaper, the Journal, so that they could deal with it. At this point, the Journal decided that the best course of action was to 1) not ask the AMS about it, 2) not publish anything about it, and 3) ask their lawyers to get back to them in a few weeks about any ramifications it might have if they did anything about this. After a few weeks, The Canuck, apparently seeing three Journal editions go by without a single response, left a sampling from yet another box for The Golden Words, the campus comedy paper, to deal with. The GW did an admirable job. They went to the AMS, made sure they dealt with the issue, and then printed a full expose on it, legal ramifications be damned. Once this happened, the Journal decided that maybe it ought to run a piece, and so it did, and then alternated between slamming the AMS and glossing over the issue. Talia Radcliffe, the AMS prez, decided not alert former employees about the problem, though, and so a friend of mine, who worked in an AMS business last year, found out through the newspaper that all of her personal information--name, SIN, date of birth, credit card numbers, everything required to perform identity theft--could have been compromised. Radcliffe has still not seen fit to apologize for this gross misconduct. The Journal refuses to call her out on it. No one's quite sure whether the Journal controls the AMS (whichever candidate the paper endorses always wins) or the AMS controls the Journal (they can cut the paper's funding whenever they want), but it seems like there's some serious puppetry going on. Diatribe, an anarchic-libertarian student-submitted magazine, has frothed about how badly both papers handled the situation, which I read as whining about not getting to be the one to do the expose. GW has gone back to comedy. Nothing happens about this issue ever again.

2) The Queen's University Muslims Students Association prayer-space gets broken into several times. A QUMSA banner is burnt. Student-aged individuals (presumably students) publically heckle a female Muslim student walking down the street with religion-derived insults. What's being called Islamaphobia seems to be writhing in the campus' bowels. Muslim students are obviously not happy. I am not happy.

3) Strange banners which may have been homophobic are found in the student ghetto during the Aberdeen street party. People don't know how to respond, largely because the slogans on the banners don't make any sense. No one knows what the creators of the banners were trying to say, other than that homosexuality has something to do with it. It fizzles after a bit, because it's so weird.

4) Jacob Mantle, the ASUS president, makes a remark on someone's photo on Facebook. Within hours, the paper finds out. The remark is, "Nice Taliban picture." The Journal says that he comments on students wearing headscarves. Because the Journal refuses to mention people's ethnicities, everyone assumes that these were Muslim students. They were not. They were white. He knew them, and knew they were not Muslim. However, most of the campus, thanks to the Journal's negligent journalistic practices, thinks that he said that to Muslim students. It hits the Globe and Mail. There's an explosion. People from left, right, and centre are asking him to step down. He refuses to apologize. The AMS announces that they would like him to step down, but cannot constitutionally impeach him. People yell and scream and want him impeached anyway. Then people figure out that the Journal misrepresented the event, and, despite it being an ignorant comment, swing to support him en masse. The Journal cannot report on anything else. It's crazy, and blown well out of proportion. People start hollering about racism at Queen's, despite the fact that the comment was not racist but Islamaphobic. Then things get even stupider.

5) On Hallowe'en, there was graffiti on campus. One incident said, "Expect Resistance." Another said, "Kill the cracker in yur head." White paint was dumped on the Queen's sign. People are obviously put off by this, and Mantle gains more public support. Yes, there's a culture of whiteness at Queen's (well, white-ness and Asian-ness--there are more Asian groups than any other category of club on campus). But the other two I don't understand. Does "cracker" help anti-racism? I don't think so. And what's this resistence? Should I wear a vest? What? This is why we have twenty-odd campus papers: if the bleeding-heart Journal won't publish your opinion (and they'll publish pretty near anything), then surely the hell-bent-subversive Diatribe will. I mean, somebody, somewhere, will publish what you want to say, and, if they won't, you can actually start your own newspaper whenever you want around here. Expressing yourself is easy. Being intelligent is apparently a lot harder. So let's avoid graffiti, shall we?

6) There's some sort of public forum about whether Mantle will step down. Word has it there might be a referendum, where members of the Queen's electorate can impeach him or something. I'm not sure what it was; I do know it was unconstitutional and would have had no binding power. The meeting exceeded fire capacity and was filled with angry people from both sides of the issue. Someone pulled the fire alarm, and everyone had to leave. The meeting was not resumed later. Mantle did not step down.

7) Radcliffe publically criticizes Mantle for not apologizing. A letter to the editor in the Journal rightfully points out that Radcliffe has yet to apologize for a much more heinious offence than Mantle.

8) Swastikas and the phrase "Dirty Jew" are soaped onto a Jewish student's car. That she was targeted implies that the culprit knows her. People really start freaking out. The Journal doesn't get around to mentioning that the student in question is Jewish on the front page, which is where the story featured, but part-way through the continuation of the story inside. I think this is relevant information, personally. The targeted student says she no longer feels safe here. Queen's Hillel says that they've never seen this before on campus; this was formerly one of the most Jewish-friendly campuses they know of. Everyone is shocked and appalled. And rightly so. This is disgusting behaviour, and I would break the perpetrator's knee-caps if I knew who he was.

9) The Journal editor, likely feeling under attack, writes a column about the paper's struggles with journalistic integrity and how it's easy to come and talk to her about the problems in a rational manner. She is right about most of it. The problem is not (entirely) with her editorship. It's with the structure of the paper, its reporters, and its over-developed sense of self worth.

10) The new principal, Tom Williams, cancels the Aberdeen Street Party, following conversations with donating alumni and, get this, a student plebiscite which supported the cancelling. Students are outraged. "How dare Mr. Williams," they say, "cancel Homecoming just because it's worsening town-gown relations, alumni have stopped donating, our degrees are worth less, and the majority of the voting student body wants it cancelled? That plebiscite shouldn't be binding, they say. You know the partying demographic doesn't vote (even though that that issue would be on the ballot was published in the Journal weeks in advance and there were Facebook groups exhorting you to go and vote against cancellation). It's not fair!" Stupid people. If you haven't figured it out, I support the cancellation whole-heartedly.

11) People from within the university and without are calling for Queen's to be more proactive in fighting racism. That the incidents have been entirely religion or sexual-orientation based seems to be lost on these individuals. Let me repeat: racism is not the problem; religious and sexual intolerance is. DO NOT CONFUSE THESE!

11) The university introduces a new task force of facilitators whose job is to listen in on conversations taking place in public spaces and interject if they hear gender slurs, homophobic language, racially-tinted insults, or the discussion of "social issues." Yeah, that's right. "Social issues." Now, these conversation cops (as they've been dubbed by the Globe and Mail) have no authoratative power besides publically confronting and "sensitively leading the conversation," but I don't think we should be surprised that the G&M has name-dropped Kafka and that students are voraciously arguing about this. Now it's not student stupidity that's dropped the reputation of our school, but the actual adminstration. Great job, guys. Just great. Now, I understand what they wanted out of this program and that they meant well. However, I'm also sure it's an immense screw-up. It'll be terribly ineffective, it will make people angry and confrontational, and it will at best drive racism 'underground' instead of dealing with it openly. Also, I love the blanc carte with "social issues." What does this cover? Can I talk about, say, creationism or abortion without getting molested by the thought police?

Apparently not...

12) In the most recent Diatribe, which was way better than usual, a submission pointed out that a particular Canadian university student union that is campaigning for lowered student fees and other student "rights" has as one of its issues the banning of pro-life groups from campus. That's right. If you're group is anti-abortion, this student union thinks that you shouldn't be eligible for your cut of the student fee dollars--or university recognition, for that matter. Pro-choice groups are still OK, though, and this union is in fact in the works of distributing pro-choice kits and helping with abortion advertising on campuses. Why is this the case? Well, apparently pro-life clubs espouse violence. Somehow. Despite being, you know, pro-life. Oh, and they're woman-haters. Despite being usually more than 50% women themselves. The submitter, pro-choice herself, thought this was stupid and inexcusable in a university, which was supposed to be about discussing ideas. Disallowing one of the members in the discussion to talk is not exactly the way to espouse conversation. And, yet, no one seems to be opposing this platform of the union. People just see "lower student fees" and jump on board.

Remember when I complained about Internet commenters? Apparently receiving an education only ensures that your idiocy is more articulate, more complex, and more in line with the rabidly liberal dogma of Canadian academia.

And let me be clear: I do not endorse Islamaphobia, anti-Semitism, homophobia, racism, sexism, or any other form of repression. Neither am I a fan of unrestricted free speech. I think the stupidest and most hateful people involved are the ones making the slurs and comments. However, I think the reaction to it has also been moronic, lamentable, and not even well-meant, for the most part. I am frustrated with most of those involved, but I have no idea how to make a change myself. My fear is that, even if I did articulate this, no one would be able to hear in the media frenzy that's taking place right now.

Also, I've just stripped another layer of anonymity by revealing which school I attend. Oh, well.