But today, for some reason, I am finding myself reading about racism at every turn. I shouldn’t say for some reason; one obvious reason is the passage of Arizona’s SB-1070, otherwise known as the Fuck All You Mexican-Looking Motherfuckers!!11! law. It’s having unsurprising fallout already even outside Arizona’s borders, and what’s really been boggling the mind (mine, anyway) is how supportive the Libertarian contingent has been about it. (The reason I’m aware of it is that my housemate, a self-identified Libertarian, is completely horrified by the evidence piling up daily that a lot of other, so-called Libertarians favor this law. He can’t understand that dynamic at all; to him it’s a clear-cut massive governmental infringement of citizen rights along the lines of the Patriot Act as well as a blatant crossing of the line between states’ rights and the constitutional jurisdiction of the federal government, though admittedly in the opposite direction of the usual infringement. Poor baby.)

I have some Facebook friends who are generally all about individual freedoms, but they’ve pretty much all also come out in support of Arizona. One even declared boldly that the opposition to the new immigration law makes him want to go visit there even MORE (this was in response to a link I posted about the RNC deciding against having their convention there, which is some tangy irony if there ever was any). As I pointed out in response, with his own mop of blonde hair and white skin, making such a, er, radical and rebellious trip into ShowMeYourPapers!OrIArrestYourAss!Land isn’t all that impresionante.

I do understand when people hold differing views from me, and under certain and specific conditions I have no difficulty respecting said differing views and even seeing quite clearly where they are coming from and generating a reasonable amount of empathy. However, there are those conditions…the one that is being massively and regularly violated for me now is the consistency condition. I have encountered this issue before–for instance, in the everlasting abortion debate. If you tell me, for instance, that you truly believe that developing human cells in utero are morally equivalent to a born human being and this is why you violently oppose abortion, I can absolutely comprehend where you are coming from…as long as you don’t also display stances ranging from total indifference to wild-eyed enthusiasm about killing off those living outside the womb, for instance, via state-administered executions or foreign war initiatives. I am sorry, but when your concern about the rights of citizens being egregriously violated by the government suddenly becomes gung-ho eagerness to jump right in and help the government do it if said citizens happen to have brown skin or speak English as a second language, my contempt begins to uncontrollably sprout up between us.

I admit, when Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, while I wasn’t such a mooncalf as to even remotely credit the whole we’re now living in a post-racial America! meme, I did hope it was at least a small and permanent swipe at the underpinnings of white racism. However, I am becoming more and more convinced that the existence of a self-identified African-American President is actually acting like fertilizer on the apparently-unkillable weed infestation that is racism in America. Because of this

and this
and this
and this
and this
and this
and this

I didn’t necessarily think Obama’s presidency would make racism go away, but I didn’t think it would make it worse. (Was that the blindness of my white privilege again..?) Not that there are more racists now–ha! but that they’re all losing whatever it was that was preventing them from being utterly and unapologetically aggressive about it previously.

Is that a good thing? Now that it’s so much out in the open, will that make it easier to kill? Maybe–but, like the Arizona’s new laws, how many people are going to get really hurt in the process? And what if there’s not even an end that’s justifying these means?

Please, folks, stop doing this. Is it really that horrible to you that we have a black President? Is it..?

You are young and don’t want health insurance? You are starting up a small business and need to minimize expenses, and one way to do that is to forego health insurance? Tough. You have to pay $750 annually for the “privilege.” (Section 1501)

Freedoms being lost: The freedom to have me pay for your uninsured emergency room visits and your freedom to start up a business which can’t bring in enough revenue to cover a single annual expense of $750. Jesus wept!

You are young and healthy and want to pay for insurance that reflects that status? Tough. You’ll have to pay for premiums that cover not only you, but also the guy who smokes three packs a day, drink a gallon of whiskey and eats chicken fat off the floor. That’s because insurance companies will no longer be able to underwrite on the basis of a person’s health status. (Section 2701).

Freedoms being lost: The insurance companies’ freedom to deny coverage to anyone who isn’t young and healthy.

You would like to pay less in premiums by buying insurance with lifetime or annual limits on coverage? Tough. Health insurers will no longer be able to offer such policies, even if that is what customers prefer. (Section 2711).

Freedoms being lost: Your insurance company’s freedom to refuse to pay for you to be cured of most serious illnesses, such as cancer. You are also losing the freedom to have me pay for your uninsured emergency room visits during your downhill spiral. More Jesus tears!

Think you’d like a policy that is cheaper because it doesn’t cover preventive care or requires cost-sharing for such care? Tough. Health insurers will no longer be able to offer policies that do not cover preventive services or offer them with cost-sharing, even if that’s what the customer wants. (Section 2712).

Freedoms being lost: Your freedom to drive up my insurance premiums by needing a lot more expensive medical treatment for conditions that, had you used preventive care, could have been circumvented or caught far earlier in their much less expensive phases.

If you are a physician and you don’t want the government looking over your shoulder? Tough. The Secretary of Health and Human Services is authorized to use your claims data to issue you reports that measure the resources you use, provide information on the quality of care you provide, and compare the resources you use to those used by other physicians. Of course, this will all be just for informational purposes. It’s not like the government will ever use it to intervene in your practice and patients’ care. Of course not. (Section 3003 (i))

Freedoms being lost: Your physician’s freedom to hide from you the quality of the care he provides and how much it tends to cost. I personally am going to miss the current system of finding a physician, which if I’m lucky can be based on a friend’s recommendation but is more often a total crapshoot based on geographic proximity to my home or workplace, where I get to test-drive him on my precious, one-and-only body.

You are a health insurer and you want to raise premiums to meet costs? Well, if that increase is deemed “unreasonable” by the Secretary of Health and Human Services it will be subject to review and can be denied. (Section 1003)

Freedoms being lost: Your insurance company’s freedom to jack up your rates without any explanation or justification. Jesus Tears Mark III!

The government will extract a fee of $6.7 billion annually from insurance companies. If you are an insurer, what you will pay depends on your share of net premiums plus 200% of your administrative costs. So, if your net premiums and administrative costs are equal to 10% of the total, you will pay 10% of $6.7 billion, or $670,000,000. In the reconciliation bill, the fee will start at $8 billion in 2014, $11.3 billion in 2015, $1.9 billion in 2017, and $14.3 billion in 2018 (Section 1406).Think you, as an insurance executive, know how to better spend that money? Tough.(Section 9010 (b) (1) (A and B).)

Freedoms being lost: Your insurance company’s freedom to funnel as much of their profits as possible into “administrative costs” rather than into your medical care.

You will have to pay an additional 0.5% payroll tax on any dollar you make over $250,000 if you file a joint return and $200,000 if you file an individual return. What? You think you know how to spend the money you earned better than the government? Tough. (Section 9015).
That amount will rise to a 3.8% tax if reconciliation passes. It will also apply to investment income, estates, and trusts. You think you know how to spend the money you earned better than the government? Like you need to ask. (Section 1402).

Freedoms being lost: For 98.5% of Americans, absolutely none.

It’s a question I try not to examine too closely, frankly. The reason for that is, well, I have them already–I’ve had them for my entire adult life, really. The time to question my decision to have them at all has long since passed, I think.

But sometimes I’ll come across an article like this one–I try not to wince at the tone they inevitably sport, a combination of defensiveness and superiority–and I’ll find myself musing a bit on my own embedded and irrevocable parental status.

The title of this particular specimen, “9 Silly Things People Say When They Hear You Don’t Want Kids,” presents us with a list of reasons the author thinks the general population considers valid reasons for reproducing, and the author’s rebuttal of each based upon her own personal slant on the situation. I wondered, were any of these going to be my reasons for becoming a parent..? I doubted that from the get-go, given the tender age at which I began my personal population replacement program and that lack of logical forethought implied thereof, but there was also the greater possibility that one or more of the reasons listed might be a reason I liked being one now. So let’s take a look:

1. Aren’t you worried about ending up old and lonely?

I agree with the author; no, I’m not worried about ending up old and lonely–not only was I not worried about that at the time I had my first child (and who is worrying about that, at nineteen?), I still don’t worry about it now. I have never really understood the mindset of creating actual, live, individual human beings as some kind of 401(k) plan that are emotionally chained to your well-being. Frankly, it worries me more that I have people whose welfare is of such utmost importance to me that I may someday be a burden to, rather than a support. If I were deciding to have kids for the first time now, this factor would make me much more likely to decide against having them, especially with the increased likelihood now that I would predecease them by decades and cause them to experience that many more years of heartbreak and loss.

2. “But you’d have such great kids!”

Well, I must say I got the opposite reaction from those around me when I was a pregnant, unmarried nineteen-year-old. Quite the opposite, as I’m sure you can imagine. Implications of my contribution to the future generation of unemployed criminals were far more common. Of course, now people are always telling me how great my kids are…I agree wholeheartedly! and in this case, in a slantwise sort of way, this was one of my reasons for having them. Not because I thought from any disinterested standpoint that they’d be some kind of evolutionary step up for Homo sapiens, but because I passionately loved their father and thought he was a sterling example of humanity both physically and mentally. (Though to be honest, by the time I’d had the second one, my personal and intimate opinion of him had deteriorated markedly, but I did still think he was a strong healthy reasonably intelligent specimen and also, I already had one kid who was in my eyes completely awesome and didn’t see why a second one wouldn’t turn out the same way.)

3. “But you’d be such a great mom!”

Oh, my. As with number 2 above–that was very much not what I was told at the time. And I still catch a fair amount of flack from their father on my non-ideal motherhood, and God knows compared to just about any TV mom in general or the pervasive societal ideal of Teh Mother, I have always fallen far short of the standard. But my kids seem fond of me..? Truly, I’m not a great mom, and I never thought I would be a great mom, either–where the hell would I have learned how to be a great mom? Not from my mother, I’m afraid–I think this one will have to go into the same box as number 1–had I thought about it logically at the time, I would have specifically not had children for this reason, rather than being inspired to have them because of it.

4. Don’t you want a family?

Yes, I always desperately yearned for one, and still have moments where I sadly wish I had a good and present one–but again, as with number 1, I really can’t see creating individual, live human beings solely to fill up some emotional holes in my life. In fact, I find it repugnant. Therapy and strong adult friendships are the palliative for having an absent and/or wildly dysfunctional family, folks–not poppin’ out brand new people who are utterly dependent upon you for well over a decade and therefore have no choice about feeding your emotional needs in exchange.

5. “But they’re so cute!”

Well, that is true. But I admit, even at nineteen, I really wasn’t thinking about that, and I can’t imagine thinking about it now if I were going to embark on parenthood for the first time either. I mean, if I want something cute around the house, I can buy any number of stuffed animals to decorate it. Having practically raised my younger sister from birth onward, which occurred when I was but nine years old, and being farmed out to babysit from age thirteen to bring some much-needed cash into the family budget, I had no illusions about either the cuteness of babies and small children nor the disgusting, scary, exhausting amount of work they were. And I wonder if people realize that childhood is really only a short part of the entire lifespan–my older son will be eighteen in February, and while I think him quite handsome at six feet four inches tall with a deep bass voice, moustache and goatee, he left cute behind quite some time ago and doesn’t look likely to ever return to it.

6. “But it’s natural.”

Can’t argue with that–my inability to control my fertility by my will alone was the entire reason I got pregnant in the first place, after all, both times. Contraception is quite an unnatural imposition on what my body does involuntarily. However, so is the progression of a fatal disease, or bleeding to death when an artery is punctured—natural has absolutely nothing to do with desirable, folks. They may intersect…or they may not.

Of course, there’s also the implication that it is natural mentally and emotionally to want to have a child, and therefore unnatural mentally and emotionally to not want one. I really hesitate to go into what is natural and what is not for people to think or feel. Says who..? Of course, some religious sects will tell you God, of course! because they’re the ones with the inside knowledge of what God is thinking and planning for you, of course! and don’t bother asking them Why do you know, specifically, what God wants me to do better than me? because you won’t get a reasonable answer.

7. “It’s a woman’s greatest achievement.”

Oh, let’s not go there. Unless you also believe that the act of ejaculation is a man’s greatest achievement and are lobbying the public school industry to produce and teach from only textbooks that discuss this as the greatest historical achievement of mankind. Otherwise, go away.

8. “You’ll change your mind.”

Obviously nobody is ever going to say that to me, as it’s rather too late for that. However, it is funny to me how taboo it is to ask anyone, or even initiate a discussion with anyone, about how you or they might have changed your mind in the opposite direction–how having children might have been a real mistake. And I can tell you, simply from having known a great many people fairly intimately over the course of my life, that it is not really all that rare for someone to feel that having one or more of their children was a mistake, and also, when you feel that way about your children–yeah, they figure that out eventually, whether you ever outright tell them that or not.

9. “You should have at least one of your own.”

I like what the article author says about this:

This is one of my favorites, as though kids were canapés or raffle tickets that would be gone by the time the party is over

She goes on to talk about overpopulation, which isn’t something I really worry about–access to choice in reproduction completely takes care of any overpopulation issues. All you have to do is look at nations where contraception is easily available, and their reproduction rates, versus places where it is banned or impossible to obtain, and look at theirs. I find addressing overpopulation as a standalone issue to be a waste of time. If you give most people, especially most women, the option to control their fertility, they will self-limit reproduction to reasonable, environmentally sustainable rates of their own volition.

So…why did I have kids? Not really for any of these reasons. I had kids because I was immature and reckless about contraception; because I was in love and thought I was going to be with the man who fathered them forever in a way that only an infatuated adolescent can; because I felt guilty about my carelessness once the results of that carelessness became clear and felt that I didn’t deserve to evade the consequences; because I was afraid of the abortion procedure; because the contraception I was given failed and when I became pregnant again, I thought I would regret an abortion more than I would regret having another child; because I believed their father when he said he would never hit me again. I can’t say if any of these were particularly good reasons for having children; in the main, I’d say they weren’t. Then I wonder just how many people have children for particularly good reasons, if emotional neediness and insurance against old age are considered good reasons…?

As I said in Part One, while I enjoyed the movie, I didn’t find that it rocked my world in a significant way for the most part. However, there were two statements that Bill Maher made, both near the end of the movie, that did perk up my “thought-inducing” antennae.

ONLY MILD SPOILERS BELOW THE FOLD.

The first came after several conversations he had with various Muslims; after he pointed out to each of them that the Quran is quite supportive in many places of treating nonbelievers with hatred and violence, even unto death, he got responses ranging from “No it doesn’t!” to “Well, yes it does but that’s only because of the time in which it was written.” All of them chorused at the end—”It’s all the politics! Not the religion!” And Bill said:

I just don’t buy it that these guys are in this state of denial. I think they’re just in a state of denial to an outsider. They will not admit anything is wrong with their culture to an outsider. (emphasis mine)

This struck me because of a recent (offline) conversation I had with a men’s rights activist–I was telling him that really, I didn’t find it much to the point to have conversations about gender issues with MRAs, because they simply weren’t going to listen to me from the get-go. It wouldn’t matter if the idea or information I was trying to impart was a solid and verifiable as the laws of thermodynamics; because I was The Enemy, a feminist, their minds would be completely walled off. Not just because of general enmity, but because my reasons for speaking must always be suspect–my purpose could only be, in their minds, to disrupt and destroy their movement–their culture. So even if something I said sounded emininently true and reasonable, it must be leading to Danger Will Robinson Danger! (An image of covered wagons circling together out on the prairie as the Injun hordes rush towards them comes to mind.)

He agreed that yes, this was a very real dynamic–and yes, it is also one that self-identifying feminists as a group also practice, as I know from personal experience being one in a group. While we may argue among ourselves, we take it as a general premise that the dissenter, since he or she is a feminist, has our group’s good in mind, no matter how disagreeable what he or she has to say is. This allows us to actually listen to it, consider it, and if it stands up to much rigorous testing and debate, sometimes even adopt it for our own. But the same dissenting idea, proposed by an MRA, would rarely get the same type and degree of consideration. And this is quite global among any group, especially one held together by some type of belief system, whether political, philosophical, or religious.

I have no idea how to solve this problem. I’m loathe to say that any problem is genuinely unsolvable, but this one is a real doozy. The fact is, many outsiders who negatively question a group do, indeed, dislike the group and would be happy to see it disbanded or destroyed. How is the group supposed to be able to tell what an outsider’s motives truly are? In the blogosphere, we even have a name for an outsider who “pretends” genuine interest and a desire to really communicate to disguise unpleasant ulterior motives–a “concern troll.”

The second was part of Maher’s final wrap-up monologue:

This is why rational people, anti-religionists, must end their timidity and come out of the closet and assert themselves. And those who consider themselves only moderately religious, really need to look in the mirror and realize that the solace and comfort that religion brings you actually comes at a terrible price. (emphasis mine.)

The first part, the call to, er, atheist militancy, is not new to me–I’m fairly sure I got my first dose of it via Christopher Hitchens but I’ve read many other present and past atheist and freethinking writers on the subject since. The second part, though, about the self-identified moderately religious–that did get me thinking.

My grandmother was religious. By this I mean that she unquestioningly believed in God, basically the Christian God and more specifically, the Southern Baptist Protestant Christian God, though she never in my hearing condemned a member of any other denomination specifically or other religion generally. She was a big believer in God’s love, forgiveness, lack of judgement, etc.–really, what her religion was to her was a way of expressing her belief in man’s love and caring for his fellow man, in the healthiest of human community behavior, in the ideal of physical violence being abhorrent in nearly every circumstance. (I’d say “every circumstance,” but I’m pretty sure she thought it was permissible to defend oneself from direct and immediate physical assault. She definitely thought it was to defend one’s children–my mom used to tell me a funny story about a couple of teenagers that were beating up on her and her siblings one Halloween and how my grandma chased them off with a broom.)

Did my grandma have a responsibility to discard her religion because it was irrational? Could she have? It was so deeply an ingrained part of her–but of course she could have; people ever since the beginning of any kind of widespread literacy in any decent-sized population have managed to do so. But I loved my grandmother, and she was such a good person–can I really believe her to have been propagating harm, simply because it was easier for her to practice her kindness and generosity under the guise of those tenets rather than having to contemplate them being self-originating? Can I really believe her to have been propagating harm simply because, during the most difficult times of her life, it was unimaginably comforting and inspiring for her to feel that she was loved and supported by an all-powerful being? It’s possible she might not have survived those times with her psyche fully intact if she could not have had that crutch–am I right to demand that she, and all the others like her, reject it anyway because of the overall harm the meme of “religion” has caused and is still causing mankind?

On the most personal of levels, there were significant periods of time during my adolescence and adulthood years when my grandma was the only member of my biological family who was willing to even make an effort to find out how I was doing from time to time, and I know how she felt about me–a few months before she died, she called me up to tell me that she was, indeed, dying–and also to tell me that I was the one person in the world who had always meant more to her than any other and that she thought that my existence justified her own–I meant that much to her. And she meant all that and more to me, as well–but she was irrational, and she was validating the terrible harm that religion has and is still inflicting on humanity as a whole. Should I have wounded her so deeply emotionally by insisting she give it up, and if she had refused (which I’m pretty sure she would’ve), should I have done what I would normally do with someone who I believed without a doubt was pursuing an ideology that was both generally and personally terribly harmful to myself particularly and everyone in general–should I have ostracized her? I must, if I truly believe what Bill Maher said about the “moderately religious.” And the fact is, I do agree with him completely. But I doubt I would ever have acted on it with my grandma.

And that is one reason why the moderately religious are very unlikely to ever be forced to face what they are doing in any great numbers. Too many of them are wonderful, lovable people to too many atheists–too many of them are family. This would be another problem that, while I dislike calling any problem unsolvable, I am unsure of what the solution might possibly be.

Study the topic of “taking offense” and you realize people are like tuning forks, ready to vibrate with indignation. So why do humans seem equipped with a thrumming tabulator, incessantly calculating whether we are getting proper due and deference?

Rarely does one see it put so colorfully, yet so succinctly…actually, rarely does one see it put so bluntly at all. People much prefer to jump onto the offense bandwagon than jump off it and God forbid they spend even a half-second coolly analyzing the situation.

From Slate’s Emily Yoffe:

We like to think we go through life as rational beings…In 1982, some economists came up with a little game to study negotiating strategies. The results showed that rationality is subservient to more powerful drives—and demonstrated why human beings so easily conclude they are being wronged. The idea of the “ultimatum game” is simple. Player A is given 20 $1 bills and told that, in order to keep any of the money, A must share it with Player B. If B accepts A’s offer, they both pocket whatever they’ve agreed to. If B rejects the offer, they both get nothing. Economists naturally expected the players to do the rational thing: A would offer the lowest possible amount—$1; and B, knowing $1 was more than zero, would accept…

In the years the game has been played, it’s been found that almost half the A’s immediately offer to split the money—an offer B’s accept. When A offers $9 or even $8, B usually says yes. But when A’s offer drops to $7, about half the B’s walk away. The lower A’s offer, the more likely the B’s are to turn their backs on a few free dollars in favor of a more satisfying outcome: punishing the person who offended their sense of fairness.

Otherwise known as “cutting your nose off to spite your face.” Nice!

Some other gems from the article:

It takes huge amounts of cognitive computing power just to keep track of who’s doing what to whom and what that means to you. Back in the day, oh, 70,000 or so years ago, we couldn’t just offload all this data processing to Facebook’s algorithms. Around that time, some scholars think, the greatest advance in the ability to keep tabs on social standing happened: Humans acquired language.

Haidt writes in The Happiness Hypothesis about the theory that language allowed humans to replace grooming with gossip. “[O]nce people began gossiping, there was a runaway competition to master the arts of social manipulation, relationship aggression, and reputation management, all of which require yet more brain power.” In other words, we may be less man-the-toolmaker, than man-the-offense-taker.

Humans have superb abilities to evaluate the defects of everyone else. The glitch, Haidt says, is that we’re blind to our own flaws…we think that our perception of events is the objective truth, while everyone else’s version is deluded by their self-interest. It is at the intersection between the urge for cooperation and desire for self-interest that we experience so much internal turmoil and external conflict.

Blogging has certainly been an eye-opener for me. I have probably offended more people in the five months since I started blogging regularly than I offended in the previous five years of merely face-to-face interaction. Why is that? Part of it is what I myself say–I feel that since I am writing a blog, to nobody in particular, I am free to much more openly and bluntly state my opinions than if I were actually speaking to a known person. I am free of the social constraint to avoid dancing around the possible tender feelings of anybody; nobody has to read my blogging, like they would have to listen to me if I were having a one-on-one conversation in person. Also, I lack control of who receives my words; I can no longer tailor what I have to say to suit my audience; my audience could be anybody. Thirdly, as anyone knows who has accidentally found himself or herself in the middle of an e-mail flame war, it’s a lot easier to misconstrue somebody’s tone in saying something when you can’t really hear their tone, or see their facial expression, when they say it–the same phrase can mean two or more quite different things, depending on how the speaker delivers it. With text and nothing else to go on, it’s much easier to infer a meaning that the writer never intended in the first place.

However, that ain’t all of it, by any means. A decent proportion of the people I have offended since I began blogging should never have been offended in the first place. I feel comfortable making this judgement because they were generally quite verbose as to why they were offended, and the funny thing was, what I said wasn’t actually what they found offensive. They read maybe two words out of every five, assigned their own (mistaken) construction based upon that to the entire meaning of the blog post, then went off like a horde of rabid banshees. These folks often share another characteristic; that eruption of offense would turn out to be one of the only times, if not the only time, they would ever leave a comment on the blog. “Drive-by offendedness,” one might call it..?

I understand that, as the article says, the function of taking offense is a vital part of humans’ ability to live successfully in groups. However, in the people described above, it seems that this group-survival mechanism has gone awry. As the article says about religion, for instance:

Across cultures, the traditional moral disciplinarian has been religion. Many of the researchers studying the origins of human moral emotions and behaviors say religion does not create morality; it is building on pre-existing patterns. University of Cambridge scientist Robert Hinde notes in Why Gods Persist that every human society has a code of conduct, and that code is usually “legitimated, purveyed, and stabilised by the religious system.”

Religion as this function is a valuable social tool, indeed, on many levels–teaching, supporting, and monitoring and eliminating harmful behaviors within the group. However, in some people, it goes badly awry; these people lose sight of the fact that religion is indeed a tool, and rather than viewing it in its proper role as a means to an end, view it as an end unto itself. Their particular religion becomes the ONLY true religion; in its most extreme form, they call for people to be disenfranchised, fired from their jobs, or even killed for not following their particular religion’s tenets.

Dedicated offendees express similar behaviors to religious fanatics; they spend a disproportionate amount of time to what’s necessary for group survival on the lookout for offense, react to it with disproportionate anger and aggression, and exhibit not only no effort to genuinely resolve the conflict that they mostly made up in the first place, but an outright refusal to even try. Why?

I speculate that these people are unusually dependent upon being in a group. We’re all social animals, but there are definitely different degrees to each individual’s need to be part of a group. Some people need it more than others from a purely physical-needs standpoint and some people need it more than others because, for whatever personal psychological reasons, they feel particularly vulnerable to attack from others and/or particularly terrified of solitude in general. Beware any of these people who actually find a group of others who share their particular physical or psychological neediness–in religious extremism, that’s where you get your terrorist organizations; in offense extremism, it doesn’t usually reach the level of physical attack (though it can), but it certainly generates a massive amount of monetary trauma in the court system, for example. The most dangerous situation of all is when a normally socially adjusted person, but one who has a lot of personal greed, finds such a group–by their very natures, the people in these groups often do not make very successful leaders, as that requires them to deliberately place themselves outside the group and results in inevitable friction with the other group members. However, an unscrupulous type that lacks their psychological issues, which enables him to comfortably lead, and is pathologically greedy and self-centered instead of too needy, can wield them as a very effective weapon for his own personal gain.

One thing the article that inspired this blog post and I have in common, though, is that neither of us have any real solutions to the problem of social over- or mis-adaptation in this regard. As the article says:

In Descartes’ Error, neurologist Antonio Damasio shows that humans who behave purely rationally are brain-damaged. Patients who have suffered injury to the areas in the brain that control emotion, but who retain their intellectual abilities, end up acting in socially aberrant ways.

In other words, you must walk the fine line of being tuned into the group’s social needs, as you will not function successfully upon pure reason alone, but you must also remember that the “three R’s: respect—the sense that proper deference has been paid to our status, reputation—the carefully maintained perception of our qualities, and reciprocity—the belief that our actions are responded to fairly” are tools to achieve an end, not ends in of themselves.

Just some thoughts.

(insert shriek, squeal and giggle)

It all started when I saw this post title on Hugo’s blog: ““Bowflex Boy” and Kristy McNichol: desire, celebrity, and the sexiness of earthy reality.” I didn’t immediately cotton onto the meaning of “Bowflex Boy,” and I think Hugo and I must be separated in age by at least a few years ’cause Kristy McNichol is a very vague childhood memory of mine. But further down in the post, Hugo says:

If you remember the ’80s, you remember the ad. I’ve done a Google image search, and can’t find it, but the picture is indelibly carved on my brain. A young, dark-haired man is pulling off his white t-shirt, lifting his arms over his shoulders. His body beneath is tanned and spectacularly toned.

(this is where the shriek, squeal and giggle came in)

Oh hell yes, I remember Bowflex Boy! Now, I had no idea that poster was some kind of nationwide sensation, not at the time nor at any point since–as a matter of fact, all my little friends had their walls plastered with big hair band icons–I was the only girl I knew who had, of all things, a home gym equipment advertisement on my wall.

Hugo goes on to talk about how insecure Bowflex Boy’s amazing abs made him feel when hanging over his head as he was naked in college and trying to make out with some chick and (I think) by extension how this makes him empathize with women who feel stressed by the nonstop avalanche of perfect female bodies plastered on every available wall, billboard and media device. (I say I think because I had a hard time focusing on the rest of his post–I kept getting lost in fond reveries of Bowflex Boy.) I did manage to gather, though, that another of his points was that, while perfect bodies cause us to feel lustful, we shouldn’t trouble ourselves because we can and do feel as much or more lust for the imperfect bodies of the real people we find ourselves in bed with.

The thing about Bowflex Boy, though, was that it actually wasn’t his aforementioned awesome abs, or pecs, or biceps, that made me fall in lust with his poster at age sixteen. They were very nice, but honestly, Bowflex Boy wasn’t THAT muscular. He was well-defined, but actually on the slim side, and you could tell from his proportions that he probably wasn’t a particularly tall guy either. What got me going, and has definitely been a trend ever since, was the subtlety of the sexuality presented.

(Oh, yeah, SUBTLETY! Some dude taking his shirt off is SUBTLE?)

Yeah, really. This is what I remember of the poster: The lighting is dim–not dark or fuzzy, just a low quiet illumination. His shirt is halfway over his head, hiding his eyes and most of his nose. His head is inclined down and his mouth is relaxed, neither smiling nor frowning–just calm. Motion is implied, but smooth and gentle motion, without aggression or haste, but without production, either.

(Warning: The rest of this post may contain Too Much Information. Proceed at your own risk.)

My mom used to keep issues of Playgirl (and other magazines, but we’ll stick with Playgirl for the purposes of this post) around the house–I don’t know when she started, but I first happened across them when I was around twelve years old. I wasn’t too interested at the time, and in spite of my increasing interest in sex and sexual matters as the years rolled by, never really did get interested in them. Why?

The men in the pictures were naked. I didn’t have a problem with that, but their nudity consisted of staring fixedly at the camera, so by default fixedly at the viewer of the picture, in a stiff awkward pose usually involving one bent leg, one straight leg and arms akimbo at their sides. The penis, by contrast, was mostly flaccid and resting like an afterthought against whichever thigh was nearest. And it was the same with my girlfriends’ big hair band posters except that they had clothes on–the men staring directly into the camera, shoulders thrust back, arms akimbo–often staring down their noses at the camera–lips thrust out, rigid stance–it reminds me of Everything Zen by Bush, as in “…there’s no sex in your violence..!”

I have a naked picture of my boyfriend that I really like–I have been known to cart it along with me on business trips even. In it, he’s lying on the bed, clearly relaxed; he is holding his erect penis in his hand, not tightly squeezing or loosely cupping but holding with an interest, let’s say. He’s looking down at it; his expression is intent, with a hint of a smile on his mouth. I find this picture incredibly sensual. It is, in a nutshell, sex without violence–with self-knowledge, with ease and without aggression. He wants to please and to be pleased. He also isn’t a big tall guy–the lightness of his frame suggests grace, but his shape is pure male, wide shoulders and defined shoulders and biceps trailing to narrow hips–strength, but without force or crushing.

Of all the pictures and posters I saw as a teen and even into my young adulthood, only the Bowflex Boy offered that sensuality to a woman. What I don’t know is if what draws me so strongly is unusual, my own idiosyncracy, and most women are drawn to the large and forceful aggression generally pictured in the posters back then, or if that vision of male sexuality is simply what the heterosexual men who overwhelmingly dominated marketing in those days just decided that that was what women wanted to see. The fact that that poster was apparently so popular, though, inclines me to think that perhaps it really isn’t just me…anybody* have any thoughts on that?

*Note: I apologize for the heteronormative focus of this post–female het desire for a male is the only form of sexual desire I really have significant first-person experience with, though.

1. You have a monthly billing rate. Find out what the approximate rate is — this will be different for each company based on expenditure, but figure it on the heavy side. If you like to order six-hour blocks of Playboy, for example, you might include that in your budget.

Let’s say you have a bill that equals $100 a month.

2. If you can’t pay in full, most companies will ask that you pay a certain percentage of the total amount due. This percentage must at least cover the past amount due on your bill. My company starts at 80%, and if this can’t be met 70%, then 60% and so on. If you can find an honest representative, find out what this percentage is.

Thus, if you are thirty days late at $100 a month, you would have to pay $180 or $170 or $160 et cetera to keep your service on.

2a. My company does not go under the most past-due amount. If you have made partial payments and your bill equals $260 dollars:

61-90 days $100
31-60 days $100
1-30 days $60

You must pay $60 to keep your service on. Again, find an honest rep that can verify how many days past due you can make your payment (in our case 60 days is the maximum). In this example, if you can go up to the three-month mark, you have to pay $60 to keep your service on and $100 by the next due date to keep your service on, and so forth.

3. If you keep getting a bill that seems higher than usual, it’s because you keep paying past it’s due date. The next bill is printing before the company receives your payment. Thus, your next bill does not reflect the payment you made. Again, it is important that you know the day that your bills are due every month, and the day that your bill prints every month.

4. Gas and electric companies are legally bound in most states to keep their services on during certain seasons thanks to extreme temperatures. If you need to get away with not paying your bills, do so during the coldest of winter and hottest of summer. This is usually when your bills are highest, so I imagine if you’re broke you can get away with it.

5. Most utility companies allow you to pay on an average rate system. They take your past utility usage and average it over the course of a year and you pay a flat rate every month. Despite this being a benefit in that you can anticipate the amount of your bill every month and budget accordingly, it’s actually kind of a rip off. Gas and electric rates change with the market — and they are averaging for the previous full year — just pay what you actually owe. Ignore their payment programs.

6. Learn the difference between a “soft” disconnection and a “hard” disconnection. A soft disconnection is when the company discontinues certain aspects of your services as a “friendly reminder” to pay your bill. If you can’t get on the internet, if your voicemail stops working, if any piece of equipment that is connected to said comany stops working, call immediately. A hard disconnection is when the company has written you off as a customer. Simply, you’ve gone without paying for too long. You will probably expect to pay a reconnection fee after this point.

7. Does your company make payment arrangements? Many companies allow you to make payment arrangements. If your utility company is not bound by the strict measures I’ve mentioned above, you may be able to pay off past debts gradually instead of all at once. My company, for example, makes you pay off past debts, along with a reconnection fee and a first month of service, before you can get service reconnected again. This is not necessarily the case with all companies. Find out for yourself.

8. Keep contact with the company representatives. They make notes on your account, can give you deals and specials, and often their stats (which dictate their schedules and pay) are dependent on what they get you to buy. Your best offer, i.e. the company line, may not actually be what the rep is telling you. Press the issue. You can tell if your rep is being honest or not, primarily because they get paid about as much as you do. These are not elite folks.

8a. Be nice to your rep. They are far more likely to be sympathetic to your situation if you aren’t calling them losers and bitches. This happens at least ten times a day. They aren’t fazed by your insults and they aren’t fazed by your threats to disconnect. They may be able to cut you a deal or tell you what exactly you need to do to keep from being disconnected.

And finally, scoring credit:

9. If your service is shitty, call in. Don’t call in only when you’re fed up enough to turn service off. If you have consistently complained about the rate of your service the rep is more likely to offer you credit for your troubles. This accounts for installations, billing, credits not received, service that you have not received, etc.

9a. However, if you call in every time your service has an interruption and have insisted on a credit, your rep is going to see you as a money grubber and refuse credit. Especially if you have a history of not paying your bills on time.

Any other questions you might have I can offer answers in the comments. Thanks for calling Big Media Co. and have a nice day.

I am convinced more than ever that I, as a Christian, need to trust God and not worry so much when media events like the “Da Vinci Code” give people a distorted image of Jesus. When He wants to get His true face into the news, He does.

MICHAEL CORLEONE
Where does it say that you can’t kill a cop?

TOM HAGEN
Come on, Mikey…

MICHAEL CORLEONE
Tom, wait a minute. I’m talking about a cop — that’s mixed up in drugs. I’m talking about a- a- a dishonest cop — a crooked cop who got mixed up in the rackets and got what was coming to him. That’s a terrific story. And we have newspaper people on the payroll, don’t we, Tom?
[Hagen nods in the affirmative]
And they might like a story like that.

TOM HAGEN
They might, they just might…

I’ve cracked wise a few times this week about the Christians as the new mafia and McCain showing up at Falwell’s house to pledge undying loyalty to the godfather on this, the day of his students’ graduation. But the more I think about it, the less absurd the mafia/Christian comparison seems.

Whether it be a church or Cosa Nostra, you remain a member… or else.

I hear that you can only give two weeks’ notice in the mob when your doctor gives you two weeks to live. Apparently, there are a growing number of crazy churches with a similar intolerance for resignation. Try to leave and they’ll whack you excommunication-style:

After getting some coffee and making polite conversation “Bob” finally got to the point. “Thank you for seeing me, Pastor,” he began. “I have a serious theological question and I need your help.”

Well, his own pastor had somewhat of a reasonably good reputation on theological issues, so I asked, “Why me and not your own pastor?”

“He’s the problem. You see, I’ve been offered a promotion at work that will mean moving my family to another city. My pastor says that I am not allowed to take the promotion if it means leaving the church. He just warned me that if I do, I will be excommunicated for violating my covenant vows of church membership.”

Sadly, “Bob’s” situation is not as unusual as one might think.

The Catholics have always said that if you leave the church, you burn forever. Sounds like the Protestants are finally catching up.

That reminds me — even though they agree on the same general rules, both have several warring clans fighting for all the power. For further reference please see: Ireland, Northern. There are also no shortage of wackos like this guy:

There can be few people in the world who are more anti-Roman Catholic Church than I am. I believe the RCC to be a demonic cult that corrupts the Gospel and distorts the teachings of the Bible in order to lead the theologically immature to trust in manmade religiosity instead of the Word of God. Further, I believe there are no limits to the measures the RCC leadership and Magisterium will apply in their service to their master, the Prince of this Age.

Oh, and before I forget, the pastor who refused to let his parishioner go exposed that both extort their clients for artifical protection. You don’t want a molotov cocktail fastballed through your restaurant window, so you pay Tony Caps not to do it. You don’t want some supposed soul thing bodyslammed down to a dark pit of fire that isn’t there, so you give your church little envelopes of gratitude to see it doesn’t happen. Either way, the threat only exists because the protector made it up, but you still have to pay them for safety. Sweet gig if you can get it.

This also kinda reminds me of asking us to support imperialist occupations in the Middle East to prevent terrorism, too, except that this particular protection actually makes the threat real. But I digress.

For both Christians and Friends of Ours, there’s also no shortage of repressed man-love. Check out this interview with an obviously-closeted Christian who wrote a book about how the Sopranos are okey-doke with the Lord:

The characters in “The Sopranos” are in a closed, set-apart world. They have their own moral code as well. Does that raise more comparisons to the world of religion?

Yeah, I think it does. They exist in their own unique culture and have to figure out how to relate to one another. There is definitely some crossover there to people of faith. I think that’s one of the main attractions for people of faith, and for people in general. I think everybody wants to belong to something. And these people clearly belong to one another. Men write to me and say, “I want to be a part of a Christian Mafia.” What they’re really saying is “I want to be a part of a group of men that are so committed to each other that they would die for each other.” The men [in "The Sopranos"] are incredibly affectionate to one another. They kiss more than any other men you’ve ever seen, so there’s this deeply rooted love and trust that exists there. The challenge is when you violate that trust they’ll kill you. That sucks. But the glue that holds them together and the fact that they are so tightly bound is real attractive to people, myself included.

Finding people like that on the internets just makes my weekend.

Moving on, churchies and gangsters also have codes of silence once you get far enough up the ladder. For those of you who haven’t heard of the Fellowship Foundation, aka The Family, check out this Harper’s article:

Regular prayer groups have met in the Pentagon and at the Department of Defense, and the Family has traditionally fostered strong ties with businessmen in the oil and aerospace industries. The Family maintains a closely guarded database of its associates, but it issues no cards, collects no official dues. Members are asked not to speak about the group or its activities.

Oh yeah, and they both have all the politicians and higher-ups in their pocket, too, but I figured that went without saying. Still, nice to know they’re praying in the Pentagon, huh? I think I’d rather see them rent it out for mob weddings.

Perhaps most importantly, though, such pocketed politicans are literally willing to execute people who stand in opposition to the Church, kinda like if they were soldiers in This Thing of Ours. I’d like to remind you of eager US Senator Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) famous fightin’ words:

On the death penalty, he said: “I favor the death penalty for abortionists and other people who take life.”

He said he performed two abortions to save the lives of mothers who had congenital heart disease, but opposes the procedure in cases of rape.

“Under the mores we live under today, my lineage wouldn’t exist,” Coburn said, explaining that his great-grandmother was raped by a territorial sheriff.

Dr. Coburn wouldn’t exist. What a damn shame. We should definitely force raped women to give their lives to the result of their victimization just because _you specifically_ wouldn’t have been born. If that doesn’t illustrate the extreme self-absorbtion of your typical fundie, I don’t know what will. The mob’s kinda caught up in a bunch of self-important shit, too, don’t you think?

The churches and the mafia also like:
-men more than women
-not paying taxes to the government
-and talking about honor while using any dirty tactic they can.

Now if one of the lawyers in the audience would be kind enough to help me figure out how to prosecute the jesusfreaks under the RICO Act, we’ll be all set.