I often write and then re-write pieces. When I first wrote the piece about Ms. Wallace's Wired article, which I wrote right after reading that horrible piece of shit, here is how it began:
Paul Offit Rapes (intellectually) Amy Wallace and Wired Magazine
By J.B. Handley
"The roofie cocktails at Paul Offit’s house must be damn good, I really don’t know how else to explain the intellectual rape that lead to the writing and printing of Wired magazine’s cover story on vaccines and autism that you can now read HERE..."
I was so amazed with the article. As a student of Paul Offit's talking points for years, it was as if he had put his brain inside Ms. Wallace head and written the piece for her. As is often the case, I forwarded my essay, via email in advance, to Ms. Wallace the night before it ran.
With some reflection, I decided that although "intellectual rape", a relatively commonly used term, and "sexual rape" were very different things, the use of the word "rape" was ultimately in poor taste, would distract from the article, and would most certainly offend some readers, and could appear demeaning of women, which wasn't remotely the intention of the piece or my words. So, I changed the article to the one you all have read, and then AoA ran it the next day. And, I sent Ms. Wallace, via email, the new piece.
"if someone has been masturbating before for the past six years and he stop it. is it possible for the person to recover all the lost sperms"
"I believe that all of us, even those who are atheists, seek God - or at the very least not one of us would be unhappy if God appeared and told us that the universe was actually His creation," Richards writes in God Is.
Oh, we might put him on trial for making it so hard, and get angry at Him, too, but we would be very happy that He is here. Well, He is.
Richards uses incidents from his own life to underscore his belief that God is present in everyday life.
Others might call them coincidences or luck, like the day when he was a child and he was run over by a car. All four wheels missed him leaving him unhurt.
He also rolled a car end over end in his younger years driving at a 175 kilometres per hour and survived. In that case, his forgetfulness in not buckling up probably saved his life..."There are things that happen in life which seem to be absolutely ordained for us," he says during an interview.
Richards staunchly defends "a person's right to believe," which he considers sacrosanct to a person's humanity.
The glib comments of non-believers strike him as sanctimonious.
But then again I have dealt with this all my life in my work, the idea that hubris and self-righteousness promotes sins against others. It's the one thing humanity continually tries to overcome and that they overcome it by recognizing in themselves and others a universal truth and that if this is denied as Harris and Dawkins and Hitchens kind of mock it
"The church has done enormous harm in the world but that doesn't mean that everyone who practises religion has done enormous harm," he says.
The Islamic fundamentalists have done harm but that doesn't mean Islam has done harm ... these things get very confused in our society. They get confused because there's a benefit to those who want to confuse these things. I know many Catholics who are tremendous people and who have never done wrong.
The only time man pretends he does not need God is when he thinks or she thinks they are themselves God or are in a position of such comfort that God cannot trouble or touch them. Once the man or woman finds himself or herself in deep trouble or despair, they search for what was always there.
P.S. You can now bother me by email anytime, if you are so inclined.
P.P.S. No, this does not mean I will start twittering about how I'm taking a crap (another word not in their dictionary).
P.P.P.S. "Fuck" doesn't exist either. Fuck!
If you take off your panties and get into bed with a man, he will conclude that you want to have sex with him. Counterintuitive, I know, but there ya go.
So if a woman took off her panties, got into your bed and rubbed up against you, meanwhile breathing, "No," into your ear, you claim that wouldn't be a mixed signal? I pity the women who actually want to sleep with you; what do they have to do, put it on a billboard?
Lately I've been seeing a lot of feminists (Isis the Scientist is one example, the Errant Wife is another) shrilly insisting that women should be able to wear provocative clothing without having men ogle them, or that women whoring around will not inspire violence.
One point he makes is that men will do pretty much anything else you can imagine for sex, why wouldn't they use force?
There are exceptions. I slightly know a fat, homely, middle-aged woman who was raped last year. The culprit has apparently raped other women of similarly low attractiveness. Why does he target this type of woman? I have no idea. This guy is the exception, though. Most rapists target fertile women.
Feminists need to separate sex from rape because that's the only way they can defend women's "right" to sashay around in provocative clothing, including late at night in bad neighborhoods.
Does a woman who does that deserve to get raped? Absolutely not. Is it a high probability that she will be? Yes, it is.
An analogy: suppose that when I go into the grocery store, I leave my wallet, with fifty-dollar bills sticking out of it, on the seat of my car. Do I deserve to have that wallet stolen? Of course not. Would anybody be at all surprised or sympathetic if someone did steal it? Of course not.
Basically, feminists want women relieved of all responsibility.
They tell women they have a "right" to do foolhardy things, then insist that there's no connection between, say, provocative clothing and rape. Does a woman have a "right" to wear a miniskirt and halter top? Of course she does. Does such attire make her more likely to be raped if she's not careful where she goes and with whom? Of course it does.
Anyway, I remember a couple of articles they published about rape. In one, a woman related that a man she had been "dating casually" showed up at her apartment unannounced. He started kissing her. She says she was "too frightened" to stop him or protest, even though she admitted that he didn't threaten her in any way. She lay passively letting him have his way with her. Afterwards, he said, "That would've been better if you had, you know, got into it." She finished, "It was years before I realized that it was RAPE! Sex to any unwilling partner is rape!" Well, how the hell was he supposed to know she was unwilling? Feminists had at that point spent years telling the world that women wanted to have active sex lives just like men!
Another article: after a date, a woman invited the man into her apartment. While she was pouring some wine, he came up behind her and started kissing her. She said something like, "Don't, I'll spill the wine." He said, "Let it spill," and embraced her. She submitted without any further protest. She too took years to decide that this was rape.
Yet another, hauntingly remniscent of the Mike Tyson case, though this guy was far more guilty than Mike: a co-ed spent the night in bed with her college boyfriend. She was wearing a short nightgown and no underwear. She had told him repeatedly that she wasn't going to have sex with him. Before they went to sleep, he kept moving his hands up her thighs and she kept telling him to stop. Then she went to sleep. She woke up when he penetrated her. She screamed. He kept on. Now, I suppose this one does qualify as rape, but this woman was behaving with incredible stupidity. (Thankfully, one letter to the editor did point this out.) He behaved wrongly, but really. What was this woman thinking? Did she really think that she could spend the night in bed with a man who had made it clear that he wanted to have sex with her, wearing a shortie nightgown, and still be a virgin in the morning? See, all those hidebound rules about how nice girls behave around boys - i.e., not spending the night in bed with them without any underwear on - was to protect stupid bimbos, and the hapless males they date, from exactly this sort of thing. I doubt this young man believed he was committing rape. She was sending out extremely mixed signals, and he was a college-age male flush with hormones.
I actually don’t favor ‘cautionary tales’ as the cases of Macross Plus and Macross Frontier
suggest. When the AI of Sharon Apple becomes too human, or when Grace O’Connor becomes too powerful via her ‘on-line’ existence and her robotic bodies — bad things happen. But these are cases where these characters are more plot devices rather than explorations so I’m not that bothered.
Today begins a very important initiative called Silence Is The Enemy to help a generation of young women half a world away.Why? Because they are our sisters and children–the victims of sexual abuse who don’t have the means to ask for help. We have power in our words and influence. Along with our audience, we’re able to speak for them. I’m asking all of you–bloggers, writers, teachers, and concerned citizens–to use whatever platform you have to call for an end to the rape and abuse of women and girls in Liberia and around the world.
In regions where fighting has formally ended, rape continues to be used as a weapon. As Nicholas Kristof recently wrote from West Africa, ‘it has been easier to get men to relinquish their guns than their sense of sexual entitlement.’ The war has shattered norms, training some men to think that ‘when they want sex, they need simply to overpower a girl.’ An International Rescue Committee survey suggests 12 percent of girls aged 17 and under acknowledged having been sexually abused in some way over the previous 18 months. Further, of the 275 new sexual violence cases treated Jan-April by Doctors Without Borders, 28 percent involve children aged 4 or younger, and 33 percent involve children aged 5 through 12. That’s 61% age 12 or under. We read about their plight and see the figures, but it’s so easy to feel helpless to act in isolation. But these are not statistics, they are girls. Together we can do more. Mass rape persists because of inertia so let’s create momentum.
The movement began a couple weeks ago after I was feeling particularly outraged after reading Kristof’s terrific NYTimes piece. I wondered aloud to Isis how we might draw attention to the mass rape taking place across the globe. Very soon we began coordinating a blogospheric awareness campaign to say 1) this is happening 2) it’s completely monstrous, and 3) we want change. But acknowledgment isn’t enough–people have to be motivated to care and act. We want folks thinking about these girls beyond a single morning they read a few coordinated posts.
Speech is action.
Let me be more specific: every word that is on this page right now is a contribution to the social and cultural gestalt of humanity. Every person who has read these words, or read some of them, or skimmed them, or heard somebody talk about them once, has been affected by them. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. But to dismiss a conversation like this, to unroll a banner emblazoned "Talk Is Cheap" and prance away towards far-off charity websites, is to elide a very important aspect of what it is to be human: that we can communicate, and that our communication can affect others and allow us to be affected by them in turn when they communicate back to us.
I don't think anyone here actually forgot that fact. It would be kind of difficult. But I never want to hear "virtual virtue" derided as meaningless. It isn't. It can't be. Virtual virtue, Internet virtue, is the exercise of virtue in communication. Such exercise is crucial to all other aspects of what it means to be human and humane and good. How can we be virtuous if we never learn what virtue means? How can we be virtuous if we never teach that meaning to others-- never discuss it-- never remark on its presence or absence in the stories that shape our minds?
Lois Bujold/110, you tell us talk is cheap, and then you demonstrate that it isn't. You tell us that we tipped you over from intention to action; you tell us that this conversation, this dialogue we're having right here, had a material effect on your material contributions to one or more causes.
You're right: holding admirable opinions and doing nothing is indistinguishable from holding execrable opinions and doing nothing. Because if we hold admirable opinions and keep them locked inside our skulls, nobody will ever know about them. But if we hold admirable opinions and talk about them, and defend them in the court of public discourse whose standards of due process you so diligently uphold, we can change other people's minds. Such a powerful phrase, when you think about it: to change someone's mind. That is action. That is admirable.
Lois Bujold/121 , I see more of the same. Your stance on falsehood and the provability of motivations, while interesting, isn't my primary concern at the moment.
Consider this: you ask us to rule our statements in the court of public discourse by the measure of due process, and by that, you mean we ought to read a book before discussing why we don't like it. Why can't we ask Patricia Wrede to rule her statements in the public discourse of fiction-- and fiction is a discourse; vast, slow, indirect, but a discourse all the same-- by the measure of virtuous speech?
And by that, I mean that you are engaging in exactly the task which you imply is cheap and easy and not enough for you. Here we are, expressing our dislike for yet another erasure in yet another place of a people who are erased too often already; here you are, expressing your dislike for yet another case in yet another comment thread where people talk a book down without ever having picked up a copy. It must in some sense be a worthwhile task to you, or you wouldn't be doing it.
Yes, monetary donations to charitable organizations often have a more concrete, or at least more measurable, impact on issues than words on the Internet. But somebody still has to say those words. Somebody has to say "no, this is wrong, this story has problems", because if nobody ever does, then the people who write those stories will never realize that they could be doing it better.
You are, if I'm to believe the name attached to your comments, a writer of stories. Realize that you could be doing it better. Realize that everyone you know who also writes stories could be doing it better. In other words, what Stella Omega/133 said.
Fiction_Theory/131, you made a good point extremely well. I'm now in the middle of reading the blog post you linked in the course of introducing that point, and it is a work of further excellence. I encourage anyone whose eyes are passing over these words right now to go and read both of the above; you will be improved thereby.
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| BCH446H1 Principles and concepts of cell biology are covered including the structure, molecular organization and dynamic interactions of cells with each other and the extracellular matrix during cell migration & cell adhesion. The role of cytoskeletal components and cell surface receptors in these processes and in membrane traffic will be addressed. OR PSL452H1 Biophysics and molecular biology of ion channels. Topics include equivalent circuits for cells, molecular structure of voltage-gated channels, distribution of channels, relationship between single-channel and whole-cell recording and regulation of channel function by voltage, phosphorylation, G-proteins and metabolites. | BCH426H1 A variety of questions relating to signal transduction are investigated. How is calcium regulated in the cell and how does calcium regulate cell function? How are extracellular signals received and transmitted by intracellular proteins to control cellular proliferation and differentiation? What signalling pathways are triggered by insulin? OR PSL450H1 Exocytosis and other aspects of secretion mainly in neurons and neuroendocrine cells, but also in pancreatic cells. Topics include synapse anatomy and physiology, synaptic plasma membrane and vesicle proteins, membrane fusion, genetic tools, endocrine secretion, plasticity in neurotransmitter release, diseases arising from secretion defects. |
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