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.
