Shitting All Over What Helps You Most

feminism, stupid, conservative, wingnut

bngfan is hardly original amongst conservatives for her hatred of feminism, she's just a convenient target for posting this picture:

Here's what drives me crazy about that. Bngfan is hugely into politics. However, without feminists earning her the right to vote, bngfan wouldn't have a say in the running of this country, something she clearly cares very much about.

Bngfan owns her house. Without feminists clearing the way for women to own property, she couldn't do that.

Bngfan has 3 children, not 15 or 20, which leads me to believe she's used birth control a time or two. Without feminists fighting for her right to control her body, bngfan wouldn't have the option to stop at a few children, which is also clearly something she wants.

Women who fight against feminism while enjoying the fruits of the feminist struggle are the worst kinds of hypocrites: the kind who work to create a world they have no interest in living in. They just want to condemn their daughters, and ours, to it.

The Dance of the New World Order

Bungalow Bill seems to be dead serious in his interpretation of Beyonce's Grammy performance as:

Beyonce's 2010 Grammy performance featured the dance of the coming police state.
Once again, we see how pop culture is used to condition people to accepting
what's going on in the world.

Beyonce dances with storm trooper like
police that resemble the sound cannon police last year in Pittsburgh during the
G20. When you see the performance, the message is clear. Condition the people to
the police state--check points at the airport with the KGB now known as the TSA.
Your papers please, now choose between naked body scanners and or all them to
place their hands all over your body.

Dude, if the New World Order is going to involve the entire police state dancing at all times while dressed like that, I am so there!

2/3 of a Person?

I don't know that Ray Comfort is not under one of those hoods.
bigotry, atheism, atheist, ray comfort, christianity, wtf

I know Ray Comfort isn't American by birth, but he's been here long enough to know that percentizing people is a tradition in this country*, but not one we're proud of. I can't quite understand exactly why Ray thinks it's okay to baldly state that atheists are 2/3 of a person.

If you are not conscious of the reality of God, it’s because you are only two thirds a person. You are made up of your body (the machine in which you live), your soul (the real you that lives within your body--your emotions, your will, consciousness, etc.), and spirit. Your spirit is your “God conscious” part, and that part of you is "dead in trespasses and sin" (see Ephesians 2:1). The plug is pulled, and so you have no light.

Ray, it's not okay to state that some human beings are less (33% less than Christians, but still 0.07% more than slaves!) than others. That kind of reasoning is offensive and dangerous. Hard as it is to believe, there are those that take you seriously, Ray. And you just told them that I am only 67% of a real person. Whenever people think they are more than others, that those others are intrinsically less, they feel free to do all kinds of things to the others. US history, which you should be familiar with by now, is rife with examples: the extermination of the Native Americans, the enslavement of blacks, and oppression of women are just a few examples.


Even you can go too far, Ray, and implying that the 3/5 Compromise was right, just applied to the wrong group, is going too damn far.



*For those not familiar with US history, prior to the US Civil War, slaves in the US were counted as 3/5 of a person for the purposes of enumeration for tax distribution and representation.

Oh, Really?

As someone who is chronically ill, you can imagine how I feel about Revival or Riots Ministries (props on the name, though) beliefs concerning illness and healing. (You'll have to click on the picture to really see it as it was designed to be a 5' x 7' card.)

Sickness is always from the devil . . .

First of all, this is so ignorant, I want to hit somebody over the head with a medical journal wrapped around a brick. We've only known about bacteria since 1683, when Antony van Leeuwenhoek took a look at the plaque from his teeth under a microscope. We've known about viruses since 1892, when they were discovered by Dmitri Iwanowsk while studying mosaic tobacco disease. We've known about genetic abnormalities since the first time, doubtless tens of thousands of years ago, somebody said, "Hmmm . . . those Smiths all seem to bleed to death after a scratch. Weird."

So to say that Satan causes everything from common colds to cancer is just astoundingly ignorant. It also leads nowhere good. It's not far from "Satan is rotting your joints" to "you are evil because Satan is rotting your joints. It's also not far from "I can cure your rotting joints" to "I failed at curing your rotting joints because you are evil", which is, coincidentally, where RoR Ministries is headed with their helpful instructions on healing.

The instructions on healing take advantage of two facets of illness and one of modern life. (1) Most illnesses are temporary in nature. With or without prayer, you're going to get over a temporary illness eventually. Colds only last a week or two, food poisoning works itself out fairly quickly, and even things like gout will resolve themselves eventually. (1) Chronic illnesses are continuous, but not constantly the same. Anyone with a chronic illness will have good days and bad. This is why it can be hard to tell if a treatment works or not. The sufferer may be crediting a treatment or prayer with improvement, when in reality they simply entered a better phase independent of treatment. (3) Most people will pray and go to a doctor, but if you have a certain mindset you credit god instead of the medicine.

Let's see how faith healing takes advantage of the above:

Command the sickness or pain to leave in Jesus’ name and continue to do so until it does. Do not back down! The devil is very patient and is much more willing to stick it out in a fight with us if he knows that we’ll give up before he does.

In other words, keep at it until the person gets over the illness on their own, has a better day or the medicine starts working.

Ask the person after you tell the sickness or pain to leave how they are feeling. I usually ask, “On a scale from 1-10, if 10 is 100% better, how are you feeling now?”

and

Thank god for any progress. 5% improvement is IS PROGRESS.

Continually pressure the person for evidence that prayer is working because most people like to please other people and will convince themselves that they do feel a little better even if they don't. Take that as a victory.

Above all, don't stick around. Eventually, the good day will cede to a worse one and the placebo effect will wear off, and then your victim patient is left exactly where the were wondering why god has forsaken them.

Fatigue

I'm going through a fatigue cycle again, so I thought I'd write about it for everyone who doesn't know jack about fatigue, which seems to be everyone I run into lately.

First of all, fatigue is different from tiredness. Tiredness is the need to sleep, caused by overexertion or lack of sleep. Tiredness is easy to fix, all you have to do is sleep. Fatigue is bigger, more widespread and unaffected by sleep. I've been sleeping 10-14 hours a day lately, and I wake up as exhausted as when I went to sleep. Judging by my dreams, I'm as exhausted asleep as I am awake. (I have literally been having dreams about trying to sleep and being interrupted. It's very surreal.) I'm not very clear headed, and I'm also not terribly interested in, well, anything.

The best way I can try to explain fatigue is imagine trying to get through your day while wearing a suit of armor made of lead.

Now imagine trying to work or do chores or care for children in this state. The exhaustion alone is exhausting.

Fatigue is frustrating in a variety of ways. Fatigue is a very common symptom. Virtually anything can cause it, so doctors are left looking in every direction for a cause. Diseases that case fatigue as a primary symptom, such as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia, are poorly understood, underdiagnosed, not very treatable, and most common in women. (And if you think that doesn't affect how doctors regard a disease, I'd like to know what alternate universe you inhabit and how to get there.)

Fatigue is also frustrating in that everyone totally understands it- "Wow! I know just how you feel, I only got 4 hours of sleep last night!"- everyone has a cure right at hand- "More B vitamins, try this tea, do this exercise!" - and nobody appreciates how you feel- "What do mean, watch the baby for me? You're so lazy!"

If you've never suffered from fatigue, you don't know how I feel. I have a doctor, I've tried your treatments. I would drink motor oil if I thought it would work. Shut up. I'm not lazy. The fact that I am currently upright is a testament to pure willpower. Shut up some more.

I'll get better. These things pass, eventually, I just thought I'd share and maybe promote a little understanding.

A Lesson in Management

I am beginning to think that I am involved in some sort of ad hoc psychological study involving management styles. I am the secretary for two of the partners at the law firm, and their management styles couldn't be more different.

Niceboss is the nicest boss I have ever worked for. He always says "please" and "thank you". He always asks me how I'm doing or how my weekend was, and he actually listens to the answer. He remembers things I have said in the past, to the point where, if he sees a video game advertised, he asks me if I'm playing or interested in it. Niceboss never gets angry at me. One time, I accidentally erased a long tape, and he simply rerecorded it. He did tease me about it for a while afterward, but that was it.

I would give Niceboss a kidney. His work is always flawless and done first. If he asks me to do personal errands on lunch, I do them, with a smile.

Meanboss is a manic control freak with impulse control issues. Meanboss expects me to psychically predict what he wants and when he wants it, and gets angry when I don't. This morning, he threw a fit because I didn't have the right size Post-its at my desk. About a month ago, he grabbed my stapler off my desk, tried to staple something, and when it didn't work, he threw the stapler at me. I swatted it away from my face at the last second with my hand, and it left a bruise. Nobody in the office, including me, found any of this unusual.

Meanboss' work frequently contains grammatical errors. He's not that great at grammar and far be it from me to correct him. I give people his cell phone number and then feign ignorance as to how they possibly could have gotten it. I check his email when I damn well feel like it. (He can't tell when emails came in. He doesn't even know how to turn on a computer.)

I do this because I fucking hate Meanboss. I wouldn't piss on him if he were on fire.

So, if you're in management, and you've noticed that your employees just don't seem to care about the quality of their work, you might want to ask yourself if the problem is them, or you.

Not a Family

bigotry, gay, marriage, traditional, same sex,
"Traditional marriage" advocates keep running into the same problem: how to define "family/marriage" in a way that excludes gays, but doesn't piss off childless heteros, like me. See, you don't want to get into the issue of "well, families only include children", because then you have to field questions like, "okay then, should we test people's fertility before allowing them to marry? what about older married couples in which the wife is menopausal and can no longer have children- should we force them to divorce? not allow older people to marry at all?"

Eventually, if you start arguing that family=children, but don't exclude infertile or deliberately childless hetero marriages, you have to admit that you just don't like gay people. Thusly:

The family is not easy to define, but I define it as group that includes dependents, children.

So, my family is not a family, as it does not include children. However, looking at the above, we could easily define a gay commune that includes children as a family.

Ah well, it's not like clear thinking is a desirable trait amongst bigots. Oh, Opine Editorials, you never fail to amuse.