World, Fix This Crap

1. I don’t have a million dollars, but if I did, I would pay a million dollars to figure out how to make this woman aware of this and this. Let me be as clear as I can. If you disapprove of someone’s lifestyle or the choices they make, but it does not affect you, it is not your business. Going after someone’s livelihood, especially in this economy, just because you think they’re immoral, is cruel.

And if you think that a person being in porn is so immoral and evil and wrong, going after her source of non-porn money is a funny way of showing it.

Good lord, did we not leave that “Let’s all talk bad about the ‘whore’ and try to ruin her life” crap back in junior high?

2. This article at Slate about shamans annoys me. I am, apparently and happily, not the only person it annoys. I have a couple of different criticisms than Jason over at The Wild Hunt. A.) “Shaman” is a culturally specific term. Using it to broadly mean any indigenous non-Christian healer is grouping a lot of very disparate practices together under a word that is really not designed to hold them all and doing so lets people ignore a lot of very important distinctions. B.) Many traditional shamans were women and many current neo-shamans are women.  Wright mentions no women in his article.

3. Megan McArdle talks about obesity with Paul Campos and then again here and her readers have a shit-fit. You see, if we don’t keep telling fat people how much they suck, they might not know! Oh, I mean, they might stop trying. It’s weird to watch people argue that they should have a right to act like an asshole for someone else’s own good.

I have to tell you, I think we need healthcare reform, but if this is just going to be a way for rich politicians to try to control the bodies of poor people, it’s going to make me barf. Like we’ll help people get access to healthcare, if they agree to let us oppress them. I don’t like that dynamic.

It’s not your business, but if people feel like its their tax money, they’re going to feel like they’ve bought the right to make it their business.

While We’re Contemplating

I have a new post scheduled at Pith, for supposedly 12:15, though I can’t ever work that fucker right. Every time a post of mine actually shows up, I about die of shock.

Anyway, I think it’s a good one, some funny stuff and some thoughtful stuff.

But I wonder if I’m not wrong. I mean, I, too, want to legislate morality–I want there to be rules that say, “Don’t fuck your intern and, if you must, then here are the steps for how to mitigate the stupidity.”  But I still think that’s different than what folks like Stanley do.

But maybe it’s not.

Do I Have Goals? I Don’t Think I Do.

So, we were sitting around drinking Monday night and my drinking buddy was going on about how he and his other drinking buddies sometimes sit around and shoot the shit about what their goals are and how they plan to achieve them.

Then he asked me, “What do you want?”

And I was a little frozen in terror, because I could not think of a damn thing I wanted.

Now, it’s not that I don’t want things. I mean, right? This is how I’m trying to do better than the generation before me. I don’t want life to be something that just happens to me while I sit around and try not to come to the notice of anyone who might fuck me over.

Not that I’m very good at not doing that. Just that I see that’s what we do and want to struggle against it.

Though it’s hard to struggle in a way that leads to being free when you don’t know what you’re doing.

You know what I mean? Sometimes you struggle and the ropes loosen. Sometimes you struggle and they get tighter.

Anyway, so I don’t think it’s that I don’t have goals or desires.

I think it’s that I don’t know them.

I don’t say them outloud to myself because I’m hiding from disappointment. If I don’t know what I want, then never getting it isn’t a problem. I don’t want anything. Woo hoo! I have it right now.

I win.

Maybe most people do not experience themselves constantly as the horse’s ass, but that’s how I feel my conscious mind works. The body is going somewhere, we are doing something (my body and me), but I’m just back here spewing shit, hoping the-body-I knows where I’m going, because I’m not even facing that direction.

This is one reason I remain a religious person even when I’m full of doubt. I need a way to hear my own heart. (of course, I think it’s more than that, but even when I think it’s only that, that’s something I need.)

So, yeah, clearly, I need some goals.

I think, also, I probably already have some goals.

I just need to figure out how to articulate them to myself so that when asked, I don’t just sit there like a dumbass.