As I mentioned on the last Wikipedia post to ML, my boyfriend and I both got banned on Wikipedia for sockpuppetry. Why? Same IP address. Obviously we must be the same person!
Re: insulin
Yes, it needs to be refrigerated. Type I diabetes usually has two kinds of insulin: fast-acting insulin, the kind you take before meals/throughout the day; and slow-release insulin, for overnight.
The slow-release one has to be kept in the freezer and is injected with a normal syringe and the fast-acting one should be refrigerated, especially if you don't plan on using it for several days, and nowadays is more commonly injected with a metered pen. You can of course take the fast-acting stuff with you throughout the day and it will be fine for quite a while.
(My roommate was diabetic and had to give us all the what-to-do-if-I'm-in-a-coma speech.)
Regarding gendering children: I don't know if anyone remembers the NYT article many months ago about a hermaphrodite, sexed at birth (hermaphrodites are nearly always sexed female because "it's easier to make a hole than a pole"), who is now a crusader against this procedure. The procedure itself is pretty awful--if the clit/penis (a growth that will develop into one or the other once puberty hits) is more than x number of centimeters, they make the kid a boy. If it's less, they make the kid a girl. Anyway this woman(?) has organized lots of people who were forcibly sexed as infants. Most parents are told by their doctors that if you don't do it to their newborns, the kid will wind up so confused, ambiguous, and distraught, they'll never fit in socially, etc. The reality is that most of these kids wind up feeling even more confused, ambiguous, and distraught, and because of horrible scarring and damn-near mutilation they can't enjoy sex with anybody. Most of them advocate for leaving the kid alone until he/she is old enough to make a choice about choosing a gender at ALL, and if they DO choose, it's their choice based on their actual life experiences. I remember doing tons of research about this phenomenon in college and let me tell you, it's pretty gruesome, and the suicide rate is extremely high...
In unrelated but relevant news: speaking of feminism in action...
#121 - Serge
Absolutely! You didn't embarrass yourself. Bottom line is that clothing and fashion are mostly illogical, but we already knew that. I saw a woman this morning in a business suit wearing Crocs.
Serge @ 103 and Scott @ 106:
Victorian clothing (and this is a huge category, as Susan said) was not about restricting, cloaking, or punishing women (or at least no more so than beauty/cosmetics through the ages). It was a fashion choice. The same goes for Renaissance clothing. Queen Elizabeth I often wore dresses that revealed her breasts because it was a sign of purity and chastity. Victorian corsets aren't about preventing you from breathing but accenting your breasts and hips--the idea was to get a cone-shaped figure. No one said fashion made any sense. But the sometime costume mistress in me will argue that really, there was no oppressive male conspiracy going on--just oppressive, silly, illogical beauty standards (no different than today). How those beauty standards inform or reflect our attitudes towards women is a different story.
And for the record: if you're a certain body type corsets are way more comfortable than bras.
PRV, no offense, but stay away from my feminism. Serving women is just as misguided as trying to dominate them. We're not objects, we're not goddesses, we're PEOPLE. See Avram's post. We're just like you. I want to be respected as a human being, not exalted for some parenthetical biological function (not all of us need or want children, and "bearing life" is NOT our greatest calling). You want a higher calling? Join the Peace Corps. Spread truth. Fund good causes. Do something with your life and your money that betters the lives of all people, men and women both.
As far as "innate" differences in the sexes go, whether physical, psychological, or emotional, science has proven again and again that while there probably is SOME biological difference, it's so small as to be negligible. Are women less capable of aggression? More nurturing? Less strong? The biological answer tends to be "Maybe, but not enough to make a difference." The rest is up to culture.
Does anyone else remember this awful book?
I am so sick and tired of throwback feminism that claims to be interested in "protecting" women from their own choices (thank goodness for Justice Kennedy! We can't be trusted to make informed choices about our bodies). Poor poor women who have the unimaginable burden of being 100% responsible for sex. The author says she did not discuss men because women are the "sexual gatekeepers." Yay for blaming the victim.
What really troubles me, though, is this total misunderstanding of the function of sex. To her and so many others, it's currency. She says she wants women to embrace dating and romance "the better to get to know each other" and "Guys will do anything for homemade baked goods." Worse, she claims that "Real power is not giving it away, but using it wisely. That’s when you’re liberated, really." Because liberation shouldn't be about the simple capacity to make sexual choices and not be stoned for it--it should be about using sex to purchase power. And this is in my own country. Is that really the solution? I sure as hell hope not.
I saw that article, and honestly, I'm not impressed.
First of all, even evolutionarily speaking, a lot of scientists would argue that men don't envy women--they envy other men (see Bateman's Principle).
I find that womb-envy arguments avoid the real problem: sexism has frighteningly little to do with biology and everything to do with power. I liked Amanda's response over at Pandagon:
My theory about the origins of misogyny isn’t that it goes back to womb envy or anything like that. I don’t think it’s that complex, actually. All you need to do to see how one group of people can demonize and hate another is to look at the history of American racism. White people’s desire for cheap labor preceded fear and loathing of black people. The hateful stereotypes about black people came about as post hoc justifications for slavery—if you dehumanize someone, it’s easier to justify your oppression over them because you think they’re either hateful and need to be controlled or inferior and need to be controlled, or some combination of the two.
I'm not saying that the same thing is at play here as in slavery, but I think it's clear why things like sexism and racism persist: they're convenient methods of dehumanizing someone for the purposes of exploitation. Let's also not forget that the symbol of penetration is a powerful one, and in that sense biology very much informs dominance structures. We're smaller and lighter, too, easy targets of violence. A perpetrator, through the demonstration of violence against others (particularly public), secures his own safety and dissuades competitors (of food, shelter, sex, whatever).
And sometimes "because I can" is as good a reason as any.
#161 - ARGH! The jerk that deleted my article and banned me looks like he can't be more than thirteen. Sigh.
I just went through a whole ordeal with Wikipedia over their deletion of an article I wrote on Archibald Motley, Jr. (a Harlem Renaissance painter). They deleted the entire article because of copyright violation. What? I checked the website they claimed to be the source--some random arts organization website in the Midwest--and was horrified to see my entire article, word for word. The admins accused me of jeopardizing Wikipedia legally. They threatened to ban me. They refused to believe I had written it, and were oh-so-generous about offering to let me recreate the article without "stealing" from other sites.
The best part: when I ranted to my boyfriend about this he checked the website and discovered that they had stolen their other biographies from the NYT, the Guggenheim, etc. He commented on the Deletion Review Board... and we were both banned. Why? They said he was my sockpuppet because we're on the same IP address.
That was when I gave up on Wikipedia. I did, for the record, sort everything out, get the article restored, and unban us both--but still.
My personal peeves are the Original Research Police ("You failed to cite any published academic research on the lolcats phenomenon thus your analysis must be invalid.") and the Notability Gestapo, who rampantly delete articles they don't deem important.
Wikipedia could become a collection for all human knowledge. I'm inspired by that. But the obsessive, shortsighted attempt to create a "reputable" encyclopedia, both in style and content, undermines its own efforts.
#34 - No, he did not say anything slighting about women in SF. His review of cons, however, reduces fandom to a bunch of Yu-Gi-Oh trading card enthusiasts and people who dress up in latex. I've been to plenty of cons and while things like cosplay and anime catgirls abound, I have *always* found those people to be outnumbered by intelligent, insightful people (and hey, tons of cosplayers and anime catgirls are intelligent, insightful people, too). And if he's willing to reduce a cons to a gathering of a bunch of weirdos, I'm wouldn't be surprised if he reduced something like Wiscon to a gathering of a bunch of, well, feminist weirdos. Yes, SF cons are branching out to things like anime and comics that attract younger and younger audiences--but some of the best intellectual discussions I've had with fans have happened over a gaming table.
That being said, I'm not familiar with his reviews and have no opinion about his general treatment of such things.
Quick anecdote: Margaret Atwood visited Columbia about four years ago, and I went to her Q&A. A professor of our English department was interviewing her to promote her latest book. He asked her what she thought of the direction that science fiction was taking, and where she fit into it--and she cut him of with an abrupt "I do NOT write science fiction." The interviewer was dumbfounded.
#29 - Oh lord. I hadn't seen *that* article. I'm tempted to write him a letter and invite him to WisCon in a few weeks. Actually, that's a bad idea. I'm sure he'd just write another inane opinion piece about what happens when crazy women sympathizers get together and worry their silly pretty little heads about "literature" or politics.
Oh, but did you notice? He referred to science fiction as a "literary category." What the hell does that mean?
I'm totally working right now, I swear.
#96 - You're not not going to watch that movie!
#97 - Not quite. This is low-budget and the girls aren't exactly bombshells. The movie opens with a cringe-worthy sex scene where the lead sorority girl is having sex with her jock boyfriend and says, "Okay, now you're the blacksmith and I'm the princess..." You can imagine where it goes from there. The movie gets way better once the bugs attack.
#92 - Gryphon was great! You missed out. It wasn't as good as Insecticidal*, though.
A quick check of the Sci-Fi website reveals that June brings to the world Ice Spiders. I know what I'm doing that day.
*Nerdy sister of sorority leader does science experiment with bugs. Sorority girls think this is icky and spray insecticide on her science project. Mutant bugs attack sorority girls!
#86 - You're close. Laura Bush professed her favorite book to be The Brothers Karamazov, a statement Tony Kushner went with.
#70 - Well, they did refer to the manticore as a "weapon of mass destruction." I thought they were expecting to find that in Iraq? Har har.
#73 - I don't see anyone "tearing apart" Romney (at least, not based on BE). Most of this thread has involved tearing apart, well, Battlefield Earth.
#33 - I never said it was any good...
#35 - I like that interpretation.
If liking bad things makes one ineligible for public office, I think most of us are screwed. Once the press found out about my affinity for the weekly Saturday Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie, my campaign would be in ruin! All those evenings of watching Manticore (featuring Chakotay as a military commander in Iraq who has to fight an enormous manticore summoned by a "Persian" enemy! The message here is clearly that like terrorists, mythical beasts hate freedom), Gryphon (exactly the same plot except "medieval"), Disaster Zone: Volcano In New York (evil hippies who want to harness geothermal energy tap into a hidden volcano! With Michael Ironside!), or Mansquito (which I sadly did not get to see, and thus cannot adequately summarize).
#15 - Speaking of candidates who write speculative fiction, what about the former President who wrote historical fiction. You can even read an excerpt!
Ha! You can't make this stuff up. I'm amused that one man in the comment thread says of Romney, "I’m dumbfounded. Mitt Romney was a valedictorian English Major." Well so was I, and since when did that preclude a person from loving genre? Sigh.
However, the internet seems to collect things like this and here is a list of favorite books mentioned by him (mostly on Nightline, I believe):
http://myclob.pbwiki.com/books. He's previously quoted Huck Finn as his favorite book.
In any case, I'm unsuprised. If people want to argue about his religious beliefs, remember that genre has a significant Mormon presence and is generally extremely accepting.
My favorite opening line is still from One Hundred Years of Solitude:
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano BuendÃa was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
And generally speaking, I tend to believe that bad opening lines can be forgiven. The worst thing a book can do to me is have that boring filler quality where I look up and realize that I'm at the bottom of the page with absolutely no recollection of how or why I got there.
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| 2006 | 10 |
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