Hairy [chat]y Ants
I, for one, welcome our new ant overlords. May their antisocial circle-running usher in a new era of pain and suffering for the hu-mans. All hail the ant!
"Only a Sith deals in absolutes" - Obi-Wan Kenobi
Disagree?
I, for one, welcome our new ant overlords. May their antisocial circle-running usher in a new era of pain and suffering for the hu-mans. All hail the ant!
Posted by _J_ at 11:59 PM 12 comments
Labels: [chat]
You owe it to yourself to spend an hour watching this episode of Louie. And if you don't get it afterwards, then you need to read the A.V. Club Review to understand what you missed.
A low-budget comedy show on FX really doesn't deserve to be this good, or tackle these sorts of issues. But Louie continually meanders its way to heartfelt emotional truths via dick jokes, silliness, and in this case, ducklings.
Posted by _J_ at 12:06 AM 2 comments
Labels: comedy
It's apparently gender week here on EOIAS. Yesterday I started things off with a rant about the problems of Ablowing Chaz Bono. Today I continue my tradition of not providing positive cases with a rant about Australian Passports.
Two weeks ago I read an article about the addition of Gender-X as a category to Australian Passports. Now that I’ve stewed the concept for a while, I present my reflections to you, my six quazi-loyal readers.
Australian passports will now have three gender options — male, female and indeterminate — under new guidelines to remove discrimination against transgender and intersex people, the government said Thursday.
Intersex people, who are biologically not entirely male or female, will be able to list their gender on passports as "X."
Transgender people, whose perception of their own sex is at odds with their biology, will be able to pick whether they are male or female if their choice is supported by a doctor's statement. Transgender people cannot pick "X."
'X' is really quite important because there are people who are indeed genetically ambiguous and were probably arbitrarily assigned as one sex or the other at birth," Pratt said. "It's a really important recognition of people's human rights that if they choose to have their sex as 'indeterminate,' that they can."
Posted by _J_ at 4:06 AM 32 comments
Sex and Gender arguments are good for the same reason that abortion arguments are good: People really, really care about these issues. And, usually, that care translates into an impenetrable veil of emotion that clouds any semblance of reason. So, while the arguments descend into nonsense quite quickly, it is a passionate, visceral, argumentative nonsense with raised voices and finger pointing.
You know, fun.
So, when “Dr.” Keith Ablow starts discussing Chaz Bono’s inclusion on Dancing with the Stars, we know we’re in for good times.
Now, I should say that I am not entirely opposed to Ablow’s “position”. You see, as an individual with a faculty of reason, I can discern some problems with the notion of transgendered persons: they do not play nicely with our binary categories. Transgender invites ambiguity and subjectivism / relativism into our clean division between male and female. We’ve had these categories for quite some time, most languages contain the division, and a vast majority of persons fit neatly into one or the other. With that recognition, I can agree, to a point, with Ablow when he says shit like this:
It is a toxic and unnecessary byproduct of the tragic celebration of transgender surgery that millions of young people who do watch "Dancing with the Stars" will have to ponder this question: Maybe my problems really stem from the fact that I'm a girl inside a boy's body (or a boy inside a girl's body). Maybe I'm not a tomboy; I'm just a boy!
We really don't know how these behaviors influence people when they are mainstreamed and celebrated. But I would say during the very vulnerable times when kids are forming their identities, as well as their sexual identities, yes, it's possible that if someone is celebrated and lifted to heroic proportions like that of a civil rights leader that someone who is somewhat uncomfortable with his or her gender might say, "You know what? I'm going down that road." And that is a very tortuous road that we know very little about. And it's still the subject of tremendous debate.
Posted by _J_ at 2:33 AM 5 comments
7:25 – Bryan Magee:
It leads philosophers into a situation where, as soon as anyone makes an assertion of any kind about that world, what you then do is examine the assertion. And you get straight-away into the examination of statements, the analysis of propositions, an analysis of the relation of the terms of the propositions to each other, it’s logical form, so on and so forth. And philosophy soon, can soon seem to become, on that basis, about language. And, indeed, it would be true to say, wouldn’t it, that a lot of non-philosophers have acquired the view that philosophers are only concerned with language, and sometimes this is put, disparagingly, that “they’re only playing with words.” Can you give some explanation of why that sort of prejudice against philosophy, which is very widespread, is misplaced?
8:08 A.J. Ayer:
Well, a great deal of philosophy certainly is about language insofar as it distinguishes between, um, different, uh, types of utterance and analyzes certain types of expression. I think the main, I mean I would make no apology for this, but beyond that I think the answer I would give is that the distinction between being about language and being about the world isn’t all that sharp. Because the world is the world as we describe it. The world is the world as it figures in our system of concepts. And in exploring our system of concepts you are at the same time exploring the world.
Let’s take an example. Suppose now one is interested in the question of causality. Now, uh, we certainly believe that causality is something that happens in the world…I...I...am bitten by an anopheles mosquito, I get malaria, and so on; one thing causes another. And one could put it by saying: What is causality? And, uh, this is perfectly respectable, important, traditional philosophical question. You can also put it by saying: How do you analyze causal statements? What do we mean by saying that one thing causes another? And, in fact, although you look as though you’re posing a purely linguistic question, you’re answering exactly the same questions philosophers have always posed, only putting it in a different form. And we think, or most contemporary philosophy, a rather clearer form.
Posted by _J_ at 10:22 PM 2 comments
Labels: philosophy