Garden of Daisies

Rise of the Conservative Right in America

I have something scary to report:

Since the 1960s the birthrate among the Conservative right in America is four times that of liberals (read: since birth control became readily available).

Interesting right? No?

Then look at it this way: Statistically that more than accounts for the rise in popular support for the Conservative Right in the States.

That’s right folks. People aren’t converting. It’s just that the liberals aren’t having as many kids.

Now you’re thinking, ‘holy shit’, right?

Now imagine this over another two generations…

yea.

I’m gonna go think about something else now.

6 comments March 29th, 2006

Feminists (aka whining schoolgirls)

Has anyone every read any good (read: solid, well constructed, valid…hell reasonable even!) writing from a feminist scholar? Seriously though…anything at all. I’m dying to see something worth reading…

…this year I’ve had a number of feminists on my reading list for various courses, and each one has not only disappointed me, but has also left me either disgusted or offended.

…if you are supposed to be a scholar it’s important not to whine in your academic writing; not to sound like a 16 year old school girl. And it’s important to work on your writing skills: “In his discussion on [such and such], [he] discusses [such and such]” is just bloody juvenille. I can’t believe this stuff is being published in academic journals!

*coughcough*…right. sorry. I’m off to class.

Add comment March 28th, 2006

The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

An excerpt from the book I’m currently reading:

They exchanged family gossip for a while, drinking bush tea and reflecting on how Mochudi had changed since their day. Mma Ramotswe asked after Dr Maketsi’s aunt, a retired teacher to whom half the village still turned for advice. She had not run out of steam, he said, and was now being pressed to stand for Parliament, which she might yet do.

Mma Ramotswe was quick to agree. ‘If more women were in power, they wouldn’t let wars break out, ‘ she said. ‘Women can’t be bothered with all this fighting. We see war for what it is - a matter of broken bodies and crying mothers.’
-Alexander McCall Smith

*unfortunately, women can lose this practicality when it is not fostered…when they have been raised to try to be men…
**for the record, the author of the book is a man.

3 comments March 22nd, 2006

A little bit on blasphemy, a little bit on heresy

Rob Cordry of the Daily show pointed out this wonderful little anamoly. First on the topic of blasphemy:

“He who blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall certainly be put to death and all the congregation shall stone him.”
-Leviticus 24:16

Then he went on to say: “You may ask why an all-powerful all-seeing diety needs mortals to carry out his punishments for him…
and asking that is heresy.”

Don’t forget to come back to Sunday school next week kids!

4 comments March 21st, 2006

UnCanadian Mister….and highly uncool!

Man’s car rolls into the ditch. Woman stops to help. Man assaults woman and steals her car. Man rolls her car. Couple stops to help. Man kidnaps the couple and forces them to withdraw money for him, before stealing their car and driving off….

Not cool mister. Not cool.

Add comment March 21st, 2006

An analogy

Believe it or not, I’m finally coming to terms with Cognitive Science’s fascination with Artificial Intelligence. I maintain my stance that it will not provide an explanation of cognition, but I have finally come to understand that that debate is not actually the point…what the field of Artificial Intelligence provides for us, is a framework in which to experiment with theories we do get about how the mind works. …Theory first…then implementation.

I get that now, I think.

It’s still not my area though. I’m still signifigantly more fascinated by the semantics of mind, and the physical realization of saide semantics. …..an anlogy:

When we observe an artist painting a landscape, we can ask two kinds of questions about the product taking form. We can wonder about the artist’s physical coorination or the expenditure of caloric energy in getting the job done. But we can ignore such mechanical questions and consider teh painting as an intended end product. Why this interpretation of the scene and not another? What was the artist striving to communicate? What goal did he or she have in mind? …The psychological question was not the “how of motion but the “why” of one style of movement rather than another.

I understand that what the behaviourists are discovering is fascinating, and neurochemical research is certainly an important field for countless reasons. ….but that’s not all there is to understanding the mind. There is an entire other field to do with why the mind does the fascinating things that it does. It is that phenomenon that I want to study.

5 comments March 19th, 2006

Apparently it’s a week for quotations from famous scientists

In his book The Descent of Man Darwin postulated that morality could have arisen when a certain tribe began to value the spirit of helping one another. Such a tribe, in the face of disaster would surely have been able to work together to get their community back on track. …and of course today some recent studies in animal populations are demonstrating that in certain instances the survival of communities can in fact be dependant upon altruistic tendancies amongst members of the population.

On the other side of the coin, however, a great deal of Darwinian research has propogated the signifigance highly individualistic behaviour, highlighting the competitive side of “survival of the fittest”.

In fact, in the very same book Darwin had this to say on that subject:
We civilised men…do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies proagate their kind. No one who has attended ot the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man

…….even when you adjust some of the vocabulary to something more politically correct for today’s day and age that remains a charged claim. …and the balancing of the two points such a profoundly fine line it’s no wonder that over 100 years later we still haven’t figured it out.

4 comments March 19th, 2006

Sexy quote for the day

“Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge in the field of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods”
-Einstien, 1972

….ehehehe

1 comment March 16th, 2006

Me against (perscribed) drugs

I thought it worthy of mention that for the first time in a very long time I’m on the side of the White House.

Admittedly our sentiments are differant. They are probably thinking something like “oops. ya…about that. sorry. lots of money on the war effort, we’ll get back to you”

I would be thinking something more like “Right. Ya. Sorry. Looked into it and decided not to endorse the chemical manipulation of our society anymore. Did some research and discovered that pharmacuetical companies funding research in science was a pretty obvious conflict of interest, then pulled the plug on your funding and have started endorsing naturopaths. Again, sorry (I did mean to send a memo).”

Ah well. I can’t really complain about the differance in sentiments, I’m all over a jab in the side at the pharmaceutical system no matter where it comes from.

8 comments March 12th, 2006

Women**

There is a great deal of irony in me writing this. I can’t cook. I don’t know how to sew. I’m not exactly the queen of keeping my own little household running or doing even my own dishes…I’ve always pushed myself harder than I could handle to try to be the best at everything I was working at. I always thought I’d be some revolutionary scientist or have some other influential academic career…but all that having been admitted to, I’d like to say that I’m sick of hearing about women’s rights in the way we talk about them these days.

I don’t mean to denounce the importance of the feminist movement. Women were being misunderstood and opressed and mistreated and undervalued and something had to be done. And something powerful was done and in many ways women are better off today.

Society paid for it though. Women can earn respect now, but the traditional role that women played is just as misunderstood and undervalued as it ever was. Today for a woman to earn respect she has to do it by living her life, each step of the way, trying to be a man.

I saw a play tonight that was frighteningly powerful. It had a cast of eight women, and it was called “vic”, short for victim. The play explored and ripped into almost every angle of what it means to be a woman and to put yourself in that role as the victim in all the differant ways that women do that to themselves, and it was a powerful painful thing to watch.

It had every broken woman you could imagine. It had a young black woman striving to build herself a powerful career but sick of being handed things for being female or being black, but held back by the fact that that stopped her from identifying with who she was. It had a woman convincing herself she could save the lives of soldiers in indonesia fighting in vain to make a differance. It had a mother clinging to a presbyterian faith trying to come to terms with her broken daughters. It had a career filmmaker so broken and beatdown by the trade that she had become a dark dangerous alchoholic bitch. It had a post-graduate student working toward a dissertation, driving herself mad still just trying in vain to please her own parents. It had a girl who had been beaten as a child, raised herself on the street, that battled alchoholism every day. It had a young teenage girl, with strict parents struggling with her very first boyfriend. It had a woman so in need of something to believe in she ended up a wife in a polygamous cult.

In each one of these women you could see the tendancy to reach out and to take responsibility for the people around them and to internalize failure of those around them…and you saw it at all differant stages. In the old filmmaker you saw the danger of a woman truly broken. How she still never ceases to reach out but that it becomes “at” people rather than “to” them, and how she’s not satisfied until she touches someone even if it means breaking them. …and in the young girl, you see the woman before her spirit is broken. Just trying to come to terms her body and her emotions and her desire to make a positive differance in the world.

Today women are called “needy” and “emotional”, and are harassed for symptoms of PMS. But the fact of the matter is our bodies were built differantly than the man’s body. We were built to be mothers, in every sense of the word. We were built to be the centre of communities, the lifeblood, to care for people and to take on nurturing roles; and in a society where that is undervalued our reaching out to people becomes “needy”. We were built to by sympathetic, to connect with other women and with men; and in a society were connection is misused we are labelled “emotional”. We were built to make babies, and that means our body is constantly going through a very powerful cycle, and in a society where we have to pretend to be men and that cycle is seen as nothing but an inconvenience, you’re damn skippy you’re gonna see some PMS.

Women are very powerful creatures. Women are beautiful creatures with the potential to be incredably influential and inspiring.

…if we could acknowledge that. If we could build families in which the role of motherhood was worshiped for the amazing thing that it is, and where a wife supporting and loving and encouraging her husband was considered an honourable thing to do…

..if we …if we stopped talking about equality as in ’sameness’…because the thing is we’re not the same. Look at a man. Look at a woman. They are not the same. They are two differant sides of a coin, a yin and yang, a night and day. They make a balance.

The Women’s rights movement was important. But it’s time to take another turn. It’s time to try again with women being women. And with that being acknowledged for what it is.

**to the boys: I believe the role of men is misunderstood today as well. But I am not a man, so I have less to write about that. ….watch Fightclub…read Chuck Palahniuk. I think he has a lot to say about it.

Poetry is no place for a heart that’s a whore
And I’m young & I’m strong
But I feel old & tired
Overfired

I will not pretend
I will not put on a smile
I will not say I’m all right for you
When all I wanted was to be good
To do everything in truth
To do everything in truth
-martha wainwright

4 comments March 11th, 2006