“As men, Force is the greatest weapon we have … We must use it,” says racist manosphere asshat.

Yeah, I can see the brown a little. A few washes will make it more muted, too. But enjoy the brightness while it’s there! Mine is very very pale pastel now. Soon it will be plain white.

Katz – I am doing, I’ve spent the past four or five months with bubblegum pink hair because I’ve been too lazy to dye it. And I hate pink.

Thanks Clairedammit 🙂

“Dude, you’re seriously invoking Freud as an expert on Islam? lol”

Ha. Ha. No. He psychoanalysed the problematic transition of the ancient Semitic peoples from open worship of gods and goddesses to the exclusivistic worship of one Sugar Daddy.
It started with Moses. Was Freud wrong about that?

“It turns out they are mostly composed of normal people with a wide variety of opinions and attitudes about everything.”

Oh most definitely. I’m not talking about individuals here but about the basic tenent of Abrahamic monotheism. That there be only one god and all other gods are competitors of his attention and also false.

It’s because militarized fundamentalist Islam (as opposed to quiescent, pietistic groups like Sufis and Ismailis) represents to the manosphere a cultural unity and total mobilization of society for a unified goal that the West (writ large) hasn’t experienced since 1683, or, if one wants to extend it to the Russian Crimea, 1850. “Gates of Vienna” isn’t an anti-Jihad blog for nothing. One of the interesting things about some of the anti-Islamist manosphere is how it situates some relatively marginalized peoples like Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, and Cossacks as defenders of the Occident. (I realize that “Cossack” is more of a job description than a nationality in this context, but “Jews” in this context is also more a religion or a religious community than a nationality, at least until 1789.) It’s so spooky the way Khmelnitsky or 1944 never happened when we need to enlist everyone against Islamism.

Eurosbra, “It’s because militarized fundamentalist Islam (as opposed to quiescent, pietistic groups like Sufis and Ismailis) ”

I’m afraid you’re thinking of post-modern new agers (that California Caravan of Whirling Dervishes, etc) with your idea of Sufis there, Euro. Brush up on some South Asian His-story (as in onefathergod’s story).

Oh, I know the history, it’s just that with Twitter-length comments you can only compare and contrast everybody’s preferred vision of him/herself. And, um, well, how many Indian Muslims are there and how many Hindu Pakistanis? And, um, “Peccavi” and Hodson’s Horse and all that. And I should probably shut up now, as Israelis think we know enough about India and know all too little. One of the things I *do* know quite a bit about is Ottoman Palestine as a home for Bosniaks and Algerians and Berbers who left areas that came under Western colonial rule, and how the Ottomans began systematically treating Jerusalem Ashkenazim in ways that encouraged them to leave in the mid-to-late 1700s. If all the outliers took center stage for a bit we might get some nuance.

Sorry to interrupt this fascinating discussion about religion, but does anyone have any really good kitten or otter videos? My new medication is making me wacky and the Irish forced-birth thing is giving me a serious sad. A sad this big. *halfheartedly spreads out arms*

And, um, well, how many Indian Muslims are there and how many Hindu Pakistanis?

I was just wondering this myself! I was chatting with someone this afternoon about my favorite subject, food, and we were talking about the differences between southern Indian food and that from the northern regions, and then the conversation drifted onto vegetarian Indian cuisine vs. non-vegetarian, and then this question came up.

So?

“I was chatting with someone this afternoon about my favorite subject, food, and we were talking about the differences between southern Indian food and that from the northern regions, ”

One word: coconuts!

Nepenthe, I’m sorry your day is crap. I don’t have kitty vids, but here’s a pic of my big baby Lilly (hope this works) http://imgur.com/hjEzp

@skeptifem-

In my experience, the vocalizing and groaning and moaning during childbirth is not necessarily because it hurts more than anything ever (in my personal birthing experience, even with the epidural the first time, the pressure during the pushing stage was enough to make me groan and moan without being horribly painful), but it looks freaky as hell from the point of view of an outsider because we’re used to hiding pain except when it gets extreme (or when it’s being dramatized as insanely bad on TV/movies). I mean, there’s a reason I was so afraid to be loud during sex for a long time- moaning and groaning is a big no-no when you share a room with your sibling or have a snoopy parent, and anyway, when you’ve only seen people making that kind of noise in pain, it’s hard to associate it with pleasure.

So yeah. With my first labor, it was heavily managed- I was induced after holding them off for 42 weeks. I had back labor, the epidural (yaaaaay), and then pushed for 20 minutes with only a couple of stitches needed. But the baby was OP (face up), and 90% of the time, OP babies are automatic C-sections- so I dodged a bullet there, even though I was supposedly at a low intervention birthing center with midwives and stuff.

My second labor? I labored at home because I didn’t think it was “painful enough” to be “real” labor. Then when I got to the hospital (my insurance changed so no birthing center), I was at 9cm with a bulging bag of waters (not broken) and almost ready to start pushing. They couldn’t even get in an IV, and they were drawing blood between contractons. I had zero pain meds, it sucked a lot, but it wasn’t horribly painful, and after giving birth, it was immediately over- no pain beyond a bit of bleeding and a tiny amount of burning near the stitches. I used a lot of body movement and vocalization to manage the pain. I had zero outside “management” other than the OB lady massaging the perineum so it would not rip horribly during the birth and using her hands to guide the baby’s head down the birth canal, and the nurse helping me keep my breathing steady. In the end, being loud and moving my body around to deal with the pain was a coping technique, not necessarily an actual metric of my actual pain level. But I could see how to others, this would seem like a ridiculously horrible thing.

But yeah, the horror stories made me think that it would be far worse than it was even though I have always wanted to have children…and I can see people being put off of pregnancy and childbirth altogether if they look at the horror stories as gospel truth.

But no one should ever be forced to carry a pregnancy without their consent.

OMG. I just agreed to foster a mum cat and her 3 week old kittens. I am excited and of course the first people I thought to share this news with was you kitten-loving manboobzers. 🙂 Expect lots of photos and videos to be shared over the next 8 weeks til they are big enough to be adopted.