Hey, everyone. So I sat down to write something about this horrific discussion of domestic violence on The Spearhead – which some of the Man Boobz commentariat have already started discussing here – and, well, I just couldn’t do it.
I need to step back a bit from this blog for a little while to clear my head and maintain my sanity. So I’m going to take a bit of a break – maybe just a few days, maybe a week – and post nothing but interesting videos and other things having nothing whatsoever to do with misogyny or the manosphere. You all, of course, can treat this any any other thread as a totally open thread to discuss whatever you want, including the regular Man Boobz topics of misogyny and general MRA shitlordery.
I’m going to start off with the dance number that first got me hooked on Bollywood music some years ago. This is from the 1998 film Dil Se, a drama about love and terrorism. But in Bollywood, even serious dramas have dance numbers, and Dil Se’s dance numbers are gorgeous and a little surreal.
The music from the film is by A.R. Rahman, a prolific and popular Bollywood music director best known in the US for doing the music for Slumdog Millionaire.
And yes, that is Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh Khan dancing on top of a moving train without any safety harness or stunt double or CGI trickery. (Well, there are a couple of brief bits where a double might have been used.) Enjoy!
Yeah, when they do get us riled (or more often, creeped out, or disgusted and contemptuous) it’s because of things they say in general, the misogyny, racism and ableism they all display, and the stuff so many of them fantasise about doing.
The sheer dumbfuckery’s in there too, of course.
This angers me to no end. My dad is one of the best men I know, anyone I’m with has to live up to the standard he has set with how he treats my mom. I can count on one hand the number of actual yelling arguments they’ve had during my life and you know what happened? He never hit my mom, ever. He also has a criminal record for something back when he was young and stupid and barely out of highschool. By their logic my mom should never have had anything to do with him instead of being married to someone who loves and respects her for the last 31 years. I really hate how we make it so hard for someone to get ahead once they’ve done anything wrong. My dad was lucky and wasn’t kept back by it the way he might have been had other factors been different.
You’ve a gentle soul, Boobz.
Thanks everyone! And thanks for all the videos.
augochlorella, I have seen a lot of oddball Bollywood videos but that one’s odd even by Bollywood standards!
As for movie recommendations, there’s always the super-popular Hum Aapke Hain Koun. It’s a kitschy wedding melodrama but the music is incredibly catchy and it’s got dance numbers like these:
Single mom shacks up with exciting tatted ex-con badboy and brings her kids along because WHAT COULD GO WRONG?
The victims in that story are the children who had no say in the matter. Equating the mom’s voluntary plight to theirs is ridiculous.
Feminism: seeking to give women the rights of adults with the accountability of minors.
If I may just weigh in on the whole “skepticism vs. harmless unprovable beliefs” thing…
I, like a couple other posters here (I cannot remember who you are at the moment, please forgive me), am Neopagan. Not Wiccan, since I find that religion a bit too regimented for my tastes, but I do identify as a Witch. I worship deities of nature and leave treats out for the faeries in springtime.
The thing is? I’m also agnostic. I’m not especially confident that said deities and faeries are really real. If they’re not, does that mean I’m wasting my time? Of course not. The rituals are as much for me as for them, if not more so. Acting as if these beings are real has made me a better, more gentle person, and studying witchcraft has introduced me to many concepts and techniques I have used to help myself and others.
For the most part, I trust science. But I don’t think it will ever have all the answers. Science relies on predictability and repetition of phenomena to get its answers, and some very important things are unpredictable and unique…such as human psyches. Science has to treat the mind as a “mere” extension or function of the body, specifically the brain, because dualism cannot be proven. But I think taking that view as a given leads to harm in that it leads people to treat minds as mechanistic things when clearly they are not.
Is there some conspiracy here to get me kicked out of the library for belly-dancing in the quiet reading room? Resistance seems futile.
Yeah, I’m staying at a homeless shelter right now, and a lot of other people in there are ex-convicts (usually some sort of drug charges) just trying to get a job and get on with their life. Personally, I think if the U.S. weren’t so keen on locking up people for nonviolent drug crimes, we might be able to do something about all those rapists out there.
Well, I’ve identified as an atheist for a while now, and I’m sorry there are so many jerkass atheists out there. Lately I’ve been identifying with Atheism Plus, and striving to be a friend to everybody (except jerkasses).
Also: French whiskey? This (not-so-)old Bourbon County boy’s cautiously optimistic.
Hrm…
Okay, as one of those evil “Capital-A Atheists”, I kinda feel a little need to speak in defense of the crew.
1: Anyone who says that science knows everything, or even that it WILL know everything, is completely unaware of how science works, and how the scientific mindset operates. A scientist–one who is actually doing it the way it’s meant to be done–loves nothing more than being told, “You’re wrong,” and having it backed up with proof. To be a good scientist, the first thing you have to do is take your ego behind the woodshed and shoot it.
2: Most of the really bad science-types you folks are referencing aren’t scientists–they’re science fans who’ve overlapped real-world science with science fiction (see Argenti’s post regarding transhumanism). Amusing point: “Brain-downloading”? That’s totally a dualist thing–it can’t work as described in a materialist world-view. (While the movie The Prestige talks about teleportation rather than downloading, the same core issue is at play there, and pretty much puts paid to the idea.) I can think of some other cybernetic-type options for brains, but that’s definitely not one of them.
2.5: On the flipside, note that most popular science fiction is fairly technophobic, and thus tends to obsess about the potential downsides (often completely imagined) of the suggested advances. See “Caveman Science Fiction” by Aaron Diaz as an example of why this line of rebuttal is often not as well-received as might be expected.
3: Atheism, humanism and skepticism are three different circles on a Venn Diagram. However, they are often overlapped, and there’s a good deal of confusion in the ranks about where the lines are/should be.
4: Atheism is not about saying “There absolutely is no God.” Rather, it’s the viewpoint that, until proof of a deity, deities or other supernatural claims can be verified, there’s no point in acting as if they are true–the default is the null position, and claims counter to that need to be backed up with evidence. Given the sheer number of God-claims, many of which fly in the face of direct evidence, this seems to be the soundest approach.
5: All that said, yes, there’s a very smug subset of atheists who need a good smack-down, particularly those who’ve decided that being right about one thing makes you right about everything; when this gets added to privilege, well, things get messy. (See: Elevatorgate.) In addition, anyone can be a smug bastard about anything (I’ve seen it in pagans and neopagans, Christians, Hindus, Shintoists, traditional Native American believers, atheists, etc, etc.). More often than not, associating the smugness with the identification and belief, rather than the particular individual, is a mistake. For those of us who want to think that being a Capital-A Atheist carries with it additional responsibilities, check out the Atheism+ movement.
I think I saw the start of this, but I missed Pecunium’s smackdown because BABIES COMING RIGHT NOW happened, and now I can’t even remember which thread this was in. 🙁 because I want to read Pecunium being awesome and smart.
Can I have a little derail?
I got some bad news today. A good friend of mine has a daughter who’s 12. Since she was about 3, she’s been receiving treatment for brain tumours. Today a few of us got an email from the friend’s sister – the chemo’s stopped working and the doctors have said there’s nothing more they can do. My friend’s asked that none of us contact her at the moment because a) she doesn’t want to have to talk about it over and over again and b) she doesn’t want her daughter to know. I don’t need advice or anything like that, I just had to have a little vent, because I can’t talk to any of my friends because I don’t know who knows and who doesn’t. It’s just. Not. Fucking. Fair.
I don’t even know why I’m telling you guys. It just won’t go out of my head and it feels like it’s just filling up with how just fucking shit it all is.
>>Science has to treat the mind as a “mere” extension or function of the body
Back when we couldn’t know where the ‘seat’ of personality was in the body, questioning this fact might make sense. Now that we have observed the results of brain injuries upon patients, and in fact have developed methods by which we can reliably ‘read minds’ via EMR, it seems to me the onus is on people who still believe in dualism to explain the mechanism by which acting on the brain acts upon the soul.
I have been acquainted personally with one of a very limited number of cases worldwide of transexuals that were the result of an accident that involved brain trauma. Did his soul become dislodged and her new soul come in because of the accident? Did brain damage alter her soul? Or should we just assume that since there seems to be a one-to-one correlation between the brain and personality, it’s quite probably that dualism is a bunch of hooey and that there is no such entity as a soul?
(It’s important that I note here that I’m not implying that transexualism, in the general case, is a result of brain damage. Anymore than the fact that one known case of a person who was an introvert having a radical personality change and becoming an extrovert upon receiving brain damage means being extroverted is caused by brain damage.
The reason I feel obligated to mention it is that that particular trans person repeatedly said transphobic things and used her privilege as a former cis person to deny that the general trans population was anything other than either fakers or brain damaged, and I repudiate that interpretation vehemently.)
Don’t worry about us, nat. Just let it out. That’s really shit about your friend’s daughter, and the whole situation with not knowing who’s been told.
Alls I gots is hugs for you and everyone.
Slightly more on topic, if I weren’t already an atheist, I fucking would be now. And capital-A atheists are wankbubbles.
@thenatfantastic: Virtual hugs if you want em.
Kitteh, if you don’t mind my asking, I think you are a reincarnationist, or something like that? I’ve been a little confused as to the corporeal state of your husband, but I read a little of your blog and it seems a bit clearer now.
LOL, typing out “reincarnationist” makes the word look like it means someone who does strange things to flowers!
But as long as you’re happy, and your perception of the world currently around you is solid enough for you to adequately care for yourself, I have no issues. I’ve had enough experience to know that everything and anything is possible. It’s why I tell people that I am a confirmed agnostic. Any other label would be too restricting, and nothing is going to shake me from my belief that nothing can be completely proven to be true or false.
Personally, I like Terry Pratchett’s notion that whatever happens to us after we die is whatever we believe will happen to us after we die.
Argenti, it’s sad the young man you’ve been talking to has such narrow views. Fiction is basically speculative fact – everything is fiction until someone discovers it or invents it. But it’s typical of someone with the type of background you describe, with or without ASD, to have trouble looking beyond their own limited experience. Hopefully, he’ll get the experiences he needs without actually being “upgraded” into a Cyberman.
Thenatfantastic: I obviously don’t know you well enough to say anything useful, so just know you have lots of sympathy, and yes, feel free to vent here about it. You might want to contact the friend’s sister (the one who told you about it in the first place) and ask if she can tell you who else knows, so that you can offer one another grief support without taxing the family or talking out of turn.
Thanks guys.
Her sister asked me to pass the message on to someone she couldn’t track down, so I’m talking to him now, and I know two of my other friends were told at the same time, because they were CC’d in (although one of them is out of the country at the moment). I don’t really know the daughter too well, since obviously she’s too ill to go out most of the time. I’ve asked her sister to ask her if she wants me to go over in the next week or so.
I feel pretty bad because when I do see my friend she tries her best to just be ‘normal’, so it’s not something we’ve discussed a lot, and when she mentions other stuff on FB I never know what to say without it sounding insincere, so I usually just say nothing. It just feels especially unfair since just before Xmas they were told the tumors had shrunk by 20%. Gah. Right. Sorry. Shutting up.
@thenatfantastic: Oh, I’m so sorry. Somehow it always seems so much harder when it’s kids. Virtual hugs if you want them, and otherwise just comforting thoughts in your direction. Don’t worry about venting – sometimes it just helps to say it out loud (or type it and know someone will read it),
Please don’t think you’re galling us. It’s a shit situation. That poor little girl.
Love and hugs all round!
Great, now I’m almost in tears myself, from the situation and from imagining it happening to my little girl. Not your fault, nat. I am moved to tears easily in general, and when it comes to my babies, much more easily than usual.
@thenatfantastic
I am so sorry. Hugs if you want them. (I also have freshly ground coffee if someone else wants to contribute a shot of something, it’ll be a slightly better virtual offer.)
@C.R.
That reminds me to check and see if the boyfriend made the promised contribution. Thanks, asshole troll!
I use Atheist/atheist interchangeably because I like the rationale behind the capital letter/movement (hope that makes sense), but hate the racism (most recently had to unlike something on Facebook for that) and, of course, all the other -isms that Atheism seems infested by. I like Atheism+, but don’t really need the community (I am one if those Atheists) and don’t think I should let the assholes dictate what I call myself.
Sorry Falconer. I didn’t mean to upset you. Hope the little’uns are OK, or at least a little bit more sleepy than they were a few days ago…
Oh thenatfantastic, I am so sorry. All the hugs, if they’re welcome.