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!
@Marie
Rant away! Talking to parents about childhood stuff can be so awful and hard and awkward. Best of luck if you ever decide to bring it up.
Well, I’m going to stop here. I don’t think you should get to decide the top priorities of an organization you’re not a part of, nor do I think you should be the judge of the biggest threats to a community you’re not a part of. You’re just reminding me more and more of every other person who thinks they should get to decide what other people should do, and, well, once you’ve put yourself in that position, there’s no arguing with that.
Marie – you’re not weird. Death is hard. Everyone deals with it in their own way, and it’s normal and appropriate to go through different stages of feeling about it, and those feelings don’t always make sense.
It’s one of the reasons I think having pets is so important for children. It’s hard every time one of my beloved cats (or dogs) dies, but I’ve been through it enough times, both as a child and as an adult, that I feel comfortable accepting it and dealing with it, and I’m willing to take however much time I get with each pet with the knowledge that their lives are likely to be much shorter than mine. And when friends and family die, I have those experiences to help me deal with it.
katz and Some Gal, I’m going to agree with both of you.
Churches do have an obligation to support their congregation and their community. That’s the basic reason for having churches in the first place: to gather and support the community (you can add the actual religion in as well if you want, but the societal purpose of organized religion is really community support).
But the decision on how, and on what issues, to show that support are the sole decision of the individual church and its congregation, not the rest of the community or someone on the other side of the country (or the world). Issues are infinite – resources are not.
@some gal
I’m taking that as an opportunity to rant XD (if anyone doesn’t want to read this, there’s a rant coming up)
Basically, the whole thing went down when I was in sixth grade, and I stopped going to school and was just sleeping/hiding in my room the whole day (one of the reasons I think I was depressed too back then, because that’s how I am now when my depression’s acting up). My parents were taking me to therapists a bunch, trying to do whatever, but it never really worked.
I should mention I really wasn’t being a good kid, we were getting into fights where everyone was yelling and screaming, and I’d kicked a whole in my wall at one point :/
Last therapist I saw before I had to go to kiddie asylum (which I think he actually worked for kiddie asylum, since they were in the same building) it was taking an hour, and both my parents were there. Actually, thinking back on it, I’m wondering if they were planning on trying to talk me to enter willingly *ick*. Anyway, after we’d been waiting for around 20 minutes I said I wanted to go home if the therapist didn’t show up in an hour, which they agreed to*
*spoiler space, it didn’t work.
So my dad took me into the therapist’s room while idk what was happening, and we were having a stand down in where since he was forcibly keeping me in the room I was debating trying to physically fight him to get out. *ick*
And they had a cop come in, so it was pretty much go along or get tazed by the cop (I assumed it’d be just forcibly removed, but one of the other kids talked about getting tazed when he tried to escape, so that’s my call in retrospect.)
I got locked in one of those actual padded walls (with a camera up top, because every time I hit the wall because I was frustrated they used the intercom to tell me to stop). I also got yelled at for not being able to get to sleep when they wanted, it’s like, hello, I was just sleeping all day, schedules don’t adjust automatically.
The whole thing only lasted a week in that place, and another week (two weeks?) in a place I had to go for half a day after, plus like a year+ of therapy and some time on the meds (which I stopped taking once I got out of kiddie asylum, so technically they were just getting wasted).
Sorry for dumping this all on you guys I just …gaah. rant. bad time in childhood. I mean, what kind of parent sees an eleven year old is too miserable to go to school and thinks that is the best solution?
@ellex
thanks 🙂 though part of the reason I feel weird is because I felt better about death at 12 than 18.
Also normal. Much, much more normal than you think. At 18, you understand more and have more experience than you did at 12. You have more awareness of the potential consequences of death. It’s natural to feel differently, and natural to have some bad feelings about it.
I’m 38, and it’s still going on for me. I’m always learning new things about myself, changing and adjusting the way I feel about things. My mother is 67 and she’s still doing it, too.
Honestly? The fact that you are feeling things, thinking about things, questioning things, makes you a lot more mature than a lot of people I’ve met who seem to have put themselves in mental and emotional stasis at some point and never grow any further.
@katz
You are right, I am not part of these organizations. I left precisely because they didn’t meet my priorities. It is impossible to know whether or not, had churches lived up to my expectations, I would be a member today. I might have become an atheist anyway, I might not.
Chriches have a lot of rights that other groups do not have (no other group gets to appoint members who act as counselors without state approval for example). Those rights should come with extra responsibilities or they should go through the same approval processes that all other group have to go through to get them. If a church is no different than a PAC, so be it, but the law and community norms should reflect that.
@ellex
Thanks 🙂 I really didn’t know how other people felt about it. Mostly when I talk to my mom and sister they seem pretty cool with the idea that we’re all gonna die, so I felt like a worry rat XD
@Marie
That is horrible. I was a pretty “bad” kid, too. I beat up my sister a lot and once dented a wall using a plate as a frisbee (I was angry). In retrospect, this was probably all a really normal reaction to depression and mania, but it was treated as me being a spoiled brat. I used to have terrible anxiety and would sit in the car rather than go into strange places. Luckily (or perhaps “luckily”) my mom is big on “acting normal,” which committing her eldest daughter would not have worked so well for. So, I saw a couple of therapists and none really thought anything was majorly wrong (in part because they weren’t very good and in part because I had learned the “acting normal” thing really well).
More hugs. 🙂
Katz: The key difference here is that while I don’t have the right to set another group’s agenda–but I sure as heck can judge a group according to how well it fulfills the agenda it claims to support. If radfems were showing up at the funerals of murdered transwomen, with mocking signs, etc, I damn well WOULD expect mainstream feminist organizations in the same area to show up and counter-protest, or at least reach out to the family in some way to offer consolation and make it clear that the protestors did not speak for all feminists.
As it is, when TERFs start posting transphobic bullshit on the internet, mainstream feminists (at least, all the ones I follow) do, in fact, call them out on it, in that same medium.
And of course, this underlines the false equivalence you’re making–TERFs, even the worst of them, don’t make a habit of attacking the families of transwomen at funerals. The level of offense is being matched by its challengers, and those challengers are the ones I choose to support.
The WBC protests, though, were carried out in the name of the same deity that these other churches all claim to serve. Furthermore (and this is key), those churches all claim to be moral and spiritual leaders–to have a greater insight into what is ‘good’, and thus the right to have the authority to teach it to their flock (not to mention, the reason that they say that others should join their churches). And so yes, the WBC and how they responded to it (or rather, didn’t), is a fair test of that claim.
The whole justification for highly organized religion is that the whole is supposed to be greater than the sum of its parts. If even one of the larger churches in America had taken as part of its mission to ensure that the more hateful actions of the WBC folks were countered as effectively as possible, then those protests would be history by now–or at least, we’d have constant news stories about how “The WBC made another failed effort to disrupt a funeral again.”
And no, it wouldn’t have to be the top priority–frankly, WBC are so minor a group that countering them wouldn’t take much resources at all. One person to watch their protest announcements (they routinely let everyone know what they’re going to be up to), and contact a local branch of the same church. That church then calls a few others (if the church is part of an inter-faith council of some sort, this should be trivially simple). Then they reach out to the family, and ask if they’d like support. If the answer is yes, then ten times as many ‘true Christians’ as WBC’ers show up, with large sheets designed to screen the mourners from the trolls. But not one of the churches decided to step forward and do so.
Freemage, you’re just repeating the same nonsense somegal already said and I already said I wasn’t going to keep replying. You guys just both want to wank about churches because you hate them so much and I guess you can knock yourself out, even if you haven’t got anything meaningful to say.
@ somegal 🙁 sorry about your childhood too. Hugs accepted, and hugs for you to if you want them.
Ranting about this on the internet (sowwyz *blushes*) has made me realize I probably should talk to my parents about it, since I’m still not completely over it, but that’ll probably go down much better with my mom than my dad. She was better about the whole thing back then, we have good communication now, ect
/thinking out loud
Freemage – My impression of the reaction of most of the major organized religions in the US to the WBC is much like that of the NRA to any and all types of gun control: it’s a slippery slope that will lead to a complete ban.
The NRA and it’s supporters are genuinely convinced that even a small amount of gun control legislation will eventually lead to all guns being illegal. The major churches are similarly convinced that if they step in to block or protest another church, it will eventually lead to similar restrictions on them.
The ACLU tends to feel similarly about free speech.
I think the position of the NRA and the major churches is ridiculous. I’m not certain about the ACLU…it can be fine line between freedom of speech and incitement.
@Marie
Again, my best wishes. I hope you find out what you need to know.
@some gal
Thanks 🙂
If you aren’t a member of the NRA, you shouldn’t criticize how they accomplish their goals or their priorities.
If you aren’t a member if the ACLU, you shouldn’t criticize how they accomplish their goals or their priorities.
If you aren’t a member of the Catholic Church, you shouldn’t criticize how they accomplish their goals or their priorities.
If you aren’t a member of the Republican Party, you shouldn’t criticize how they accomplish their goals or their priorities.
I fail to see how this isn’t nonsense. Unless, of course churches are unique. In which case, I think that the justifications for that uniqueness should be open to scrutiny.
So, I grew up in a cult. A right-wing fundamentalist cult. I’m pretty well done with all religion.
But, um, freemage, … even the hatemongers that raised me condemned the WBC.
And it doesn’t take much time to find plenty of moderate christians calling them out.
You ever hear a rightwinger say ‘well if there are moderate Muslims, why aren’t they condemning the terrorists?’ While actively ignoring those that do?
I mean, seriously. The church that raised me was all ‘gays will destroy this country’ and they still condemned the WBCers. And there are denominations that are, y’know, okay with gay people.
The standard you’re holding the churches too–that if there were moderates, they could somehow shut down the WBC–is kind of ridiculous. How? Seriously, short of violence or intimidation, how?
I just–I don’t want to be the guy standing here defending organized religion, I really REALLY don’t, and I think there are plenty of valid complaints about religion in general, but the way you’ve chosen to go about it is kind of… well, icky.
So, I won’t be around to reply to anything until tomorrow. I have family stuff. Sorry.
@howardbann1ster
The issue, at least that I have, is that if the goal is condemnation, they aren’t really succeeding at doing that beyond their own congregations. Even putting a press release in the paper would be a fair bit more that most churches do.
The WBC is obviously hated by most everybody. But it is fairly easy to identify the groups who feel that condemnation is important enough that the wider world hear about it first-hand.
The WBC example just seems oddly specific to me. If I were religious, which I am not, I don’t think I could comfortably be a member of any church that didn’t reject, say, homophobia or other forms of bigotry. But I wouldn’t insist that rejection take a specific form like protesting WBC.
I feel like I am missing something in this discussion.
@cloudiah
If it helps, I also think churches should be more vocal about other churches enabling child abuse. (Not just the Catholic Church does that.) The WBC was Freemage’s example, but I can think of numerous cases of churches engaged in wrong-doing that other churches ignore.
That should be ignore outside of their own congregations. I have no idea how much condemnation goes on inside the church, but I know very little goes on outside it.
Also, and I kind of said this already so I’m not really expecting it to make a difference, but churches are different because 1) they claim to be and 2) they are treated differently by society at both a legal and social level. I think that expecting churches to uphold a higher standard of behavior is loving the idea of the church not hating it (if I had a dollar for everytime my trying to convey “it is such a beautiful idea, why not be upset that the reality is often ugly?” was called hatred, I could keep myself in cheap coffee forever). I think that, part of this higher standard is also holding each other accountable. I understand that churches don’t want to fight in public. I disagree that there are good seasons not to do so. I think churches that only look out for their own members fail at meeting this higher standard.
I would be willing to examine reasons why the WBC is not the major disruption to a community that I see them as. But, if they are a major disruption, I think churches that are members of a community so disrupted have a duty to minimize and mitigate that disruption. I think it is part if their mission statements implicitly (and explicitly in many cases).
In the case of child abuse, the disruption is also (to me) a major one. And I see churches as having a duty both to hold each other accountable as God’s representatives and to mitigate the harm by addressing the problem publicly.
(This is also very American Christian Organized Religion focused because it is what I know the most about and have – having been a member of many churches – thought the most about. I actually doubt it makes much of a difference, but would need to read more stating that these exact points apply to all organized religion. If it isn’t organized, it isn’t able to act as an organization and so none of this would apply. I think many Christians do a great job at publicly distancing themselves from other Christians who fail at meeting the standards they set for themselves. Sadly, their churches don’t.)
This is long, and going back a page, but I opened a can of worms and want to reply to it.
Uber-short reply because this and the next reply overlap. But that (human trait) of giving weight to your sentimental thoughts? Apparently that’s emotion and you have to use pure logic and logic-bot says that disability before death is worse than sudden death. See below about fearing one versus the other.
OMGS don’t want to die so I’m going to be extra careful about the most common problems/causes of death? Hey, it’s your life, do wtf you want with it. But this ends the very goddamned second you start declaring what other people have to fear, especially with the implication that they have to act to minimize the things you think are more important than the things they fear.
Am I making sense? You’re allowed to fear whatever you like, reasonable or not (though you may want to see a psych if it interferes with your life…just not my psych >.<) What you aren’t allowed to do is insist that other people have to fear the things you fear, insist of the things they fear. Add in the “I’m right because I’m Less Wrong” and it ends up this disgusting mix of patronizing spinach and intellectualist tomatoes with a colonialist salad dressing (salad analogy cuz salad diner, sorry)
Yeah, my semi-existent living will says ECT before antidepressants. Back to the more general topic, yeah, dude puts way too much faith in medication working. He treats science as a religion and thus no part of it could ever be wrong.
Marie — re: forced medication — fuck, I’m sorry. I can’t wrap my head around why people think that is acceptable. In any case, hugs are available if they’re welcome.
In general, I’m comfortable with death. We’re a collection of atoms in the end, space dust basically, and eventually we’ll return to space dust. I find this not just comforting, but strangely beautiful.
And yeah, baring either a brilliant argument, being too drunk, or unleashing my righteous fury on his ass…I’m done.
@Argenti
+1 on the comforting and beautiful.
As long as you are still enjoying yourself (for certain definitions of enjoying, I hope you know what I mean here), have at it. I certainly don’t mind reading about transhumanistic nonsense if you want to share. (Even when I go “GAH!”) I think there is no way he is gonna get it, but I don’t really know him.
BTW, how is the weather treating you? It has been vicious to Boston today and I am all achy. 🙁 Is it just us or is this a New England storm?