So, there’s a whole bunch of MRA stuff I should be writing about now, and some Roosh drama, but, you know, my heart just isn’t in it at the moment. So I’m going to take a few more days off to clear my head. In the meantime, I would suggest keeping up with the latest MRA and PUA shenanigans by checking out the AgainstMensRights and TheBluePill subreddits, respectively.
Also, I thought you all might appreciate this video of a cat discovering snow for the first time.
And Happy New Year! Or did I already wish you guys that?
That’s just…that’s so far out there it’s circling back into looking glass MRA logic. Education is (fe)male lies? *sigh*
But, um, yes? Men, as well as women, and the rest of us, require mtDNA to survive. This is inherited from our mothers, thus we need female energy to survive. If mtDNA = energy and we’re playing ciscentric world. But that’s biology, not some weird political lie…
And Mary Daly…*gags* I’m delusional by her, a tool of the patriarchy, gender is innate wtf is my problem?! Pardon me while I fail to take her seriously. Though, off the top of my head and a quick look around, most fish equipment the male adaptor powers the female side. Airline tubing goes over the pokey outy bit that’s attached to the pump itself, for example. So nope, that part about adaptors isn’t universal either.
As for energy vampires, I guess if we stretch mtDNA to mean men need female energy to survive, as in, men need a constant supply of female energy to continue living (versus the true statement that everyone needs a one time mtDNA contribution to exist)…then yes, energy vampire. In the less commonly used vampiric subculture sense. Standard usage these days seems to be simply someone who makes you feel drained, and I’d be totally unsurprised if radfems claimed that all men drain all women.
That is … beyond weird.
What gets me is that this is like a mirror of the whole biotruth wharbleargle rubbish. Not so much “men rule coz biotruths!” but somehow blaming men for (alleged) DNA and genetic goings-on. I mean … people don’t choose what happens at that level, get a grip!
Dunno if I’m putting that at all clearly.
As for energy vampires, can’t say I’ve ever met anyone I’d describe that way. Pains in the arse, bullies, idiots (funny how most of ’em have been in management), people you’d want to avoid, but not draining as such.
I get the feeling this brand of radfem is like the MRAs: have they ever met any men? Ever talked to a man, ever liked a man? Doesn’t sound like it. I can understand wariness, even extreme wariness, on a woman’s part, given what society’s like, but this is so out there.
Daly worked in academia so she must have met lots of men. Apparently she didn’t like them very much.
It always feels like she’s trying to use language to manipulate the reader into being forced to agree with her viewpoint. As in, well, if we just redefine X to mean Yplusmenareevil, and Z to mean Aplussomethingsomethinggynomagic, then obviously my theory must be 100% true! Gotcha, logic! It’s annoying.
Oh great, our oven’s conked out. The stovetop’s still working but the oven’s pumping out cold air.
Wonderful. 🙁
Bright side – second fridge? But seriously, I don’t know enough about ovens to figure out what would cause that to happen.
Second fridge, lol!
I’ve no idea, either. Something’s fused, maybe? It’s an electric oven (gah … wish we had gas). I guess we’ll just have to call a repair person tomorrow morning. At least we’ve the microwave, though I doubt the fish we were about to cook will come out of that too well.
And of course this couldn’t have happened when it was obnoxiously hot and you might have appreciated a blast of cold air.
Absolutely not. We’ve had almost wintry weather this week – lots of wind and a fair bit of rain.
Hey, Ally, maybe I can take you to Eaton Canyon or somewhere. There are some nice hikes around here.
@katz
Just looked at some pictures of Eaton Canyon – I’d love to go there. It reminds me of the Colorado mountains I used to hike in (I was raised there for half of my childhood). It’s so pretty. :> And it looks like one of those places I can do plenty of climbing, which is a plus.
Ooh, that’s lovely. ::envy envy envy::
I wish I could go back to Yosemite. It’s the most beautiful landscape I’ve ever been in.
This area probably can’t compete with the bay area and definitely not with Colorado — those places are both beautiful! But Doad and I are very fond of Eaton Canyon. We like to go there for birding.
So much of the US is just stunningly beautiful – I really envy you guys that. I’m afraid Australian landscapes just don’t do it for me. I would love to see the eastern states in autum.
The first time I went to Yosemite was awesome. I did a lot of rock climbing (nothing too difficult or dangerous) and I really enjoyed the landscape at night especially. What got me into Pink Floyd was listening to Dark Side of the Moon while walking on the camp trails at night. So now every time I listen to “Us and Them,” I think about Yosemite. 😛
I wish my subsequent trips to Yosemite weren’t so terrible, though. My first trip there was the only one in which I wasn’t super anxious and stressed out.
You’d probably find SoCal chaparral rather familiar, actually. Same biome as most of Australia.
Speaking of ridiculously beautiful places that we’d like to visit…
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Wuyi_Mountains_Sea_of_clouds_4.jpg
http://www.travel-china.net/china-pictures/wuyishan/mt-wuyi-scenery1.jpg
http://chinatravels.tripod.com/webonmediacontents/Wuyi%20Mountain_4.jpg?1346314748210
@katz
Heh, I’m starting to get tired of the Bay Area personally, and not just because of my living situation. We don’t even have mountains close to San Jose – just hills. And because the Bay Area has been very dry this year, the hills aren’t even green like they usually are at this time of the year.
There are some nice parks I’ve hiked in, though (both near San Jose and elsewhere). Such as Alum Rock Park and Henry Coe State Park (where I got lost with my hiking buddies and ended up needing to be rescued by a ranger).
And last week we went to Henry Cowell Redwoods in Santa Cruz. Basically completely gorgeous in every way.
For nostalgia’s sake, here’s the mountain I used to hike on with my siblings when I still lived in Boulder, CO: Mount Sanitas.
I’m definitely a hiking enthusiast. =P
And for anyone who doesn’t know why Cassandra’s third link isn’t working: just get rid of the “?1346314748210” at the end of the link and it’ll work. Anyway, that place looks so pretty.
Also, they grow tea there! So you have something to drink while appreciating the view.
Sorry about the link, btw, not sure how I did that.
Redwood forests are amazing. Doad totally wanted to plant one in our yard.
Speaking of cool places I’ve been to, Istanbul was amazing. I went there when I was 11, and I have never seen so many cats in a city in my entire life. I was ecstatic to see kittens around every other corner of the city. The architecture there was also cool; the Hagia Sophia and the Sultan Ahmet Mosque in particular were impressive, considering they were built in the middle ages. And the cuisine there was great as well. I only spent like 5 days in Istanbul, but I felt like I spent a few weeks there just because there was so much to do.
To get an idea of how many cats I saw in Istanbul: here’s an example of a rather common sight in the city.
Also, there were so many cats in the park near our hotel that I had to carefully look around a bench before sitting on it.
My second post replying to Unimaginative was inappropriate. The conversation moved on while I was composing it. I wouldn’t have gone that route if I had read dallasapples’ meltdown. I’ll avoid that language.
Kittehserf,
Reading through that blog, I was struck by how many of the MRM’s rhetorical foibles she used. One post refers to males as a “species.” There’s a just-so stories about tribal societies. According to witchwind, priestly and shamanic roles are male-exclusive in all indigenous cultures, whereas in reality arctic shamans, at least, can be of any sex or gender. There’s the assumption that anything useful was produced by the favored gender. Witchwind finds it impossible to consider that men could have discovered the drugs and herbal medicines used by priests and shamans, so they must have been stolen from women. There’s the use of gender-envy as a catchall motivation: evidently male religious leaders use the drugs to acquire the spritual perception that women have naturally. (She is also under the impression that female oracles and seeresses were not substance users, which does match what I recall having heard about Delphi)
There’s the narrative of political/theoretical awakening after personal misfortune. In Witchwind’s case, she apparently had what most of us would consider consensual sexual relationships, including intercourse that wasn’t painful (though it was emotionally fraught.) Later in life intercourse became painful for her, which enabled her to understand its fundamental wrongness.
There’s even the illiberal ethic, that assigns people life priorities unrelated to their desires. For instance, Witchwind doesn’t seem to be saying that PIV is never pleasurable, or that women who enjoy it are deluded. She’s starting from an incorrect premise — that PIV is fantastically, unconscionably dangerous and unhealthy — and asserting that the health risks are so great that the pleasure is irrelevant. I think that’s actually a decently structured argument, it’s just not based on our universe.
katz – gods yes, it’s all too similar to home. Not helped by having so many eucalypts planted there, of course. First visit driving out I was all, “I’ve paid how many thousand dollars and flown how far to look at FUCKING GUM TREES???”
So many beautiful places …
I don’t know if I could handle seeing so many kitties. I’d want to take them all home.