A very wise guy said on Twitter a few hours ago -

The desire to carve up the world into people-like-us (righteous) and people-like-them (unrighteous) is utterly pervasive. Nobody escapes it.

Yes. (Or almost yes. I wonder if it holds for psychopaths? They simply don’t care about righteous/unrighteous, so they wouldn’t carve up the world that way, would they? For them it’s just Self and everything else.) Yes, but – that desire isn’t always salient. It’s far from always salient. It depends.

It’s a bit like that shift I mentioned the other day, about walking the Pebble Beach golf course – from a distance I think of everyone as caricature Plutocrats, because after all – it’s Pebble Beach. It … Read the rest

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The NY Times has an editorial on abuse in religious groups.

 the truth is, there are not two kinds of religions — the enlightened and the medieval. Every religion has evildoers stalking its corridors. They just survive, and thrive, with different strategies.

Take Zen Buddhism, the paragon of open, nonhierarchical spirituality. Anyone may practice Zen meditation; you do not have to convert, be baptized or renounce your old religion. Yet leaders of major Zen centers in Los Angeles and New York have recently been accused, on strong evidence, of exploiting followers for sex. This weekend, Zen teachers ordained by Joshu Sasaki, the semiretired abbot of the Rinzai-ji Zen Center in Los Angeles, are holding a retreat to discuss

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Carmel beach again this afternoon, but a completely different kind of day – it’s cloudy, and it was very windy there. It was fantastic! Dramatic, and turbulent, and beautiful – also, oddly enough, more conducive to lingering. On a sunny day it actually gets glarey after awhile. No glare today, so I was able to walk all the way north on the beach, where it’s directly below the Pebble Beach golf course. You have the beach, and then these bluffs rising sharply out of it, and on top of the bluffs is the course.

I can see a surfer from here. [looks through binoculars] Gosh, the surfer is using a paddle. I didn’t know they did that. It looks like … Read the rest

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I’m catching up on the Steubenville (Ohio) rape-and-Twitter-and-football case. It’s not unfamiliar. Years ago I read a shocking but not surprising book about a New Jersey rape case that also involved high school jocks seen as heroes and the girl they raped seen as oh who cares. Our Guys, by Bernard Lefkowitz.

Lefkowitz’s sweeping narrative, informed by more than 200 interviews and six years of research, recreates a murky adolescent world that parents didn’t–or wouldn’t–see: a high school dominated by a band of predatory athletes; a teenage culture where girls were frequently abused and humiliated at sybaritic and destructive parties, and a town that continued to embrace its celebrity athletes–despite the havoc they created–as “our guys.” But that

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India has other horrible rapes. (As does the US. I’m not claiming any national superiority here.)

On most days, Indian newspapers report shocking new atrocities – a 10-month-old raped by a neighbour in Delhi; an 18-month-old raped and abandoned on the
streets in Calcutta; a 14-year-old raped and murdered in a police station in
Uttar Pradesh; a husband facilitating his own wife’s gang rape in Howrah…

One of the most painful and lingering cases is that of the Mumbai nurse Aruna Shanbaug.

Sodomised by a cleaner in the hospital where she worked, the 25-year-old was strangled with metal chains and left to die by her attacker, Sohanlal Bharta Walmiki, on 27 November 1973.

She was saved and survives, but

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Cooper and I walked (part of) the Pebble Beach course today. We walked a bigger part of it on Tuesday. It wasn’t as gorgeous today because it’s a little hazy, so the hills just southeast of Carmel were a bit blurry and flat as opposed to sharp and full of depth and detail as they were on Tuesday. But it was fun anyway. It’s on bluffs overlooking the ocean and Carmel Bay, so it’s a pretty dazzling place for a stroll, even with all the pesky people messing around with sticks and balls and buzzy little carts.

Actually the people are rather nice though. I always expect them to be parody millionaires, sniffing out my alien nature and ordering me … Read the rest

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Michael DeDora reports one bit of good news.

In a landmark move welcomed by the Center for Inquiry (CFI), the United Nations General Assembly has adopted for the first time a resolution calling for a global end to female genital mutilation.

The measure, A/67/450 A/C.3/67/L.21, calls female genital mutilation, or FGM, “an irreparable, irreversible abuse that impacts negatively on the human rights of women and girls” and “a harmful practice that constitutes a serious threat to the health of women and girls.”

Oyyyy. Couldn’t they have just said “damages”? What is this “impacts negatively” crap? I assume people made “impact” into a verb to save time/words in the first place, but now we’re always getting “will negatively impact” … Read the rest

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I took Cooper to Carmel beach this afternoon. When we got there I realized we had the Chuckit but no ball, because I took him to a crappy place for Chuckit yesterday and the ball went missing on the first chuck. Oh well, it’s a very doggy beach, I’ll probably find one, I told him, so we went down the stairs with the empty Chuckit.

As soon as we got to the water a guy in a family group said, “Lost the ball?” and I allowed as how we had, and did the rueful laugh thing, while Cooper danced around frantically as he always does. We went ahead north and I heard the guy’s daughter (I assume) telling him “We … Read the rest

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And in Pakistan, seven Pakistani teachers and health workers, six of them women, were shot to death in the Swabi district of the northwestern province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

India needs rape jokes in the form of cocktails, and Pakistan needs fewer teachers and health workers and women. That’s the way to make a better world.

The attack on Tuesday, near the village of Sher Afzal Banda, was conducted by two men on a motorcycle who followed a van taking the workers home and then opened fire on it with assault rifles, the police said. The victims worked for the private Pakistani aid group Support With Working Solution, which works in the health and education sectors.

…

The aid group was founded

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Good thinking, Bonobo bar in Bombay: selling a cocktail called “the rapist” is a brilliant idea. It’s so convivial and amusing, so jolly and sociable. Rape is such a funny joke, and it’s so hilarious to encourage people to find rape and rapists a source of humor.

Rape culture? What rape culture? Don’t be silly.

 … Read the rest

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Taslima has been writing about the Delhi rape since it happened.

She wrote about the patriarchal mindset.

About India, the land of eroticism, sexism and rapism.

She wrote about saying a woman who was brutally gangraped, tortured, mutilated and killed has “died peacefully.”

And she wrote about the fact that this kind of thing doesn’t just burst out of nowhere.

For the very first time, folks were angry. Or did it wake them up? Does wakefulness appear so easily? It is true that for the first time, thousands of men and women of all ages took to the streets demanding from their government the safety and security for the womenfolk. It has also been demanded that the

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