Archive for category Uncategorized
Selective Outrage
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Uncategorized on March 8th, 2010
… In which I continue my spiral into the world of liberalism.
I’ve been thinking a lot about oppression and privilege lately. Fat-hate. Rape culture. Sexism. Racism. Able-ism. I don’t claim to be particularly well-versed in the topics, but I have started to notice a trend or two in the ways that people respond to an idea that challenges their position of privilege. One behavior that I’m noticing at this moment is what I’ll call selective outrage. Honestly, it’s a topic that I, myself, am only really starting to grasp, so I may have a hard time describing it, but I”ll give it a try. Selective outrage works something like this.
In 2007, A law was proposed in Australia which stated that intoxication does not imply sexual consent. Note: the law did not say that intoxicated people cannot give sexual consent, just that intoxication plus the lack of a “no” does not mean “yes.” Apparently, “She was drunk,” was being used successfully as a defense to rape charges, and this law was intended to change that. Put another way, the law requires drunk people to actually agree to fuck you. Seems pretty non-controversial, no?
Here are some of the comments made on a certain web forum regarding this law:
“So yeah, we had a few drinks, we went back to her place she threw me on the sofa, blew me for awhile and then rode we until she orgasmed and then the next day I get arrested for raping her”
This commenter appears to be concerned with the potential for misapplication of the justice system. He doesn’t want to see innocent people accused of a crime, and he is OUTRAGED.
When you drink and drive, it’s is YOUR responsibility in the fact that you should of known to say no to driving. Why is it then, that when women drink, our justice system thinks they are nothing but children, unable to control themselves at all, and thus exonerate them of ANY responsibility?
This commenter appears to be concerned with issues of personal responsibility. He also seems upset at a system that treats women like children, rather than autonomous adults. He is OUTRAGED!
Now, I can support the Sober Guy/Drunk Girl = Rape argument to some degree, but I have two issues with this. Foremost; Shouldn’t this girl be, in some respects, responsible for her own level of intoxication? Hate to tell you, but you don’t HAVE to get drunk, and then the consent issue stays clear. How can the guys be the only ones faulted when both parties are drunk?
Likewise, this commenter raises questions of personal responsibility and agency. OUTRAGED!
Do you want to deny a woman with a slumbersex fetish pleasure?
This commenter tackles the conjoined issues of sex-negativity and sexism, standing up for the right of people to consent to treatment of their bodies, even in non-mainstream ways. He is OUTRAGED!
Except it’s all bullshit, isn’t it? Because these people are probably not outraged about misapplication of justice, treating women like children, taking away people’s personal responsibility, or, more to the point, rape, ANY OTHER TIME than when it might affect them. And that slumbersex person? The most eggregious example. Is that person actually kink-positive in real life, or is this just some semantic trick, used solely for the purpose of opposing the new law? Which, I will re-iterate, says simply that intoxicated people have to consent to sex just like everybody else.
The sneaky thing about selective outrage is that the points raised are, on the face, valid. At least they would be if they occurred in a vacuum. But they don’t. They occur in a context in which, for example, WOMEN ARE ACTUALLY BEING RAPED and the people who raped them are not being convicted at stunningly high numbers. The commenters often have absolutely nothing to say about that. Being outspokenly angry about rape is reserved for Feminists Who Are Probably Also Lesbians. Oh, if you asked them, they’d probably say, “Rape is bad, yo,” but the only time they can be bothered to actually type a comment on the Internet is when a law might be passed to actually DO SOMETHING about the raping, and when they do, it’s to poke holes and point out potential problems with the law.
This is the essence of selective outrage. If the only time you express your outrage is to oppose ideas that seek to change conditions, then you support the conditions, no matter what you might intend. And in this case, that means you support the status quo as it pertains to rape, which is a little shocking given the state of rape in America today. If you are anti-rape, I don’t insist that you actually speak out about it. Hey, there are a lot of issues in the world for people to care about, and rape may just not make your list. That’s actually fine with me. But at the very least, maintain your position of silence on the issue when those who care enough to speak up do so.
Making Firewood
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Homesteading, Uncategorized on March 4th, 2010
This is the first two truck-loads of firewood that I brought home. The stuff sitting on the ground, not the stacked stuff. Well, it ain’t firewood in the picture, but it is by now.
Notice the difference in the height of the right-hand stack? That’s what used to be that wood. I estimate it’s about a rick, which is about $65 in the bank by my math, or about $50 if you take into account that I picked it up vs. having it delivered. I focus on the money, because it’s obvious, but there’s no price I would put on the idea that I’m providing for myself a fundamental and life-sustaining need (heat, during the winter).
Splitting wood is fun, which is an odd thing to say given how much work it is. My hands and arms have been very tired from swinging the maul, and my back and legs are tired from moving the big hunks of stump after I cut them off the log with the chainsaw. Still, hitting a solid chunk of wood with a12-lb piece of metal and having the wood split into two pieces and go flying has a certain visceral pleasure. KA-POW! It’s kind of like working a heavy punching bag, but with a fire at the end.
The neighbor has offered to let me borrow his gas-powered splitter, but I’m not interested. I have enough things in my life that a gasoline engine turns into nothing harder than a button push. I’m happy to have something so valuable come out of nothing more than a stick, a piece of heavy metal, and my body. That’s not to say that I’m not also happy to have a riding mower for the field, or a gas tiller (that thing was a damn life-saver; I can’t imagine doing all that work by hand), just that here’s one thing I can do by hand, and I like doing it, and there’s no need to turn it over to Almighty Petroleum just because I can.
Currently, we have at least 3 cords stored up, but some of that is going to be burned on what’s left of this winter. I estimate we may need about 5 cords to get through a year, so I’ve got a lot more work to do before I’m “done.” The truth is that I may never be “done,” because it’d be fantastic to have at least two years’ worth saved up. One year is the absolute minimum for seasoning hard-wood, but two years is usually better.
And, even if I had two years saved up, seeing good wood rotting on the ground just looks like a waste to me now. But of course, that’s not true either. Bugs live in the wood and eat it. The wood itself rots and turns into soil. I suppose if I gathered up enough firewood, eventually the soil in the woods would be less fertile, but I doubt that little-ol’-me is making that much of a difference. If everyone in Knox county heated their homes with wood, then we might have to worry about how many trees were getting cut, but as-is, I can pretty much heat my entire house for a year on what other people would just leave lying on the ground. It’s nice to be in a situation where I can be reasonably confident that my ecological impact is low. Hopefully I can increase the number of those as this homesteading adventure, also know as My Life, continues.
Ism Awareness
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Uncategorized on February 17th, 2010
For about five years, from the late 90’s to the mid 2000’s, I journaled nearly every day. In the beginning, I had a very cheery tone, with lots of positive affirmations and a desperately sincere desire to live up to a personal standard I had set for myself. Somewhere in the middle, I became much more sarcastic, cynical, pessimistic, and angry-sounding. Unexpectedly, I was also much more sincerely happy than I had been.
Somewhere along the line, noticing things to get angry about became a sort of hobby. Don’t let the ranting fool you: I’m really very happy most of the time. I can’t explain why anger at the injustice in the world and a near-total loss of hope for humanity’s overall redemption coincided with happiness for me (Stockholm syndrome, maybe?) but it did. Being angry seems to work for me, and I’ve found more and more things to be angry about.
I started out being mad about religious inequality. I used to call myself Pagan, and was able to get up a good head of steam about the ways in which my religion was not afforded equal treatment by the majority. I eventually came to call myself an Atheist, which is an even more fruitful ground for righteous indignation. After religion, I added relationship issues. I’m polyamorous, and there are all sorts of ways that society punishes me for my non-conformist relationship structure. From there, it was a short hop to gender, sexual identity, and race. The newest “isms” of which I’ve become aware related to people with disabilities and fat people. It turns out that we have enough discrimination and self-hate to go around to just about anybody, even groups that I wouldn’t have immediately identified as discriminated against.
As each of these groups came onto my radar, it was pretty easy to integrate them into my existing framework of non-discrimination, because the principles at work seemed to be the same. The reasons why I would discriminate against people are the same, regardless of which particular factor I’m basing the discrimination on. The ideological framework that leads me to try not to discriminate is also the same. I’m often surprised when I hear, for example, feminists, spewing hate-speach about, for example, trans-gender people, or gays, or what-have-you. It seems so obvious to me that the feminist argument is fundamentally the same as the argument for acceptance of other minority classes. Issa tells me that line of thinking is relatively new, and falls under third-wave feminism.
Each time I have become aware of a way in which I am unconsciously bigoted against a certain type of people, it has made it easier to accept the next time it happens. The more I do it, the more I am able to see people as, simply, people, and the more I feel able to relate to them, instead of whatever condition I am imagining obscures them.
Jig-A-Loo Lubricant
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Uncategorized on September 25th, 2009
I recently had the opportunity to use two different lubricants from Jig-A-Loo. I hadn’t heard about this company before and wanted to share my results with you (no, I’m not a shill, just excited about this product).
Jig-A-Loo silicon lubricant is the absolute slickest lube I’ve ever used. It’s more expensive than, say, WD-40, with $5 getting you 10.9 oz of Jig-A-Loo and 16 oz of WD-40, but this stuff is incredible when it comes to lubricating. Goes on dry, clear (doesn’t stain), and, did I mention, really amazingly slick?
I first heard about Jig-A-Loo because it’s one of the preferred lubricants for Rubik’s cubes. I accidentally bought their Extreme Graphite product first. Because graphite can handle extreme temperatures (-99 to about +1000 degrees), this product is ideal for applications like automobile engines. Not so much Rubik’s cubes. I shot the stuff into my cube and it immediately got all sticky. I think this might be because the graphite is suspended in an adhesive medium that allows it to stick to the surface to be lubricated. I kept turning the cube and it loosened up pretty quickly. If I had it to do over again, I would lay out the parts to be lubed, cover any surfaces that didn’t need lubing, or that I didn’t want to stain (see below), and spray a light coat over it from a distance of 8-10 inches, per instructions. The typical technique of just squirting the stuff into whatever you’re lubing and then turning the gears to work the lube in doesn’t seem to work with the Extreme Graphite product.
What seemed to happen is that it coated the surfaces it was applied to with a layer of graphite. Once the stickiness wore out, it was actually pretty slick, but it didn’t seem to work nearly as well as the silicon version. I guess if I needed an extreme-temperature lube, I would use it again, but not so much otherwise. Additionally, the graphite coating was more or less permanent. I had to scrape at it with a fingernail to get it to come off. For some applications, this would be great, but I would never put it on, say a firearm, because I wouldn’t be comfortable with my options for removing it if I decided I didn’t like it.
Additionally, I should point out that the graphite lube stains anything it touches black. Graphite, I’m guessing. So be careful when applying. This stuff is still worlds better than powdered graphite, because at least it stayed in place where I put it.
Jig10.9OZ Spr Lubricant
Playa-Bound
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Uncategorized on August 27th, 2009
Off to the playa in just a few days now. Be gone until September 11th. Just so you know that this upcoming two weeks without posts will be for a completely different reason than any of the preceding two weeks without posts.
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