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stoiccthulhu · 4 years

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Update time...actually, why should these be titled? I mean, whats the point of writing a title to these if all I’m going to do is ramble on and on with no specific topic of discussion, just several things on my mind?

Election day 2020 happened yesterday and I voted for nobody. And if I would have voiced my polling choice I would have voted for the candidate I see as being the best option in line with my thoughts and opinions concerning the state of the world at the moment as well as the future.

You can insert whomever you want to believe that would be based off an assumption and a look at my internetting footprint, but you would be wrong, but that’s part of the fun of interpreting what I’m writing down for you in the future. Trying to figure out what I’m actually saying. While it makes complete sense to me, because you don’t have the hidden key phrase you can’t decipher what it is that I am putting to digital paper.

I get it, I’m an asshole.

And this isn’t, completely, a justification towards my actions but a direct result of your intervention within my life that has caused this behaviour. Think of it sort of like a self-fulfilling prophecy. You interpreted me, came back, and intervened in any little way imaginable. Negatively or positively, but no matter your justification, it was still an intervention that didn’t need to happen because, as Malcolm once said, “Life, finds a way.” And just like destiny, it will find a way. But enough of all that crazy talk, you’re here because you want to hear all about my political leanings and to unravel the mystery as to this anonymous random on the internet’s preferred presidential choice in the election that has already passed.

But before I do that, let’s get some shit off my chest because I tend to swear and if you don’t like it, go the hell away. I’m sick of people being sensitive over everything. As if they’re looking for any reason to complain or get offended nowadays.

“The internet has given everyone in (the world) a voice, and evidently everyone in (the world) has chosen to use that voice to bitch about (anyone they find offensive)” -Holden McNeil (with some modern revisions)

And that’s why I’ve chose not to be PC in this thing, whenever I feel the urge to put pen to paper, relatively speaking.

Like, let’s see who I can offend right off the bat.

Women need to start getting punched more and treated like human beings instead of china dolls. If you’re a pro-gender equality advocate, and you’re a woman, you need to be willing to be punched in the face for doing ANYTHING a man would otherwise be punched in the face for. They also need to be held accountable for the shit they do to everyone. I am a strong supporter in believing that no matter what women say about women controlling the government and such, while women have great communication skills, they have the worst track record when it comes to not being aggressive, biologically speaking.

In the wild, whom are normally the more aggressive of the genders? Whom is usually the one more protective of the young? more willing to go out to hunt?

To be fair, I have a very limited knowledge when it comes to the animal kingdom. But, I mean, the Black Widow is normally depicted as being a deadly female, the female preying mantis devours the head of her mate after they’re done mating. There are so many, example, of females being worse than males in nature its hard to ignore. And, to add religious believers to the list of people offended, if you’re not ignorant to science and knowledge, or at least the pursuit of it, we evolved over a long period of time from apes, which, by nature, makes us, humans, not white people, black people, yellow people(to stick to the color scheme), brown people(gotta throw the other Asian people’s in there as well), animals. Highly evolved and communicative animals, but animals none the less. Was that supposed to be one word? Nonetheless?

Doesn’t matter. So, if you stick with my logic, you’ll see that women are terrible. Terrible. But, because men like to have sex with females as opposed to men for the most part in today’s society women have a stranglehold on the pelvic reason of an entire world, which means they can make anyone, for the most part, do anything they want and see things their way, even if they’re saying the sky is as green as the skies of Namek. An example of this is perfectly laid out in a clip from That 70′s Show. Kelso and Hyde prove women can’t play fight because they’ll turn it real, for whatever reason, just because they’re girls. To prove this, Kelso and Hyde play fight, and it looks bad, but they stop, laugh, and hug it out. Then Jackie and Donna play fight, starting out playfully, but then turning it into hair pulling and needing to be pulled apart. Both visibly angry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUwxxJvtQnI

(OK, my memory was bad, it was Eric and Hyde, and it was set up differently, but the concept is still there.)

And I get it, they’re actors, being paid to do what the script is telling them to do, but it is true. Girls are worst during puberty as well, from what I’ve heard. And I get it, I have a biased standpoint being a male, but in today's culture that shouldn’t matter, it’s about what’s being said, not my gender.

Now that women are out of the way, lets also as black people, but not specifically black people, its more of a systemic form of racism that I believe shouldn’t exist. In which, if you are not of that specific race, you are not allowed to say the n-word. What makes me giggle right now is that with just that sentence every single person reading this probably got a bit riled up. A bit ruffled in the feathers because I’m not a black person. And if you weren’t, you are now, knowing what you know now.

So let me provide you with some context so you can understand how I’m not racist at the same time as saying what I said above.

I enjoy rap music and hip-hop, as do a lot of people throughout the world, black or otherwise. Which, in this current climate, would be considered one of the forms of cultural appropriation we tend to sweep under the rug because it doesn’t fit our narrative of being offended about something. Because I like rap music I tend to learn the word to all of the songs I enjoy listening to. Because I learn the words to the songs that I enjoy listening to I sing along. But, because I’m not black, I have to ruin my flow to edit myself just because the artist chose to use nigger in their song. Which, as an artist, is their choice.

Now, why should I have to edit myself? I have tried to replace it with “wigger”, but because of the closeness of the words, I felt that would still be offensive if I was ever overheard by the wrong black person who, understandably, would be mad if they heard a pasty white boy say the word nigger without any context.

I just think, unless the person is using the word in a hateful way, directed at the person the speaker either personally knows or is conciously speaking about, as in “i hate that nigger” or “you’re a nigger”. If it’s something like that, totally beat the shit out of that racist.

But if you’re singing along to Wu-Tang, and you say:

I be that insane nigga from the psycho ward I'm on the trigger, plus I got the Wu-Tang sword So how you figure, that you can even fuck with mine? Hey, yo, RZA! Hit me with that shit one time! And pull a foul, niggas, save the beef for the cow I'm milkin' this ho, this is my show, Tical! The fuck you wanna do on this mic piece, duke? I'm like a sniper, hyper off the ginseng root PLO Style, buddha monks with the owls Now who's the fuckin' man? Meth-Tical It shouldn’t be labelled as being racist.

There is more rattling around in my head right now, things that I’ve been thinking about for years, and things that have been bothering me for just about as long, but for now those were the two that fell out when I vomited all over my keyboard.

And if you’re offended. Get over it. You need to start.

Oh, I almost forgot. I was going to tell you whom it was I was going to vote for yesterday if I had voted for anybody. Jokingly I wanted to write-in “Obi-Wan Kenobi”. But in truth I was going to vote for Biden. Not because I thought he was the better candidate, but because there was not a good option at all, he was just the lesser of two evils. This election has made me decide I want a third option when it comes to my politicians, or at least, get rid of political parties all together. We spend so much time infighting and holding each other back instead of up no real change has happened in the past decade? Longer? And whatever change that does happen gets nitpicked apart so much it becomes a shell of its former self. But, enough about that. I have a baby demanding eggs and waffles and I still need to tag this.

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bonesandblood-sunandmoon · 5 years

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Carnival of Aros (May 2019) [Call for Submission post]

The Intersection of Religion and Aromanticism

Coincidentally, it was deciding to check out a blog recommended to this one (@aroacepagans themself) that led to trawling through different aro blogs and questioning if I actually experienced romantic attraction. [For the sake of saving space, I split the full “I don’t think I’m alloromantic, but I’m not sure if I can pinpoint a specific label” part into a separate post (link).]

Region’s Dominant Religion & Love/Romance

It’s not a shock for the usual blog readers, but I distanced myself from Christianity, particularly my family’s flavor of a certain Protestant branch, when I was younger and coming to terms with being queer. Some people reconcile their connection to Christianity with being queer, but I already had theological doubts and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back in a manner of speaking. In that stance, I was more concerned with the church approved relationship only looking heterosexual, and I honestly wasn’t paying as much attention to the intertwined issue that basically went “God will bring everyone a special someone into their life”.

Depending on the exact environment you’re in, you sort of run into different issues with how Christianity may have played into how you discovered your sexuality, lack thereof, romantic orientation, its lack thereof, etc. I remember a focus on the negative attributes given to sex between two people of the same sex/gender in arguments and an incredibly obtuse inability to see that queer people were capable of anything other than sex in irl interactions. It’s honestly a bit of a clusterfuck trying to remember it; “just friends” could cohabitate for years, might be able to hold hands, and could be physically affectionate until the point of Too Romantic when there were suddenly assumptions about The Gay Sex.

The conflation of romantic and sexual made it easy to fall into a trap of falling back on amatonormativity, especially when you were going up against people who didn’t even agree that non-heterosexual people were capable of love. It was all tied up in sin, and lust, and a confused teen who wants to hold hands with someone of the same gender without hearing how they’re “evil” (and probably going to hell) just isn’t on equal footing with that type of argument to get into dismantling amatonormativity when it sounds like they’re agreeing that they can’t love.

This isn’t to say that someone shouldn’t try to address the amatonormativity in those Christian settings. It would be a lot of years before I even had the terminology to try to talk about that, and I’m looking back and trying to be gentle with past-me for using the limited tools I had against adults who really should have known better. I wasn’t the first queer person to spring into existence, y’know? It shouldn’t have been my responsibility to miraculously Know everything to defend myself against homophobia, transphobia, and all kinds of interconnected types of queerphobia (bi, pan, ace, aro) from adults.

Weddings =/= Marriage

That being said, the shorthand for talking about queer acceptance in Christianity was tied up in religiously motivated opinions about whether “gay marriage” was ruining the sacredness of cisheteronormative marriage that dovetails into having 2.5 kids and the American Dream. I remember different levels of informal and class sanctioned debates on whether same-sex marriage should be legalized, notably a whole class period devoted to it in AP US Gov in high school. (This was before the ruling on Obergefell v. Hodges in June 2015.)

In the context of that type of discussion (“why can’t the gays just have a commitment ceremony?”) and the related issues of “just partners” in relation to the AIDS crisis (not having the legal rights tied to a recognized marriage), love wasn’t necessarily reserved for marriage, even though “us queer people basically love like you straight people do” was a popular defense, and marriage didn’t exactly mean the same thing to everyone.

Some people, often straight, associated marriage with the big wedding, a priest/preacher in a church setting, and the whole shebang of the reception and stuff afterwards, which is more tied up in having religious recognition and acceptance. The wedding gets turned into romantic shorthand, and I think that’s why I wound up with complicated personal feelings even while staunchly being the person to speak up and support alloromantic queer people’s rights for their marriage to be recognized and their weddings to be held.

Non-romantic Partnering & Marriage

I grew up with an ambivalent relationship to weddings because they were associated with being reserved for het couples, and even though same-sex marriage has been legalized nationwide (and therefore in my state) for almost 4 years, I haven’t really been concerned about having a big blowout, church approved, het acceptable wedding. I don’t mind the idea of romantic coded activity or partnering with someone, which has personally made me a bit wary of claiming an aro/aro-spec identity. (Not to say that these are incompatible. I, personally, just feel like I’m intruding at times in some aro places.)

Partnering is one thing, but it’s a little hard to nail down if I want to legally marry a long-term committed partner. (Having the potential for more than one and being poly-flexible also makes it hard to imagine picking one person unless there were a particular reason for accessing a marriage benefit with them.) I’ve also had depression for at least a decade and have struggled with suicidal ideation on more than one occasion, so I honestly have trouble with imagining anything that could qualify as “long-term”. The future’s just a hazy guess with some blurry sketched in goals. However, I can’t deny that the benefits of a legal marriage do look appealing, and I just can’t say I’d want to restrict it to a romantic partner.

. . . & Minority Religion

I’m a polytheist (sorted under the Pagan umbrella), and usually when I try to look into Pagan weddings, I mostly get Wiccan or Wiccan derived information on handfasting. I can understand wanting personally relevant symbology and scripts that don’t draw on Xtian ones, and I can understand wanting a rite that means something for your own religious community (not everyone just wants to go to the local courthouse and have their marriage license being signed be it).

For a taste of how handfasting has different definitions across time periods and the Neopagan and/or Wiccan wedding commonly thought of now doesn’t actually have some unbroken link to pre-Christian marriage ceremonies: Tying the Knot: Handfasting Through the Ages [link] and Historical Handfasting (Late Middle Ages to Reformation, Reformation to 1940, Historical v Mythical v Neopagan Usage) [link]. This doesn’t mean certain elements wouldn’t perhaps look familiar to certain pre-Christian people in a certain location, but the whole package of binding hands with a cord, talking about the union of the God and Goddess, year and a day ‘trial’ from one Beltane to another, possibly jumping a besom, “greenwood” marriages starting on May Day isn’t an exact carbon copy of a historical pre-Christian marriage ceremony for everyone.

I’m not saying that no one should do any of this or call it a handfasting because the Neopagan definition has been around long enough to become its own recognized thing. Some of it just sounds like “our wedding ceremony is just as legit as a Xtian ceremony because it’s Old”, but I’m not really interested in that. While the aesthetics can certainly be beautiful, moving, and adaptable to commitment ceremonies for polyam arrangements, I just find myself about as ambivalent to the idea of handfasting as a church wedding.

If the stars were to align and I was clear on feeling romantic attraction or I wanted to get married to a partner for legal reasons, I would want the marriage (signing the paperwork) to be separate from any ceremony held for friends and family to attend. I really can’t lock myself into one ‘ideal wedding’ idea, in part, because I would want to take into account some sort of interfaith compromise in ceremony melding. Even though weddings get used for romantic shorthand, there are personally significant connections to culture, ethnicity, and other minority religions within the US in how some people celebrate a wedding, and I wouldn’t want to ignore that for my hypothetical partner.

#My writing #aro spectrum

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benrleeusa · 5 years

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[Ilya Somin] Federal Court Rules Male-Only Draft Registration is Unconstitutional

If the decision holds up on appeal (which is quite likely), Congress would have to choose between expanding draft registration to women or ending it completely.

In a decision issued on Friday, Judge Gray Miller of the federal District Court for the Southern District of Texas ruled that the US government's system of mandatory male-only draft registration is unconstitutional. The case was brought by the National Coalition for Men (a mens' rights group that has long opposed male-only draft registration) and two individual men, who are required to register under current law.

The United States has not had a military draft since the early 1970s. But federal law requires men between the ages of 18 and 25 to register for "selective service" so that will be available to be drafted in the event the draft is ever reinstituted. In the 1981 case of Rostker v. Goldberg, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of male-only draft registration against a challenge arguing that it should be struck down because it discriminates on the basis of sex. However, since then the situation has changed greatly, as the Pentagon has opened up virtually all combat positions to women.

As Judge Miller explains in his opinion, this change undercut the Rostker decision's main rationale for upholding male-only draft registration, which was that male draftees are far more valuable to the armed forces than female ones, due to the fact that the latter could not serve in combat:

In the nearly four decades since Rostker,... women's opportunities in the military have expanded dramatically. In 2013, the Department of Defense officially lifted the ban on women in combat.... In 2015, the Department of Defense lifted all gender-based restrictions on military service... Thus, women are now eligible for all military service roles, including combat positions.

Therefore, although "'judicial deference . . . is at its apogee' when Congress legislates under its authority to raise and support armies," Rumsfeld, 547 U.S. at 58 (quoting Rostker, 453 U.S. at 70), the Rostker holding does not directly control here. The dispositive fact in Rostker—that women were ineligible for combat—can no longer justify the [selective service system's] gender-based discrimination...

[W]hile historical restrictions on women in the military may have justified past discrimination, men and women are now "similarly situated for purposes of a draft or registrationfor a draft." Rostker, 453 U.S. at 78. If there ever was a time to discuss "the place of women in theArmed Services," that time has passed. Id. at 72. Defendants have not carried the burden of showing that the male-only registration requirement continues to be substantially related to Congress's objective of raising and supporting armies.

Under Supreme Court precedent, sex-based classifications are generally subject to heightened "intermediate scrutiny," which means they must be "substantially related" to the achievement of an "important" government interest. Since 1981, the Supreme Court has taken a tougher line against sex-discriminatory laws and policies, making intermediate scrutiny almost as stringent as the "strict" scrutiny applied to laws that discriminate on the basis of race and ethnicity. Most notably, the Court invalidated the exclusion of women from the Virginia Military Institute in the 1996 case of United States v. Virginia. The exclusion of women from a military college is not exactly the same as their exclusion from draft registration. But there are obvious parallels between the two situations.

Judge Miller correctly concluded that the government's other arguments for male-only draft registration don't pass intermediate scrutiny. For example, he rejected the claim that sex discrimination here is justified because men are, on average, bigger and stronger than women. The Court rejected similar arguments in US v. Virginia. As Miller points out, size and strength are less significant in many positions in modern armies than in earlier eras. In addition, the armed forces have the option of setting gender-neutral physical requirements for potential draftees. While fewer women than men are likely to meet those requirements, that fact does not justify a categorical exclusion of those women who can meet them. Indeed, the Pentagon already has such requirements for a variety of positions within the armed forces.

Friday's ruling is not surprising. Indeed, I have been predicting since the new Pentagon policy began in 2013 that the abolition of rules barring women from combat roles in the armed forces was likely to eventually lead to the invalidation of male-only draft registration. It took this long for a court to make such a ruling mainly because a number of previous lawsuits suffered setbacks on procedural grounds or are still ongoing.

While most of Judge Miller's analysis strikes me as absolutely on target, he may underrate the continuing relevance of Rostker. While that decision was largely premised on the fact that female draftees were less useful to the military than male ones due to the former's exclusion from combat roles, it was also based on special deference to Congress on defense policy issues. Justice William Rehnquist's majority opinion emphasized the courts' "lack of competence" on national security issues and the consequent need for "healthy deference to legislative and executive judgments in the area of military affairs." That deference might justify upholding male-only draft registration even if all or most combat positions are open to women. Rostker could potentially be read to justify applying such heavy deference to other possible rationales for exempting women, even perhaps ones that Congress gave little or no consideration when it adopted male-only draft registration.

It is, therefore, possible that Judge Gray's ruling will be reversed by the court of appeals. But if that happens, there is a strong likelihood that the Supreme Court will eventually reverse Rostker or modify it to bring it in line with more recent Supreme Court sex-discrimination decisions. The days of male-only draft registration are likely to be numbered.

Contrary to some initial media reports (since corrected), Judge Gray's decision does not require the government to impose mandatory draft registration on women. Indeed, the ruling does is just a "declaratory judgment" and does not impose any injunction on the government at all. In the short run, therefore, it will have little effect beyond allowing the two individual plaintiffs to avoid registering for the draft without fear of punishment.

But, assuming it is not overturned on appeal, other plaintiffs can likely use this ruling to secure a more general decision against the male-only draft. When and if that happens, the courts could potentially issue an injunction ordering either the extension of draft registration to women or its abolition for men. I believe the latter is the more likely outcome, since it would impose far less of a burden on both the government and private individuals. Either way, the ultimate choice between the two remedies would be in the hands of Congress, which can enact a new law embodying either of them.

In my view, by far the best option is to abolish mandatory draft registration for both sexes. That would simultaneously promote both liberty and equality. It would end one of the last examples of open sex-discrimination in federal government policy, while also freeing both men and women from the threat of forced labor.

Judge Gray's decision mentions the ongoing deliberations of the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service on the future of the draft and other forms of "national service" (the government tried to use them as a justification for dismissing the case on procedural grounds). Back in October, I testified before the Commission. My testimony outlined both constitutional and moral reasons for rejecting mandatory national service of any kind.

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