Culture Warriors category archive

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Addendum:

Dick Polman ponders “evolution” vis-a-vis “flip-flops.” Read it.

When an ethnic slur can be defended as tradition, that’s privilege.

Noz has a question about them:

but then once the evaluation system is up and running it finds that 97-98% of the teachers perform at or above effective levels. education reform people seem to think this means that teachers weren’t evaluated properly. but isn’t it just as likely that teachers aren’t as big of a problem as policy-makers has assumed them to be? and if policy-makers won’t budge from the “bad teacher” hypothesis no matter what new information they get, why should anyone listen to them?

Holy foregone conclusions! No! Batman! Facts delendi est!

Flawed and perverse policies must be defended against facts at all costs.

Via PoliticalProf.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

I’ve told this story before, but any joke worth telling once is worth telling again.

So the fellow settled down on the shrink’s couch. The shrink, being an old-line Freudian, decided to start with the Rorschach test.

He held up an inkblot. “What does this remind you of?” he asked.

“Sex,” answered the patient.

He held of another inkblot. “What does this remind you of?” he asked.

“Sex,” answered the patient.

This went on until the entire library of inkblots was exhausted.

After a long pause, the shrink stroked his goatee (I said he was an old-line Freudian) and said, “I think you are obsessed with sex.”

“Me!” screamed the patient, jumping off the couch. “You’re the guy with all the dirty pictures!”

Meanwhile, over at Delaware Liberal, Pandora wonders what it is about the word “consent” that some folks don’t understand.

At the Roanoke Times, Stratton Wayne St.Clair thinks our society’s attitude towards sex may have something to do with it. A nugget:

The problem we have with sex in this country is it’s juvenile. We are saturated with sexual images. Have you ever seen a Little Miss beauty pageant? It’s obscene. And yet for all the sexual innuendoes, poorly disguised jokes (think “Two and a Half Men”), movies (think “American Pie” or “Girls Gone Wild” or any other films aimed at teenagers), advertisements, etc., all done with a snicker and a wink, we have a shortage of images of what an adult, mature sexual life looks like.

Add to this mix the ongoing puritanical attitude toward sex that actually goes hand in hand with the above, is it any wonder kids (not to mention adults) are confused and messed up regarding sexuality?

Until Americans can talk about sex and sexual conduct without either giggling or getting the vapors, silly, stupid, vicious sexual conduct will continue to be common.

In my local rag, Margaret Matray writes of the effort by the Virginia State Historical Society to make historical information about slaves available for genealogical research.

It is a difficult task, as little is preserved, other than sales transactions, bequests, and gift records, for black slaves were considered on par with cattle. Indeed, as anyone who has ever dealt with prize cattle will know, more attention was likely paid to the ancestry of cattle.

The whole article is worth a read (it appeared in the print edition two weeks ago), but a few nuggets will remind you that, when persons speak nostalgically of “The Lost Cause,” this is the cause that was lost:

• A receipt from a slaveholder in Richmond in 1850 details the sale of a man named Nate for $850, his condition listed as “sound and healthy.”
• In a written agreement from King George County in 1762, a slave owner gives his daughter a wedding gift: a slave named Diana.
• In a 1758 estate inventory from Essex County, a woman named Leek is valued with her child, London, at 65 pounds. Their names appear on a list with other slaves, alongside silverware, furniture and cattle.

Via Bartcop.

Arizona Republicans, skeevier than ever.

Is this their next step?

Read more »

Lee Jussim:

Just because people on both sides think the other side is out of touch does not necessary mean both sides are equally out of touch with reality. If you believe there are demons under the bed and I think you are delusional, one of us is actually right and the other is actually wrong.

So who engages in more science-denial — liberals or conservatives?

Read the rest.

At Psychology Today Blogs, Laurie Essig cuts through the crap about the Steubenville rapists.

But the real story shouldn’t be about the mainstream media behaving badly or even the mock media’s hoisting them on their sports-obsessed petard. The real story isn’t even that a young woman was violently raped and then violated over and over again by the people in her community and then again by the media. The real story is that there is something seriously wrong with a culture so twisted that it values male athletes so much that it refuses to hold them accountable for anything but winning.

Read the rest.

It’s a parent thing.

Something about having kids causes people to forget what growing up was like.

Read more »

(Context.)

His phrasing is instructive, is it not?

Via Contradict Me.

Chauncey Devega explains.

Republican legislator claims to be unaware of the favorite fantasy of old white Republican men.

Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI) declined to take a position last week during a town hall meeting on whether transvaginal ultrasounds should be mandatory for women seeking abortions, saying he has never heard of the practice and couldn’t weigh in on it because “I haven’t had one.”

(snip)

Duffy has described himself as “100 percent prolife without exceptions” (though he also said “To qualify, I believe that if we have the life of a mother as an issue, the mother’s life takes priority, but we must make every effort to save the life of the child.”) Asked about one of the main goals for the pro-life movement, however, Duffy said he had not heard of transvaginal ultrasounds at all.

Yeah.

Right.

Via TPM.

A NASCAR driver who was suspended on Sunday for using a racial slur is explaining that he “didn’t think twice” about using the word because it “didn’t seem like a big deal.”

Hateful behavior doesn’t usually seem like such a big deal to the person doing the behaving, now, does it?

A pride of heteros.

Kavips has a theory:

. . . I notice that across the red states of the United States, primarily a bastion of fundamentalist conservative theocracy, the weather is changing. Basically, there is no rain…. Secondly I have noticed that the weather in Oklahoma is every year, corresponding more and more like those dry, hot , sandy climes on the other side of our planet, which coincidentally, are also occupied by a bastion of fundamentalist conservative theocracies, practicing something very similar to Oklahoma policy but over there it is called Shara (sic) Law…

Read the rest.