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Social PhilosophyCategory Archives

The right to life – I have it.

The Way It Was | Mother Jones.

This article has made me angry. So angry, i am going to open very far too fresh wounds.

I don’t miscarry. Five times, the fetus died. Five times, this longed for child died before twenty weeks. Some early, two, very very late.

Once I gave birth to a little girl I grieved over, too tiny and perfect for life.

The rest of the time, I had a D&C. The fetus, long dead, had to be removed, as my body was not letting go, as my heart was not. It was killing me. I could have died of septicaemia.

With the law changes in the US, I WOULD have died. My subsequent miracles, my youngest children, never born. My equally cherished older children motherless too soon.

The pious arrogance of the anti abortionists. If they are all so pro life, why are they so willing to sacrifice mine? And my youngest two children, who would not have even had a chance to live? 

And all the women who must make the terrible, awful choice, whether the fetus is viable or not, to end a pregnancy. What cruelty is there in choosing for them. Choosing a way of vast expense and pain. Of almost certain death at the hand of backyard butchers. For these desperate women, often trapped in violence and poverty, frequently trying to protect other already born children, unable to access affordable contraception with the obscene lottery of health insurance (unless for the gift of Planned Parenthood, who do far more to prevent unwanted pregnancies than to end them), or perhaps young, vulnerable and scared, with parents who would not understand, or who would rage and throw them out, or with the consequence of death and revilement from their community, hard lined with religious intolerance, mocking the very words of their religious ethos – how dare ANYONE condemn women to this? Their children left motherless, often already fatherless, consigned to foster homes that may scar them in too many ways. The women dead or broken, from one awful episode left unable then to ever have that child they may have wished more than anything they could have had, who perhaps died, or meant the death of them? Or that they could have had if older, supported, or not abused?

People like these so called right to lifers make me sick with their sanctimonious hypocrisy. They seek only to preserve the narrow definition of life. All life is not sacred to them. ONly that which gestates. 

Those people have blood of far more on their hands than any abortionist. Those people are murderers far more vile.

How to learn from a tragedy – 10yo girl suicides over bullying

And here is an endless grief story where nobody wins.

This poor little girl, suffering until driven to desperation.

Her traumatised family, asking themselves why they didn’t react sooner, why…

Little girls who, (like big ones), can be so cruel – but often don’t intend to be so cruel, they are just fitting in themselves, trying to work out the mores and ways of the culture they are in, a pecking order that all socialised creatures have. They will carry (except potentially in a few, sociopathic type cases) a dreadful guilt, learning too harsh a lesson.

If anything that we hope they would be, her teachers and prinicipal, wishing they had intervened earlier, not dismissed as ‘just kids’ scenario.

And all of us parents, the sad majority of which wince at recollections at how intensely felt the bullying was when we were recipients, (and shame if participants at the giving end), how we want to protect our kids, wondering how to do that without knee jerking into overprotectiveness so that our children are wrapped even further in paranoia and cotton wool, learning nothing but fear…

We need to ask if this is a big picture we are missing, or single incident? Media is of little help in this, the pedophile around every corner has gotten us terrified tolet our kids out to play, restricting their capacity to socialise independently with their peers in a way few groups have historically known.

And in the meantime, if you will excuse me, I am going to hug my 10yo daughter and 8yo son (and think about my other more grown daughters), and hope I know enough to have given them what they need to not face an abyss that this sad little girl could not get beyond.

Parents in a small town in Illinois suspect their young daughter took her own life after enduring years of bullying

via A 10-year-old’s ‘gut-wrenching’ suicide: Is bullying to blame? – The Week.

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86th Birthday Post from someone throughly magic

Oh, how marvellous this post is!!

 

86th Birthday Rage [very long] [first post] [hello!] – Imgur.

Death of this innocent means death of social innocence?

Well, indeed…this one has torn me up. That poor child. But don’t we all feel a twinge before robustly denouncing the Chinese, before claiming it would never happen here, wherever our here may be? Can any of us be totally sure?

How can I be proud of my China if we are a nation of 1.4bn cold hearts?

The death of the two-year-old run over as passersby ignored her is symptomatic of a deepening moral crisis

via How can I be proud of my China if we are a nation of 1.4bn cold hearts? | Lijia Zhang | Comment is free | The Observer.

Death is solitary, but must we be alone?

A beautiful woman, who had met famous people, talented, desired, loved and cared for, liked even by so many around her. Yet her body is found after 3 years – in a housing flat, isolated, with the tv flickering on her corpse – so decomposed they needed dental records to identify her. How does this happen?

Even if people are around us, the dying is the most solitary act we can do. But to be so alone, after such a vibrant life. What made her hide? How did she die?

And what does it say about us?

via Joyce Carol Vincent: how could this young woman lie dead and undiscovered for almost three years? 

The vile power of anonymity

I don’t agree with everyone online. I am also strongly opinionated. We will pause for collective gasps of shock. Ok, over that? Good.

Does my disagreement with them give me the right to abuse, stalk, harass them? Obsess over every grotty little detail I can pathetically seek to find, like a creepy stalker?

The fact I think Fred Phelps is creepy dangerous does not give me the right to provide him unsolicited abuse, (unlike his vile practices, that he has, in my occasionally humble opinion, brainwashed his near cult into emulating).

Anonymity (the relative anonymity, at least), that being online bestows on us, seems to remove basic lessons in human social skills. The ability to use good manners. To reflect on potential pain. The fact that the person you spit your vitriol at is actually a fellow human, not a series of electrons after all. There are people who make mistakes, who have other opinions, who are actually still stumbling around through life like the rest of us.

I love the benefits the Internet brings. It can build amazing communities for the lonely, and empower the disenfranchised, educate those with limited access to knowledge. It is a deeply powerful tool. Like all tools, it is two edged and dangerous when wielded by those who have underlying agendas. I am sickened by this descent into abusive hostility when faced with disagreement – the argument of the playground, the kindergarten.

I often wonder if people who behave so badly are role playing out their responses to times of being bullied, or feeling powerless, of adolescent sufferings. For adolescent cruelty is deeply apparent in such responses. The cruelty of thoughtless high school students.

I hope we evolve better mechanisms, and start to enforce better behaviour by our lack of accepting such rudeness and hostility.

I f you can read this tale, (Mom, Don’t Read This – Skepchick), and not feel outraged – no matter how much or little you agree with where the tale started  - then please, examine the basic set of human rules for interaction we should all have been educated with, instantly.

 

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Digesting the fat of the land (via The Drum)

Frugality vs conspicuous consumerism, the hav it all now mentality that certainly is a porton, way upgraded to large portion, of obesity crises in western countries…

In Australia and just about every other country in the world the proportion of overweight and obese people increases year-on-year. Sixty-seven per cent of Aussies are overweight as are 74 per cent of Americans. The one ray of light in this is that the New Zealanders have managed to trump us with 68 per cent – it’s good to hear the fat hobbits across the Tasman Sea can beat us in something other than Rugby, but still, we’re all getting too large.

Not only are we eating more meat, our food portions generally are expanding in size. In the US 20 years ago, the average cheeseburger had 330 calories, now the average is 590; the average portion of spaghetti contained 500 calories, now it comes in at 1020; and a can of fizzy drink had an average of 82 calories, now it has ballooned out to 250. Now, none of us were starving 20 years ago, but a hell of a lot of us weighed a lot less. Added to this we are chucking food out at a rate never before seen – in Australia we throw away 5.2 billion dollars worth of food each year, including 1.1 billion of fresh fruit and vegetables. That’s around 600 dollars per household. There are charities popping up around Australia now whose sole purpose is to take the food we want to throw away and give it to hungry families.

So we’re getting fatter and fatter, eating more and more, and to top it all off we are throwing tonnes of it away. Six hundred dollars worth per household thrown into landfill – think about that. You know what is going to cost that much? The carbon tax. Actually, it’ll cost a bit less – around 500 per household. And that is putting aside the Treasury estimates that show nearly 70 per cent of Australians will be fully compensated.

via The fat of the land – The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).

Fooey, Facebook, Farewell.

I know, I tried once before. I didn’t manage it. But tbh, the last few months have seen me avoid Facebook, except to update The Serval Project Page. I now have an identity to do that, and find I am merely annoyed and overwhelmed by Facebook. I have so much happening in life, that I avoid responding. It is making me rude. I don’t like being that. And I guess the story today of cookies from Facebook tracking you even when logged out was the final straw. Also see this ridiculous Facebook Timeline (Facebook Invaded My Privacy, And All I Got Was This Lousy Timeline). Enough already.

I find am actually interested in engaging people now the dread of it Facebook had instilled in me is gone. But why the dread?

I think the simple answer is, many people do a lot on Facebook, and I just became overwhelmed. Guiltily, the unanswered messages piled up.  Facebook, like me when the kids rooms are beyond my acceptability limit, turned into a screaming +10 monster of nagginess. Actually, I am much more mellow…I just remove tech from their reach until fixed – or unleash Daddy (the Gary Larson cartoon featuring a small boy in front a whiteboard with formulae, and a professorish man with a pointer standing next to it, with caption ‘eventually Billy came to dread his father’s lectures as a form of punishment’ is terribly apt here:) ).  Anyway, Facebook is starting to feel like the Internet‘s version of the beginnings of an abusive relationship. Questioning me endlessly about what I am doing, who I am seeing. Tracking me endlessly. Demanding endlessly. That is a lot of endlessly:) Yes, hyperbole, but I honestly came to dread Facebook emails.

I do participate more on Google+, I have found. That might be temporary, but I am more comfortable there. Twitter I don’t mind dipping in and out of, but have never found the right tool to wade through the flood of information. I would love to, so recommendations, please!

So, henceforth, all will centre back with my blog, Google Plus, (this is me) and sometimes, Twitter (me there too). My blog updates Twitter. I update Google+, until APIs from Google allow me to blog-> + the same way,with a nifty plugin. Posterous occasionally will be kept in mix to update log, Tumblr,(which just mirrors this blog, so nbd), and Twitter all at once, in lazy fashion.

So if you want to actually interact, Google Plus, or here on blog:)

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A Guide to Disney’s Horrible Female Role Models

Some nsfw but very black humoured points here:)

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A Day to Call for Data Independence

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