Month: May 2013

David Bellamy left the following curious link:

A leading neurologist at the University of Oxford said this week that recent developments meant that science may one day be able to identify religious fundamentalism as a “mental illness” and a cure it.

During a talk at the Hay Literary Festival in Wales on Wednesday, Kathleen Taylor was asked what positive developments she anticipated in neuroscience in the next 60 years.

“One of the surprises may be to see people with certain beliefs as people who can be treated,” she explained, according to The Times of London. “Somebody who has for example become radicalised to a cult ideology – we might stop seeing that as a personal choice that they have chosen as a result of pure free will and may start treating it as some kind of mental disturbance. I am not just talking about the obvious candidates like radical Islam or some of the more extreme cults,” she explained. “I am talking about things like the belief that it is OK to beat your children. These beliefs are very harmful but are not normally categorized as mental illness.”

Yes, let’s all get lobotomized and have “correct” thoughts implanted into our brains. It surely is an attractive idea: anybody who disagrees with me must be sick and needs to be cured. Of course, it is only attractive for as long as my disagreement with Kathleen Taylors of this world doesn’t mark me as diseased.

This was actually the idea behind the persecution of Soviet dissidents in the 1970s. Anybody who didn’t believe that the Soviet system was the best in the world was considered insane. Dissidents were put into psychiatric facilities and subjected to enormous doses of psychotropic drugs. As a result of such “treatments”, many would, indeed, become disturbed. This allowed the authorities to take the triumphant “We told you so, they are crazy!” position. So this approach to dissent is anything but new.

From a student’s comment:

In our society, people who are well off or successful are stigmatized and persecuted. Everybody hates them and blames all of the world’s problems on them.

A feminist blogger writes:

My mom has actually told me stories about going for job interviews in her twenties and having the male interviewer ask if she was pregnant, or planned on getting pregnant.

I personally witnessed this question being asked of a female candidate in 2002 in Canada, so there hasn’t been as much progress as we would like to imagine. The female candidate in question had to offer humiliating reassurances that she wasn’t and wasn’t planning to. I was not on the search committee and if I witnessed this, it means the whole thing was done publicly.

A blogger asks about Polanski:

Far more troubling is his absolute dismissal of any attempt at gender equity. Does he not understand oppression?

Yes, of course, he understands it. Not only that, he lives for it. Why do you think he is so rabid that there are fewer women for him to oppress these days?

When I see jerkwads of Polanski’s caliber start foaming at the mouth about the horrors of feminist liberation, I always feel very happy. We must be doing really well to make somebody this nasty so upset.

Now, repeat after me: “Clarissa is always right.”

Years ago, I wrote a post titled “Why Female Viagra Doesn’t Exist.” In the post, I explained that even though this is an invention that could bring billions upon billions of dollars in revenues, it will not be made because there is a huge opposition in society to the very idea of this product.

The few readers I had at that time objected and grumbled. But guess what? I was right, as usual. See  here:

Journalist Daniel Bergner, whose story on the still-being-developed wonder drug was published last week in the New York Times Magazine, says researchers worry about creating an orgasm-hungry nympho. Yeah, the author expressed surprise at that, too.

“More than one adviser to the industry told me that companies worried about the prospect that their study results would be too strong, that the F.D.A. would reject an application out of concern that a chemical would lead to female excesses, crazed binges of infidelity, societal splintering,” Bergner writes.

Nobody wants women to liberate the full force of their libidos because too many of societal structures that hinge on female sexual repression will collapse. For instance, a woman who is familiar with the concept of an orgasm cannot be bought. And that is what terrifies so many people (both men and women).

P.S. Yes, my writing skills were much poorer when I first started blogging. So what? I was still right.

Woman: Now is the best time in your relationship with your child!

Me (after 3,5 hours at the dentist’s, itching all over, and suffering because of swollen ankles and hands): What do you mean? I can’t say I’m enjoying this “relationship” a whole lot.

Woman: Because while he is inside you, he is all yours. And once he gets out, that’s it, it won’t be perfect any more.

The university administrators pushed through a video surveillance policy without consulting anybody. The policy was announced at a time when most faculty members are not around and cannot protest.

Now, the university can install video cameras pretty much anywhere on campus, including classrooms, professors’ offices, etc. The language of the policy does not prevent the administration from installing cameras in the toilets or gym showers.

One lonely voice of a senior faculty member has been raised in outrage. Everybody else is on vacation, afraid to say anything (my case), or indifferent.

The greatest suffering I’m experiencing as I sit in the dental chair is not even contemplating the bill that awaits me at the end. It’s the horrible TV show that plays on the screen right in front of me. The number of gender-essentialist idiocies its 5 chatty and toothy female hosts have regaled the viewers with in just ten minues is horrible.

It turns out that men are primitive and incapable of expressing even the most basic thoughts and women are hypocrites because they never say what they mean. And it’s important for women to know how to manipulate men well because otherwise they will never take out the garbage.

Then the show informed me that men cheat because they want approval and women cheat because they want attention. The possibility that people might have sex because they want sex is obviously too complex for the show’s creators. Acording to the show’s logic, this must mean they are all men. But I shouldn’t say this so directly because that would mean I’m not a woman.  And then nobody will be willing to be manipulated by me into taking out the garbage. And then I will just have to cheat to get attention from potential garbage removers. Who will cheat to get approval for their garbage removing services.

God, I’m glad I don’t have cable.

Have you heard about this very silly “procreate now or else” campaign that Britain is trying out? This is yet another one in the series of useless European measures aimed at getting people have more children.

World-wide practice has demonstrated that there is absolutely nothing anybody can do to boost procreation than to deprive women of their right to study, work, and have opportunities for development. Similarly, there is nothing one can do to limit procreation save give women the right to study, work, and develop. All other measures are a waste of time and money.

When women have a chance to do absolutely anything else whatsoever, they invariably choose not to have more than 2 children (which is what you need to boost population numbers.) So Britain’s campaign is doomed to be as useless as all similar campaigns. The campaign’s creators are total idiots who think that women don’t procreate like bunnies because nobody has reminded them to do so. This level of stupidity is very disturbing.

Yes, multiculturalism is stupid, and everybody with a brain has already recognized that many times over. Now it is important not to let our disgust with the concept distract us from everything else that is going on:

Strange things are happening—financial crashes occur that affect our daily lives, but are experienced as totally opaque—and the rejection of multiculturalism introduces a false clarity into the situation: it is the foreign intruders who are disturbing our way of life. . . Clinging to ethnic identity serves as a protective shield against the trauma of being caught up in the vortex of non-transparent financial abstraction.

Žižek has been one of the most vocal European critics of the concept of multi-culturalism, and I think he deserves to be heard on this matter. If something becomes too easy of a target, then maybe something else is happening that is more obscured from view.