Spearited Away (In Leaps And Bounds)

Dark alleys leading down dark alleys. Turn back now:

"A person who shits on the kitchen floor because it gives them erotic pleasure and a person who shits on the kitchen floor to ward off the demons living in the cupboard are both shunted into the diagnostic category of encopresis. It’s not just that their thought-process don’t matter, it’s as if they don’t exist. The human being is a web of flesh spun over a void."

Saying it's wrong doesn't condescend or deny our humanity. 

So (again and still) fuck "you can believe what you want to believe"...

Drink Your Own Urine To Be Happy, Healthy, And Thin

I love how she sells it. She's so confident. So Professional-Model sounding.

Fucking fruitcake,...

Laurence O'Donnell To Weiner: What's Wrong With You?

What a jerk.

Though, I must admit, it seems kind of unfair to hit Weiner with this question, alone, when so many need to have it placed before them as well,...

Some People Never Want Us To Get It Straight Again,...

 

 Nobody has to tell me this. I'm very specific when I tell you this. I say it everyday:

"Abnormal Is the New Normal"

But you can only see it if you're normal, in which case it's all still very weird,...

 

Like Ann And Gays: He, Too, Was All About The Fashion

White Power. Black Power. Grrrl Power. Gay Power. Whatever's next. It doesn't matter what they put before the word "power," they're all striving hypocritical assholes to me, slithering around, trying to exploit anyone they can. I've been watching it my whole life:

These post-'70s Eldridge Cleaver types will say anything, but in the end, have always stood for nothing more than the power to con the naive and idiotic into focusing on their privates.

We compare football, which women are especially fond of watching. The big shoulders, the tight pants (bulge-enhancing,...)...Basketball players are dressed like very unattractive women or horribly oversized children..."It's completely not sexy."

Sigh. "Sexy". Yes, that's what professor and gay rights activist Ann Althouse finds important in a discussion about sports, people.

Trying to have a discussion with these people is like living with Janet Jackson's nipple slip at the Super Bowl - completely unprompted - all the time.

(I know, I re-used this photo, but it worked,...)

That switch - turning every topic of conversation into a reason to reference (and something to be subject to) that itch in their pants - is how you know who's "spiritual" today.

Or stupid.

Whichever it is, they make me stop caring about, pretty much, anything - and pretty fast.

See, what I'm thinking is, I could be writing "Kill Whitey!" for you to read. And that would be no different from me reading a certain twice-"married" white feminist, with a gay son, discussing the worth and role of men and tradition in society. 

Of course, if anyone did see me "go black" and write "Kill Whitey!" every day, the twice-"married" white feminist with a gay son would think I was a "bad man".

(Is it just me, or do those women, above, look like three dudes in drag?)

At least, I'd be less than a "good man" like San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who is another of these *reasonable* defenders of "gay" marriage. Like Ann, he, too, is divorced (and twice "married") but was also busted for adultery with his best friend and campaign manager's wife - making him an even bigger (and better!) authority on the subject of how things should go than even Ann Althouse, who is incredulous anybody but someone like she and good ol' Gavin and her gay kid (with their hair, and pants, perpetually on fire) should call the shots:

"What a nutty set of things we're asked to believe! Who the hell is this stereotypical married man, constrained by what other people are forbidden to do? And why should his ridiculous, tenuous connection to norms carry the day? And how can obsessing over what makes him tick work to keep marriage focused on the raising of children and not on the emotional needs and desires of adults? It seems to be all about the needs and desires of adults — really ridiculous heterosexual male adults. 

Who are these people?!"

I don't know, but I do know it's impossible to have anything resembling a reasonable conversation, or a true debate, with someone who is so fucked up - so steeped in portraying any form of deviancy as anything but - the entire concept of straight upstanding men as a focus, and standard, of normalcy can seem "ridiculous" because (as the divorced, and supposedly-twice-married mother of a gay son) it centers around nothing they have cultivated.

Just like the racists of the 50s and 60s hadn't cultivated a relationship with blacks.

And, just as before, good and normal folks are trapped between the extremists. 

No, there's nothing wrong with you, Miss Ann, or "spiritual" gays - and your constant "search" for something "sexy" - it's the rest of "normal" society that has the problem:

It's been this way since the day Martin Luther King died - that's when people started listening to you Eldridge Cleaver "power" types, trying to get your little (very little) revenge on everybody for who-knows-what:

That was the point of the cod piece, all along,...

 

Which Christmas Carol Asks 'Do You Hear What I Hear?'

"He calls it a quest - to recharge his chi - I call it an excuse for him to score his pot and wag his pickle at co-eds."

-- Lucille Bluth, cutting through the jargon, on Arrested Development 

 

Things My Friends Say (A Series)

"Wow. The shit you find on YouTube. Chick with a tail. And I'm sure, in the flick, some guy...bangs the chick...with a tail. O.K., I'm in." -- Vince

I've Been Reading Those Books With Big Words

"If in the past it was wealthy and powerful elites who labeled others as deviant, this prerogative has now been seized by influential interest or advocacy groups. Women's groups and gay rights organizations, for instance, now have the ability to silence speech by those with whom they disagree. Health care professionals and advocates have succeeded in medicalizing drug abuse and other behaviors once considered destructive. But the academic and media elite have the greatest power because they can shape discussion and dramatically influence public perceptions. These changes in the intellectual landscape prove that [Emile] Durkheim was right in his prediction that the rate of deviance recognized by a society is constant, and that deviance will occur and be identified in every society, even in a "society of saints." But in ways that he and the earliest sociologists would have found startling, the targets of the new labeling system have changed: from those at the margins of society to those at the center.

Yet the picture is even more complex. Despite these political and intellectual crosscurrents, there are signs that the fact of deviance is being rediscovered by ordinary people who have suffered the realworld consequences of the academic elite's rejection of the concept. Those whose communities have been broken by failed welfare policies, or whose families have fallen apart as a result of teenage pregnancy or divorce, are now speaking out about the moral chaos that is destroying their neighborhoods, their schools and their families. The pendulum continues to swing; where it will stop is not clear.

For more than thirty years, the evolving politics of deviance has demanded that we adopt standards of conduct that come from human will and desire as mediated by advocacy groups, rather than those that derive from reason and common sense. Social theorist Philip Jenkins has proposed that the current social constructionist environment can be likened to a marketplace in which activists compete to win buyers for their products. As marketers well know, success in convincing buyers that they really want to purchase a new product, especially when they are perfectly happy with the one they already have, can be achieved only through creative packaging of the product. The packaging of ideas involves a complex system of communication aimed at reaching people on an emotional level, convincing them that they want a redefinition of deviance even though they never realized that they needed it.

The following chapters explore this "culture war" between traditional and postmodern definitions of deviance. My central argument is moral good or moral harm can come to a society according to how this conflict is resolved. I do not believe that all behaviors are created equal. And no conception of what is morally right exists without a corresponding idea of what is morally wrong. The distinction between these - that is, the boundaries of deviance - must not be established by politically powerful advocates through savvy marketing techniques. I argue that we must reject the marketplace model, and instead draw from nature, reason and common sense to define what is deviant and reaffirm the moral ties that bind us together."

-- From the introduction to The Politics Of Deviance by Anne Hendershott.