And another way of putting it is to think about it in a foundationally different way.

Judith Butler asks "What can a body do" and points out the contrast that question has with our understanding of gender roles.


The ignorance on display here is like watching the people throw tomatoes at the girls in A League of Their Own, because everyone knows girls can't play baseball. They just aren't built for it. It's wrong! We gotta do something!


Blah blah


It's like that but imagine the same old times voice shouting "they can't let a man wear a dress and take estrogen, it taint right!!"

They know that they're in danger but go on with their own lives anyway. It's incredibly brave. Like an illegal immigrant at a cross burning, they March into the restroom of the gender they feel they are knowing they're going to be harassed like this.

How many of those fact checking organisations would have flagged Judith Miller's Iraq pieces in the NYT as "deliberatly misleading content"? Or what about the 16 hit pieces on Sanders within 24h at Bezos' rag of a newspaper? And let's not even start about the reporting on the recent night of the long knives in Saudi Arabia ("reform", really? fuck off)...

Point is, the effort to curtail "fake news" regularly goes hand in hand with the suppression of non-establishment views while leaving the main sources of deliberate misinformation untouched. Remember PropOrNot and how Bezos' rag, amongst others, jumped on it? That list included prominent left wing/anti-war sites such as TruthOut, Counterpunch, TruthDig, ConsortiumNews, etc.

Want some examples of "misleading content" or "deliberate misinformation"? Just browse through the articles at Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting for a few minutes.

*related to http://videosift.com/video/Evidence-of-A-Long-Hard-Life-for-Judith-the-Horned-Dinosaur

Not a downvote spree, I watch these videos on other sites and come here and see them after already watching them and I vote on them, call it what you want but I have viewed the video and voted accordingly. So if it seems that boneremake downvoted a video and twenty seconds later another, your sure to saint judith's titties I have watched them and I am expressing my voting abilities to their extent.

I apologize when I mean it, people saying sorry over stupid little trivial shit like that is not my style, your feelings are not my concern, they are a your problem not a my problem. Yes I am an asshole and my words are blabbering of a jack ass, totally well aware of that.

You auta try out reddit.com, my account goes from -80 downvotes to +220 in a couple hours. One lil vote down your submission of a video someone else made shouldn't be much of a concern to you, yet it always seems to be.

Damn, I was trying to fit the full song title in the tags, but it leaves no room for anything else.

@deathcow: damn, did you really miss Mer de Noms? Judith? That was really a great album that stood apart from other material that was coming out at the time. I highly recommend it.

Thirteenth Step was good, but it was a little Toolish. That's not a bad thing, except that I really liked APC, so to have Tool II was a little bit of a letdown. Still a good album, though.

eMotive, the source of the above track, was lazy filler. I prefer to pretend it doesn't exist. Pet is the original song that the above is based on.

If anyone wants to read more about Stephen and LGBTQIA youth, here is the NYT article.

The New York Time's

Generation LGBTQIA

By MICHAEL SCHULMAN

Published: January 10, 2013

STEPHEN IRA, a junior at Sarah Lawrence College, uploaded a video last March on We Happy Trans, a site that shares "positive perspectives" on being transgender.

In the breakneck six-and-a-half-minute monologue - hair tousled, sitting in a wood-paneled dorm room - Stephen exuberantly declared himself "a queer, a nerd fighter, a writer, an artist and a guy who needs a haircut," and held forth on everything from his style icons (Truman Capote and "any male-identified person who wears thigh-highs or garters") to his toy zebra.

Because Stephen, who was born Kathlyn, is the 21-year-old child of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, the video went viral, garnering nearly half a million views. But that was not the only reason for its appeal. With its adrenalized, freewheeling eloquence, the video seemed like a battle cry for a new generation of post-gay gender activists, for whom Stephen represents a rare public face.

Armed with the millennial generation's defining traits - Web savvy, boundless confidence and social networks that extend online and off - Stephen and his peers are forging a political identity all their own, often at odds with mainstream gay culture.

If the gay-rights movement today seems to revolve around same-sex marriage, this generation is seeking something more radical: an upending of gender roles beyond the binary of male/female. The core question isn't whom they love, but who they are - that is, identity as distinct from sexual orientation.

But what to call this movement? Whereas "gay and lesbian" was once used to lump together various sexual minorities - and more recently "L.G.B.T." to include bisexual and transgender - the new vanguard wants a broader, more inclusive abbreviation. "Youth today do not define themselves on the spectrum of L.G.B.T.," said Shane Windmeyer, a founder of Campus Pride, a national student advocacy group based in Charlotte, N.C.

Part of the solution has been to add more letters, and in recent years the post-post-post-gay-rights banner has gotten significantly longer, some might say unwieldy. The emerging rubric is "L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," which stands for different things, depending on whom you ask.

"Q" can mean "questioning" or "queer," an umbrella term itself, formerly derogatory before it was appropriated by gay activists in the 1990s. "I" is for "intersex," someone whose anatomy is not exclusively male or female. And "A" stands for "ally" (a friend of the cause) or "asexual," characterized by the absence of sexual attraction.

It may be a mouthful, but it's catching on, especially on liberal-arts campuses.

The University of Missouri, Kansas City, for example, has an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Resource Center that, among other things, helps student locate "gender-neutral" restrooms on campus. Vassar College offers an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Discussion Group on Thursday afternoons. Lehigh University will be hosting its second annual L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Intercollegiate Conference next month, followed by a Queer Prom. Amherst College even has an L.G.B.T.Q.Q.I.A.A. center, where every group gets its own letter.

The term is also gaining traction on social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr, where posts tagged with "lgbtqia" suggest a younger, more progressive outlook than posts that are merely labeled "lgbt."

"There's a very different generation of people coming of age, with completely different conceptions of gender and sexuality," said Jack Halberstam (formerly Judith), a transgender professor at the University of Southern California and the author, most recently, of "Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal."

"When you see terms like L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," Professor Halberstam added, "it's because people are seeing all the things that fall out of the binary, and demanding that a name come into being."

And with a plethora of ever-expanding categories like "genderqueer" and "androgyne" to choose from, each with an online subculture, piecing together a gender identity can be as D.I.Y. as making a Pinterest board.

BUT sometimes L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. is not enough. At the University of Pennsylvania last fall, eight freshmen united in the frustration that no campus group represented them.

Sure, Penn already had some two dozen gay student groups, including Queer People of Color, Lambda Alliance and J-Bagel, which bills itself as the university's "Jewish L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Community." But none focused on gender identity (the closest, Trans Penn, mostly catered to faculty members and graduate students).

Richard Parsons, an 18-year-old transgender male, discovered that when he attended a student mixer called the Gay Affair, sponsored by Penn's L.G.B.T. Center. "I left thoroughly disappointed," said Richard, a garrulous freshman with close-cropped hair, wire-framed glasses and preppy clothes, who added, "This is the L.G.B.T. Center, and it's all gay guys."

Through Facebook, Richard and others started a group called Penn Non-Cis, which is short for "non-cisgender." For those not fluent in gender-studies speak, "cis" means "on the same side as" and "cisgender" denotes someone whose gender identity matches his or her biology, which describes most of the student body. The group seeks to represent everyone else. "This is a freshman uprising," Richard said.

On a brisk Tuesday night in November, about 40 students crowded into the L.G.B.T. Center, a converted 19th-century carriage house, for the group's inaugural open mike. The organizers had lured students by handing out fliers on campus while barking: "Free condoms! Free ChapStick!"

"There's a really vibrant L.G.B.T. scene," Kate Campbell, one of the M.C.'s, began. "However, that mostly encompasses the L.G.B. and not too much of the T. So we're aiming to change that."

Students read poems and diary entries, and sang guitar ballads. Then Britt Gilbert - a punky-looking freshman with a blond bob, chunky glasses and a rock band T-shirt - took the stage. She wanted to talk about the concept of "bi-gender."

"Does anyone want to share what they think it is?"

Silence.

She explained that being bi-gender is like manifesting both masculine and feminine personas, almost as if one had a "detachable penis." "Some days I wake up and think, 'Why am I in this body?' " she said. "Most days I wake up and think, 'What was I thinking yesterday?' 

"Britt's grunginess belies a warm matter-of-factness, at least when describing her journey. As she elaborated afterward, she first heard the term "bi-gender" from Kate, who found it on Tumblr. The two met at freshman orientation and bonded. In high school, Kate identified as "agender" and used the singular pronoun "they"; she now sees her gender as an "amorphous blob."

By contrast, Britt's evolution was more linear. She grew up in suburban Pennsylvania and never took to gender norms. As a child, she worshiped Cher and thought boy bands were icky. Playing video games, she dreaded having to choose male or female avatars.

In middle school, she started calling herself bisexual and dated boys. By 10th grade, she had come out as a lesbian. Her parents thought it was a phase - until she brought home a girlfriend, Ash. But she still wasn't settled.

"While I definitely knew that I liked girls, I didn't know that I was one," Britt said. Sometimes she would leave the house in a dress and feel uncomfortable, as if she were wearing a Halloween costume. Other days, she felt fine. She wasn't "trapped in the wrong body," as the cliché has it - she just didn't know which body she wanted.

When Kate told her about the term "bi-gender," it clicked instantly. "I knew what it was, before I knew what it was," Britt said, adding that it is more fluid than "transgender" but less vague than "genderqueer" - a catchall term for nontraditional gender identities.

At first, the only person she told was Ash, who responded, "It took you this long to figure it out?" For others, the concept was not so easy to grasp. Coming out as a lesbian had been relatively simple, Britt said, "since people know what that is." But when she got to Penn, she was relieved to find a small community of freshmen who had gone through similar awakenings.

Among them was Richard Parsons, the group's most politically lucid member. Raised female, Richard grew up in Orlando, Fla., and realized he was transgender in high school. One summer, he wanted to room with a transgender friend at camp, but his mother objected. "She's like, 'Well, if you say that he's a guy, then I don't want you rooming with a guy,' " he recalled. "We were in a car and I basically blurted out, 'I think I might be a guy, too!' "

After much door-slamming and tears, Richard and his mother reconciled. But when she asked what to call him, he had no idea. He chose "Richard" on a whim, and later added a middle name, Matthew, because it means "gift of God."

By the time he got to Penn, he had been binding his breasts for more than two years and had developed back pain. At the open mike, he told a harrowing story about visiting the university health center for numbness and having a panic attack when he was escorted into a women's changing room.

Nevertheless, he praised the university for offering gender-neutral housing. The college's medical program also covers sexual reassignment surgery, which, he added, "has heavily influenced my decision to probably go under the Penn insurance plan next year."

PENN has not always been so forward-thinking; a decade ago, the L.G.B.T. Center (nestled amid fraternity houses) was barely used. But in 2010, the university began reaching out to applicants whose essays raised gay themes. Last year, the gay newsmagazine The Advocate ranked Penn among the top 10 trans-friendly universities, alongside liberal standbys like New York University.

More and more colleges, mostly in the Northeast, are catering to gender-nonconforming students. According to a survey by Campus Pride, at least 203 campuses now allow transgender students to room with their preferred gender; 49 have a process to change one's name and gender in university records; and 57 cover hormone therapy. In December, the University of Iowa became the first to add a "transgender" checkbox to its college application.

"I wrote about an experience I had with a drag queen as my application essay for all the Ivy Leagues I applied to," said Santiago Cortes, one of the Penn students. "And I got into a few of the Ivy Leagues - Dartmouth, Columbia and Penn. Strangely not Brown.

"But even these measures cannot keep pace with the demands of incoming students, who are challenging the curriculum much as gay activists did in the '80s and '90s. Rather than protest the lack of gay studies classes, they are critiquing existing ones for being too narrow.

Several members of Penn Non-Cis had been complaining among themselves about a writing seminar they were taking called "Beyond 'Will & Grace,' " which examined gay characters on shows like "Ellen," "Glee" and "Modern Family." The professor, Gail Shister, who is a lesbian, had criticized several students for using "L.G.B.T.Q." in their essays, saying it was clunky, and proposed using "queer" instead. Some students found the suggestion offensive, including Britt Gilbert, who described Ms. Shister as "unaccepting of things that she doesn't understand."

Ms. Shister, reached by phone, said the criticism was strictly grammatical. "I am all about economy of expression," she said. "L.G.B.T.Q. doesn't exactly flow off the tongue. So I tell the students, 'Don't put in an acronym with five or six letters.' "

One thing is clear. Ms. Shister, who is 60 and in 1979 became The Philadelphia Inquirer's first female sportswriter, is of a different generation, a fact she acknowledges freely, even gratefully. "Frankly, I'm both proud and envious that these young people are growing up in an age where they're free to love who they want," she said.

If history is any guide, the age gap won't be so easy to overcome. As liberated gay men in the 1970s once baffled their pre-Stonewall forebears, the new gender outlaws, to borrow a phrase from the transgender writer Kate Bornstein, may soon be running ideological circles around their elders.

Still, the alphabet soup of L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. may be difficult to sustain. "In the next 10 or 20 years, the various categories heaped under the umbrella of L.G.B.T. will become quite quotidian," Professor Halberstam said.

Even at the open mike, as students picked at potato chips and pineapple slices, the bounds of identity politics were spilling over and becoming blurry.

At one point, Santiago, a curly-haired freshman from Colombia, stood before the crowd. He and a friend had been pondering the limits of what he calls "L.G.B.T.Q. plus."

"Why do only certain letters get to be in the full acronym?" he asked.

Then he rattled off a list of gender identities, many culled from Wikipedia. "We have our lesbians, our gays," he said, before adding, "bisexual, transsexual, queer, homosexual, asexual." He took a breath and continued. "Pansexual. Omnisexual. Trisexual. Agender. Bi-gender. Third gender. Transgender. Transvestite. Intersexual. Two-spirit. Hijra. Polyamorous."

By now, the list had turned into free verse. He ended: "Undecided. Questioning. Other. Human."

The room burst into applause.

Correction: January 10, 2013, Thursday

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this article and a picture caption referred incorrectly to a Sarah Lawrence College student who uploaded a video online about being transgender. He says he is Stephen Ira, not Stephen Ira Beatty.

Source NYT

Fair Use

*canada

Animal abuse and neglect is a world-wide problem; lately however, it seems to be getting exponentially worse in British Columbia. I'm sure it's the same everywhere (it's just that most of the media I see on this is specific to Greater Vancouver), you can't get through the 6pm news without hearing about another animal some person has tortured.

http://www.animaladvocates.com/videos/yard-dogs/

Judith's videos, among dozens of others to be found here.

>> ^draak13:

People make stupid comments all the time. Whether or not it was intended, this thread was essentially trolled off-topic with enormous rants about religion vs. atheism. Instead of going on forever about it, why not pay as much attention to it as it deserves? Immediately after the religious posting, Enoch magnificently addressed and concluded that religion doesn't consistently shape behavior nearly as much as good parenting in just 1 post. Of course the religious faction is going to reply back; their religion is a strong component of their identity. Just don't mind it and continue the thread forward.
If it's possible to salvage this thread at all, we were actually talking about how behavioral shaping comes most strongly in 2 forms revealed so far:
1) Mass showing of materials which help instill understanding of people who are very different from normal in some way, with sincere discussion (such as dealing with bullying the gay or mentally retarded individuals)
2) Parenting, to ensure that children hold strong values about understanding each other and treating each other well.
Are there any other interesting ideas to add to the list? Also, point 2 is huge; how do you get more parents to parent better?


I think 2) is in fact overrated. Most of a child's development nowadays comes from social interactions at school and in their neighborhood. Judith Harris expounded on this in her book, The Nurture Assumption. Parents have the most impact on their child's early development, before they can socialize on their own. In that small period of time, you can develop a child's intellectual potential, but the moral character, if not already determined or strongly limited by genetics, will be molded by future social interactions. Of course, parents are included in these social interactions, but their influence will be much diluted, especially compared to the school authority figures, the real authority in a school kid's life (they can make life miserable for them both at school and at home, by telling the parents).

So, as the saying goes in Africa, it takes a village to raise a child. Again, something known in the time of the ancient Greeks. Even Plato admitted this, although he tried to bring religion in, hence why he wasn't taken seriously. In this perspective, 1) should be an integral part of society's behavior at large, not just in videos. Although of course videos can have a pregnant effect on a child's mind and act as a surrogate to real life examples. The problem arises when those children are let go after school: they see that real life is not like the videos. They can then try to change the real world, become apathetic or worse, become cynical. And this is what is wrong with preaching: the hypocrisy of the "do as I say not as I do".

To prevent this, you have to teach intellectual self-defense at the same time as the reasons why behavior as shown in the videos is more desirable than behavior seen in real life. This would be hard for even philosophers to do, not to mention underpaid elementary school teachers. In our philosophy department here, there is a minor in "philosophy of children". It has nothing to do with describing the essence of children, but more with how to talk about philosophy with children: how to approach concepts in general and how to touch difficult subject matters. Still, the goal is not for the philosopher to teach children about moral/ethics, but to teach how to think about such things.

So, as a parent be a good role model and teach your child how to fish (think) instead of just giving him fish (preaching). For example, instead of trying to always be the best you can be around your child, be yourself. And when you fail to uphold a principle or whatever, instead of giving excuses be frank and explain why people sometimes fail even if they start with the best of intentions. The important thing is not that you be the best today, but that you be better tomorrow.

Also, never think you can shield your child from anything. Better it be you that show him the ugly things than he finds out by himself or through friends/society. That way you can explain and answer his questions. So: sex, drugs, violence and death education at a very young age repeated at various times to ingrain the facts (not the moral preaching). No need to be hands-on of course! Don't want you all to go rape and kill your children or something.

This is as much as you can do, I think, to "protect" or "arm" your children against society's more nefarious influences without resorting to indoctrination or physical confinement (although these last two options sound more like blinding and amputating than protecting really). If all children were educated like this, we may not get a perfect society (the genes!), but at least it should be a better society and certainly a more honest and open one.

>> ^quantumushroom:

The left is scared sh!tless of Palin because she can win. Unlike the community organizer who had a communist papa, she isn't demanding a radical leftist overhaul of freedom. Remember freedom?


Leftists like Trotta who suggested Obama be assassinated and Judith Miller who served jail time for the exposure of Valarie Plame. Those damned liberals.

good call!
"Fuck your gaaaaaaaaahd!"

In reply to this comment by SpaceOddity:
The song playing from 7:00 to 8:00 is Judith (Renholder mix) by A Perfect Circle off of their rEMIXED album.


>> ^bamdrew:
I'm trying to figure out the track at 7:14; I remember it, but can't put my finger on it... first thought was that it was a remix by Apparat or of an Apparat song

The song playing from 7:00 to 8:00 is Judith (Renholder mix) by A Perfect Circle off of their rEMIXED album.


>> ^bamdrew:
I'm trying to figure out the track at 7:14; I remember it, but can't put my finger on it... first thought was that it was a remix by Apparat or of an Apparat song

Tags for this video have been changed from 'alex zane, snake trouser, judith chalmers, alan whicker' to 'alex zane, snake trouser, judith chalmers, alan whicker, major chubby' - edited by gwiz665

From Wikipedia (which has said image of dog riding a dolphin's back across a sunset)

This is a film about a boy, Jordan, and his dog Zeus. A marine biologist, Mary Beth, who is a single parent and leads a hectic life with her two impossible daughters, Judith and Nora. She, along with her partner Becky, are trying to study and save a beautiful dolphin named Roxanne. Unfortunately, Mary Beth's greedy partner, Claude Carver, tries to capture the dolphin and sell her. Terry finds out that he has relationships with Mary Beth, and they start going out, under the watchful eyes of the kids. Zeus stows away one day on one of Mary Beth's boat trips, which really annoys Mary Beth. However, when she finds out that the dog and the dolphin can do "interspecies communication," she is intrigued and curious. In the end, it's a race to save the dolphin and Zeus, who was kidnapped by Claude. At the end Claude gets caught by Becky, and gets peed on before he gets arrested. In the end Terry marries Mary Beth, and Roxanne finally finds a pod to live in, and has to say goodbye to Zeus.

Ooh, thanks for the 80's treats! Being a child of the 80's there's not much I DON'T like from that time!

Big fan of that stuff! Thanks for bringing that to the sift.

And thanks for the compliment!

In reply to this comment by enoch:
In reply to this comment by brycewi19:
enoch, you going to vote for your vid?


eventually.i see how they do first.
if it needs my vote to get sifted i will.
other than that i just post stuff i like or find interesting.
while its fun to get things sifted, i started to post due what i saw as a niche that only my eclectic schizophrenic style could fill.
this tune has been a fave of mine for a long time.
i am a former nudey bar DJ and this song was on my "must play" list.
got all the girls into it,even the hip-hop booty girls and the raver girls.
you see the tool vid i posted?
secret track 69 disgustable,some middle school person made the animation!

*edit* you're old school right?
http://www.videosift.com/video/WHITESNAKE-slow-and-easy-original-video
and
http://www.videosift.com/video/JEFFERSON-STARSHIP-stranger-the-return-of-grace-slick
im attempting to archive as much 80's rock that was on MTV as i can.
these have a chance to get sifted.
up to you.no hard feelings if you are not a whitesnake or jefferson starship fan.
now THAT vid i whored myself to get sifted...its that good.
love your posts man,and thankies for the vote!

In reply to this comment by brycewi19:
enoch, you going to vote for your vid?


eventually.i see how they do first.
if it needs my vote to get sifted i will.
other than that i just post stuff i like or find interesting.
while its fun to get things sifted, i started to post due what i saw as a niche that only my eclectic schizophrenic style could fill.
this tune has been a fave of mine for a long time.
i am a former nudey bar DJ and this song was on my "must play" list.
got all the girls into it,even the hip-hop booty girls and the raver girls.
you see the tool vid i posted?
secret track 69 disgustable,some middle school person made the animation!

*edit* you're old school right?
http://www.videosift.com/video/WHITESNAKE-slow-and-easy-original-video
and
http://www.videosift.com/video/JEFFERSON-STARSHIP-stranger-the-return-of-grace-slick
im attempting to archive as much 80's rock that was on MTV as i can.
these have a chance to get sifted.
up to you.no hard feelings if you are not a whitesnake or jefferson starship fan.
now THAT vid i whored myself to get sifted...its that good.
love your posts man,and thankies for the vote!