(no subject)
Someday someone will ask me if I am an atheist. And I will say "no." Then they will ask me "why?" and I will respond with one and only one word. "Tomatoes."
Truly ... Chocolate is great but as we have long experienced it is a cultural phenomenon. In sweets, in mole, even in that special alcoholic drink served at feasts it's always been something people made. But tomatoes ... aside from cultivation they've had little influence. And ... the genus they're from is usually poisonous. But tomatoes are noms. They are indeed nomilicious. Salty and sweet and ... they even have excellent texture. You bite into them and they have this sort of bouncy resistance and then your teeth go through and the juices flood into your mouth. It is great. And rereading that I suddenly understand why there's weird rumors about me and my hate for the sun.
And so much you can do with them. Raw is yummy but they also cook down great, or you can dry them or just sear the skin ... noms.
In other news I HATE Michelle Bauchman. Really ... I've explained countless times why its weird that anyone's threatened by gay marriage. My friends have all explained it countless times. First thing you learn in ANY Anthropology class ... literally Anthro 101 is that marraige is largely undefinable. People get married to other women other men multiple partners, an entire age group, a effigy of a particular house, spirit people, the long deceased, the recently deceased, and God. Also, you don't have to go back AT ALL to find examples of this stuff. If you want you can because it's historically ubiquitous, but marriage - by definition - is whatever the hell people decide it is. So basically anyone saying marriage is only between a man and a woman is either lying or fucking stupid. And I've said this ... a billion times. Again and again and again. Even if you weren't paying direct attention to me, you should have been listening to any one of the millions to billions of people who have ever been exposed to any form of formal Anthropology. How the fuck did she miss this one? How? I'd make a hard science reference, but it's not even that obscure.
And if she just toted the GOP line I'd just be like "well they're stupid/liars, so what can I expect." But no. No she took it one step further. She asked - rhetorically I might point out - whether or not there was ever in the "5,000 years of recorded human history" marriage that was not between a man and a woman. Again, the above, but even besides that ... 5,000 years? Really honey? I regularly handle things made by people over 10,000 years ago. And even if you're doing things in the formal definitive sense, yeah some of the oldest extant written documents are only 5,000 years old, but for it to exist in a form that we recognize as writing that means there's earlier communicative forms that are not necessarily writing. Hieroglyphs get really wonky yo'. So if she means in the past 5,000 years did anyone write about a marriage that was not between a man and a woman then the answer is yes. Yes they did. A lot. If she means in all of human history then she's gotta go back a little bit further and consider a whole lot more. I mean ... we have pictures on jars of pagodas. And people holding hands. We have scratches on sheep scapulas and turtle caripaces. And that's just what we have. Think about all the many things that were burned or disintegrated or intentionally destroyed or yet to be discovered, or rendered illegible ... Really you can't just say "5,000 years" add the words "recorded" and "history" and think that'll earn you props. Even if she wasn't directly refuted historically, genetically, evolutionarily, anthropologically, emotionally, and psychologically she's still massively oversimplifying ... everything.
Furthermore, and this will go way over her head because I'm about to get all post-processual up in here, history in the modern understanding of the word only dates back a few hundred years. If you want to be really strict about it, you can barely go back 100 years, because it has to do with development of the understanding psychology in conjunction with literature and science. I've ranted before about how "novel" means "new" because it didn't come to be until the acceptance/recognition of the human ego and realization of the myth or reality of human autonomy as a valid plot driver. This furthermore legitimizes the exploration of mental as opposed to physical time and space for both literary and historical forms as it equalizes or even preferences perception to reality.
Epics are great and if you have them in conjunction with other "historical" documents you can parse out with reasonable certainty a history of sorts. In my opinion they're far more useful anthropologically or psychologically, but ... that could be my training. For example: I go to bed reciting lines from the Heike Monogatari. Because I am a huge nerd. However, while the Heike Monogatari is an epic detailing events of the Genpei war, it is not a history of the Genpei war. And if you read the Hojo papers and various diaries from the time that will quickly become clear. Everyone has a different version of the story. And these are classical Japanese versions so the degree of accuracy is far higher than what you could expect from Europe or anywhere else. Pretty much at this point in Europe's history everyone was running about screaming that either the Hungarians or the Danes were attacking and boy are those barbarians tall. Now likewise everyone in Japan was also running about and screaming about various families attacking and these weird demons that are crazy good with martial arts and somehow resistant to altitude sickness, but their system was sufficiently centralized that the authors of these epics or government documents or diaries or claims petitions expected to have their claims investigated. They knew that they couldn't just go the European route and be all "ZOMG THEY NEVER MISS AND THEY RIDE LIKE CENTAURS" they would have had to say something like "In the year of the coffee mug in the cycle of electricity and the hour of the tabby cat three hundred and fourteen riders attacked from the Northeast slaying in their first sweep three hundred of my soldiers, twenty of my retainers, wounding one of my sons and injuring a second greviously, and killing three of my personal horses. The third horse died by an errant spear. The horsemen showed incredible dexterity and accuracy and appeared to be not wearing armor. For fighting bravely in defense of the central beaurocracy and to alleviate my losses I petition for a million bajillion in gold and twenty acres of prime real estate." That last part, by the way, is why there was tremendous political instability following the failed Mongol invasions. But on top of that they also usually were required to have witnesses especially if their rank was not sufficiently high. On the other hand, people without rank were simply ignored as liars unless they had a ranked witness. This became a problem as trophy taking took off because when the military realized it was being bamboozled by some rather imaginative writers and when the various warriors discovered that their cases were no longer being investigated based on accuracy but rather family and political connection, proof of injury or valor was increasingly required. For the valor part this usually meant a human head. Well that's very proofy unless you're a cold-hearted bastard and just cut off the head of anyone you happen to meet. Which happened. So then they started requiring that the heads be identified by old friends or family and then labeled. But ... okay ... do you know what happens to human flesh if you leave it outside too long? Yeah. And they did wash them and dress them up and apply makeup, but given how long it might take for someone who recognizes the person to arrive ... it's still a very ew situation. Especially when you consider that a lot of these battles occurred in the summer in the more humid regions of Japan. Delicious. Even if the flesh dessicates you're still left with a highly unrecognizable face and ... it's the Kanto region dudes. Ain't nothing dessicating over there. But the point is, even in this society where accuracy was highly valued, maintained, and expected with potential punishments in place, you still have people writing/saying/killing whatever/whomever they damned well please. These weren't meant to be immortal words documenting a history of whateverness, they were meant to be documents documenting why so-and-so should get paid.
So to China you say? Well China had a similar problem in that China was is and always will be desperately in love with itself. They had "histories" and "historians" meant to document reality, but in the end it all came down to politics. If the Chinese liked something it became Chinese, if they didn't it was "strange" and "one of our many diverse names for barbarian." You wanna know why my ancestors decided to kick some whitey ass? They couldn't stand the Chinese no' mo'. Y'all didn't beat us, we were just sick of you and your "plum wine" and "agriculture." I digress again, but probably the best example of how Chinese "history" lands you in a very strange place is the earliest history of the Japanese archipelago which will tell you of a great and magnificent queen. Whose kingdom was somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. No really, the directions have you riding your horse well off the coast of Japan. Or if you don't like that consider the various "documentations" of the assassination of the first Emperor. In fact even if you do like that read those because they are hilarious. In one version the assassin cuts off his own face so his sister won't recognize him (and of course she does anyway) and in another the king is the only one who tries to pull a sword and fails at whipping it out so the doctor ends up running up at the assassin intent on beating the man with his medicine bag. It's like the Three Stooges except much much darker.
And then you can just consider the fact that Ang Lee needs to keep his head down now that even Ai Weiwei has been arrested. (Also, the guy's name if read really fast sounds a lot like my Chinese name so when I first got the notification I thought they were talking about me and I got all paranoid.)
China be all crazy and shit.
But the point is, recorded history woman? Ain't no such thing. But the accuracy or inaccuracy of the historical record is irrelevent in regards to her argument because she's arguing a cultural phenomenon. In fact her demand for precedent for culture is ridiculous because culture exists beyond the necessary constraint of history. Ethics transcend culture. Her problem though is morality does not and she is trying to adhere to morality without understanding ethics. Thus she gets into weird hypocritical territory. Avoid morality people. It's the best way to damn yourself to whatever hell you believe in.
Truly ... Chocolate is great but as we have long experienced it is a cultural phenomenon. In sweets, in mole, even in that special alcoholic drink served at feasts it's always been something people made. But tomatoes ... aside from cultivation they've had little influence. And ... the genus they're from is usually poisonous. But tomatoes are noms. They are indeed nomilicious. Salty and sweet and ... they even have excellent texture. You bite into them and they have this sort of bouncy resistance and then your teeth go through and the juices flood into your mouth. It is great. And rereading that I suddenly understand why there's weird rumors about me and my hate for the sun.
And so much you can do with them. Raw is yummy but they also cook down great, or you can dry them or just sear the skin ... noms.
In other news I HATE Michelle Bauchman. Really ... I've explained countless times why its weird that anyone's threatened by gay marriage. My friends have all explained it countless times. First thing you learn in ANY Anthropology class ... literally Anthro 101 is that marraige is largely undefinable. People get married to other women other men multiple partners, an entire age group, a effigy of a particular house, spirit people, the long deceased, the recently deceased, and God. Also, you don't have to go back AT ALL to find examples of this stuff. If you want you can because it's historically ubiquitous, but marriage - by definition - is whatever the hell people decide it is. So basically anyone saying marriage is only between a man and a woman is either lying or fucking stupid. And I've said this ... a billion times. Again and again and again. Even if you weren't paying direct attention to me, you should have been listening to any one of the millions to billions of people who have ever been exposed to any form of formal Anthropology. How the fuck did she miss this one? How? I'd make a hard science reference, but it's not even that obscure.
And if she just toted the GOP line I'd just be like "well they're stupid/liars, so what can I expect." But no. No she took it one step further. She asked - rhetorically I might point out - whether or not there was ever in the "5,000 years of recorded human history" marriage that was not between a man and a woman. Again, the above, but even besides that ... 5,000 years? Really honey? I regularly handle things made by people over 10,000 years ago. And even if you're doing things in the formal definitive sense, yeah some of the oldest extant written documents are only 5,000 years old, but for it to exist in a form that we recognize as writing that means there's earlier communicative forms that are not necessarily writing. Hieroglyphs get really wonky yo'. So if she means in the past 5,000 years did anyone write about a marriage that was not between a man and a woman then the answer is yes. Yes they did. A lot. If she means in all of human history then she's gotta go back a little bit further and consider a whole lot more. I mean ... we have pictures on jars of pagodas. And people holding hands. We have scratches on sheep scapulas and turtle caripaces. And that's just what we have. Think about all the many things that were burned or disintegrated or intentionally destroyed or yet to be discovered, or rendered illegible ... Really you can't just say "5,000 years" add the words "recorded" and "history" and think that'll earn you props. Even if she wasn't directly refuted historically, genetically, evolutionarily, anthropologically, emotionally, and psychologically she's still massively oversimplifying ... everything.
Furthermore, and this will go way over her head because I'm about to get all post-processual up in here, history in the modern understanding of the word only dates back a few hundred years. If you want to be really strict about it, you can barely go back 100 years, because it has to do with development of the understanding psychology in conjunction with literature and science. I've ranted before about how "novel" means "new" because it didn't come to be until the acceptance/recognition of the human ego and realization of the myth or reality of human autonomy as a valid plot driver. This furthermore legitimizes the exploration of mental as opposed to physical time and space for both literary and historical forms as it equalizes or even preferences perception to reality.
Epics are great and if you have them in conjunction with other "historical" documents you can parse out with reasonable certainty a history of sorts. In my opinion they're far more useful anthropologically or psychologically, but ... that could be my training. For example: I go to bed reciting lines from the Heike Monogatari. Because I am a huge nerd. However, while the Heike Monogatari is an epic detailing events of the Genpei war, it is not a history of the Genpei war. And if you read the Hojo papers and various diaries from the time that will quickly become clear. Everyone has a different version of the story. And these are classical Japanese versions so the degree of accuracy is far higher than what you could expect from Europe or anywhere else. Pretty much at this point in Europe's history everyone was running about screaming that either the Hungarians or the Danes were attacking and boy are those barbarians tall. Now likewise everyone in Japan was also running about and screaming about various families attacking and these weird demons that are crazy good with martial arts and somehow resistant to altitude sickness, but their system was sufficiently centralized that the authors of these epics or government documents or diaries or claims petitions expected to have their claims investigated. They knew that they couldn't just go the European route and be all "ZOMG THEY NEVER MISS AND THEY RIDE LIKE CENTAURS" they would have had to say something like "In the year of the coffee mug in the cycle of electricity and the hour of the tabby cat three hundred and fourteen riders attacked from the Northeast slaying in their first sweep three hundred of my soldiers, twenty of my retainers, wounding one of my sons and injuring a second greviously, and killing three of my personal horses. The third horse died by an errant spear. The horsemen showed incredible dexterity and accuracy and appeared to be not wearing armor. For fighting bravely in defense of the central beaurocracy and to alleviate my losses I petition for a million bajillion in gold and twenty acres of prime real estate." That last part, by the way, is why there was tremendous political instability following the failed Mongol invasions. But on top of that they also usually were required to have witnesses especially if their rank was not sufficiently high. On the other hand, people without rank were simply ignored as liars unless they had a ranked witness. This became a problem as trophy taking took off because when the military realized it was being bamboozled by some rather imaginative writers and when the various warriors discovered that their cases were no longer being investigated based on accuracy but rather family and political connection, proof of injury or valor was increasingly required. For the valor part this usually meant a human head. Well that's very proofy unless you're a cold-hearted bastard and just cut off the head of anyone you happen to meet. Which happened. So then they started requiring that the heads be identified by old friends or family and then labeled. But ... okay ... do you know what happens to human flesh if you leave it outside too long? Yeah. And they did wash them and dress them up and apply makeup, but given how long it might take for someone who recognizes the person to arrive ... it's still a very ew situation. Especially when you consider that a lot of these battles occurred in the summer in the more humid regions of Japan. Delicious. Even if the flesh dessicates you're still left with a highly unrecognizable face and ... it's the Kanto region dudes. Ain't nothing dessicating over there. But the point is, even in this society where accuracy was highly valued, maintained, and expected with potential punishments in place, you still have people writing/saying/killing whatever/whomever they damned well please. These weren't meant to be immortal words documenting a history of whateverness, they were meant to be documents documenting why so-and-so should get paid.
So to China you say? Well China had a similar problem in that China was is and always will be desperately in love with itself. They had "histories" and "historians" meant to document reality, but in the end it all came down to politics. If the Chinese liked something it became Chinese, if they didn't it was "strange" and "one of our many diverse names for barbarian." You wanna know why my ancestors decided to kick some whitey ass? They couldn't stand the Chinese no' mo'. Y'all didn't beat us, we were just sick of you and your "plum wine" and "agriculture." I digress again, but probably the best example of how Chinese "history" lands you in a very strange place is the earliest history of the Japanese archipelago which will tell you of a great and magnificent queen. Whose kingdom was somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. No really, the directions have you riding your horse well off the coast of Japan. Or if you don't like that consider the various "documentations" of the assassination of the first Emperor. In fact even if you do like that read those because they are hilarious. In one version the assassin cuts off his own face so his sister won't recognize him (and of course she does anyway) and in another the king is the only one who tries to pull a sword and fails at whipping it out so the doctor ends up running up at the assassin intent on beating the man with his medicine bag. It's like the Three Stooges except much much darker.
And then you can just consider the fact that Ang Lee needs to keep his head down now that even Ai Weiwei has been arrested. (Also, the guy's name if read really fast sounds a lot like my Chinese name so when I first got the notification I thought they were talking about me and I got all paranoid.)
China be all crazy and shit.
But the point is, recorded history woman? Ain't no such thing. But the accuracy or inaccuracy of the historical record is irrelevent in regards to her argument because she's arguing a cultural phenomenon. In fact her demand for precedent for culture is ridiculous because culture exists beyond the necessary constraint of history. Ethics transcend culture. Her problem though is morality does not and she is trying to adhere to morality without understanding ethics. Thus she gets into weird hypocritical territory. Avoid morality people. It's the best way to damn yourself to whatever hell you believe in.