A miscellaneous post
GAY: List stolen from gjadventures, who stole it from Facebook:
On the legalization of gay marriage:
1) Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.
2) Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.
3) Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.
4) Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn’t changed at all; women are still property, blacks still can’t marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.
5) Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Britney Spears’ 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.
6) Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn’t be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren’t full yet, and the world needs more children.
7) Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.
8) Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That’s why we have only one religion in America.
9) Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That’s why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.
10) Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven’t adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.
RACISM: I've been working my way through Stuff White People Do (lj feed: whitesdostuff) and it's quite awesome. There was an entry specifically about the technique of throwing imaginary colors into a discussion ("I don't care if he's white, black, yellow, green, or purple.") and why it's not an effective or appropriate technique. From the entry:
And that's one problem with these "x, y, z or whatever" lists of people of color. Not only do they usually include non-existent skin colors that compare identifiable human skin colors to those of space aliens (thereby basically relegating the people themselves to the non-human status of space aliens). They also dismiss both matters of race and the people to whom race actually matters, in part because it often causes them problems.
As Rachel Brown writes, "The invocation of purple, blue, green, or other alien people is offensive for many reasons, including but not limited to the fact that it's completely trivializing, turns a serious and painful topic into a joke, and compares people of color to fictional aliens."
I've also been checking out Sociological Image's series on how and why people of color are portrayed in advertising. Not sure if I agree with ALL the conclusions, but I definitely see most of the points quite clearly, and it's good food for thought.
LJ: I really wish they had a search feature for syndicated feeds. I'd love to have a box where I could enter an URL and have it tell me if a syndicated feed for it already exists and, if so, what the name is.
SICK: I am much sicker. I feel like I got hit by a truck. This is unhappy-making.
On the legalization of gay marriage:
1) Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.
2) Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.
3) Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.
4) Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn’t changed at all; women are still property, blacks still can’t marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.
5) Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Britney Spears’ 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.
6) Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn’t be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren’t full yet, and the world needs more children.
7) Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.
8) Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That’s why we have only one religion in America.
9) Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That’s why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.
10) Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven’t adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.
RACISM: I've been working my way through Stuff White People Do (lj feed: whitesdostuff) and it's quite awesome. There was an entry specifically about the technique of throwing imaginary colors into a discussion ("I don't care if he's white, black, yellow, green, or purple.") and why it's not an effective or appropriate technique. From the entry:
And that's one problem with these "x, y, z or whatever" lists of people of color. Not only do they usually include non-existent skin colors that compare identifiable human skin colors to those of space aliens (thereby basically relegating the people themselves to the non-human status of space aliens). They also dismiss both matters of race and the people to whom race actually matters, in part because it often causes them problems.
As Rachel Brown writes, "The invocation of purple, blue, green, or other alien people is offensive for many reasons, including but not limited to the fact that it's completely trivializing, turns a serious and painful topic into a joke, and compares people of color to fictional aliens."
I've also been checking out Sociological Image's series on how and why people of color are portrayed in advertising. Not sure if I agree with ALL the conclusions, but I definitely see most of the points quite clearly, and it's good food for thought.
LJ: I really wish they had a search feature for syndicated feeds. I'd love to have a box where I could enter an URL and have it tell me if a syndicated feed for it already exists and, if so, what the name is.
SICK: I am much sicker. I feel like I got hit by a truck. This is unhappy-making.