Thanks to lucullean for bringing this story to my attention:

Runaway with Asperger's [sic] Syndrome Spent 11 Days on Subway

Though the public is more aware of Asperger syndrome and the autistic spectrum than it was 25 years ago, spectrumites of color are still all but invisible. This article is the first I've seen about anyone at the intersection of autism and race, and it suggests that those of us who want a better world have a lot of work to do.

For some time now I've been meaning to share my thoughts on this season of Heroes. ( Some minor spoilers for people who have not yet seen Episode 7 or earlier. Folks who don't plan on watching the series might be interested in observations raised from a social justice perspective. )

The new community is now open for posting. Here it is:

lesbopalooza

It was created to be an accepting community, so if discussing matters of interest to lesbians and queer women is something you'd like to do, by all means join us. If you'd like to give me a hand and spread the word (in a non-spammy way, of course), I'd greatly appreciate it.

A sobering message from the wonderful Monica Roberts of transgriot:

http://transgriot.blogspot.com/2009/06/what-if-there-was-trans-trial-and.html

So after getting out of a domestic violence (DV) situation a few years back I started getting counseling through an anti-DV program for TBLG people. The program keeps non-identifying aggregations of details about its clients, including their "genders". The options for this category are male, female, MTF, FTM, and other. These options make me say, "WTF." Presumably what they mean by the former two are men and women, and if that's the case MTF women and FTM men are being third-gendered. So if I didn't think it important to specify that I'm trans my inclination would be to specify that I'm "female" or "other (woman)". However, it is important. As was recently posted to Questioning Transphobia, sixty-four percent "of trans people have experienced domestic violence at some time". Considering this and the fact that my former partner explicitly linked my being trans with some of the abuse, I really don't feel that I can afford to be invisible.

My counselor is wonderful and knows that these options are awful, so fortunately it's up to me to decide. But it would be much better if the institution she's a part of would separate the question "What is your gender?" from the question "Are you trans?"

If you didn't know, there's been debate over whether the word transgendered is acceptable. The point of contention surrounds the -ed. The debate often goes something like this:

Anti -ed: The -ed implies that trans people have undergone a process that makes them trans. However, trans people are trans from birth.

Pro -ed: Pish posh. The -ed in transgendered implies this no more than the -ed in right-handed. Nobody thinks right-handed people weren't right-handed at birth. Why would this be an issue for trans people?

In my opinion the Pro -ed counter-argument was hurt recently when this was published in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

While some people do not think their corporeal alteration is required to comfortably fit into opposite gendered roles, others seek medical intervention to facilitate their transgendering.

(The quote is from the entry "Feminist Perspectives on Disability". The emphasis is mine.)

For similar reasons it's problematic that the author refers to intersex people as intersexed.

I came out to my therapist today. She was really supportive and happy for me. No surprise there, but it still felt good.

I also came out to my roomie. She took it well. We agreed on which of her friends should know and which ones shouldn't.

In Rent (both the musical and the movie) why is it that the song Roger sings when he is unable to come up with any material so much better than the song he sings once he is able to write music again?

It's not very often that creationists or the evolutionary biologists they attack make claims that I can test directly. When I was growing up, I tried digging up dinosaur bones in my parents' backyard, but I only found rocks and that digging is backbreaking work. But recently William Dembski, an "intelligent design" (ID) theorist, made a claim that I could test without having to do so much as put my boots on.

The claim concerns Weasel, a simulation that Richard Dawkins coded in the 1980s for his book The Blind Watchmaker. In the simulation there is a series of generations in which a parent gives birth to children, one of which is selected to be the parent of the next generation. The parent of the first generation is a string of random text, but through random changes and selective pressure each generation of descendants looks more like a line of Shakespeare: "Methinks it is like a weasel." If you're thinking that this is in important respects different from natural selection, you're right, and Dawkins was the first to point this out. Dawkins only aimed to provide evidence for a rather modest claim: Random changes with selection can give results exponentially faster than random changes alone.

William Dembski recently raised questions about Dawkins' program at a web site called Uncommon Descent. Dawkins, as paraphrased by Dembski, claims it took 43 iterations to make his program give the line of Shakespeare the first time he ran Weasel, and it took 64 iterations the second time. Dembski points at Dawkins' abbreviated list of iterations and asks why we don't see any instances in which a letter that has been selected mutates again, this time away from the target text. He then says, "It is natural to conclude that that it [Weasel] is a proximity search with locking (i.e., it locks on characters in the target sequence and never lets go)." He then points to a portion of a documentary in which Dawkins runs a program in which changes can be seen to occur, even after the target is reached:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sUQIpFajsg

Though he doesn't come right out and say it, the implicature is that Dawkins has overstated his claims about his program and that there has been some dishonesty on Dawkins' part.

Unfortunately for Dembski, this is all easily testable. I pounded out my own version of Weasel in one sitting. What did I find? If I print all the children to screen, I get results much like what we see in the documentary. However, if I print only the most adapted child of each generation to screen, I get results much like the ones Dawkins gave in his book. This is entirely consistent with what he said he was doing there. Dawkins didn't say what parameters he used, but when the chance of mutation for a given character is around 1 in 20 and the population size is around 100, I reach the target in little over 64 generations. Even when the population size is decreased, it's often the case that there will be runs in which the most adapted child of any given generation is in no respect less adapted than the most adapted child of the previous generations. What's more, even when there is drift, it's not at all unlikely that this will be corrected within 10 generations. If Dawkins reached the target in 43 generations, he may well have been using a larger population size, in which case it would have been even less likely that this sort of drift would be apparent. Having seen these results, I see nothing improbable about the lines of text Dawkins gave in his book. There is no reason to suppose that Dawkins made a locking program, and there's no reason to suppose that the program he used for The Blind Watchmaker works differently from the one we see in the documentary. If Dembski wants to say this mutation-selection behavior is counter-intuitive, I'll grant him that, but it is what happens.

Kudos to Ian Musgrave of The Panda's Thumb for bringing this matter to my attention.

. . . you're having a dream about urinating and awaken to find that you can't pee.

Having grown up hearing that the theory of evolution was (literally) the work of the Devil, I found this to be really interesting:

Darwin's twin track: 'Evolution and emancipation'

Before the publication of The Origin of the Species talk of common descent was found in anti-slavery tracts; abolitionists argued that black slaves and white people had a common ancestor. Charles Darwin wanted to demonstrate this and went one step farther.

I was surprised that in addition to mentioning people of "all faiths" Barack Obama mentioned "non-believers" -- that's something even more radical folk often fail to do.

The Rev. Joseph E. Lowery asked God to "deliver us from the exploitation of the poor, the least of these". If more Christians saw that as the chief evil, it wouldn't make me a believer, but I'd be sorely tempted to visit a church again.

And of course from now on when children in the US see an up-to-date list of Presidents accompanied by their photographs, they won't see a panoply of all white faces. No, that doesn't mean racism is over, but it isn't a bad thing.

So I recently wrote to US Airways to protest its pilot's refusal to fly with three Sikh men on board. This is the response I got today:

Dear [my name omitted],

Thank you for visiting usairways.com.

Thank you for your e-mail regarding the removal of six imams from a US Airways flight last November. As we said previously, we do not tolerate discrimination and believe that our crews and ground employees acted appropriately. We are sorry that you disagree, but we will continue to back the actions of our employees.

We know that you have many choices when it comes to traveling these days and we would like to say thank you for choosing US Airways!

Sincerely,

Kelli Kingsley Internet Support Specialist US Airways

If anyone is curious, the form I used to complain the first time can be found here: http://www.usairways.com/awa/content/contact/generalform.aspx

Beryl took me to see ''Wicked'' last night. Apart from some Timeline performances that Yvette has taken me to see this is the first musical I've seen live since I saw Show Boat about 13 years ago. I enjoyed it because and despite the fact that it wasn't what I was expecting. Contrary to my expectation, the songs weren't as good as I was expecting. Mind you, they weren't bad, but the musical was no Rent or Fiorello. ( Mild spoilers behind the cut. ) The surprise definitely outweighed the disappointment; I recommend it to anyone who has the opportunity to see it.

Please leave a one-word comment that you think best describes me. It can only be one word.

No more.

Then copy & paste this in your journal so that I may leave a word about you. :)

I'm pretty sure International Blog against Racism Week (IBARW) is over, but I'm also pretty sure there's still racism in the world, so I'm going to register my disgust anyway.

The seed for the idea of this post was planted when I learned of the cast of the upcoming film adaptation of Watchmen. I started to wonder why there are so few anti-heroes of color. The only film I could think of that had an African American anti-hero was Spawn. When I tried finding another, the only relevant film title I found was Superfly, a sort of exception that proves the rule. I considered that the lack may partly be due to movie creators' feeling that they need to tread carefully in order to remain racially sensitive. After all what sets an anti-hero apart from a hero is certain less-than-heroic qualities, and an ignorant audience member might associate these qualities with the character's ethnicity. However, I didn't think that alone explained the dearth of anti-heroes of color in mainstream media.

I was then reminded of something else I had noticed: Why is it that in recent years the judge, the computer expert, or the God of a mainstream work of fiction has been black? At first glance this might look like a cause for celebration: Finally a positive portrayal of black people! But I started to feel that I was seeing the genesis of a new stereotype. But it was only while thinking about these stock characters in relation to anti-heroes that it hit me: These characters are just one step away from being magical negroes (indeed the article that I link to lists God as played by Morgan Freeman as a magical negro). By and large their history is neither explored nor shrouded in a mystique to give the audience cause to supply their own history. They have a lot of power that comes from their genius or near-genius mental abilities, but they generally only use it to bail white protagonists out of trouble or teach them valuable lessons.

The anti-hero could be considered the antithesis of the magical negro. Anti-heroes tend to have rich histories; this is part of what helps us see them as heroic. I can remember reading Classic X-Men and coming to admire Wolverine, because even though he acted like an asshole a good part of the time, the writers hinted at a rich history of suffering to explain why he acted that way. (This was many years before the publication of Weapon X.) Anti-heroes also tend to be somewhat egoistic, working with the group only insofar as is needed to further their own ends. So I think there are two main reasons we don't see many anti-heroes of color in fiction. First, white writers don't want to depict people of color with rich histories that involve suffering, even though real life people of color experience oppression that white people in a racist society will never know. Second, white writers don't want to depict people of color being reluctant to help out white people or doing things for their own sake. And so we have characters of color who have or may as well have dropped out of heaven to help out white people -- though never white writers, it seems.

If anyone insists that this is an innocuous lacuna, consider how often you see anti-heroes who belong to any oppressed group. (This is appropriate, as the theme of this year's IBARW is intersectionality.) In Alan Moore's graphic novel V for Vendetta the protagonist's race and sexual orientation are left ambiguous. But the movie makes V white and straight, despite the movie's pervasive pro-gay-rights theme. It's difficult to excuse this by saying, "We wouldn't want people to associate V's anti-heroic qualities with being black or being gay," when the film version of V has been stripped of most of his anti-heroic qualities. This is even less justifiable when the film has Evey make reference to V's being an everyman. One of the advantages of having a masked protagonist be an everyman -- one that Moore had the insight to exploit -- is that you can let many of the character's attributes remain ambiguous. It seems that the film-makers simply did not want to present a protagonist or an everyperson who even ambiguously knew what it was to be a person of color or non-heterosexual.

On a note unrelated to anti-heroes but related to racism, if I were a person of color, people might attribute my lateness in contributing to IBARW to my ethnicity. But because I'm white, I have the privilege of never having to deal with that accusation.

I feel that I need to correct a mistake I've made. Though I don't know if I've ever said it, I've certainly had many thoughts along these lines:

You know, as far as quasi-religious philosophies go, Taoism is pretty cool. It's more or less free of the supernatural elements found in comparable schools of thought, and I agree with most of its main points. I could see myself going so far as to call myself a Taoist.

Unfortunately, as I learned by reading a piece by Russell Kirkland, this sort of thinking is Western hubris. Like many Westerners I had the impression that there is a tao-chia (philosophical Taoism) that was later perverted by religious Chinese people, who made it tao-chiao (religious Taoism). However, the distinction between tao-chia and tao-chiao has little basis in reality. Even so, the distinction has taken root in the West for a number of reasons. One is that Tao Te Ching and Zhuangzi are taken to be representative of true Taoism, even though they are not the only or the first Taoist texts to be written. Another is that many Westerners become acquainted with Taoism (also known as Daoism) through "translations" of the Tao Te Ching written by people who don't know Chinese but have an ideological axe to grind. (Sadly, one such "translation" was written by Ursula Le Guin, an author who is popular among anarchists and other leftists for having written fiction novels with an anti-colonialist subtext.) The underlying problem seems to be that Tao Te Ching and Zhuangzi -- or popular distortions of these works -- have little in them that "enlightened" Westerners take offense to, while polytheism and religious rituals are more likely to be seen as superstitious nonsense.

If I've contributed to a misunderstanding among anyone here, I'm sorry.

Edited to clarify a couple of things.

I'm posting this and Part 2 as part of a project assigned in the community debunkingwhite. ( A long piece. )

I'm working on a project related to my interest in René Girard, so I've been studying myth. One thing I discovered recently is that Qingu, the name of a god in Babylonian mythology, means unskilled laborer. According to the Babylonian creation myth Marduk created the human race out of Qingu's blood, upon slaying him.

On a related note, today is a global day of action against Starbucks. The day of action has been called for jointly by the IWW and the CNT to protest the firing of Cole Dorsey in Grand Rapids, Michigan and Monica in Sevilla, Spain. If you've ever been inclined to make some noise about the way Starbucks has been (mis)treating its workers, today would be a good day to do so.

I didn't think I'd ever embed a YouTube video into one of my LJ posts. But George Carlin was the sort of person who could inspire me to do a lot of things I never thought I'd do before.

Here's a link to a video that explains why he was so great:

george carlin nails it

But given the occasion and given that I think George would prefer that we see him off laughing, I've chosen to embed this video instead:



Damn, I'm going to miss him.

Message from the president of the Autism Self Advocacy Network:

( Action alert )

ETA: I just learned from zorah and robertrabbits that Utah Phillips has passed away -- he died on the 23rd. I didn't know him, but I know many of the lives he has touched. This is an incredibly sad day.

On Sunday morning six anti-war activists were arrested for a die-in they staged at an Easter mass in Holy Name Cathedral, a mass where Cardinal George was delivering a homily. The point of the action was to draw attention to the Cardinal's fence-sitting -- he recently met with President Bush -- while the holidays of US soldiers and Iraqi citizens have been disrupted by war for five years.

This is perhaps the most accurate article you'll find on the 'net currently:

http://chicago.indymedia.org/feature/display/70337/index.php

By all means, check out what other media sources have to say, but based on what I've seen, I can only conclude a lot of it is distortion. Meanwhile, the mainstream media has downplayed the fact that the activists have suffered abuse since being arrested, and one of them is being denied medical treatment.

If you're in the Chicago area, please consider coming well-dressed to the arraignment hearing at 1:00; it will be at 26th and California. Also please consider donating to help the Six. If you want to donate via Paypal, visit http://tiny.cc/holyname6. The e-mail contact is holyname6@riseup.net.

I'm posting this without my wrist splint. Please don't let my self-destructive act be in vain.

It's been a while since I've posted here, not counting the one message I posted that's visible to "just me". I've been doing a lot of thinking lately -- thinking about philosophy and religion. One of the major conclusions I've reached is that there really needs to be some kind of online community for people interested in Girard's theory of mimetic desire, so I'm thinking of creating one of my own. Of course, there's little point in my doing so if no one else is interested. So if you'd like to see such a thing, let me know -- this would help me plan.

Post anything that you want here, and post it anonymously. A story, a secret, a confession, a fear, a love... anything. Make sure to post anonymously and honestly. Post as many times as you'd like. Then, put this in your LJ to see what others have to say.

IP logging is off.

Comments are not screened, but I reserve the right to delete hateful stuff.

This post will be locked at some point - in a day or a week or a year, who knows?

Love,
The Anon E. Moose

So I've become an early contributor to Scribblit, a blogging service that grew out of the whole Live Journal/Six Apart free speech mess. Until November 18th anyone who donates 30 Canadian dollars (around 33 US dollars) to Scribblit can become an early contributor (click here to read more), which amounts to getting a permanent paid account. If you can't pay that now, at some point there will be an opportunity to become an early adopter -- that means you'll get all the then-available paid account features, but you won't get paid account features that are introduced after that. I'm not sure yet what I'll be using my new blog for, but I thought I'd let my friends know about these opportunities before they pass.

Incidentally, this is the first time I've converted US dollars to Canadian dollars and gotten a smaller numerical value. It's too bad that the color of US bills wasn't updated in time to reflect that we are now the ones with Monopoly money.

What I learned from Movielens:

The five least often rated movies that you've rated:

1. CrissCross (1992)
2. Funny About Love (1990)
3. Murderous Maids (Les Blessures Assassines) (2000)
4. Cemetery Club, The (1993)
5. Ogre, The (Der Unhold) (1996)
( More )

We were lying in bed together, and I had my hand on her tummy. It felt very familiar, but something wasn't right.

"Is it you?" I asked.

"Yes," she said.

"Is it really you?" I asked.

"Yes," she said again.

"I'm just so afraid that this is going to be like the other times. I'm going to wake up and find this is all a dream. You will still be the one who abused me. You will still be the one I'll never be able to talk to again."

Silence. So I lay with her in my arms, as if by holding her tight enough I could prevent wakefulness from snatching me away, and she would still be with me, no matter what bed I found myself in when I awoke.

For some time now I've been wanting to write something to introduce some of the thoughts I've had after reflecting on Girard's theory of mimetic desire and Rebbecca Adams's reassessment thereof. Yesterday I think I finally settled on what I'd write -- another transfeminist manifesto. I say, "Another," because Emi Koyama has already written one that's quite good.

The difficulty I'm encountering at the moment is figuring out how much, if any, of the text should be spent discussing Girard or the insights feminist theologians have drawn from his work. ( More. )