OMG

So I read a lot, as I said before, and one of the things I see frequently is riots over the hurt feelings of Muslim Rage Boy.
Let me preface what I'm going to say with this: I have no problem with moderate Muslims. Totally cool with you if you don't want to make me A) convert or die or B) live under Sharia law in my home country, or C) blow people up.

But the riots over the Danish cartoons two summers ago made me laugh. I hardly thought they were serious--you set shit on fire (the shit belonging to innocent, not-involved people) because your poor wittle feeling were hurt? Awww.
Seriously, who does that? Didn't your mother teach you not to lash out violently when you were angry? Or did she skip that lesson? I thought everyone's other did that around the age of five.
I find it very hard to take people who lash out like angry children seriously. I really want to just sit them in a corner until they learn their lesson. And tell them they can't have any pie after dinner.

The most recent example of this is the riots in Calcutta that happened recently. Taslima Nasreen is a controversial feminist Bangleshi writer in India, and apparently her writing tends to ridicule Islam.
Honestly, if you can't take mockery, than you've never gotten past middle school mentally. Yes it hurts sometimes, but FIX WHATEVER IT IS (unless it's something like, I dunno, having a spine and a mind and a vagina). Or maybe think about the time the book was written.

Any and every book is the product of its era, so think about it. Would the Pope suggest that someone be whipped for theft? Well, no, he wouldn't. Community service, or maybe work to pay for whatever they stole, but not 30 lashes.
Humans are failable, yes? The Quran was not written by the Prophet himself, but by his followers, the same as the Bible. So it maybe garbled, and thus require some thought to it, rather than blindly following Scripture/the Word/etc.

Yay for the tangent!
Back to MRB.

So grow the fuck up. Grow some balls and deal with the world. Deal with the fact that there is a mind inside her pretty little head, and that she is your equal.

Now, a good question would be why woman are supposedly unequal to men. I realize the Quran says that, though what the Scriptural* reason for this is is still beyond me.

My mother has a theory that I tend to agree with that explains this trend in world culture.
Woman have an incredible amount of power simply because they are women. Men are fascinated by women--the shape, the smell, the possibilities that she holds. I've seen men go to incredible lengths to get a woman, and even further ones to keep her.
By this very fact, she wields power over her man. And no one likes to be powerless, so he puts her in a veil. Keeps her under his control, or that of a close male relative. (A lot of cultures had variations of this, but I'm going to use Middle Eastern tendencies because it's the most familiar to most people).
If he controls her behavior, he controls her allure. He cloaks the mysteries within. Hides them for his personal perusal.
Because the woman has power over him, she becomes unequal.
Why women tolerate this is beyond me. I suppose the threat of death or loss of a protector/income or physical violence is enough to convince most women it's better to give in than suffer the consequences.

*I'm probably not using the correct term for the Muslim version of Scripture, but I'm not sure what is the right one. Feel free to inform me.

Ugh

As something of a political/news junkie, I run into any number of depressing things--Often US policy is the worst.
I can't help but be frustrated by what I see.
The US is now nearly indistinguishable from the people we claim to be fighting. Torture, violence, violations of rights, and a fiercely ideological rhetoric is spewed frequently. Secret memos passed around. Hiding things from the public. Lies. Bull shit. Misdirection.
I'm probably going to end up with my own file someplace because of this post. If I haven't already got one for attending protests and protesting in general.
I cannot support anything or anyone that hurts other people. I may not like people in general, but I'll be damned if I allow pain and suffering to brought on anyone by a ruling entity without some squeak of protest.
I want to change things. I want to help make the world into what it should be. I want to help other people become what they could be.
You know what scares me?
The USA PATRIOT act was a shelved bill, brought back out right after 9/11.
The fact that the government has lied to me and to the public flagrantly. Perhaps they believe we are, as whole, less intelligent than a young goat.
That it watches everything with the Predator program, which watches for key words and then tracks anyone who enters those key words.
That there are secret prisons.
That there are people who are drugged and tortured by government officials with official approval.
That we were lied to get our nation embroiled in a war that we will never be able to leave properly. The day the Middle East is stable is the day the world begins to end.
That there are cases of people being arrested IN THE US for running opposition sites.
That the American public has simply accepted the various violations of human rights with nary a shrug.
That we've left the values we championed for so long so far behind that it will take some serious, strenuous effort to recover.

And that's what scares me the most--hard work is not something people are willing to do. As long as day-to-day life runs smoothly, who cares about what the politicians decide? Who cares what happens to other people as long as I'm ok? As long as my circle of friends and family is ok?
Neil Postman warned against this in Building a Bridge to the 18th Century. And damn it all, he was right.

If we set our minds to it, roll up our sleeves, and plunge forth into the muck and mire of what the Bush administration will have left us, we can move heaven and earth. The diety of your choice cannot stop us.

But I don't think it will happen. It makes my heart break, but it's true. Nothing will change unless something serious happens. It would take a lot of secretive arrests--mysterious disappearances of friends and neighbors--lots of trials that end in censorship--to honestly change the world my generation is setting foot in.

The nation I cherish--the ideals and ideas that I live with and for--is slipping away. Slowly. There are hints of what we were still. But they are slowly dying away.

And we will soon be left with nothing but memories of a golden past, when every man and woman could have a real trial. When the word of secret arrests reached us, we assumed they were in some forgotten hell-hole of a nation. When lies of government officials consisted of, "I did not have sex with that woman!"

Time for a change

More than just me, of course.

Need a new, well, government. Need to go back to...*le gasp* the CONSTITUTION!
*Faints*
My generation needs to get moving. We need to make a difference.

Everyone needs to help. We need to tell the people we put in charge what they ought to be doing besides feeling up the skinterns and/or page boys.

Post

It is generally not my thing to post my real life here, 'coz, well, I like my privacy. But I need to, so I'm going to . Not, of course, that many read this.
So I accidentally (initially) got myself entangled with a friend romantically. (IE, I accidentally got him interested in me). I decided that I DID like him, so I encouraged him. And today, I simply lost interest. A couple of us went to his place, and he insisted on giving us (read me) the grand tour, which included excursions to see his vacuum. And he generally acted immature. And I'm not really interested in that.
But I don't want to hurt him, because I want to keep him as a friend.

I'm also feeling trapped, like I need to escape. Falling into a rut, and I don't want to get stuck. School, do nothing in between classes (except flirt), work, catch up with school (sometimes) and more work. I need to go out. I need to get out. I don't know where I'm going to go or if I can. But I need to.

Playing Catch-up

So I have a variety of things to say:

1. The term "va-jay-jay" that has become a trend is the stupidest thing I've heard. Sounds like the kind of name you give to a small furry creature you don't expect to live long.

2. Mitt Romney's despicable play on Islamophobia is getting old real fast. "Barak Osama?" Jeesus. Pathetic and wrong.

3. Hillary Clinton--aka She Who Must Not Be Named--is getting on my nerves. She was here in my city a few weeks ago and , as usual, she pandered. She apparently had to pay for law school (oh noes! She's sooooo poor!), and the tried to acquire the vote of the poor and uneducated.

4. Ron Paul is not a racist, and he attracts people from up and down the spectrum. I've seen trannies and homophobes alike at rallies and all sorts of people, too. You're going to get the crazies with every campaign--SWMNBN has her vagin-nazis and I suspect Barak's going to get some crazy Black power people in there.

And that's it, I think