From Sebastian at Snowflakes in Hell comes this little gem:
And I’ve reflected, Mr. President, on the “tragedy we are living through in Mexico,” and have come to the conclusion the problem is that your country sucks. That’s not my country’s fault.
Word.
While surfing around the intertubes I came across this interesting article in The Telegraph. “UK is Violent Crime Capitol of Europe.” It begins:
Analysis of figures from the European Commission showed a 77 per cent increase in murders, robberies, assaults and sexual offences in the UK since Labour came to power.
Now, yes I know. It’s very crass of me to blame the Left for Britain’s violent crime rate being so high. I’m not blaming them. I’m not pointing to causation but correlation. Discuss.
If you haven’t heard, back in 2007 there was a horrible triple homicide in Connecticut. The Petit family was enjoying a quiet night at home when two men broke in, beat the father nearly to death with a baseball bat, raped the mother then strangled her to death, raped one of the daughters, then tied them both to a bed and set the house on fire. The girls were left to burn alive. Miraculously the father, who had been tied up in the basement, escaped and survived.
Last week, Steven Hayes, one of the two men who broke in that night, was convicted by a jury of his peers and sentenced to death. Hopefully his accomplice will be as well.
I’ll never forget sitting in a college class when the teacher asked who was in favor of the death penalty. In a class of over 150 students, barely 20 of us raised our hands. We were then berated as barbaric Neanderthals who failed to see how capital punishment is “cruel and unusual punishment,” how it is “expensive,” how it does nothing to “deter crime.”
Cruel and unusual punishment – I’m sorry but sticking a needle in someone’s arm and giving then a mixture of chemicals that makes them fall asleep, then stops their heart, is not cruel. Allowing this person to live is cruel to the victims of their crime.
It’s expensive – The appeals process (lawyers fees) has made it expensive. Also, making sure that the lethal injection is done with a clean needle, in a clean facility and to make sure the procedure is not cruel, all make it expensive. On the other hand, one round of .45 ACP ball ammo is about 40 cents.
It doesn’t deter crime – Prison doesn’t deter crime either. If your litmus test for a criminal punishment is deterring crime, then nothing really works. Capital punishment is about removing and purging evil elements of society. Capital punishment is not there to deter crime, it is there because, at times, some people prove through their choices that they don’t want to live in society and be a productive citizen. And no, in these cases, rehabilitation doesn’t work.
Now, please don’t get me wrong. I’m not in any way suggesting that the death penalty should be applied in all cases. But for heinous crimes it definitely should be applied.
Alan, of Snarky Bytes fame, has a positive outlook on the future of America.
To sum up – yes, things are bad, but they’ve been worse and America has always come out the better for it. Go. Read. Enjoy.
You know things have gotten bad for the Galactic Empire when Darth Vader is sent to rob a bank.
“Want to stick your sausage-like fingers into a bag of Cheetos? Tough. You’re on my dime now.”
Say Uncle – Dear America, I own your ass.
My only complaint about WordPress is that I can’t track how people are finding this site. I can see what phrase they searched and ended up here, but that is the extent of the info.
Over on the old site, which is still running, my sitemeter has recently been active with people searching for information on “constructed reality” – more specifically, movies, tv shows, and other media containing examples of constructed reality. Several of these searches have come from Canadian school districts so I figured I’d post this to help, in case they find their way to this site again.
Theory
The idea of constructed social reality has grown out of several communication theories. The first thing I was taught in my Communication Theory class at the U was,
Communication is a symbolic/relational process whereby social reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed.
The symbolic process is:
- Rule-governed, interpretive activity.
- Process of assigning meaning and intention to the acts of others.
Social Reality is:
- Sum total of communicative acts within it.
- Persons both produce and are shaped by their communicative activity.
There are certain assumptions:
- Symbolic production of reality
- Reality is not given but supplied
- Symbolic maintenance (repair and transformation) of reality
The basic idea is that human language is symbolic. Humans have the cognitive capacity to take a symbol and assign meaning to it. That symbol holds no inherent value outside of the meaning assigned to it.
Example: One of my favorite professors, Norm Elliott, loved using this example:
- Red grapes make the best wine.
- He pulled a red hot poker out of the fire.
- I like my steaks red in the middle.
- She’s a tall woman with red hair.
- When Elliott noticed his fly was open during lecture, his face turned red.
The word “red” is made up of three symbols, “r”, “e”, “d,” and together they form another symbol, the word “red.” But the word “red” has no inherent value until we assign it meaning, and as you can see in the above example, the word “red” can mean at least five different things, or express five different thoughts.
So it is with the rest of our world. Yes, there is physical reality but even our understanding of physical reality is symbolic. A rainstorm is a physical reality. If it’s raining, it’s raining. Though the meaning may differ between people – a ruined day for a hiker or water for the farmer’s crops.
The easiest theory to study would be George Herbert Mead’s Symbolic Interactionism. Mead’s main theory is that we interact with objects based on the meaning that we’ve assigned to them. This applies to objects – guns for example – and people – homosexuals; race relations. What meaning(s) has your life experience created for a specific person/object?
I highly recommend A First Look at Communication Theory, by Em Griffin, or go to his website.
Media
As for media containing constructed reality, all media contains constructed reality. A great film on the subject is “Ordinary People.”
You can easily take this basic idea and quickly expand it. Are you in favor of or against Obamacare? Why or why not? What experiences have shaped your world view on the subject? Are you willing to understand the other side (I didn’t say agree with it)? What is your opinion on gun-owner rights and why? Are you a hoplophobe and if so, why?
In November of last year I mentioned a “code of jihad” that was released by the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. It is a challenge to al-Quida philosophy on jihad (click here to read more and review). Today, Alan pointed out that a Muslim scholar in London has released a 600 page fatwa:
The 600—page fatwa says that “suicide bombings and attacks against civilian targets are not only condemned by Islam, but render the perpetrators totally out of the fold of Islam, in other words, to be unbelievers.” Mr. Qadri described the al—Qaeda movement as an “old evil with a new name” and said he believed that the overwhelming majority of young Muslims in Britain had not yet been radicalized and would “think again” on reading his proclamation.
I’d be interested to know if this fatwa is in response to the “code” released five months ago. Regardless, it’s one more step toward a greater understanding for the world, and of a new social reality.
Joe Huffman continues his discussion of the Brady Bunch’s bigotry. It is very, very insightful.
And Sebastian talks to us about it, giving his thoughts on what Joe Huffman has previously said concerning it.
Linked off of that last article was this article. Read and witness Mitch Mayne’s truth:
September 6, 2009
You know who I am. You have been seated next to me in meetings. You have greeted me with enthusiasm when you’ve seen me come to Church. You have heard my voice in prayer.
Yet, I wonder how many of you would treat me less kindly if you knew the truth. I wonder if you would judge me–however mildly, however inadvertently, however silently.
Being honest about who I am has seldom led to a positive outcome. In my home, my Father told me that my being gay was his ultimate fear, and my ultimate failure. My mother told me it would have been better for her if I’d been born dead than gay. Growing up, I was scorned on the playground, and ridiculed and bullied in the classroom. I have been fired from jobs because I am gay. I have been told by church leaders that I am unworthy of ever taking the Sacrament. I have been told that I will never work with the youth of the church. I have been told in meetings that it is because of people like me that the AIDS pandemic has come upon the Earth–that my sins are bringing punishment upon the wicked and the sinless alike.
It has not been an easy path, nor a path I would wish for anyone. But it is *my* path. And it has made me who I am today. I am, in fact, grateful for being gay. It has given me levels of compassion, understanding, patience and forgiveness that I would never have developed otherwise.
Many Sundays I look out across the congregation and watch
Advertisementyou: Shawna and Raymond Lee, with their brood of wonderful and rambunctious boys; MJ and Katherine Pritchett with their fledgling children, offering them support as they leave the nest; Dick and Jackie Alder, with their deep, lifelong companionship and love for one another. And I know I will never have those things. If I am to live by church doctrine, I am relegated to a life of solitude, and my sentence is to grow old and leave this world alone.
Those are painful moments for me. Yet when the Sacrament is passed, and I bow my head and speak my sorrow to my Heavenly Father, something equally grand happens.
Almost without exception, a feeling washes over me from deep inside my soul. A tender, warm, yet powerful feeling–and a voice that tells me, “You belong here.”Not when I have it all figured out, not when I am perfect, not when I know all the answers — but today, right here, right now. With you. That, my dear brothers and sisters, is why I am Mormon. Because I belong here.
I had no choice whether or not to be a child of my Heavenly Father. And I had no choice whether or not to be gay. Both things simply are. Both things are intertwined into the DNA of my soul so deeply that you could not extricate one from the other without destroying who I am. They are, in fact, who I am.
Why do I speak to you today?
I don’t want pity. To pity me is to make me a victim. I want understanding. To understand me, is to love me as an equal.
I don’t want tolerance. If I am tolerated, I am disliked or feared in some way. I want respect as a fellow striving child of Go — an equal in His eyes.
I don’t want acceptance. To accept me is to graciously grant me the favor of your company. To accept me is to marginalize me with the assumption that I am less than you. I am your peer. I am neither above you nor below you.
I don’t want judgment. My path may be different than yours, but it is a plan built for me by a power greater than any of us in this room. To judge me is to judge the designer of that path.
I do not want to be viewed as a mistake. My path on this Earth was prescribed uniquely for me, just as yours was. It was designed to give me the experiences I need to grow as a child of my Heavenly Father. To view me as a mistake is to view Him as a maker of mistakes.
We are very different, you and I — on a cosmetic level. You have spouses, or the opportunity for spouses, I do not. You have children, or the opportunity for children, I do not. You are attracted to those of the opposite gender, I am attracted to those of my same gender.
What I want most of all is for you to look past the cosmetic. I want you to look at what makes us the same: the simple fact that we are all children of our Heavenly Father, and we are struggling day to day to understand how to best do His will, and how to return to Him. It is that similarity, brothers and sisters, that weighs more than all the cosmetic differences in His universe.
You know who I am. You have been seated next to me in meetings. You have greeted me with enthusiasm when you’ve seen me come to Church. You have heard my voice in prayer. And now, you have heard my truth.
Thank you, Mitch Mayne, for sharing part of yourself. I am grateful for your gift.
I saw this article in the Salt Lake Tribune and thought it was a perfect example of A Public Peace Process: Sustained Dialogue to Transform Racial and Ethnic Conflicts and Sitting in the Fire: Large Group Transformation Using Conflict and Diversity.
Gay rights: Oakland LDS Stake tries to heal post-Prop 8 rifts
‘This is the church I know and love’Updated: 02/05/2010 01:39:33 PM MSTTed Fairchild, who is openly gay, has HIV and serves as a part-time LDS missionary in the Bay Area, left the love of his life to return to church activity. Linda Schweidel wondered why her bright, successful returned-missionary husband still was not ready for children after eight years of marriage. That’s when he broke down and told her he was gay.Diane Oviatt held her sobbing gay son in a darkened kitchen as he poured out years of grief at the secret he had been carrying for 18 years and wondered how he would get to heaven without marrying.
These were among the anguished stories several Mormons shared during emotional church services Oakland LDS Stake held last summer to heal rifts caused by the faith’s activism in the Golden State on behalf of traditional marriage.
In June 2008, the LDS First Presidency asked all California Mormons to give their time and money to Proposition 8, a ballot measure striking down gay marriage. Many members did so with gusto, circulating petitions, raising money, sending e-mails to church lists and putting up lawn signs.
That left other Bay Area Mormons, particularly those with gay friends and relatives, feeling embattled and alienated. Some stepped away temporarily from church; others left for good. Those who remained often felt at odds with fellow believers.
Oakland Stake President Dean Criddle, a respected lawyer and gentle leader, sensed the ripples of collective pain and wanted to reunite his flock, says Matt Marostica, bishop of the Berkeley Ward.
So Criddle and his counselors assembled quotes and speeches from LDS general authorities that stressed love and compassion for those with same-sex attraction. They then asked each of the 10 wards in the stake to hold a joint meeting of adult members during church services on either Aug. 30 or Sept. 6 to hand out the quotes and listen to personal stories from area members.
The response in Oviatt’s suburban Moraga, Calif., ward was electric, Oviatt says. “Everyone in the audience was weeping. Men came up to my husband, crying, and hugged him, saying, ‘We love you and we love your son.’ “
A couple of the more ardent ballot supporters apologized to Oviatt for having Prop 8 signs on their lawns, saying, “We never knew.”
Several people told Berkeley’s bishop, Marostica, how much they appreciated the meetings, including one woman who said, “I am so glad we did this. This is the church I know and love.”
[s]Till they have faces » The authorities’ statements and church setting provided a comfort level to Mormons who rarely discuss homosexuality openly, except to condemn it as a social trend or satanic tool. By all accounts, though, it was the stories that were transforming.
One man, who outed himself from the pulpit during one of the meetings, talked about a life of being scorned, bullied and accused by other Mormons of bringing on the AIDS pandemic. Still, every week when he takes the sacrament bread and water, God’s voice whispers to him: “You belong here.”
It’s the same voice Fairchild has heard over and over since becoming active in the LDS Church as a 17-year-old in Pullman, Wash., in 1970.
He served a two-year mission in Mexico, earned a degree at Brigham Young University and married a woman because, he says, she was pretty and could play the piano. The couple had two daughters.
But Fairchild always knew he was gay and eventually couldn’t continue the lie. He fell for a man.
“It was the only time,” Fairchild says, “I have ever been physically, emotionally and spiritually in love.”
By 1986, he and his partner were diagnosed with HIV, which at the time was a death sentence. Elder Richard G. Scott — then an LDS Seventy, now an apostle — gave Fairchild a blessing in which he asked God to build a protective wall around his cells. In that moment, Fairchild believed he needed to live by Mormon standards. He broke up with his love and returned to the church.
“Once you’ve experienced the Holy Ghost,” he says, “there’s no other feeling like it.”
More than 20 years later, Fairchild is relatively healthy and at peace with his decision. He believes he was born gay and a child of a loving Heavenly Father, twin qualities that make him a more effective “worker in God’s kingdom.”
Letting go or holding fast » That doesn’t work for Oviatt’s son, Ross Oviatt, who has not been back to church.
He attended BYU for a few semesters, she says, but it was a “toxic environment.” The Prop 8 fallout — which continues in California with the ballot measure now before a judge – proved difficult for Ross as he tried to weather homophobic slurs and keep his secret. He misses his Mormon experience and friends, but the association is too painful.
It hasn’t been easy for the rest of the family, either.
“We had to re-examine our place in the church,” Oviatt says. “We are not leaving, but it’s hard to stay in a religion that does not embrace our child. If we had to choose between the two, we’d choose Ross.”
Some Mormons in the stake see only one choice: following church edicts.
“I am a faithful Latter-day Saint, happily married with children, striving to live up to my temple covenants, fulfill my calling, be a good father and all the other things which active members of the church try to do,” one man wrote to Criddle in between the two joint sessions. “According to your definition of homosexuality, I am also a homosexual. I have had strong attractions to men (and exclusively men) my whole life.”
But homosexuality is not his identity, just a temptation he refuses to act on, the writer said. He thought the stake should have included more emphasis on heterosexual marriage as the core of Mormon teachings.
Criddle shared the letter (without identification) in all the wards.
Coming back » In what she calls, the “dark days of Proposition 8,” Schweidel took a “leave of absence” from the church.
She didn’t know if she could return. But when Criddle and Marostica asked her to tell her story at one of the joint sessions, she readily accepted.
She has been attending and involved ever since.
“The special meeting made me want to be part of a positive change in the church,” she says. “I want to talk to people, to explain why I feel like I do, and help them try to understand.”
That may work in Berkeley, but how about Bountiful?
Schweidel is hopeful. There are two kinds of Mormons, she says, quoting a friend: those who know gay people and those who don’t know they know gay people.
The task, she says, is to move more members from the second to the first category.
“If my mom in Orem had gay neighbors next door, I know she would love them,” Schweidel says. “The Mormons I have spoken to make an effort to understand. They totally get it.”
This gives you an idea of what I was trying to convey in my post Unpacking Things. This is how the process works.
