Hound Party Manifesto

Yesterday evening I was walking the dogs and we past a local bar that seemed to be holding some kind of function.  It turned out to be a Green Party fundraiser/meeting.
Gus, while he doesn’t like the kind of parties that involve strangers coming to your house and making you stay up late, was taken by [...]

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Flame bait!

People, we need to increase the traffic around here.  It’s pathetic.  Since the “be really good and attract an audience through your writing, consistency of posting, and original thought” route is obviously off the table, I’m going to go with the “throw out a list of inflammatory statements and/or buzzwords and hope for the best”.
Come [...]

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Book review: The Great Derangement by Matt Taibbi

Last year I read an excerpt from this book (“Jesus made me puke” – Taibbi’s account of his bizarre weekend at a John Hagee-sponsored retreat) and thought, “No way.  This can’t be real.  Nobody is casting out ‘the demon of the intellect’* and exhorting believers to vomit.”   But like all good skeptics I suspended judgement [...]

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The Communist Manifesto was better*

OK, so even though I said I would try to stop myself from exploring the dark, dark world of Quiverfull, I couldn’t help myself from looking up Alan Carlson and Paul T. Mero’s The Natural Family: A Manifesto.
This has led me to another conclusion I didn’t come to yesterday: these people actually hate children.
[actual quotes]:
“We [...]

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My patriarchy researches

As you may already know, I recently read and had my mind blown by Kathryn Joyce’s Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement.  Now, my general media consumption pattern is as follows:
- I run across something by accident, usually something nerdy
- I dabble in it for a little while
- I become increasingly obsessed with but slightly [...]

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Right answer, wrong reason

How do you know when someone/ something is right or wrong?
This isn’t as simple a question as it sounds. Seriously, how do you know?
I know someone who is firmly convinced by the 911 conspiracy theory because, when he watched the towers fall, “it didn’t feel real, it felt staged”. I know otherwise rational people who [...]

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Complaining with Kay, Episode 23: My confession.

How I went from being a religious Catholic to, well, not being a religious Catholic.  Mentioned in this episode: The Cartoon Bible, the God Helmet, Simple Partial Seizures of a part of the brain I can’t quite recall.
Link.

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Where I get off the bus

Feministe, which is a feminist blog I read, has a post up today about fibromyalgia.  More specifically, about a jerky article in Salon about how fibromyalgia is bullshit.
Cara at Feministe takes the “misogynist/ableist” tack, which has a lot of validity – a combination of the attitudes that “women are always making shit up and don’t [...]

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