Clearing the Cache

Personal education has been at the forefront of my agenda this past week. I have been wanting to get some concepts strait and try to make sure my positions are consistent.

It started off with the Kübler-Ross model, commonly referred to as the "five stages of grief". I was never able to keep the stages strait, or even remember what all of them were. I could get denial, anger, bargaining, and acceptance, but I never could remember what that fifth one was. It's funny that the fifth stage should be depression. Since depression always walks with me in life, I never actually think of it in any other context.

After getting the Kübler-Ross model correct, someone suggested that the problem I was searching for might be found in the concept of culture shock. After all, it has four distinct stages: honeymoon, negotiation, adjustment, and mastery; as well as several other hindrances to living in the new culture.

That was enough work for me regarding remembering different models of how we interact with the world and our culture. I didn't get far before someone brought up the concept of dualism in regard to the mind/body philosophy. I was pretty sure I knew what they were talking about, but I didn't want to take any chances at missing some of the finer points, so back to Wikipedia I went to make sure I wasn't missing anything. And it's a good thing I did. There are more layers stacked on top of each other in dualism than I would have ever imagined.

I had my grasp on dualism, culture shock, and the Kübler-Ross model. There didn't seem to be anything that philosophy, psychology, or religion could throw at me that I wasn't prepared for. What I didn't expect was that all the changes that I was talking about with other people might cause a moral panic. I gave up at this point and started reading about politics.

My ideas on politics seem to be pretty simple to me. I want as much freedom for myself and others as can be allowed. I want every type of freedom by default, and only put limits on that freedom when there is a specific and compelling reason to limit that freedom. But as I tried to form my ideas into more specific words, I ran up against the problem of exactly what freedom I was talking about. Was I talking about political freedom, or economic freedom. And regardless of what type of freedom I was thinking about, there was the principal-agent problem.

By this time I had a headache. My only choice was to take two aspirin and go to bed.

Clearing the Cache

I save links that I want to write about. I save far more links that I could ever possibly write about even if I spent all my time in front of my computer typing. What happens to these links when they get too old? I have to do something with them. For those that are time sensitive or which became stale to me, I usually delete them without fanfare. But there are certain links that still have to power to hold my interest and move me even after they are no longer news. These are the links that collect in the bottom of my link collection. They are too good to throw away. I have decided to post them to my blog partly for archival purposes, and partly to share the things that I found interesting. In no certain order, here we go.

The Atlantic has a piece on the Stonewall uprising entitled An Amazing 1969 Account of the Stonewall Uprising.

The above, while a true evaluation of the situation does not explain why the raid on the Stonewall caused such a strong reaction. Why the Stonewall, and not the Sewer or the Snake Pit? The answer lies, we believe, in the unique nature of the Stonewall. This club was more than a dance bar, more than just a gay gathering place. It catered largely to a group of people who are not welcome in, or cannot afford, other places of homosexual social gathering.

The "drags" and the "queens", two groups which would find a chilly reception or a barred door at most of the other gay bars and clubs, formed the "regulars" at the Stonewall. To a large extent, the club was for them.... Apart from the Goldbug and the One Two Three, "drags" and "queens" had no place but the Stonewall....

We all know that rape and sexual assault are horrible (or we should). Regardless of how traumatic it is, there is one sure thing to make it worse: treating the victim like a criminal. Salon has the following piece titled Report: DC police treatment of sexual assault victims "traumatizing".

Susan D., a survivor of sexual assault who reported the incident to police in 2011, told HRW, “Reporting to the police was far more traumatizing than the rape itself.” Her sentiments were echoed in a 2009 complaint form sent to the Office of Police Complaints, which read, ““I think that filing the report was just as traumatic as the crime, if not more…. Is it common place for the police to put blame on the sexual assault victims and then completely ignore them?”

The Gallop Organization finds some nice results in a recent poll. Majority of Americans Still Support Roe v. Wade Decision.

PRINCETON, NJ -- Forty years after the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Roe v. Wade, significantly more Americans want the landmark abortion decision kept in place rather than overturned, 53% to 29%. Another 18% have no opinion, the highest level of uncertainty Gallup has recorded on this question in trends dating to 1989.

Meanwhile, NPR is reporting that the States Become Battlegrounds For Nation's Deep Abortion Divide.

The group is battling legislation that it says is intended to intimidate women. The latest flashpoint is a provision requiring patients get counseling from crisis pregnancy centers that oppose abortions and try to discourage them.

And maybe most interestingly, The Huffington Post has some history and a firsthand account of the significance of Roe vs Wade titled simply Roe at 40!

Before turning to Roe, some history is in order. At the time the Constitution was adopted, the prevailing view was that human life did not exist until quickening (when the mother first feels movement), which typically occurs at around eighteen weeks, or roughly halfway through a pregnancy. American courts, following the English common law, consistently held that abortion before quickening was not a crime. Let me say that again: At the time the Constitution was adopted, abortion in the first eighteen weekss of a woman's pregancy was lawful.

Abortion rates soared in the mid-nineteenth century, as Americans left the land for industrial jobs. The large families vital to farming became burdens in crowded cities. Abortifacients were widely available from mail-order firms and pharmacists, and newspapers regularly ran ads for products and persons to "cure" pregnancy or "restore menses." Social scientists estimate that twenty percent of all pregnancies in this era were terminated by abortion.

Another interesting result from The Gallop Organization is the finding that Americans Back Obama's Proposals to Address Gun Violence. And they back them even more if they don't realize that they are siding with President Obama.

These results are from a Gallup survey conducted Jan. 19-20. The question does not tell respondents that all nine proposals come from Obama's recently released plan to reduce gun violence; however, the wordings used to describe them intentionally follow the White House's "Now Is the Time" plan descriptions.

...

Although Democrats show more support than Republicans for each proposal, majorities of both partisan groups favor seven of the nine proposals. That includes nearly universal support among Republicans and Democrats for requiring criminal background checks for all gun sales. A majority of Republicans also favor a ban on armor-piercing bullets and increasing penalties for straw purchasers, as well as the various school security, police funding, and mental health funding proposals tested.

Mother Jones is reporting that the Boy Scouts (of America is) Losing Big Funders Over Anti-Gay Policy.

The Boy Scouts of America teach young men how to build fires, pitch tents, weave camping chairs, and "be prepared"—unless your son happens to be gay. But the Boy Scouts long-standing policy of banning "open or avowed homosexuals" is starting to cost it some major financial backers: In the last six months, companies including UPS, United Way, the Merck Company Foundation and the Intel Foundation have announced they will drop or postpone funding for the Boy Scouts. Verizon Communications could be next: Over 70,000 people have signed a petition asking the corporation to stop funding the Scouts over their discriminatory policies.

And finally, an article from the New York Times about the changing of the generational guard in the LGBT community. Generation LGBTQIA.

If the gay-rights movement today seems to revolve around same-sex marriage, this generation is seeking something more radical: an upending of gender roles beyond the binary of male/female. The core question isn’t whom they love, but who they are -- that is, identity as distinct from sexual orientation.

But what to call this movement? Whereas “gay and lesbian” was once used to lump together various sexual minorities -- and more recently “L.G.B.T.” to include bisexual and transgender -- the new vanguard wants a broader, more inclusive abbreviation. “Youth today do not define themselves on the spectrum of L.G.B.T.,” said Shane Windmeyer, a founder of Campus Pride, a national student advocacy group based in Charlotte, N.C.

Part of the solution has been to add more letters, and in recent years the post-post-post-gay-rights banner has gotten significantly longer, some might say unwieldy. The emerging rubric is “L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.,” which stands for different things, depending on whom you ask.

Happy reading,

Zouri