If you want to.
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I kind of know what you mean. I have friends and relatives who slavishly adore everything he ever recorded (not accusing anyone here of that, mind). For one person in particular, any discussion of Lennon begins and ends with the word “genius”. They simply cannot unpack the word to acknowledge any nuances.
For me, Lennon is either on or off. Either I like what he sang or wrote or I don’t.
WINOTW I can get into, with the caveat that it’s of its time and not of now.
Mother I can’t get into, because Lennon is on record for saying his aunt and uncle did a perfectly good job raising him. Living with non-parental relatives wasn’t exactly unheard of (and really, it still isn’t, especially for people of his generation or slightly older.
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He wrote about what he wanted to write about, whether it was cheesy love, or anger over his mom being dead, or nonsense, and so on and so forth…
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But it’s also on record that his mom got hit by the trolley right after visiting Mimi and him.
Really? Haven’t heard that before.
“The Love You Make”, by Peter Brown with Steven Gaines, and I think “A Twist of Lennon” by Cynthia has it. Also, “John”, by Cynthia before she died, has lots about his half-family that Julia and Twitchy, her partner before she died, had together.
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It makes us doubly afflicted, by both racism and sexism.
Add in being biracial, and you have a whole other layer of issues and unfair bias to deal with.
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Reddit is both the worst kind of discussion forum as well as the best to cite when normal human disbelief compells one to say, “No one actually believes that. They can’t. Oh shit. That’s actually a thing.”
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Unless you’re absolutely sure there’s no class of entity or entities that could answer to the name ‘God’, why not go by agnostic?
Pretty sure douchebros haven’t claimed that one.
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I’ve never worked that one out.
In the Roman tradition, Mars (god of war) is associated with iron (brown) and the colour red. Venus is associated with copper, but the planet is slightly bluish and later on the traditional colour of the Virgin Mary (the successor to Venus in mythology) is blue. (Copper bronze in antiquity was used for mirrors, and copper compounds are mostly blue.) Traditional British Army uniforms were red. I can recall in the 1960s and 70s pink striped shirts for men were definitely OK - I had some - and men’s suits often had at least one pink thread in the pattern.
At some point in the 20th century there seems to have been a reversal. Was it perhaps started by Corporate America and its passion for blue?
I mention this just to show that fluidity of how gender is perceived has a long history.
I am confidently 100% sure that the various classes of deity claimed by different Abrahamic religions are totally nonexistent and that in any case I don’t care for them, so to that extent I classify myself as an atheist. I’m only an agnostic in respect of why and how there comes to be a universe at all, and that’s not what the typical agnostic means.
But I’m also definitely not a humanist - to me that’s still a theological error, the idea that there is something special about us as a species. As well be a pongist or a leonist.
However, on one issue I am in complete agreement with the recorded sayings of Jesus; and that is that what matters is not what goes into people but what comes out of them. I’m far more interested in the questions people ask than their certainties.
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It was also an old-school European Catholic thing to have children of either gender wear long white robes and not cut their hair until they’ve had their First Communion. So, somewhere, there’s a picture of my grandpa with long hair and a white dress.
I’ve heard that pink is too intense a color for little girls, but that’s always been coming from people my grandparents’ age. By the 1980s, this had been completely reversed.
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Marketing.
“It is generally thought it was simply because if parents followed such a color scheme, they would have to buy a whole new wardrobe and set of baby accessories in the “appropriate” colors if they had a boy and a girl at some point, rather than just going with reusing the one set for both as before.”
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It was surprising when I visited a Victorian home in Wilmington, NC to see a photo of the young boy of the house in a contemporary photo - all decked out in curls and frilly frocks. Seemed that boys were treated like girls as long as they were being tended to by their moms.
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Can we talk about this for a second?
Because to some people this is sexist and sexual harassment, and to some its just a compliment.
I am of the former category, and to me its obvious, but its a little subtle.
I’ve worked with men like this. They simply do not understand that this could ever be “wrong” or not wanted. “Its a compliment!” they’ll say. And I honestly believe they sincerely believe that.
The danger in these men is that respond badly to women they don’t find attractive. Because the idea of “woman” is so intrinsically linked to what I like to call “pants-feels” they simply don’t understand the existence of women that don’t generate said “pants-feels” - when they encounter a woman that doesn’t generate these feelings they get angry (See also: “Nasty Woman”) - they simply don’t want them to exist anywhere near them. (See also: Gay people, Transfolx, PWDs, etc.)
Its deeply insidious, and I honestly don’t know how to combat it. Heck even just raising the point of “Hey, not cool” is usually met with screeches of “Its a compliment can’t you take a compliment!”
So, how do we combat that? Cuz I am out of ideas.
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And the way she handled it, too - exactly how I deal with crap like that. Act sort of flattered and sort of annoyed and don’t call it out for the bullshit it is.
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I could only get through a few seconds of the video, but what was very clear was that it was NOT flirting, no matter what that headline says.
He called her up to the desk like a headmaster. He’s ordering her about. And then saying things like, “you have a nice smile did you know that?”
Well, let’s see, media professional on an international assignment… Yeah, I think she fucking knows that.
It’s hard when you’re representing your employer and your country (something Trump really ought to learn to keep in mind) to talk back, but there’s always the, “Yes! I know! I do have a nice smile!” response. Because people, especially women, aren’t supposed to say nice things about their own bodies.
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Because it’s not “atheist” I said was the problem, and because “don’t know” isn’t my default state. I am pretty damn sure there’s no eye-in-the-sky watching over us. What I am, is “willing to accept that I may be wrong, if appropriate evidence presents itself.” Agnostic says “we don’t know” and sometimes “we can’t know”. I don’t feel either way on that. Like I said I am pretty damn sure one direction, but it’s not “being rational” to cling to a theory that later gets disproven.
But what I don’t feel the need to do is point my finger and laugh at those who do believe in something. Yet, go into any public forum where there is a post on religion, and you will find a dogpile of people doing exactly that, while claiming how superior their interpretation is. And I use “interpretation”, because that is what science does with data to get results. And that is the kind of behaviour I have a problem with. My interpretation of the data comes out the same: there is no evidence pointing to a higher power, but I don’t feel the need to be smug or judgemental about it. The history of science is riddled with those who couldn’t readjust their thinking in the face of new discoveries and got left behind.
Short version: keeping an open mind if new data emerges and can be tested isn’t saying “we don’t / can’t know”. But like an astronomer who doesn’t believe in the existence of little green men on Mars, it’s important to be able to also examine that and maybe revise the theory if one walked over to Curiosity’s camera and waved.
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No idea how to combat the assholes, no. But it is _absolutely_harassment. He’s doing everything possible to signal how “powerful” he is, before calling her over (dominance move again), just so he can say that. He’s making certain she knows how dangerous it is to oppose him.
This ties precisely into my post on the Tim Shields assault trial. Both in the denial of power imbalances and the “comments like that are compliments” bullshit. And as long as our judges allow that garbage into court, we’re not going to be able to convince the bros that it stinks.
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