Sorry about all the flying nastiness.

And yes, Charlotte is middle-ish. I’m in the mountains, 2.5 hours away. The beach is at least 3 to 4 hours away from that.

NC is a LOOOOOOOOONG state.

“September 13, 2013, in Pennsylvania. Mark your calendars.”

Will you be there, physically, in the flesh and in reality and person?

Celebrating non-superstition. Friday the 13th.

At least that is one traditional day of superstition that is nowadays tongue in cheek. Most adults young and old know that the various superstitions of that day are done just for fun. The superstitions of that day are more comparable to the superstition of Santa tallying up your naughty and nice points than they are to the superstition of Jesus counting you as one of his sheep and deciding which of you get to enter the greener pastures. Heck, even superstitions about nights when the moon is full are taken more seriously than Friday the 13th superstitions, aren’t they?

Question: does the trend for same sex marriage help or hinder the movement for secular celebration? Margaret and Reba: it helps!

I don’t understand the connection between the success of the secular celebration movement and the success of the marriage equality movement, but I would like to be clued in. If anything, I would think that marriage equality would be helped by vocal and strident advocacy for secular marriage celebrations because it would help people separate what they do at church from the civil aspect of marriage, which is the only part of marriage that matters when it comes to what is legal and what is a human right.

Admittedly the Bro’ Saudi connection is less direct. When Egypt cracked down on them, many members hid out in Arabia, thus getting all chummy and ecumenical with the wahhabis.

Women get interrupted a lot more than women.

Just wanted to call attention to this sentence. In context, it’s clear what you’re saying, but I got stuck on it before I made it to the context.

I do have some problems with some of the right wing groups she has been associated with in the USA.

That could be because groups on the left are too busy denying the truth of life under Islam.

I suspect she did not run to those groups with open arms, she was pushed there.

Similar I suspect to Ayaan Hirsi Ali after she was hung out to dry in the Netherlands and her relationship with the American Enterprise Institute.

I saw Wafa Sultans take down of a Muslim cleric a few years ago on Al Jazeera and she was awesome.

She got it bang on when she said:

a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another that belongs to the 21st century… a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality

Most Americans take it for granted, they don’t know how lucky they are.

Which is more than a bit depressing given all the USA’s current problems.

I especially liked this line of Sultan’s which I saw quoted on Twitter:

The worst form of slavery is when the slave believes they are free.

“Men get asked idea questions, women get fact questions.”

In the course of any given exchange, it is always the asker of a question, any question, who gets to sit in the power chair.

I AM the voice of authority.

(sorry)

But seriously, now you’ve got me wondering how much I do those things. Which I suppose is at least partly the point.

I don’t do fashion and I have degrees and work in traditionally male areas – but I had a baby and I nursed him and I focus on pregnancy and pregnancy education as an applied sort of philosophy of biology/epistemology.

The last three things make me Girly, and therefore in the gender ghetto.

“White men are not oppressed for being white men. Gay white men, disabled white men, poor white men, incarcerated white men – yes. because they are white? No.”

So one can still be white and oppressed. A poor white disabled gay male prisoner would probably find little comfort in the fact that his oppression did not arise out of racial caste, or that nonpoor, nonwhite, nondisabled nonprisoners were arguably enjoying better lives.

A key observation has been made (I think it was by Marx) that when one man oppresses another, both are reduced by that fact. This was not just rhetoric. (His stated aim was to eliminate all oppression by anyone of anyone, but to what extent he succeeded is of course, highly debateable.)

But as I have pointed out elsewhere on other B&W threads re the oppression of females via genital mutilation, trying to shift all blame for all oppression onto one perceived oppressor caste has got a few problems.