An Import of my Tumblr Blog
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…
Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.
White men have been raised to believe that they’re God; most gay white men are marginal in only one respect. Much of the gay white movement seeks to be included in the American dream and is angered when they do not receive the standard white male privileges, misnamed as “American democracy.”
Often, white gay men are working not to change the system. This is one of the reasons why the gay male movement is as white as it is. Black gay men recognize, again by the facts of survival, that being Black, they are not going to be included in the same way. The Black/white gay male division is being examined and explored by some. Recently, for instance, there was a meeting of Third World lesbians and gays in Washington. It was recognized that there are things we do not share with white lesbians and gay men, as well as things that we do, and that clarification of goals is necessary between white gays and lesbians, and Third World gays and lesbians.
I see no essential battle between many gay men and the white male establishment. To be sure, there are gay men who do not view their oppressions as isolated, and who work for a future. But it is a matter of majority politics; many gay white males are being pulled by the same strings as other white men in this society. You do not get people to work against what they have identified as their basic self-interest.
Audre Lorde, in Sadomasochism: Not About Condemnation. (via pickledhappiness)
This is a load of shit. Basically it says, since you don’t get screwed as much as we do, you are part of the problem. This is divisive crap that screws the left every time. When you fight for your rights, you’re fighting for everyone. No one said this doesn’t apply to gays of color. No one ever said gays in third world nations are worse off. What does this finger pointing accomplish?
“The enemy of science is not religion. Religion comes in endless shapes and forms … . The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.” -Frans de Waal-
In a book coming out next week called The Bonobo and the Atheist, primatologist Frans de Waal argues that morality is built into our species. Rather than coming to us top-down from God, or any other external source, morality for de Waal springs bottom-up from our emotions and our day-to-day social interactions, which themselves evolved from foundations in animal societies.
For 30 years, de Waal has authored books about apes and monkey that open our eyes to the bottom-up origins of our human behaviors, ranging from politics to empathy. In this, his 10th volume, he extends that perspective by writing, “It wasn’t God who introduced us to morality; rather, it was the other way around. God was put into place to help us live the way we felt we ought to.”
In Search of Humanism Among the Primates
Hardcover, 289 pages purchase
“The way we felt we ought to” has a long evolutionary history, so that de Waal’s thesis depends crucially on numerous and convincing examples from our closest living relatives.
(via fuckyeahnerdpr0n)
If NATO had been developed to defend the West against the USSR, it would have been dissolved when the USSR collapsed. If, on the other hand, the goal was to extend the dominance of the US and its allies and clients, it would not only remain but would expand its membership and range of actions — exactly as has happened.
The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won’t let go of your life; your memories, your attachments. They burn ‘em all away. But they’re not punishing you, he said. They’re freeing your soul. If you’re frightened of dying and holding on, you’ll see Devils tearing your life away. But if you’ve made your peace then the Devils are really angels, freeing you from the Earth
It was strange how some of childhood’s words and ways fell at the wayside and were left behind, while others clamped tight and rode for life, growing the heavier to carry as time passed.
I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards.
No tree, it is said, can grow to Heaven unless its roots reach down to Hell.
In the very depths of Hell, do not demons love one another?