aww, melty....

WaPo has a same-sex attraction-and-outing story:

MINNEAPOLIS -- A Lutheran pastor ardently critical of allowing gays into the clergy is on leave from his Minneapolis church after a gay magazine reported his attendance at a support group for men struggling with same-sex attraction.

Lavender Magazine published a story last week about Brock's quiet attendance of the Faith in Action meetings, written by a reporter who falsely posed as a member of the group.

The disturbing and regretful part of this story is not the outing (though the bias in the article against outings is so thick you could cut it, the bastards) -- it's that the pastor in question recognizes and accepts that:

"Every time the Bible mentions homosexual behavior, it condemns it. It never adds, it's OK if you love each other."

It's true, and that's the tragedy here. His religion requires him to hate himself, or to hate his religion. Awww. I melt for him.

* * *

And damn, but I do wish the WaPo even slightly indicated that the blameworthy party here might not be Lavender Magazine. "Newspapers are worth saving because they are our only form of unbiased reporting," my ass.

eye candy, brain candy

I'm too accustomed to good vids to really be able to watch music videos -- music videos are almost always either too literal or too randomly-pasted together, and they rarely tell stories, use any metaphors, or allow for any analysis. Viewer-side thinking just means frustration. Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" vid was the first music video I ever considered art -- more than yet another love story, the video tells the story of a star's relationship with the media. It's intricately put together, pieces of this and that, random snapshots coming together to form a coherent whole; even the randomness is meaningful under my interpretation. Since that vid, I've seen Lady Gaga as an artist rather than just another pop star.

So when people started trashing the new "Alejandro" video, I had to go take a look. It's gorgeous, beautiful eye candy -- and I do too spy a point in the vid. It's an argument about the relationship between repressed sexuality, the military, and the Church.

Snapshot themes:

• Individuals are trapped by a net of religion and militancy that denies their sexuality to them on their own terms.
• "Stripped" religion is only allowed out in as much as it serves militant needs; it will deny your love and your sexuality. Pure religion is utterly impotent (and getting more impotent).
• People have some control over their fate; they are fucked by this situation because they have bought into it and clamor for it. However, we're all essentially puppets of larger forces in the end.
  

"the end of men", guffaw

Sigh:

Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way— and its vast cultural consequences

There is so much wrong with this article that I can't even begin to take it apart. Every point it makes is misguided or inappropriate, or doesn't lead to the point the article pretends it supports in some other way.

I want to rip it apart bit by bit, but I don't want to grace it with the time and attention that would require. Essentially: there's still a serious wage gap. And just because women make up half the work force, they are employed as peons much more often than men. See my lovely sample org chart with women in green and men in yellow that parallels just about every organization I'm aware of (minus maybe some woman-focused non-profits)....

heteronormativity or heterosexism?

This stuff makes me bang my head on the wall:

Valdez and his team of 45 freelance writers do it all: write a client's [online dating] profile, pick out potential matches, send introductory e-mails and message back and forth until a date is confirmed. Then they turn over the correspondence and tell the lucky fellow where and when he's meeting Madame X. (And it's almost always that gender dynamic; 80 percent of the firm's clients are men.)

I feel like keeping this paragraph on an index card in my wallet, ready to be pulled out at any moment, with the line: "Do you really believe that gay people are not discounted or devalued in our nation's 'liberal' media?"

cars that drive themselves!

Someone is in the WaPo suggesting that cars will drive themselves by 2020, but the article tosses out two sentences that indicate this is not as cool of a scifi future as we've all been imagining. Two interesting implications:

1) Privacy. The US and European manufacturers are supporting ad hoc networks for cars on the road to exchange information, whereas Japan is supporting a central repository for particular locations. There are some interoperability issues here, but more interesting to me are the privacy issues -- the US/European system strikes me as significantly less of a privacy threat, since ad hoc networks are just that: ad hoc and non-persistent. I actually suspect in a rousing turn-around of events that at some point our government will start quietly lobbying our auto manufacturers to switch to the Japanese system, if not advantaging that system overtly.

2) Environmentalism & Public Transportation. "Drivers will be able to work, read, watch films or even sleep while their cars are driven for them. 'It will be like sitting on a bus or a train,' says Ekmark." Now, I use buses and trains in order to avoid the scary traffic. But if my car drives itself (and does so presumably more safely than the bus driver drives me today) and I can sleep or read in my own car amongst my own dirt for that time instead.... I'd be very much inclined to stop using public transportation. (Especially if they somehow fixed the parking problem too.) This has major implications for the budgets of the public transport companies and for the mobility of people who can't afford personal vehicles. It also puts the movement toward carpooling and mass transit for environmental purposes back a number of years....

So, I'm curious how much we actually stand to gain from these magic cars (how many fewer accidents? anything else?) vs. what we stand to lose (our privacy? our jobs? mobility of the lower classes? our planet?). I'd love to see someone do a breakdown of this so I know whether my fears are greatly exaggerated.... And I'm sad that the perfect scifi future doesn't look so perfect now that I'm an adult and it's becoming more real.