Culture – Page 33

Can I Tempt You To Sin?

Published on January 25, 2007

Fancy fucking with the patriarchy a little bit?

Punkassblog has a link to one of those batshit fundy sites that’s running a survey on attitudes to what’s allegedly modest or immodest in dress:

Their survey, in which 200 something girls submitted over 300 “is it skanky when I _____” questions, which were then boiled down to something like 150 meticulous statements covering topics like bikinis, body glitter, and appropriate fabrics, complete with pictures for those guys who don’t know what a camisole is because in their minds they call it “she’s wearing that shirt that gets me all hard again.” Boys have to indicate to what degree they agree or disagree with the statements. The results will help girls help guys by finally having a clear set of instructions that will help them avoid being siren songs to sin. Unless you want to be a siren song, in which case the results will give you detailed instructions of exactly where the fine line is for getting your Christian brothers all hot and bothered against their will without overdoing the slut bit.
[…]

Here’s some statements they want yes/no replies to:

#5 It is a stumbling block when a girl reaches into her shirt to adjust a bra strap.

#1 A girl’s physical posture and/or position can be a stumbling block.
#5 The way a girl walks can be a stumbling block.
#4 It is a stumbling block to see a girl lying down, even if she’s just hanging out on the floor or on a couch with her friends.

#1 Putting lip-gloss on in front of a guy is a stumbling block.
#18 A purse with the strap diagonally across the chest draws too much attention to the bust.

And no eating bananas or ice-cream either, I’ll warrant. I’d better put down this lollipop I’m sucking too.

Those poor poor boys, they must be in a constant state of priapism. For god’s sakes, why can’t they just go and have a wank and stop bothering the rest of us?

The Brothers’ softly lit photograph is prominently featured in several places on their site and shows two remarkably handsome, male model-like young men:

Making good fundy girls horny

The dirty, dirty teases. Surely it’s immodest and un-Christian to inflame young girls’ lusts with images like that? Shouldn’t they be covered up?

Joking aside – let’s face it, these are just two young evangelists on the make, no different than the hucksters on the tv channels, in the megachurches or at revival meetings. The only difference between them and an Elmer Gantry or Pat Robertson is that they’ve dressed their hypocrisy up in a slick, hip online image.

They boast that evangelism is a family business to them, which leads me to doubt both their sincerity and their integrity:

Alex and Brett have grown up in a ministry household. Their father, Gregg Harris, is a well-known homeschool author and speaker, teaching elder at Household of Faith Community Church and director of Noble Institute for Leadership Development. Their mother, Sono Harris, is an accomplished speaker and successful speech coach. Their older brother, Joshua Harris, is senior pastor of Covenant Life Church and bestselling author of, “I Kissed Dating Goodbye,” “Boy Meets Girl,” and “Not Even A Hint.”

Do you see anyone actually doing anything in the way iof real work there? No, they’re just sucking off the teat of fundy largesse, as so many others do.

Their website doesn’t appear to be about helping anyone but themseves – it’s primarily about their making a living without actually having to to do any actual work, by trading on their good looks and exploiting other young people’s religious confusion and insecurities to make a buck.

They may not be making much money right now, but just look at the exposure they’re getting. The paid preaching engagements at Christian Academies’ll soon be rolling in.

Their whole site is also a form of porn by proxy. By tempting other supposedly godly young people to thoughts of sex and sin, they’re breaking one of the central tenets of Christianity – that inciting another to sin is a sin in itself and potentially a worse sin than the sin that was encouraged.

Call themselves Christians? Bloody hypocrites and whited sepulchres, the pair of them.

Am I suggesting you go over and freep their poll? Well, yes, yes actually, I am. I suggest we all go over to their survey en masse, wearing our tightest basques, highest heels and filmiest lingerie (and that means you too, guys) and freep it to hell and back.

For further in-depth discussionof the whole issue of fundies pushing ‘modesty’ see also Feminsiting, Pandagon, Feministe and Feministe again.

Bloody God-Botherers Again

Published on January 24, 2007

Of all the things that you think might’ve finally split the British Cabinet – Iraq, Bush poodlism, Trident, cronyism, cash for honours, general corruption, gross incompetence – in the end it may come down to religion, if Inspector Knacker doesn’t swoop on No. 10 first, that is.

Why? Because paedophile-enabler and Roman Catholic Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor‘s outrageous and blatant political pressure on individual ministers to exempt the church from anti-gay discrimination legislation means that those promiinent Opus Dei members, marital Catholics and sporadic mass-attenders that overpopulate Blair’s cabinet and his hangers-on ( the recently-arrested Blair aide Ruth Turner, for example, is the daughter of a prominent Catholic theologian) are going to have to choose between their beliefs and what few political principles they have left.

Rome and O’Connor are determined to oppose UK gay rights legislation and the church has already bullied themselves an exemption from ensuring gay equality in employment and now they’re trying it on on the issue of gay adoption rights, saying that they should be special, exempt from the law on the spurious grounds of ‘conscience’. (Spelled B_I_G_O_T_R_Y.)

Shit, I’d like to be excused from any number of laws on the grounds of conscience. For instance, what about the Rastafari? Cannabis is a sacrament in their religion: can they ignore the drug laws?

Cherie Blair ‘split Cabinet in Catholic adoption row’
By Colin Brown, Deputy Political Editor
Published: 24 January 2007

Senior cabinet ministers have told MPs privately that Cherie Blair is the cause of the cabinet split over demands to exempt Roman Catholic adoption agencies from equality laws on gay adoption.

The row intensified yesterday when the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, was accused by gay rights campaigners and some Labour MPs of trying to blackmail the Government.

The accusations flew after Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor wrote to cabinet ministers warning them that Catholic adoption agencies would have to close if they were not exempted from the new laws.

The leaders of the Church of England backed Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor, warning the Government that religious people may feel that their conscience forbids them from undertaking public work under the new laws. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York, Rowan Williams and John Sentamu, wrote to Tony Blair saying: “In legislating to protect and promote the rights of particular groups, the Government is faced with the delicate but important challenge of not thereby creating the conditions within which others feel their rights to have been ignored or sacrificed.”

The Equality Act, due to come into effect in England, Wales and Scotland in April, outlaws discrimination in the provision of goods, facilities and services on the basis of sexual orientation.

Ruth Kelly, the Communities Secretary, a committed Catholic, was accused of seeking to gain an opt-out for the Church. But Ms Kelly and the Education Secretary, Alan Johnson, have privately told MPs the pressure for an exemption has come from the Prime Minister.

“They said Tony is the one who has been asking for this exemption, not Ruth, who is pretty annoyed at the way she has been presented in the media,” said a senior Labour MP. “Another cabinet minister told me it’s all coming from Cherie.”

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Could He BE Any More Up Himself?

Published on January 22, 2007

I worked on a Tesco’s checkout when I was a law student, to make money for my children’s Christmas presents and to pay off pressing bills, so this condescending blogpost really got my goat.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Blogging Comes of Age …

There is a golden thermometer that I and others use for technology known generally as the Tesco Checkout Girl Test (TCGT). This is the test of what happens when someone, with often limited ability, has to use technology in order to carry out their job tasks, such as credit card checkers, changing till rolls, rebooting an electric till etc. It comes as a shock to me then to have been standing in a queue in my local Tesco tonight and hear two checkout girls discussing the optimal ways to ensure comment moderation in their blogs and discussing the merits of Blogger versus MySpace, Facebook or TagWorld. In fact when it came to my turn to be served I went and stood in another queue and left them to it so I could listen some more.

I don’t know when Julian was at university but grants no longer exist. The person serving you in Asda or KFC may well be putting themselves through a course in nursing or astrophysics.

He should be a little more careful – for all he knows the heart surgeon doing his triple bypass in 15 year’s time could be the same girl he’s taking the piss out of on his blog this week.

Aside from that, who the hell is he to assume that even fulltime non-student supermarket staff have no intelligence or aptitude for technology?

But ah, yes, I forgot. They’re checkout girls. Naturally their grouindstate is brainless and they have no life other than when they’re pushing his lasagna-for-one over the scanner.

Julian, you may be a fellow Pratchett and Guido Fawkes fan and Blears-hater, but you’re still a condescending sexist prick.

Sunday Breakfast Lunch Mixed Bag

Published on January 21, 2007

A selection of interesting, silly and disturbing things to look at with your Sunday ~~morning breakfast~~: afternoon repast:

Wow, so much we still don’t know.A new form of life has been found in Arctic waters. How many other of these unknown new forms have we already destroyed inadvertently?

How’s that democracy-spreadin’ goin’, guys? The FBI says laxity in recruiting means gangs are joining the military and may spread US gang culture worldwide. A bit late to be worrying about that surely?

How happy is your country? Check the World Happiness Map

Video: how the US Army is selling reenlistment to the troops in Iraq

“All you ever wanted or needed to know about kitten-huffing.

Health warning: mass kitten- huffing may be 'armful.

My first thought on reading this is oooh, ooh I want one – the pen that remembers what you’ve written:

I left CES with around 20 free pens. I went a little crazy with it. “Hmm, yes, that’s very interesting…eh, do you have any pens?” I’m thinking of starting a pen blog where every entry is scanned in after being written with the pen I’m talking about. People could send in their unusual pens from around the world for review. I’d call it “Pengadget.” One for a rainy day I suppose. The best pen I saw at the show was not for walking away with. The Wowpen Memo requires the user to clip a little device to the top of any sheet of paper of any size. The writer then does their thing, taking notes, sketching, whatever. Once done, the little clip device plugs into the USB port of your computer, where it transfers all your notes and other doodlings to your PC, ready to be viewed onscreen. I think it uses a technology called “magic.” You can even convert your notes to text providing you have handwriting recognition software.

But think what a boon to ‘law enforcement’ iit could be… perhaps not, then. Not that the innocent have anything to fear from the police. Heaven forbid.

The stairway to cat heaven.

Remember the orange Bavaria beer pants that all the cloggies were wearing at the World Cup? Wel, they continue to turn up in some unlikely places.

Scrappy Chinese manufacturer, Wang Ming, saw an opportunity where others saw a crisis and pressed the excess pants into service as props in a baffling looking board game named Smack The Lion.

I dread to think what the rules of that board game are. Oo-er, missus.

Eat your bacon or sausage sandwich before you read this.

The official hairstyle of the ’08 Presidential Election

China – what’s more important to the Chinese population, democracy or stabilty? ( h/t Blood & Treasure)

Video: an octopus in a maze

Whiter than white: the utra-brite of beetles.

Ultra-brite beetle

Bread, Racists & Circuses

Published on January 18, 20072 Comments

I can’t get Channel 4 so haven’t seen for myself what this racism on Celebrity Big Brother row is about. So I had a little dig at YouTube and found this video of Jade Goody asking Jermaine Jackson (yes, that Jermaine Jackson) whether or not he is black and if so, how is it his brother is white. See for yourself and cringe:

I think that settles the question of whether Jade Goody is a racist or not, don’t you?

But leaving the jawdroppingly banal yet strangely fascinating onscreen behaviour aside, all the hooha in the world press over this, encouraged by Channel 4 and Endemol, is all just so much bread and circuses to pacify the proles. Look! Over there! Slebs! Behaving badly! I would not be at all surprised if the remaining three inmates, all of whom are hungry for fame, had come to some mutially beneficial arrangement with Endemol : how very odd that this happened just as rating slipped…

Lenin calls Bg Brother and other ‘choose your evictee’ type shows ‘placebo democracy’ and says they originate from the same political place as control orders and ASBOs, a way of allowing people an illusion of control so that they don’t notice the lack of real democracy.

That glass box, again. posted by lenin

The whole point of Endemol’s shit-fest on Channel 4 is to force together personalities so incompatible that normal human comity would be impossible, never mind solidarity under the stress of sensory deprivation and constant surveillance. Getting ‘celebrities’ on the show (three of whom are only ‘celebrities’ by dint of a previous connection with the show) therefore guarantees a daily hit of scandal, and therefore mega mega advertising revenues. Further, since C4 controls every condition obtaining in the show, and since their interventions are designed to be humiliating and bizarre, they can always confect a bit of controversy when phone-in rates slump and the tabloids find something else to gyrate over. And what is more, when the bad guy of the hour is evicted, a new balance is created and the recipient of much sympathy the day before can become the latest villain. The infinite malleability and masochism of the characters is one of the dramatic points on a desperately boring programme. So, rancour, humiliation, indignity and daily bullying are part of the mix, and it is entirely hypocritical for people who watch and like this show to complain about it.

[…]

can’t help but think of this whole ‘Neighbours from Hell’ drivel we get in the British press, in which readers are titillated and outraged with daily tales of torment from hideous people next-door or down the road. If it isn’t kids spitting and swearing, it’s old men flipping the bird, or trimming the hedges from over the fence. If it isn’t rowdy couples, it’s gyppos settling on the commons, and asylum seekers eloping from the back of a lorry. These are the people New Labour promises to “boot out” and leave to fend for themselves “in a crackdown on yobs”. These are the people who are expected to face ASBOs and “welfare disincentives” as part of the government’s Respect Action Plan. These are the families the government pledges to put in “Sin Bins”, a conceit that could quite easily have been supplied by Endemol. These are the people New Labour pledges to evict from the very country. New Labour’s campaign message – vote to evict the arsehole! Let them fend for themselves in the ghetto. The tabloids will feature pictures and descriptions of new arseholes every day and encourage readers to participate in a phone-in poll to demand eviction. A daily diorama of candidates for the Sin Bin will be the topic of quasi-anthropological inspection and curiosity, their fate to be decided by our placebo democracy..

There’s only one arsehole I want evicted and he’s sitting in No. 11 day-dreaming about his ‘legacy’ and ignoring the fuckups he’s created. Well, Tone, here’s your legacy in all her glorious ignorance and ill-educated spite. I give you Jade Goody, the ultimate product of Blair’s Britain:

Doesn’t she make you proud?