Dave Sim's blogandmail #197 (March 27th, 2007)

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Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast That Make You a Good Feminist

1. A mother who works a full-time job and delegates to strangers the raising of her children eight hours a day, five days a week does just as good a job as a mother who hand-rears her children full time.

2. It makes great sense for the government to pay 10 to 15,000 dollars a year to fund a daycare space for a child so its mother - who pays perhaps 2,000 dollars in taxes - can be a contributing member of society.

3. A woman's doctor has more of a valid claim to participate in the decision to abort a fetus than does the father of that fetus.

4. So long as a woman makes a decision after consulting with her doctor, she is incapable of making an unethical choice.

5. A car with two steering wheels, two gas pedals and two brakes drives more efficiently than a car with one steering wheel, one gas pedal and one brake which is why marriage should always be an equal partnership.

6. It is absolutely necessary for women to be allowed to join or participate fully in any gathering place for men, just as it is absolutely necessary that there be women only environments from which men are excluded.

7. Because it involves taking jobs away from men and giving them to women, affirmative action makes for a fairer and more just society.

8. It is important to have lower physical standards for women firepersons and women policepersons so that, one day, half of all firepersons and policepersons will be women, thus more effectively protecting the safety of the public.

9. Affirmative action at colleges and universities needs to be maintained now that more women than men are being enrolled, in order to keep from giving men an unfair advantage academically.

10. Having ensured that there is no environment for men where women don't belong (see no.6) it is important to have zero tolerance of any expression or action which any woman might regard as sexist to ensure greater freedom for everyone.

11. Only in a society which maintains a level of 95% of alimony and child support being paid by men to women can men and women be considered as equals.

12. An airline stewardess who earned $20,000 a year at the time that she married a baseball player earning $6 million a year is entitled, in the event of a divorce, to $3 million for each year of the marriage and probably more.

13. A man's opinions on how to rear and/or raise a child are invalid because he is not the child's mother. However, his financial obligation is greater because no woman gets pregnant by herself.

14. Disagreeing with any of these statements makes you anti-woman and/or a misogynist.

NEW! 15. Legislature Seats must be allocated to women and women must be allowed to bypass the democratic winnowing process in order to guarantee female representation and, thereby, make democracy fairer.

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Addressing the question on the minds

Of (at least) dozens, Jack Baney

(In yesterday's edition)

"About the question as to whether or

Not you've gone nuts…"

It's a difficult question to answer. I don't remember speculating that the completion of Cerebus might have caused the tsunami, but those are instances of a different perception of reality – that we are all contributing to what is going on around us in a larger sense that we don't understand. The lyrics in the Rolling Stones Sympathy for the Devil "I shouted out, `Who killed the Kennedys?' Well, now, after all, after all, it was you and me" points in the same direction and in a direction that makes a lot of people personally uncomfortable: that we are making the world that we live in on an unconscious level where we do things (many of us) and contribute to things that we could never do or contribute to consciously. Who would want to admit that they had a share in the assassination of the Kennedy brothers?


[in some cases, with those of us inclined to think along these lines, this is almost literally true. I remember reading Norman Mailer commenting on the fact that he had been having an adulterous tryst with a woman -- whom he literally called a witch -- at the time that Robert Kennedy had been shot and he had anguished about the fact that the tryst might have been a contributing cause. As Robert Kennedy lay balanced between life and death in a Los Angeles hospital Mailer spent an uncomfortable night June 5 in front of the television with his then-wife Beverly, wrestling inwardly with his gut instinct that he might be able to save RFK by confessing his adultery to his wife. Where I ultimately broke ranks with Mailer was over the fact that although he saw life in these terms he never seemed to seriously consider becoming Completely Good or as Completely Good as he was capable of conceiving himself to be which was ultimately the choice that I made for myself. Yes, I believe that all of our actions of consequences, some of them Enormous and given that I believe that, the only moral – or rather Moral – choice is to err on the extreme side of caution and Goodness and hope that my doing so serves to counterbalance those who are either ignorant of the nature of reality or who, like Mailer, are aware of it but still choose to try to play both sides of the game. I can't help but think that if at any point in his illustrious and influential life Norman Mailer had chosen to Repent – even within his own frames of reference of repentance – that the history of the 20th century might have unfolded very differently.]


Who would want to admit that something they did in 1967 or 1968 was a contributing factor in Martin Luther King being shot to death? We want to externalize those events. It was either a lone nut or a rogue faction in the US government or the CIA or the Mafia – none of which, you will note, "we" are. "We" are just ordinary folks going about our business or "we" are moral beings examining and re-examining the sequence of events from a point very far back on the sidelines. "They" shot the Kennedys. "They" shot Martin Luther King. "We" must investigate what happened. But if we accept the collectivist view that there is no "they" there is only "we" then "we" do share a personal culpability. I mean, you can't have it both ways. To collectivists, "We" are all just "We" until a Kennedy gets shot or planes hit the World Trade Centre and then suddenly there's a "they" external to "we". Now you can say that that's an evil way to think and an evil thing to even enunciate – and all I'm really doing is framing it in your own terms: there is no "they" only "we" – but you'll notice that the Rolling Stones included themselves in the indictment. Mick or Keith or whoever wrote the lyrics indicted himself as well as you. It's either an evil way to think and an evil thing to enunciate or it's taking personal responsibility that we should all be taking. As I've been fond of saying, "I'll take the blame for everything back to the Suez Crisis of 1956, before that I wasn't born." People laugh when I say it, but I'm not sure that I'm making a joke. Most days I certainly feel (when I let myself) that I'm being made to take the blame for everything back to the Suez Crisis.


I take issue with your saying that I'm "obviously able to function in this world at a much higher level than I can or probably ever will." I don't think what I'm discussing is a "higher level/lower level" kind of thing. I'm up here and you're down there. The same with people who see the rich as being "up there". You know any happy stories about rich people? How can you see obsessive materialism as being "up there"? Put another way, by the nature of psychiatry, if you and I were to be examined by a team of psychiatrists, I can pretty much guarantee that you would be way "up there" and I would be way "down here". I'd be "badly socialized," I "don't play well with others," etc. etc. Arguably sitting in a room and typing this stuff into a computer for twelve hours a day four or five days in a row is a kind of "psychosis". In psychiatry believing that you are affecting the larger world around you is called "referential thinking" and is a sign of "schizophrenia". Feminists call me "evil" and a "misogynist". See, all of those things are labels and all of those things are used to scare people and make them doubt themselves. Labels don't scare me or make me doubt myself. The difference for me is that Reality and its Core Nature is what is of interest to me. I distil feminism down to its core fourteen (now fifteen!) falsehoods and sleep peacefully every night. I never worry about what people think of me who are not able to face Reality and its Core Nature and it seems obvious to me that feminists can't – otherwise they wouldn't base their lives on inherent falsehoods – so feminists are irrelevant and feminism is irrelevant to Reality and its Core Nature.


Only (contrariwise) feminism, the inherent falsehood, is everywhere believed to be reality or Reality. Everyone either believes in it or pays lip service to it. It's comparable, I think, to life in Saddam's Iraq or Jong-Il's North Korea. If everyone is forced to pretend to believe in an inherent falsehood and a single negative enunciation can cause you to be shunned as a pariah (or worse!) then it becomes impossible to know how many people believe and how many people are paying lip service. I'm the only person (besides Jeff Seiler, Sandeep Atwal, Billy Beach and, now, David Carrington) in this environment who believes in God and that feminism is inherently false. Okay, so I'm crazy. What to do? I can't go anywhere physically – everywhere outside of here (here being the inside of my own head) is basically Bedlam, a lunatic asylum. And that's when I become interested in the nature of reality and Reality, that place next to the "inward smile" place that is so satisfied by entertainment that seems to enunciate truths and Truths but which doesn't make you laugh out loud (not all the time, anyway) (HA! That would be CRAZY!). I write and draw, I think, I do my commentaries on Matthew, Mark and now Luke (just finished chapter eight) because that's where I see Reality.


But, no, it isn't a case of my seeing your views as "being typical of the degenerate mentality for which [you] and [your] pathetic ideological comrades are so justly despised by [your] moral and intellectual superiors." Again, that's "higher level/lower level" thinking which I think for most leftists is a projection (to use a psychiatric term). You're projecting onto people like me your own attributes and "way of seeing". It's YOU who tend to see people who have Strict Morality as the core of their existence as being "degenerate" and "pathetic" (What are two adjectives that describe your view of The Religious Right in the U.S.?) (I'll take Projection for 500, Alex) and you see yourself as "justly despising" them and see yourselves as their "moral and intellectual superiors". Who do you think occupies the intellectual high ground in the debate between Creationism and Evolution? Who do you think is the drooling troglodyte for believing otherwise? I think what has happened since 9/11 is that leftists are still evading looking at themselves in the mirror and evading looking at the sheer level of malice that informs their own natures – just say "George W. Bush" or "Dick Cheney" to them and watch the light of infernal malice flicker to life behind their eyes -- since their perception of themselves (on which their very psyche seems to hinge) is of a people devoid of hatred and malice. So that hatred and malice has to be displaced and the Religious Right seems to be where it goes every time where it isn't absolutely personalized in the form of President Bush and Vice-president Cheney. You may not believe in God on the left, but you surely do believe in Satan and you always see him anytime there's a Republican in the Oval Office. I mean, ALWAYS.


There are certainly idealogues and fanatics who "return fire" from the right, but I don't think that's really the consensus view since 9/11. I think the consensus view that has emerged is that people make their own choices. If you want to discuss your choices and my choices – as we're doing here – I'm more than happy to do that (I gotta fill these postings with something, eh?). If you want to denounce my choices and champion your own choices, I'm more than happy to let you do that and "return fire". What I'm not prepared to do is to pass laws outlawing your choices or to shun you for your choices or call you crazy or evil for what you've chosen. I might call you demonically possessed if I see signs of it (which I don't with you) because I think demonic possession is a Core Reality and particularly for people who don't arm themselves against it with prayer and faith in God. But it would never occur to me to burn people like you at the stake or force you to be subjected to an exorcism. If I started where would I stop? As long as we both respect each other's right to make choices and to act on those choices within the confines of the law I can't see your demonic possession as having any effect on me. If it does have any effect on me – and it does on occasion, I'm only human – then shame on me for letting a garden variety demon make me doubt myself and my faith. And I think that's the point that a lot of people have arrived at here on the right. We aren't just fighting for our beliefs against the beliefs of Fundamentalist Islam, we're fighting for the right to make choices, including the right to go straight to hell if that's your choice. That's the difference between the West on the extreme right and the Taliban on the extreme left. I don't want to go with you and I don't want to watch you go – on television or in public places or read extensively about it in the newspaper – but if you're going and you're going in the privacy of your own home or places that are made for that (bars, sex clubs, strip clubs), I hope you like what you get when you get there. And sincerely: no hard feelings. At ALL.

Tomorrow: Jack Baney demonizes BOTH President Reagan AND President Bush (Weary leftists can just read the italicized parts and skip what I have to say)

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In the Always Ideologically Rigid

Blog &…

MAAAILLLL

(YOU LIKE THAT WHEN I SAY "RIGID"?

RIGID RIGID RIGID. Jeez you people are depraved)

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