Just like they said in the TYT video I saw on this subject this morning, I LOVE that it is football athletes that are being this vocal in support of gay marriage, that they are painstakingly breaking the stereotype that it's "unmacho" and "uncool" to support gay rights. Although linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo came out in support for gay marriage back in 2009, it is a more recent video that seems to have sparked a juicy controversy.
Oooh Emmett C. Burns Jr. did not like that. He was incenced that a football player from a team he actually likes could do something so offensive!!! He wrote the following letter to the owner of the Baltimore Ravens, the team this awesome athlete plays for: "As a Delegate to the Maryland General Assembly and a Baltimore Ravens Football fan, I find it inconceivable that one of your players, Mr. Brendon Ayanbadejo, would publicy endorse Same-Sex marriage, specifically, as a Raven Football player. Many of my constituents and your football supporters are appalled and aghast that a member of the Ravens Football Team would step into this controversial divide and try to sway public opinion one way or the other. Many of your fans are opposed to such a view and feel it has no place in a sport that is strictly for pride, entertainment and excitement. I think Mr. Ayanbadejo should concentrate on football and steer clear of dividing the fan base.
I am requesting that you take the necessary action, as a National Football Franchise Owner, to inhibit such expressions from your employee and that he be ordered to cease and desist such injurious actions. I know of no other NFL player who has done what Mr. Ayanbedejo is doing.
Please give me your immediate response " Emphasis my own. Dude, what the Hell do you think you're doing?! You're a Democrat, and a black man from Jackson Mississippi!!! Are you serious? Do you need someone to explain the definition of the word irony, or hypocrisy?! Actually no need, cause while Ayanbedejo may have been the first NFL player to speak publicly about this issue, he's got one more on his side, Vikings punter Chris Kluwe fires back with this awesome open letter:
"1. As I suspect you have not read the Constitution, I
would like to remind you that the very first, the VERY FIRST Amendment
in this founding document deals with the freedom of speech, particularly
the abridgment of said freedom. By using your position as an elected
official (when referring to your constituents so as to implicitly
threaten the Ravens organization) to state that the Ravens should
“inhibit such expressions from your employees,” more specifically
Brendon Ayanbadejo, not only are you clearly violating the First
Amendment, you also come across as a narcissistic fromunda stain. What
on earth would possess you to be so mind-boggingly stupid? It baffles me
that a man such as yourself, a man who relies on that same First
Amendment to pursue your own religious studies without fear of
persecution from the state, could somehow justify stifling another
person’s right to speech. To call that hypocritical would be to do a
disservice to the word. Mindfucking obscenely hypocritical starts to
approach it a little bit.
2. “Many of your fans are opposed to such a view and feel it has no
place in a sport that is strictly for pride, entertainment, and
excitement.” Holy fucking shitballs. Did you seriously just say that, as
someone who’s “deeply involved in government task forces on the legacy
of slavery in Maryland”? Have you not heard of Kenny Washington? Jackie
Robinson? As recently as 1962 the NFL still had segregation, which was
only done away with by brave athletes and coaches daring to speak their
mind and do the right thing, and you’re going to say that political
views have “no place in a sport”? I can’t even begin to fathom the
cognitive dissonance that must be coursing through your rapidly addled
mind right now; the mental gymnastics your brain has to tortuously
contort itself through to make such a preposterous statement are surely
worthy of an Olympic gold medal (the Russian judge gives you a 10 for
“beautiful oppressionism”).
3. This is more a personal quibble of mine, but why do you hate
freedom? Why do you hate the fact that other people want a chance to
live their lives and be happy, even though they may believe in something
different than you, or act different than you? How does gay marriage,
in any way shape or form, affect your life? If gay marriage becomes
legal, are you worried that all of a sudden you’ll start thinking about
penis? “Oh shit. Gay marriage just passed. Gotta get me some of that hot
dong action!” Will all of your friends suddenly turn gay and refuse to
come to your Sunday Ticket grill-outs? (Unlikely, since gay people enjoy
watching football too.)
I can assure you that gay people getting married will have zero
effect on your life. They won’t come into your house and steal your
children. They won’t magically turn you into a lustful cockmonster. They
won’t even overthrow the government in an orgy of hedonistic debauchery
because all of a sudden they have the same legal rights as the other 90
percent of our population—rights like Social Security benefits, child
care tax credits, Family and Medical Leave to take care of loved ones,
and COBRA healthcare for spouses and children. You know what having
these rights will make gays? Full-fledged American citizens just like
everyone else, with the freedom to pursue happiness and all that
entails. Do the civil-rights struggles of the past 200 years mean
absolutely nothing to you?
In closing, I would like to say that I hope this letter, in some
small way, causes you to reflect upon the magnitude of the colossal foot
in mouth clusterfuck you so brazenly unleashed on a man whose only
crime was speaking out for something he believed in. Best of luck in the
next election; I’m fairly certain you might need it.
Sincerely,
Chris Kluwe
P.S. I’ve also been vocal as hell about the issue of gay marriage so
you can take your “I know of no other NFL player who has done what Mr.
Ayanbadejo is doing” and shove it in your close-minded, totally lacking
in empathy piehole and choke on it. Asshole."
Ooh how I love it! I really hope the guy writes back, though I doubt it. Most importantly I hope that he royally shot himself in the foot with his constituents over this matter, and I hope that anyone that voted for him, even if they agree with him on the gay marriage issue, kick his ass out of office for his abhorrent views on the First Amendment. Is that too much to hope for? He is (technically) in the Democratic Party after all....
We've had enough of the Lorena Bobbit jokes in the 90s amirite?! There's no need to bring that back up, even when faced with such temptation as this. Turns out that scientists in Switzerland, while creating a mouse line with a deletion in a region important for development, got an unexpected result in their female mice.
We analyzed full-night video recordings and witnessed females chasing males assiduously. In the course of such inverse pursuits, they often bit the genitals,
very specifically, while the hind paws of the male were off the floor. Inverse pursuits involving such bites were directed at males exclusively, never at bystander females.
What the Hell are you doing ladies?!Bad mouse. Don't do that. The strange part is, they're not otherwise aggressive except during the time they're supposed to be mating. They don't do it to other females and the males don't seem to react aggressively back, even after getting his dick chewed. What's going on?! Don't make an MRA-style mangina joke. It's just not worth it. you can do it, stay focused. Hox genes are believed to have no function in neuroectoderm derived cells in forebrain.
They encode transcription factors and are selectively repressed
throughout the midbrain and forebrain of all vertebrates. Remarkably, we
found ectopic expression of the Hoxd10 gene in diverse regions of the developing forebrain in Del1–9 (HoxDAfc)
newborns. Later, in adult, expression was maintained only in a few
cells in the basomedial amygdala, and a new domain of ectopic expression
appeared in the hippocampus.
Basically, a gene that is not supposed to be expressed in the developing or adult brains of these mice is expressed, which is the most likely cause for this very, very strange behaviour. Is it that the abnormal expression of the gene causes a malformation in the developing brain of some kind, or is the expression of the gene in adult females the direct cause of the behaviour?
Speculation at this point, but gawd, science can be some crazy shit. Source: Zakany, J. and Duboule, D. (2012). A Genetic Basis for Altered Sexual Behaviour in Mutant Female Mice. Current Biology http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.06.067
Over the weekend dprjones came out with a new video that quite honestly got on my nerves. While it was created to promote a cause that I 100% support and am contributing to, I found it entirely unneccessary in its presentation. Well, I was going to show it here, but he seems to have taken it down as I cannot find it anywhere on his channel. Well, the title of the video was "Atheism +?? Atheism -?? I don't care!" I suppose I can't totally bash it now that there is no objective proof of its existence or way to objectively decide whether or not I'm exaggerated in my reaction or misinterpreted it, but I still want to bring this up because I had found it to be a perfect example of an argument that I encounter quite often. The basic sense that I got out of it was "I don't get this Atheism+ movement, but who cares about stupid semantics! I have more important things to worry about like suffering! Look at all the pictures of the poor sick African children!" Well pat yourself on the goddamned back dpr. It was a video promoting the MSF charity event, which as I said before I think is great and I am contributing to it, but it was also an unnecessary dig at a movement whose values, ironically, line up very well with the MSF charity event, not to mention that some of the participants of the event listed in his video are part of Atheism+. Shitting on something that you haven't bothered to look into or research aside, this argument is one that really gets under my skin and one that I have been confronted with often. Suffering animals in sub-par shelters and puppy farms? Who cares! Don't you know there are people who suffer? Drunk college girls getting raped? Who cares! I'm much more interested in stopping child rape! Innocent people put to death by the death penalty? Who cares! I only care about really important things, like genocide! Well I can't speak for the rest of you, but I can speak for myself, and my question is this: why the fuck do you always insist that I have to pick one issue, just one thing, to care about or to think is important enough to speak out about? I don't know about you, but I retain the (rare?) ability to care about a variety different things, without having to artificially squash them onto one ultimate ladder of importance and picking only the one that occupies the top rung. This is what I care about: science education and real science as opposed to pseudoscience, equality for all people regardless of race, gender identidy, socioeconomic status or sexual orientation, feminism, gay marriage and other LGBTQ issues. Oh, all of those things are included under Atheism+? Well sign me the fuck up, it seems as though it's values are also mine. I also care about democracy and freedom to choose your government, free speech, free elections, animal rights, human rights, war and persecution, bringing affordable health care, food and clean water and education to everyone regardless of what circumstances they happen to be born in, literacy, slavery, child abuse, oppression and freedom from as well as of religion. I understand that some of those things may not be "as" important as others, and if I really had to choose one there are some that I would more easily discard. But ultimately the question is, why should I have to?
Sorry about that absence guys, yesterday was the last day of the week-long conference I was at and I am BEAT! But now it's back to work as normal and hopefully the inspiration I felt at the conference will carry me along until I can catch up with my sleep. So on the last day of the conference I go to get on my bike to go home, and I was faced with an extra passenger trying to hitch a ride on the back. This is where my human side and my biologist side come head to head in a battle most people do not think should exist within me given my line of work.
So my first reaction was ah cool NO WAY! I didn't know we had praying mantises in Italy! TAKE A PICTURE! But then my second reaction was... eeeewwwww. It's a bug. It's longer than my palm, that makes it a big bug. I don't want to ride home with a big bug behind my ass. How do I get rid of it? Biologist pipes up: Don't kill it! Human side retaliates: no no, squishing big bugs is just as eeewww-y as having them around, it solves nothing. But I don't know how mantises react when you swat them. Do they fly? Do they fly at you? Do they start freaking out? I don't like bugs that stay perfectly still and then freak when you try to get rid of them. Eeeeew, what do I do? Fortunately for me a male colleague of mine chooses that minute to walk over as he had parked his bike right next to mine, at which point I find out that this interior battle is not as uncommon as I would have thought. His first reaction: Crap do I have one on my bike?! second reaction: hey, would you look at that, I've never seen one that wasn't behind glass! third reaction: eeewww, I don't like bugs, sorry, don't know if I can help you. But finally he couldn't say no to me, so what ended up happening was him taking out the cord attached to his keys, standing as far away as possible, swatting at it and punctuating each blow with "Go away! Go away!" In conclusion? Turns out Italian mantises don't fly, nor do they jump, nor do they freak out. After the fifth swat it just kind of plopped to the ground and assumed what my colleague referred to as the thriller pose
Some kind of reaction to a perceived threat perhaps? We asked ourselves as we watched it being perfectly immobile again. There's our biologist showing again.
This is a fairly common argument that I hear against abortion. It usually goes something like this: A girl is walking along the street/in a dark room alone with her uncle/drunk and underage at a party and is raped, and as a result she gets pregnant. Well, would you allow her to get an abortion in such circumstances? Even some pro-life people falter and say yes, in such a case I would not prohibit her from getting an abortion. Punchline: well, if that girl had gotten that abortion, I would not be here today. OH MY GOD cheers all round what a twist how fascinating what if she had really had that abortion?! Let me counter that with a what if of my own. I know someone whose mother not only wanted to ternimate her pregnancy while pregant with him, she actually had an (albeit illegal and makeshift) abortion, and yet he survived. She took it as a sign and had him, and did not regret it. That person is my boyfriend. The man I believe to be the love of my life, someone that I don't know how I would live without, would not be here if that abortion had been successful. I should be the first to decry it and say it should never be allowed, right? Ehm no. Wrong. While making for good rhetoric and appealing to human emotion, there are dangers to using a "what if" mentality when passing laws. What if I had crossed the street without looking five minutes earlier when that car came tearing around the corner? It is illegal to cross the street without looking! While we're at it, no more corners on roads!
What if my boyfriend's mother and father had not had sex in that exact instant to make up the unique genetic combination that is my boyfriend? What if, at that moment, his mother decided she was too tired or just didn't feel like it, and therefore he ceased to be? OH NOES that's it, it is illegal for a woman to sexually refuse her husband, because how many other lives that am I emotionally attached to would not be here if women could choose when to have sex? Living in the past with a what if mentality is not healthy, and using it in rhetoric to tug people's heartstrings is just plain dishonest. Life is made up of endless little decisions to make and directions to take, you can never know how many infinite number of ulterior possibile realities could have come about by taking any one of those different paths, nor can you know if any of them would have been better or worse. The smugness of hindsight is not something I want to use when restricting a person's freedom. So if you ever hear this line of reasoning in the abortion debate call it out for what it really is, an emotional appeal to cover up the utter lack of logic it possesses as an argument
Hopefully the last post I'll make inspired by my recent cult documentary fascination. I stumbled across this documentary that was not really about a cult at all, but rather about a brutal murder that happened in a small town in Northern Italy which may have had some "Satanic" influences, probably popping up in my searches since the word "cult" and "Satanism" go hand in hand for many. However I decided to watch it, since it happened in Italy, it obviously made very big news in its day but I had never heard anything about it.
So, what is the gist of it? A nun is brutally murdered in a small town in Northern Italy - oh my, who could do such a terrible thing to such an undeserving victim no less? Turns out it was the absolute last person, or I should say people, you would ever expect. Three teenage girls, bound together by blood ritual, friendship and boredom, decided to savagely kill an innocent woman. Here is where the documentary turns south in my opinion, into a hatchet job that did not do the Italian justice system any favors whatsoever. Impossible! Cries the town. Three sweet, innocent little girls could never do such a thing! There must have been a ring leader! There must have been someone pulling the strings! And they decide to blame..... Marylin Manson. I shit you not. How fucking embarassing. Disclaimer: I do not like Marylin Manson. I don't particularly enjoy his music, and while I understand it was done for publicity purposes I still think you cross a line into sick when you name yourself after Charles Manson. However I have seen him in interviews before: he's a smart guy, he knows his stuff and I can respect that he fills a niche for the disenfranchised youth he represents. Having said all that, he is an entertainer. He writes songs, and however twisted some of his lyrics may be, no song is going to turn an innocent little girl into a cold hearted psychopathic murderer. Yes Carabinieri, there probably was a ring leader in that trio as there usually is in cases like this, and you want to know who it probably was? One of the fucking teenagers. Probably not the one who expresses remorse in the end, but it almost certainly was one of them. True, there are far fewer sociopaths among women than there are among men, but that does not mean that they do not exist, and I'd bet my lunch money one of those three girls was a narcissistic sociopath. It profoundly disgusted and embarrassed me that the justice system in my own country could be so obtuse as to not conisder this, but desperately scrambled to find some outside, patriarchal source to blame. If it had been three Tunisian teenage boys to commit the murder, would they ever have considered blaming their actions on the music they listened to?! Fuck no. And I'll tell you something else, they damned well wouldn't have gotten a meagre 8 year prison sentence for something so heinous. Sexism is sexism is sexism, no matter how you slice it, it disgusts me and it needs to be addressed. I wish my country was better than this, and I can only hope we're steadily improving.
