No Porn, Or Even Nipples, On The iPad

Mags Blast iPad’s No-Nipples Policy

Apple’s no-nipples policy means fashion mags are censoring their iPad editions

I’m not sure what I think.

• I always appreciate somebody standing up for what they believe in.
• I hate censorship.
• I admit, I’ve got some anti-porn feelings. I do draw a line between depictions of sex in creative endeavors that require live humans and ones that don’t, i.e. in a book, painting, sculpture or even a realistic animation? Get graphic with your kinky self. In a movie,  internet video or photograph with actors/models doing these things for money? I get squiggy about that. From what I’ve read, I don’t like the way the porn industry treats its actors, particularly its women. Nobody’s looking out for them; I mean you don’t get voted into office as the politician who wants to “supervise porn.” But big business needs monitoring, and porn is huge business.  So, yeah, I tentatively appreciate somebody taking an anti-porn stand. (Note: I’m not talking about videos made by couples for sex therapy or sexual enhancement – people copulating on camera who would be doing it anyway doesn’t bother me, and though potentially titillating, those videos are not something I consider porn.)
• Just because something depicts body parts does not mean it’s porn, and America needs to lighten up about boobs (I gotta agree what the first writer says about breastfeeding).

It also gets into the question of if you develop a device, can you control the way it’s used? I’m tempted to say yes – it’s your invention – but if asked the same question about some practical items already in existence, I’d say no. Can Alexander Graham Bell set rules (yeah, from the grave) about what I can say on the telephone? Can the inventor of the television tell us what we can put on it? The inventor of digital cameras tell us what movies can be made? Does Al Gore get to decide what goes on the internet (just kidding!)?

The 20th and 21st century are all about communication – how we communicate, how quickly, from where to where – and it continues to raise some interesting questions about control.  True, a lot of communicators do not possess the same values I do, and that can lead to encountering things I would rather not see (and that I’d certainly rather my mythical children not see). On the other hand, a lot of controllers do not possess the same values I do, and as an artist, it terrifies me that they would stop me from communicating my ideas to the world. The fact that I know that the words I write would be censored in different places around the world for different reasons, in my mind, justifies my fear.

My verdict? And maybe this isn’t for the right reasons, but I’m OK with Steve Jobs outlawing porn aps on his iPad (and again, it’s not the sex. With the stories I write I have no business telling somebody else they can’t depict sex in their, uh, “artwork”). But I’m not OK with him censoring art/fashion photography in magazines. Maybe there’s a little inconsistency in that, but frankly, I’m still working out where, why, and how I draw my censorship line, because as much as we say “anything goes” on the internet, the reality is, I’ve never met anyone who still  meant that when you drag it down to the lowest depravities of human behavior (snuff? pedophilia? non-consensual sadism? is that really okay on the web?), and that means there is a line.

Go Texas Board of Education. Seriously. Can I run for this? I would do a better job. Maybe I should.

In other news of the weird, I took a phone poll today presented by Ronald Reagan’s grandson. The questions could only be answered yes and no, and ranged from the leading, “Do you want your taxes cut?” to the downright confusing (this is a paraphrase that is far less confusing that what was asked on the phone – I can’t remember the whole questions because it was long) “Obama’s health care plan would allow for abortions to be paid for through government sponsored health care. Do you think it’s fair to force taxpayers and businesses to pay for abortions?”

The whole survey was, in my opinion, a study in how you ask questions.

“Do you want your taxes cut?” Well… who doesn’t? But I said “no”  because that’s a stupid question. If there were zero consequences to having my taxes cut, sure I’d love that. But there are consequences to every action. What am I trading for my taxes? National debt? Social services? Which ones? Are we going to quit funding Title I schools? Environmental research? To ask a question without considering the consequences is misleading and creates false data.

As for the second one, I wanted to say “No… of course taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to pay for abortions.” But then I had to think about that one. It’s too broad. Example: a teenager gets napolied by a relative… can taxes pay for that abortion? I have no problem with that. So… to broadly answer “no” to the question is wrong. In most cases am I OK with my taxes paying for abortion? No. But the survey didn’t specify under what conditions the health care bill would allow them (I’m gonna  go out on a limb and say it likely specifies at least SOME conditions), but in answering “no”, I would be disagreeing with the bill – when I don’t know what the bill actually says. But the way the question was worded (and it was hecka-more confusing than I worded it) it begged the answer “no”.

The whole thing was a very frustrating and misleading study in how to ask questions in a survey and get the answers you want instead of the answers that people really think.

Two questions in the last set were “Are you male?” and “Are you over 50?” And all I could think was “Wow… you have a very narrow view of your constituency.” I used to be a Republican, but I feel like the party has completely given up on listening to any issues that are important to my generation. Segments of the Republican party seem to have ceased listening to anyone who isn’t Evangelical Protestant. Unfortunately the Texas Board of Education seems to be part of that group, and is doing its best to ignore my generation (and everybody else who isn’t on the extreme right) and indoctrinate the one after me.

Sorry for the political rant. I just get so frustrated sometimes. I know there are people who completely disagree with me, and your opinions are valid and I respect you as a human being even if you think separation of church and state means “teach any branch of Protestantism you want in the classroom”.

On a happy note, Go  New Jersey, the first state board of education to approve pagan holidays for a religious excused absence! See. The world may be crazy, my own SBOE may be FUBAR, but there is always light shining somewhere!

Anyone who follows this blog probably thinks I’m a severe leftists (I swear, I’m not. I just sound like one online.), so if you normally disagree with my politics, well, this might be the post for you.

Why ‘The People Speak’ and the Zinn Education Project May Be Illegal in Public Schools

OK. So… you ever like what somebody’s trying to say and hate the way they’re saying it?

• Education needs serious reform: check!
• History class can (and should) be used as a call to social action: check!
• All history – what we did right as well as what we seriously screwed the pooch on, all the often twisted roads to how we got where we are now – should be taught: check!
• There is no such thing as a non-biased history lesson, so we might as well come right out and say “hey, this is biased”: check!
• Students should be taught to question everything: check!

These are the stated goals of the Zinn project, and I believe with my whole heart that these are incredibly admirable goals. Then I read the lesson plan that’s posted in the article, and while I disagree with nothing in there… well… I guess in my mind there’s such a thing as too biased.

“Unity” – what does that mean? As humans, we are naturally social and we group ourselves.  It’s how we survived as a hunter-gatherer culture whose enemies had better eyesight, bigger claws and thicker skin: we made tribes.

In modern American society, we don’t have the hunter-gatherer collective defending the tribe from panthers, but we have our facsimile standing under the Friday Night Lights watching the local boys defend the home field from the Neighbor HS Panthers. We want a group to root for, to love on, to defend. Take two people who normally wouldn’t say two words to each other, stick ‘em in a stadium, and they’re suddenly wearing similar dress, carrying the same symbols, chanting in unison, and then moshing in the same pit when a field goal sneaks through the uprights to win the game.

We do the same thing with countries that we do with high school football teams: we have symbols and pennants, colors and mottoes, and these things are used to promote tribe unity… and here’s where the idealogical divide seems to split apart, because the same things that are used to promote unity in the form of pride and loyalty (what conservatives typically emphasize, and two things I think are great) are also used to promote conformity and what I’ll call a tribal psychopathy (what liberals tend to emphasize, and two things that I have a huge problem with – and I’ll get to what I mean by tribal psychopathy in a minute).

I will stand by pride and loyalty as good things, provided they don’t swing to an extreme. Pride gives us the confidence to challenge ourselves and dare things that we otherwise wouldn’t. (“We’re going to contest and we’re taking on the bigger, richer schools of Houston – and we’re going to look GOOD doing it! ‘Cause we’re MHS Theater, and we’re awesome!”) And loyalty makes us give people a second chance when they screw up – and we all will screw up. We need loyalty.

On the other side…

Conformity is a mistreatment of members of your own tribe, and I don’t think I need to proselytize on why required (or even encouraged) group-think is bad anywhere outside of a mammoth-hunting party, a sports stadium, or a group artistic endeavor (good actors and techies know that the good of the play is more important than the good of the single performer – you don’t suddenly decide to do your own thing on opening night, no matter how good your idea is).  (Just like pride and loyalty can have their bad sides, conformity, used judiciously and thoughtfully, as much as it pains me to say, does have a good side).

So what is tribal psychopathy?

A psychopath is someone who is incapable of feeling empathy for other people or remorse for their actions against them. According to an article in the New Yorker, pyschopathy could affect up to 1% of American men (women are much less likely to utterly lack empathy… go figure), so it’s much more prevalent than people think and doesn’t usually result in serial killers. It does result in that ass who doesn’t care who gets hurt, as long as he gets what he wants. Problem is, with a psychopath, this guy’s not ignoring the feelings of others or somehow squashing his guilt, like most of us tend to assume… it never occurred to his brain to have those feelings. Psychopaths will sometimes seek out useful people to make “friends” with, but when it comes down to it, their tribes only ever have one person in it.

For the rest of us, though, somewhere along the way of developing our natural tribe mentality, we realize that if there is an “us”, then there must be a “them.” And those other tribes are competing with us for the world’s limited resources, like good hunting grounds… and oil. (And while there might be enough to go around for now, our children’s children’s children are going to have a problem, so we should be forward thinking and start staking claims to provide for our children’s futures.) And while, again, it’s very natural to look out for your own tribe, a tribal psychopath is someone who, while likely caring and loyal to people within his/her tribe, feels no empathy towards any other tribes and no guilt for any actions performed against them.

I think tribal psychopathy is not only a lot more common than regular psychopathy (and if you know 100 men, according to some psychologists, you know a psychopath. As a schoolteacher who averaged 100 new students per year, every two years, I taught a psychopath. So…. it wasn’t me! It was them!) but tribal psychopathy is, to an extent at least, socially accepted. Certainly a lot more accepted than the Tribe Me form of psychopathy.

So… back to the article that you probably forgot about since I haven’t mentioned it in ten years… it seems to me, that Zinn is trying to get rid of tribal psychopathy (which is a bad thing that we should get rid of) by getting rid of tribalism. “Imagine all the people, living life as one…” and all that.

I don’t think it’s going to work. I think rejecting tribe goes against the core of human nature, because everyone but psychopaths have a tribe. (Showtime even gave Dexter tribal vestiges so audiences would like him. Imagine Dexter without his confusion over his wife, father, sister, and adopted kids. Yeah. Suddenly he ain’t so cool.) Some people might say they have no tribe, but if you study them, they’ve redirected their tribal loyalties onto an idealogical clique. For example, “I’m an artist/scientist/member of ‘x’ religious group/etc., not beholden to country but to mankind… and my fellow artists/scientists/members of ‘x’ religious group/etc.” Surprisingly, I sometimes find ideological tribes to be the most hateful of others because they (a) often don’t realize that’s a tribe, (b) justify rejecting people whose tribes are anything but ideological in nature as unenlightened or uneducated, and (c) can get the hate on in a spectacular fashion for tribes who are ideologically not aligned with their own – a difference in geography is nothing compared to a difference of opinion on gun control. My favorite true life quote ever of this type was, “I hate Republicans because Republicans hate people.” Seriously? Would you listen to what you just said?

Anyway, everyone has a tribe – probably multiple tribes – and it isn’t all of humanity.  Tribalism is an inherent part of human nature. Tribal psychopathy, however, isn’t inherent to all humanity – a lot of people love their tribe without forgetting the sovereignty and potential efficacy of other tribes – which means we can combat tribal psychopathy. But we need to work with human nature instead of trying to change human nature. Don’t tell people not to group; you’ll fail. Make it not acceptable inside your group to hate other groups. That I’ve seen be successful. Wave that flag… and make sure it stands for something worthwhile. That’s the way to a better humanity.

I’ve been running into some awesome quotes and stuff lately, so I thought I’d share a few.

Steve Faber from his article in Script Magazine called Mining for Real Comedy in a Techno-Virtual Lexicon Pit:

Arlie Hochschild from his article in The New York Times called The State of Families, Class and Culture:

In survey after survey, Americans show up as valuing marriage more than people almost anywhere else. Yet at the same time we have the highest divorce — and romantic breakup — rate in the world… Children born of married parents in America face a higher risk of seeing them break up than children born of unmarried parents in Sweden… The culprit is not the absence of family values, I believe, but a continual state of unconscious immersion in a market turnover culture. It is this that sets us apart from a more stable Europe.

Not a quote, but if you’ve got a little under and hour and want to see something really cool and hopeful, Rick Steves goes to Iran.

And in case you want to see something less hopeful… you know it’s bad when John Stewart can’t make it all funny: Rape-Nuts.

A totally random new book technology thing called Vook that I’d dying to try. And for $6.99? I guess that’s cheaper than death.

And finally, save Dollhouse! Catch up on hulu.com and keep tuning in!

*I’ve been out visiting my sister and her new husband in Georgia, hence the no writing. Athens is a really cool little town, and I had a fantastic time. I miss you, Kiddo!!!*

When I was younger, I had a strong environmentalist bent. I bought “rainforest crunch” to save trees, promoted recycling in a town that didn’t have a recycling program, and marched in parades with BSET, the Boerne Student Earth Team. Somewhere around the age of 15, however, I was already an apostate. I’d gotten the distinct impression I was being lied to, or at least that extremism was being presented as facts, and as much as I’d love a healthier planet, without real facts, I wasn’t sure anymore that anything I did was actually helping. Any dissension I voiced was viewed as heretical by my compatriots, and eventually I left the group, vowing to do what I could on my own, but I couldn’t march when I felt like half the time I didn’t know what I was marching for.

And so I continue to this day, hanging on the fringes of the environmental movement, never really allowed in due to my doubts about global warming, belief that corn for fuel when there’s a world-wide food shortage is unethical (along with a few zillion other problems I have with ethanol, but that’s a different post), and thoughts that maybe it wouldn’t be horrible to spend money on clean coal technology, recovering shale oil, or safely extracting Crystal Methyl Hydrates. It’s not like humanity is going to quit using electricity for the sake of the planet (and, to be honest, whether or not it’s better for the planet, I don’t want to give it up, either), so it seems to me that exploring cleaner and less Middle-East-Dependent avenues of fossil fuels while people like my husband work on solar technology is a good thing.

So with my experiences, when my friend Ginger sent me an article called Global Warming as Religion, I found it quite humorous and true to my experiences. Granted, author John Brignell is not presenting a scientific treatise (though he is defending science) with documentation and source quoting, but that doesn’t detract from the amusement. Besides, he uses the word troglodyte, and any article that uses the trog is automatically cool in my book. So, if you’ve got a few minutes (it’s not exactly short), check it out. He’s got some good points. If you don’t, here my favorite quote from it that I feel needs to be repeated: “There is no fundamental clash between faith and science – they do not intersect. The difficulties arise, however, when one pretends to be the other.”