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Sunday, October 31, 2010
I’m not a
religious person and I’ve never believed in heaven or hell. But there is a hell on Earth. Hell is sitting next to the person you love most and listening to her wail hysterically because her heart just broke into a million pieces. Hell is watching her entire body convulse with sobs because she’s being tortured with grief. For as long as I live and no matter how many children we have, I will never forget that sound. And I vowed to do everything in my power to make sure she’d never make it again.
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Friday, October 29, 2010
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
In the group
of women I work with – spanning the decades from late twenties to early sixties – it is noticeable that youth and beauty don’t dictate the happiest relationship, the kinkiest sex or the most wildly romantic love affair. In real life, so it is reflected on the internet (just with added loopiness). The facts are these: the vast majority of women have lives. They have careers, and marriages, and kids, and relationships, sometimes separately, and sometimes all at the same time, and sometimes with barren periods in-between. Most of them got the message that you can have it all, but you can’t have it all without negotiation and compromise because, you know, you can’t actually have anything without those provisos. Look around you; read a few blogs. Men, those devils, watch porn and, weirdly, still lust after women without pneumatic tits, fake tans and plastic sandals. They fall in love and lust with less than perfect female bodies, and are thrilled to bits to get their hands on all the bits women love to hate about themselves. Go out into the street and look at the people holding hands, feeling each other up and gazing passionately down each others cleavages: most of them aren’t world class beauties with gym-toned bodies, they are perfectly ordinary people hiding what someone else finds exceptional and arousing under not-next-season’s clothes and quite possibly a roll of flab. Here’s what women, and men, want: someone to turn them on and make them happy. Funnily enough, all this mainly goes on in the brain, which is why you don’t need botox and silicone to get laid, or loved.
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Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Monday, October 25, 2010
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Monday, October 18, 2010
University starts female-only swim hours
When Zainah Khan packed for GW last year, she left her swimsuit behind.
The Saudi Arabian native knew she wouldn't be able to swim in the Lerner Health and Wellness Center because it is open to both male and female students.
If she donned a bathing suit in HelWell, the sophomore would risk being seen without her hijab - a headscarf worn by some Muslim women in public - and in immodest clothing, which goes against the basic tenants of her religion.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Hunter S. Thompson Cover Letter
Vancouver Sun
TO JACK SCOTT, VANCOUVER SUN
October 1, 1958 57 Perry Street New York City
Sir,
I got a hell of a kick reading the piece Time magazine did this week on The Sun. In addition to wishing you the best of luck, I'd also like to offer my services.
Since I haven't seen a copy of the "new" Sun yet, I'll have to make this a tentative offer. I stepped into a dung-hole the last time I took a job with a paper I didn't know anything about (see enclosed clippings) and I'm not quite ready to go charging up another blind alley.
By the time you get this letter, I'll have gotten hold of some of the recent issues of The Sun. Unless it looks totally worthless, I'll let my offer stand. And don't think that my arrogance is unintentional: it's just that I'd rather offend you now than after I started working for you.
I didn't make myself clear to the last man I worked for until after I took the job. It was as if the Marquis de Sade had suddenly found himself working for Billy Graham. The man despised me, of course, and I had nothing but contempt for him and everything he stood for. If you asked him, he'd tell you that I'm "not very likable, (that I) hate people, (that I) just want to be left alone, and (that I) feel too superior to mingle with the average person." (That's a direct quote from a memo he sent to the publisher.)
Nothing beats having good references.
Of course if you asked some of the other people I've worked for, you'd get a different set of answers.
If you're interested enough to answer this letter, I'll be glad to furnish you with a list of references -- including the lad I work for now.
The enclosed clippings should give you a rough idea of who I am. It's a year old, however, and I've changed a bit since it was written. I've taken some writing courses from Columbia in my spare time, learned a hell of a lot about the newspaper business, and developed a healthy contempt for journalism as a profession.
As far as I'm concerned, it's a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity. If this is what you're trying to get The Sun away from, then I think I'd like to work for you.
Most of my experience has been in sports writing, but I can write everything from warmongering propaganda to learned book reviews.
I can work 25 hours a day if necessary, live on any reasonable salary, and don't give a black damn for job security, office politics, or adverse public relations.
I would rather be on the dole than work for a paper I was ashamed of.
It's a long way from here to British Columbia, but I think I'd enjoy the trip.
If you think you can use me, drop me a line.
If not, good luck anyway.
Sincerely, Hunter S. Thompson
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
I'm sorry your
feelings were hurt by my comments.
No, wait. I'm not. Gay kids are dying. So let's try to keep things in perspective: Fuck your feelings.
A question: Do you "support" atheist marriage? Interfaith marriage? Divorce and remarriage? All are legal, all go against Christian and/or traditional ideas about marriage, and yet there's no "Christian" movement to deny marriage rights to atheists or people marrying outside their respective faiths or people divorcing and remarrying. Why the hell not?
Sorry, L.R., but so long as you support the denial of marriage rights to same-sex couples, it's clear that you do believe that some people—straight people—are "better or more worthy" than others.
And—sorry—but you are partly responsible for the bullying and physical violence being visited on vulnerable LGBT children. The kids of people who see gay people as sinful or damaged or disordered and unworthy of full civil equality—even if those people strive to express their bigotry in the politest possible way (at least when they happen to be addressing a gay person)—learn to see gay people as sinful, damaged, disordered, and unworthy. And while there may not be any gay adults or couples where you live, or at your church, or in your workplace, I promise you that there are gay and lesbian children in your schools. And while you can only attack gays and lesbians at the ballot box, nice and impersonally, your children have the option of attacking actual gays and lesbians, in person, in real time.
Real gay and lesbian children. Not political abstractions, not "sinners." Gay and lesbian children.
Try to keep up: The dehumanizing bigotries that fall from the lips of "faithful Christians," and the lies about us that vomit out from the pulpits of churches that "faithful Christians" drag their kids to on Sundays, give your children license to verbally abuse, humiliate, and condemn the gay children they encounter at school. And many of your children—having listened to Mom and Dad talk about how gay marriage is a threat to family and how gay sex makes their magic sky friend Jesus cry—feel justified in physically abusing the LGBT children they encounter in their schools. You don't have to explicitly "encourage [your] children to mock, hurt, or intimidate" queer kids. Your encouragement—along with your hatred and fear—is implicit. It's here, it's clear, and we're seeing the fruits of it: dead children.
Oh, and those same dehumanizing bigotries that fill your straight children with hate? They fill your gay children with suicidal despair. And you have the nerve to ask me to be more careful with my words?
Did that hurt to hear? Good. But it couldn't have hurt nearly as much as what was said and done to Asher Brown and Justin Aaberg and Billy Lucas and Cody Barker and Seth Walsh—day in, day out for years—at schools filled with bigoted little monsters created not in the image of a loving God, but in the image of the hateful and false "followers of Christ" they call Mom and Dad.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Okay folks, I’m
pissed off. I’m just gonna warn you in advance.
There have been some conversations lately about the role of religion in, say, the suicide of gay teenagers.
“I don’t believe gay people should get married and I believe gay people are going to be punished by god, but I don’t hate them and I would never be violent against them,” say the religious fuckwits. And they genuinely believe they are not part of the problem.
Well of course they are, but that’s not my point.
Look, let me be unambiguous about this:
If you believe gay people – or indeed any people – are going to hell, then I don’t respect you. I don’t just not respect your beliefs, I don’t respect YOU. As a person. Morally. I feel morally superior to you. I have contempt for you and I think the world will be a better place when you are dead.
I’m not participating in a dialog here. I’m not creating an environment of mutual understanding. I’m not trying to see the world through your eyes. I know what the world looks like through your eyes and it’s a vision that will never, ever become a reality.
The hard part is: am I, with my bitterness and intolerance, any different from the bigots? Am I not myself a bigot? Am I not therefore a hypocrite?
Nope.
For two reasons:
(1) Having contempt for the culturally dominant narrative is not the same as having contempt for the target narrative. Believing that gay people are going to hell gives a cultural purchase to hatred and violence. Like a little bump on a rock where over years barnacles accumulate, the idea of sex as sin is a foothold for discrimination, bullying, harassment, and violence.
Believing that people who believe that gay people are morally inferior, are morally inferior (complicated predication) is the tide smoothing away that bump on the rock. The minority, target perspective – the “intolerant of intolerance” perspective – is a fundamentally responsive, rather than reactionary, perspective. It’s protective of the minority. It takes the punches of the dominant view. It absorbs and buffers violence, where the dominant view commits violence.
(2) This is the really big one: all opinions are not created equal.
The magic of culture is that we move – slowly, messily, painfully, non-linearly, but inexorably – toward justice. Toward equality. The massive blob of humanity is filled with diverse opinions, but the blob moves in a direction; some opinions will be winnowed out. In the natural selection of morals, ideas of hate and discrimination lose. It’s inevitable.
There is no finish line; peace and justice and equality are never complete, can never be complete. But the cultural process of humans is inherently inclusive. We are moving in that direction and cannot but continue so, at the largest scale of analysis. Over time and space, we grow more just.
Religion has been used as a justification for slavery, for the oppression of women, for genocide. And religion has been used to speak out against each of those. It’s not about religion; it’s about you and your wrong opinions.
You “religious” fuckwads, don’t have to respect me – I don’t ask that you do – and it doesn’t matter if you don’t because you have already lost. And I refuse to respect you because that will slow down the movement; the longer it takes us progressives to put an end to your pernicious bullshit, the more kids die.
Not all opinions are created equal. Your beliefs are not innately respectable; the belief that gay people are going to hell is, indeed, contemptible, and I am at peace feeling contempt for those who possess that belief. I am content because I know not simply which way the wind is blowing, but what force causes the wind to blow in one direction or another.
And justice shall roll down like waters, doncha know, and righteousness like ever-flowing stream.
I should probably re-read this before I post it, tone it down; I should probably add caveats about how this is just my opinion etc. But dammit I’m fucking ANGRY. And sometimes righteous anger is the only appropriate feeling.
Friday, October 1, 2010
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