hi, i'm winston

Harlow’s empathy for the perpetrators signifies a classic move in the rhetoric of rape: victim blaming. Blame it on the victim’s clothes. Blame it on the victim’s sexual history. Blame it on the victim’s initial arousal. Shouldn’t we also consider what those accusations say about men: That if women’s clothing prompts men to rape, our culture holds very low standards for masculine self-control? Instead, we treat men like animals who can’t help themselves, and we expect women to police themselves to protect themselves from men as if they were beasts. All to avoid assigning blame where it actually belongs. Consider this, if any woman with a sexual history is “asking” for rape, then most women of age in this country are asking for it. Do we really want to live in a culture where we don’t offer women the right to change their minds in the midst of amorous engagements, and where we don’t consider what kind of men need a sexual conquest without consent? Shouldn’t we contemplate why two young men would drag a barely conscious female around, penetrating her and abusing her body while joking and taking photographs?

Beyond Steubenville: Rape Culture and Complicity

Well I could dip my head in the river, cleanse my soul,
I’ll still have the stomach of a sinner, face like an un-holy ghost,
Will you save me all the soliloquies, paid my fines,
I’ll be gone before my deliverance, preach what you like.

‘Cos I don’t mind being lonely,
So leave me alone.
You’re acting all holy,
Me, I’m just full of holes.
Full of holes.

Holy shit I love this song so much and I can’t wait to see Frightened Rabbit tomorrow.

I don’t really think the humanist verities are quite enough. Because that would be crazy if they were. It would be so weird if we knew just as much as we needed to know to answer all the questions of the universe. Wouldn’t that be freaky? Whereas the probability is high that there is a vast reality that we have no way to perceive, that’s actually bearing down on us now and influencing everything. The idea of saying, ‘Well, we can’t see it, therefore we don’t need to see it,’ seems really weird to me.

wnycradiolab:

ryanpanos:

James McNabb’s Scrap Wood Cityscapes via Colossal

This is great. More of this please.

Yes.

It started with a list. “Top 10 Places We Want to See In America” I suggested, as I was driving my girlfriend back to college. She was a Junior – although she dropped out after that year as I had done the year before – and she had been up in Nashville for some holiday weekend. We started throwing out names of cities and National Parks one or the both of us had never visited. “Top 10” quickly ballooned to the something like the top 28, and it was cemented in our minds that if the relationship stuck, we would need to travel.

Well, later that spring I asked her to marry me, she said yes, and in October of 2008 Freya and I were wed. The following year two things important to this story occurred. First, we started joking about running away in a trailer for a few months so we could see this grand nation (and the one above us). It really was just a joke at first but the romantic notion underlying the basis of the joke struck a chord in each of us.

The second thing that happened was Pixar released a film called Up, with an old man named Carl Fredrickson who, as a boy in the film is seen exclaiming “Adventure is Out There!” as he pretended to pilot the blimp of his hero, a blimp named “The Spirit of Adventure.” We saw the film in theaters and bawled our eyes out at the first 8 minutes then laughed our heads off for the rest of the film. And we took the moral of the film to heart: don’t let life pass you by.

Version one of “The Road Trip” was quaint and romantic. Step One was to do something we’ve never actually done in the course of our marriage: save up some money. Step Two was to buy a small SUV (we’d chosen the Honda Element; our rationale escapes me) and a 13-foot travel trailer (vintage if possible). Step Three was quit our jobs, and Step Four was travel until we ran out of money, spending two to three weeks in various cities so we didn’t “feel like tourists” but instead we could “soak up the culture” of each city, as well as hitting up a bunch of National Parks. We’d sleep in a tent, use the trailer for a kitchen and storage, and spend our days exploring museums, our nights at breweries and restaurants and wherever else we found ourselves.

We never had to deal with our shortage of savings for Version One because the year we had this planned - 2011 - was the year EVERYONE we knew got pregnant including my wife’s sister, and so we couldn’t just be gone when all the babies arrive, could we? No, we couldn’t. So we pushed the trip back to 2012.

Version Two of “The Road Trip” never even had a chance. Even though none of our family or friends were pregnant, even though at the end of 2011 I got the job I now have and even though this job was awesome and my employers were willing to let me work remotely, the trip was impossible in the face of our unexpected pregnancy. We toyed with ideas of traveling some and then coming home in time for the third trimester, but somehow in the end all we did was take a baby-moon to Vegas and sit by the pool for a week.* The trip would have to wait another year.

That year is this year. 2013. “The Road Trip” Version Three. “It’s all happening!” as they say in the film Almost Famous. “It’s all happening.”

I’ve been hesitant to talk about it. I’ve tempered my excitement, kept my dreams and nervousness on the down low. But I don’t have to anymore. It’s all happening.

Our original plans were quaint. Romantic. Our plan now is somehow more pragmatic and also more crazy. Instead of a 13-foot vintage travel trailer, we have a brand-new 35-foot travel trailer with a king bed and two slide-outs. Instead of a Honda Element or similar small SUV, we have a Toyota Tundra CrewMax with a towing capacity of 10,100lbs. And instead of “just the two of us” sleeping in a tent every night, well, it’s Freya and I and our son Win, 5 months old as of this writing, sleeping in the aforementioned king size bed. And instead of a few months on the road, well, we’ve mapped out a year and if we enjoy that year, we’ll probably stay out for at least another year.

Here’s what we have planned so far.

On March 30, we’re saying au revoir to Nashville and heading to Richmond, VA. We’ll be there for 3 weeks, getting the hang of living in 300sq feet and seeing some super good friends that live there. From there, we’ll spend a month in Washington, D.C. Then it’s back to Nashville for a couple weeks (and a stop to see my family in Birmingham), before we head out west until Thanksgiving.

The westward leg will include Colorado, Yellowstone, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, and then (fulfilling a lifelong dream) driving down the 101 to San Francisco. We’ll get back to Nashville in time for Thanksgiving, stick around until Christmas, then we’re doing a “winter tour” of New Orleans, Austin, and San Diego. That takes us through a year, and barely half of the list of places we want to visit. These are of course the cities, there will be park visits in between as well.

It’s still sinking in that this is real life. For 3 years we’ve talked about this, planned various iterations of it, and now we’re less than a month away from the real thing.

We’ll be starting a blog shortly that you can follow all our adventures on and I’m going to create a page where anyone who wants to hang out with us or suggest places of interest along our route can get in touch. In the meantime, it’s beyond exciting to know that Adventure is Out There and on March 30 we’re going to find it.

Which reminds me. As of today we’ve christened our travel trailer “The Spirit of Adventure.” Thanks Pixar.

*My wife reminds me here that we actually traveled to Richmond in April, Asheville in May, Vegas in June, and St. Augustine, FL in July, but no trip was longer than a week.

nevver:

Jetpack Solves Everything

Up until fairly recently, it was possible—which, of course, is not the same as advisable—to see climate change as a phenomenon that was happening somewhere else. In the Arctic, Americans were told (again and again and again), the effects were particularly dramatic. The sea ice was melting. This was bad for native Alaskans, and even worse for polar bears, who rely on the ice for survival. But in the Lower Forty-eight there always seemed to be more pressing concerns, like Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Similarly, the Antarctic Peninsula was reported to be warming fast, with unfortunate consequences for penguins and sea levels. But penguins live far away and sea-level rise is prospective, so again the issue seemed to lack “the fierce urgency of now.”

you shall above all things be glad and young
For if you’re young, whatever life you wear

It will become you;and if you are glad
whatever’s living will yourself become.
Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need:
i can entirely her only love

whose any mystery makes every man’s
flesh put space on;and his mind take off time

that you should ever think,may god forbid
and (in his mercy) your true lover spare:
for that way knowledge lies,the foetal grave
called progress,and negation’s dead undoom.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance

ee cummings

nevver:

The Windows of New York

This series is exquisite.

I think that once you get over the age of 20, you begin to understand that there’s a lot of places where you can fall in and they are just locations of stases. Locations of paralysis. Places where there’s no growth. And whether it’s a job, whether it’s a way that you decide to pursue your life, whether it’s a philosophy, whether it’s a politic, we all know in our hearts when we’re choosing paralysis. When we’re choosing the dead zone over life. Yunior is one of these characters. I think that in some ways the closest he can come to love is after it’s fucking gone past and it’s only a shadow blasted in the wall. Then he’ll come every day and bring flowers to it.

I really enjoyed Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and I’m hoping to read his new collection of stories this year. I posted a quote from this interview a few months ago, but I really enjoyed the whole piece.

Walt Disney’s animated short “Paperman.” What a beautiful little film.

The Internet is perhaps the closest thing we’ll ever have to the ring of Gyges—the invisibility charm that allows its wearer to be alone while having access to the outside world—which Plato posited as the truest test of how a person will act when freed from accountability or restraint. We…

So, Andrea here was a friend of mine in high school. It’s rather awesome to see her byline appear on The New Yorker. Also, this essay is excellent.

I want to go to there.

Also, what an excellent video. Great sense of narrative and shooting and editing. Very impressive.

The other night I wanted a new desktop background, so I created one for myself. I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out, so I thought I’d share in case anyone else wants it. Here’s a zip of a bunch of different sizes, including desktop wallpapers and iOS devices:

Glow Sphere Pack

iPhone Wallpaper

iPad, non-Retina

iPad Retina

“It’s about learning how to identify, articulate and process your own emotions,” Porter says. “And about understanding how other people feel, and being able to respect that.” The words echo McCluskey’s: “At the end of the day, it’s empathy. Empathy is what keeps us together. It’s all really about people getting on with other people. And if you bring a kid up in a war zone, you’re going to get a warrior.”

“If I were one of a homosexual couple — the same as I am one of a heterosexual couple — I would place my faith and hope in the mercy of Christ, not in the judgment of Christians,” Berry said. “When I consider the hostility of political churches to homosexuality and homosexual marriage, I do so remembering the history of Christian war, torture, terror, slavery and annihilation against Jews, Muslims, black Africans, American Indians and others. And more of the same by Catholics against Protestants, Protestants against Catholics, Catholics against Catholics, Protestants against Protestants, as if by law requiring the love of God to be balanced by hatred of some neighbor for the sin of being unlike some divinely preferred us. If we are a Christian nation — as some say we are, using the adjective with conventional looseness — then this Christian blood thirst continues wherever we find an officially identifiable evil, and to the immense enrichment of our Christian industries of war.”

“Condemnation by category is the lowest form of hatred, for it is cold-hearted and abstract, lacking even the courage of a personal hatred,” Berry said. “Categorical condemnation is the hatred of the mob. It makes cowards brave. And there is nothing more fearful than a religious mob, a mob overflowing with righteousness – as at the crucifixion and before and since. This can happen only after we have made a categorical refusal to kindness: to heretics, foreigners, enemies or any other group different from ourselves.”

“Perhaps the most dangerous temptation to Christianity is to get itself officialized in some version by a government, following pretty exactly the pattern the chief priest and his crowd at the trial of Jesus,” Berry said. “For want of a Pilate of their own, some Christians would accept a Constantine or whomever might be the current incarnation of Caesar.”

Excerpts from a talk given by Wendell Berry at Georgetown College.

I’m quite sure I have a great sense of confirmation bias right now, but these thoughts track so closely with my own; that we are betraying the Gospel we claim to represent by waging the ‘cultural wars’ that heat up with every year.

For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

[…]

In response to the apparent triumphs of the sixties, mass imprisonment became a way of reimposing Jim Crow. Blacks are now incarcerated seven times as often as whites. “The system of mass incarceration works to trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage,” the legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes. Young black men pass quickly from a period of police harassment into a period of “formal control” (i.e., actual imprisonment) and then are doomed for life to a system of “invisible control.” Prevented from voting, legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives, most will cycle back through the prison system. The system, in this view, is not really broken; it is doing what it was designed to do. Alexander’s grim conclusion: “If mass incarceration is considered as a system of social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic success.”

Not much to say about this.