…but utterly black and white.
From patheos.com:
“In a closed-door meeting with a group of Polish bishops last week, Pope Francis said that it’s “terrible” that children are taught about transgender identity and emphasized the importance of society upholding two “opposite” genders.
“Today, children are taught this at school: that everyone can choose their own sex,” Francis said last week, according to the Catholic Herald and other news organizations that read a Vatican transcript of the closed-door meeting. “God created man and woman; God created the world like this and we are doing the exact opposite.”
Teaching children that they can pick their gender, Francis said, is “terrible.”
According to the Associated Press, the Pope referred to society’s gradual acceptance of transgender people as an “annihilation” of traditional God-given values:
The pope said he wanted to conclude his remarks by reflecting on this: “We are living a moment of annihilation of man as image of God.” He added that his predecessor, Benedict XVI, had labelled current times “the epoch of sin against God the Creator”.
He said: “Today, in schools they are teaching this to children – to children! – that everyone can choose their gender.” Without specifying, he blamed this on textbooks supplied by “persons and institutions who donate money”. The pope blamed what he called “ideological colonizing” backed by “very influential countries”, which he did not identify. One such “colonization”, he said — “I’ll say it clearly with its first and last name — is gender.”
It’s not the first time the Pope has used annihilation metaphors to talk about transgender people; last year, he compared trans identity to nuclear weapons because both can “destroy a high number of human beings.” And while he has occasionally made comments supporting LGBT people, he’s not exactly an ally:
Early in his papacy, some in the LGBT community looked to Francis as a source of hope when he said about gay priests, “Who am I to judge?”
Since then, however, many have seen their hopes dimmed for change in the Catholic Church’s policies on gender and sexuality. Some thought that Francis’s major paper on family issues, which was completed in April, would offer some movement on gay relationships; it did not.
“There are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family,” the document said instead.”
While this kind of rhetoric isn’t surprising coming from the highest-ranking official in the Catholic Church, whose catechism still says LGBT people are mentally disordered, it is disappointing to hear from Pope Francis, who has taken more progressive stances on social issues than any other pope in history.
Unfortunately, his smattering of promising comments don’t make things easier for the millions of transgender people hurt by religious-based stigma. Until he stops with the anti-trans rhetoric and embraces LGBT people, women, and the other groups routinely torn down by the Catholic Church, he’s not as revolutionary as so many want him to be.”
Now we might be able to have a bit of fun with the Pontiff’s ‘a moment of annihilation of man as image of God’, but that would be quite a digression, wouldn’t it?
Brietbart covered the Pope’s Dopey Black and White Shite: ‘LGBT Groups Blast Pope Francis Over Gender Comments’, with half a nod an eighth of a nod to ‘fair and balanced reporting’ while making sure that their readers knew about this Convention Prop::
“Sarah McBride, a transgender woman and National Press Secretary of the pro-LGBT Human Rights Campaign, said that Francis’ words were “not only hurtful, and frankly harmful, but really demonstrating a misunderstanding of what it means to be transgender.
Asked to speak at the Democratic National Convention, McBride said that in today’s America “LGBTQ people are still targeted by hate that lives in both laws and in hearts,” but all that can change if Hillary Clinton is elected president.”
But at least they brought this science-y thing (isn’t Francis supposed to like science, especially ‘climate science’?):
“Francis DeBernardo, the executive director of New Ways Ministry, a Catholic LGBT advocacy group, said that the Pope was ignorant about LGBT issues.
“Nobody chooses a gender identity. They discover it. Transgender people come to know themselves in a process is [sic] similar to the way that lesbian, gay, and bisexual people discover their sexual orientation,” he said.
DeBernardo added that “most reputable scientific experts say that allowing children to transition in youth is both a physically and psychologically healthy thing for them to do in most cases.” (dunno about his caveat, but then, he’s a Catholic, so…perhaps he needs to pull his punches.)
Next come the paragraphs of: caution: bigotry hard-hat area:
“Last spring, the American College of Pediatricians issued a position paper warning against the physical and psychological dangers to children posed by advocates of transgenderism. Failing to identify with one’s biological sex signals a psychological disorder that must be dealt with, not pandered to, the physicians argued.”
Then the ‘all humans are either XY or XX, which is pretty much directly opposed to yanno, actual science. (This explanation might have used ‘variants’, not ‘abnormalities’, imo.)
Transgender Europe’s Trans Murder Monitoring project reveals that as of 2013:
More than 1,000 reported murders of trans people in Central and South America since 2008
The new result update moreover reveals that in the last 70 months:
1,074 killings of trans people have been reported in Central and South America, which account for 78 % of the globally reported murders of trans people since January 2008. In this region, there has been the strongest increase in reports and with 22 countries Central and South America is the best documented region.
117 killings of trans people have been reported in Asia in 16 countries;
87 killings of trans people have been reported in North America;
84 killings of trans people have been reported in Europe in 12 countries;
8 killings of trans people have been reported in Africa in 4 countries;
4 killings of trans people have been reported in Oceania in 4 countries.
…although by their narrative, figures do seem to contradict each other. Still, thank you, Pope Francis, for endangering the transgendered and LGBTQ even further. But then, you canonized the odious First American murderer Junipero Sera, didn’t you?
Year of Mercy Jubilee, is it? Guess ya hafta repent before ya your Extraordinary Mercy, eh? Conversion therapy, perhaps? Oopsie and tiddly-pom: California, Illinois, New Jersey, Oregon, Vermont, and the District of Columbia, Cincinnati, and Seattle have all banned the use of conversion therapy on LGBTQ minors, at least.
Audre Lourde Project Retweeted:
The page includes other resources:
Black and Pink – Supporting LGBTQ people in prison
INCITE! – Community Accountability
INCITE! – Stop Law Enforcement Violence
Rose City Copwatch – Alternatives to Police
mural-in-progress by antonio ramos, murdered in 2015 while painting (rest in paint and power, anthony)
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
come to think of it, does Popesie show signs of tprojecting the gender-dysphoria that’s so often in The News of late?
good night; i’m out for the night. good dreams to you, or at least…illuminating ones. mine are hideous right now, but would be instructive if i could divine their meanings.
semi-permeability keeps popping up; but one cool one in which an old woman and a man following her…were able to walk through four or five feet of snow as if walking thru dandelion fluff, just their heads bobbling a bit above the white, white snow.
i couldn’t figure out why weren’t shoveling a path instead of ‘forging thru’. paging herr docktor zigmund….
You expected the Catholic Church (and its pontifex maximus – “biggest bridgemaker”) to be on the leading edge of a revolution?
Sexuality after a century of scientific study has become problematic for all traditional frameworks of thought. And the science that undergirds the argument for transgender rights (aside from peoples is peoples human rights of the old Tom Paine variety) just has not made it into the common sense and sensibility of any traditional culture yet. And transgender people are still dogged by the stigma that sex assignment surgery was a whim. It’s been that way for 64 years, ever since Christine Jorgensen put the issue into national consciousness.
The clergy mostly wish that these people and this issue would just go away. The Pope’s “image of God” argument reeks of idolatry, doesn’t it. Clinging to the creation of women out of Adam’s rib story doesn’t help him at all. And that one flies against the reality that all people have been created within the wombs of females. But then the same folks who have such anxieties about the image of God are the folks who keep tranlating the text into English. I wonder what the original narrative was that got transmogrified into the the whole rib thing.
Except for the cumulative load on the conservative mind, the rise of transgender rights issues has momentarily diverted attention from baking cakes for gay couples.
Unlike racial discrimination, coming out seems to collectively move social attitudes because people suddenly have friends, family, neighbors, and co-workers who show up one day as transgender (when they’ve been transgender all along). People of color already are out about their race, and racial discrimination that includes neighborhood and job segregation reduces the friends-family, neighbors, and co-workers effect; in fact, that is the whole point of housing, jobs, and neighborhood segregation–to never get the issue settled through human interaction. That might end up with — gasp — mis-ceg-en-a-tion.
The fear of transgender people is that they will “recruit” all sorts of significant others — wives, husbands, children, and so on — into the “homosexual transgender lifestyle that is undermining our country”. The Pope might have thought that, but he had the grace not to say it directly and with a revival preacher tone.
Meanwhile the issue of patriarchy and the Church is still rape. Where is the accountability of all those priests, il Papa?
jest on a Pontifax gender revolution well-taken. but i will say that he’d set himself up w/ all of his ‘don’t be so hard on gays and women who’ve had abortions’, and ‘who am i to judge?’ post-pulse murders. oh, yes, he was indeed becoming known as ‘teh cool pope’ for gender inclusiveness…but then, he went to Warsaw. i reckon the former two were his ‘extraordinary jubilee of mercy’. and yes, headlines have claimed that he’s been a total hypocrite as far as his promise to get rapist and pedophile priests outta the church, but we might consider these vicious statements from warsaw rape, as well.
yeah, science schmience; remember that sketch from studio 360, or whatever it was called? but sure, let’s go full tilt galileo galilei on the lgbtq! i had a jehovah’s witness client whose 45-yr-ol mum had come out of the closet. daughter was outraged! they spit apart, of course, and after one of our discussions about it, she mailed me a list of biblical imprecations calling it a sin (her term). thing was, they were all from the Old Testament, i’m pretty sure. and i’d guess many christians do the same. disconnect much? ;-)
i love your ‘man in the image of god’ thoughts, and your wondering at the translations. once, on a whim, it looked up the many various translations of the ten commandments, and found that…what i as taught was quite dissimilar to many; heh. it may be that da wiki has them….
yeah, i guess we should be grateful that popesie hadn’t done a ‘recruiting’ thing, but really, his ‘being taught in school’ was somewhat the same, wasn’t it? gay s a ‘lifestyle choice’ ain’t goin’ away, is it? when the question arises as to who would choose to be so marginalized, feared, loathed, or murdered in so many societies: crickets. and remember: he said all this behind closed doors.
‘diverted them from baking gays cakes’, lol. yeppers. but srsly, as far as trans visibility days, i did read a piece at salon.com by a straight man narrating a discussion with a close trans woman who’d said: ‘fuck that. we’re only too visible now, as were the jews’. and a lot more like that in terms of danger. but yes, the more who do come out gives pause to family and friends to…accept it, or suffer their own self-imposed bigoted hells. and i had totally forgotten about jorgenson; thanks.
just say no! to contraception!
;-) yay-usss.
i’m not a catholic so what do i care? well, there’s a billion of them popish peeps, ain’t there?
i don’t actually care, that much, if the catholic church chooses to believe that only authorized celibate males are qualified to turn the wonder bread & boxed-wine into authentic jeebus food. they have the right to believe that, don’t they? more power to the women & gays & etc. w/in that tradition. but, you know, religious freedom.
it’s more important that they defend the “secular” rights of ALL people. not to be discriminated against.
what’s the RCC’s scorecard on THAT front? a lot like the democrats. mouthing off about certain things, but really an integral part of statist reaction. or worse. they are just so terrible on the women’s reproductive health thing. on every level. & they squash any mildly or strongly “revolutionary” tendencies (liberation theology). & pope jp2 & his support for anti-commie forces in poland et al. what a willing reaganite tool! and franco. and the church in the philippines. and and and…fuck the vatican.
strangely, or prolly not, i’d been thinking of this pope being said to be a liberation theologist. well, sure, he speaks of wealth inequality, yada, yada, and for cripes sake, he met w/ miz this changes everything, dontcha know, so he must be anti-capitalistic!
but oddly, on the day i’d published ‘US still fighting liberation theology according to wikileaks’ on 3/13/2103 at my.fdl, the white smoke came outta the pipe and francis was pope! yeah, the piece is rather jejeune given my ignorance, but i had included a lot of quotes, a few videos calling out ratzinger, explaining JP XXIII, etc.
anyhoo, i’d stated that ‘in a pig’s eye will the new pope on a rope be anything like a liberation theologist, so i was pleasantly surprised to have to eat some crow. with all this ‘nuclear bomb’ shit? yeah, fuck the vatican.
but to your point, a short clip from authors on LT, Leonardo Boff and Clodovis Boff:
“The gospel is not aimed chiefly at “modern” men and women with their critical spirit, but first and foremost at “nonpersons,” those whose basic dignity and rights are denied them. This leads to reflection in a spirit of prophecy and solidarity aimed at making nonpersons full human beings, and then new men and women, according to the design of the “new Adam,” Jesus Christ. [snip]
The base ecclesial community is also the place where a true democracy of the people is practiced, where everything is discussed and decided together, where critical thought is encouraged. For a people who have been oppressed for centuries, whose “say” has always been denied, the simple fact of having a say is the first stage in taking control and shaping their own destiny.”
ah, death squads in central and south america, US ties; hideous stuff. but francis had made an enemy or more in argentina but not providing sanctuary to renegades in need; i forget the story.
so desperate to believe…they’ll cover up Francis’ past. nice quotes btw.
i had to endure the Reverend Mother at my little liberal episcopal church this a.m. homilizing on the pope’s recent commission of a committee to be the committee on whether the committee will commit to commenting on whether women should be admitted to the diaconate. a step below priesthood.
it’s a huge deal!!!!!!!!!!!!!! this committee!!!! we live in the DC area. “we’ve formed a committee” is like every 2nd sentence out of certain bureaucrats’ & managers’ mouths. why women/etc. are supposed to rejoice b/c some oppressive patriarchal filthy-rich bureaucracy has formed a committee eludes me.
well, it eludes me why your small episcopal rev. mother and others would be so jazzed about the pope saying he’s study on whether women might become deacons, given women can be priests in your church.
now if francis is so liberated, i’d ask if he’s also called a blue ribbon commission to study if priests shouldn’t be able to marry. now i can’t say that rape in the church is anywhere near all about that, but it would sure be a good start, eh? (given the relationship between rape and cruel power, i mean.)
but yeah, commissions and studies are a complete dodge.
teach me about this, please? “pope jp2 & his support for anti-commie forces in poland et al. what a willing reaganite tool! and franco. and the church in the philippines.”
i gotta go for now; i’m way behind in chores; i spent way too much time trying to read that old diary.
part of the deal w/anglicans is their attempts at “reconciliation” w/the RCC.
so they desperately read the tea leaves of papal bull. to which i just roll my eyes in disbelief w/words of my fundamentalist youth springing to mind like “whore of babylon” and “mother of harlots.” of course on priests & marriage.
john paul 2 supposedly worked behind the scenes w/reagan to prop up Lech Walesa in Poland & spur the collapse of the USSR. shameless capitalist tool. the RCC propped up Franco, fully supported him. not an aberration in RCC history. the church in the philippines: you could reproduce that in other heavily-catholic countries, like the RCC condemning states’ efforts at sex ed/population control. the church in these countries provides the ideological glue for the state (i know there are priests who buck this trend; the church as a whole, reactionary down the line.)
liberals are so desperate to believe, aren’t they? but what is there to believe about someone who compares transgender to nukes? just so awful.
bringing new meaning to the term ‘papal bull’, lol. well, no, i didn’t know those histories, so thank you. nor did i have any idea that reunification with the catholic is a desire. is that true among the younger anglicans, as well?
do you have any idea if the orthodox churches have been political tools as well?
so O, the irony: no sex ed, birth control, but condemned for giving birth outside the ‘holy covenant’ of marriage. or a babe, not yet baptized, not permitted to be buried in ‘sanctified ground’. or i assume those are still so.
francis’s friends denied that he’d erred, iirc, on the grounds that he was forced to, it concerned not helping to jesuit priests under the gun from the argentine military.
but yeah, trans as nuclear weapons: put yourself in their shoes, pope merciful.
yeah, i may go back and look further at the things in that post.
on edit: on annihilation of man in the image of god’, this made me howl (and worry, of course), headlines like: ‘The National Institute of Health is lifting a previous moratorium banning scientists from creating animal embryos that have human organs or cells’
there’s a younger gen of anglicans??? where??? yes, both the RCC & the anglos spout off regularly about reunion. and technically they can receive communion from each other (screw that, i say.) i don’t know so much about the orthos but i think Putin is BFF to the patriarch of moscow, who sounds like a very wealthy, corrupt, filthy, nationalist asshole. post-commie rooskies have taken a page from the American Bible & baptized themselves anew in the ancient faith. i don’t know enough about “church/state” relations in the xian east over the last 2000 years, but i assume, as in medieval europe, there was lots & lots of overlap.
hmmm on the patriarch. iirc, juliania had said that bring back the church is a yuge reason for putin’s popularity. but then, the two aren’t one dot mutually exclusive, are they? and yes, church and state overlap.
well, i’d assumed there were young uns, lol.
i’d meant to say that even the tax laws are creepy for some folks wanting to marry, but not doing so, as they would face a larger tax ‘burden’. so…i went and scored this i’d seen at telesur, a bit of a gem among some horrid stories (ukraine rapists, even chirren, for the state [but it’s over!!!]), and so on), but the marriages are more complicated than the title implies. but still.
‘Women in Tanzania Marry Each Other for Safety and Property’
OT – caught connecting the dots:
Ryan Devereaux @rdevro 29m29 minutes ago
According to these docs DOD implemented the PPG on Dec. 12, 2013 — same day as JSOC’s notorious Yemen wedding strike
surely it’s a coincidence./s if he doesn’t have the ‘heavily redacted dosc’, here’s the aclu page. so very transparent…and transparently bullshit. ‘playbook’: purrfect.
https://www.aclu.org/news/us-releases-drone-strike-playbook-response-aclu-lawsuit
emptywheel is in the midst of a close reading of it and finds it a very interesting text.
i might add more tormorrow, (cus USians love surgical, no muss no fuss war, and ignore bug splat, but it would be helpful if when you reference something, to provide a link. thank you in advance. and at ‘the intercept’,
not ‘dirty wars scahill?’ he was the only one i pretty much trusted at this site of ‘pierre’s’ that i’d pretty much trusted. (although in the twitter wars..not so much.)
https://www.emptywheel.net/2016/08/07/drone-rule-book-working-thread/
ha; i’m glad that you and a few others seemed to take her deconstruction of the docs. i er…grokked a few things, but it should have been titled: “None dare call it War Crimes: the Obfuscation Playbook”.
on edit: i just found this, ha ha ha.
homophobia as a subspecies of patriarchy? granting the validity of woman’s choice a la Romeo & Juliet, i think, is part & parcel of granting adults in general their choice/preference in matters sexual, romantic, etc.? that is, that the family (representing the State) does not OWN the sexual/reproductive lives of the daughters in particular. i think, once this still revolutionary notion is embraced, it’s easier to find one’s way to accepting LGBTQ rights, etc.
certainly vis a vis The State, “alternative” sexualities defy the family/state’s claim to ownership of sexuality/reproduction. the modern state’s interest in reproduction, the controlling of the sexual energy of the populace, is all about warfare. people who talk about “traditional families” & such nonsense refuse to see these nuclear families for what they are: radioactive, weaponized manufacturers of soldiers (or at least workers for empire.)
u.s. education seems to be following the same rubric: chirren as drones for the state gdp. you may be right that homophobia is a subset of patriarchy, and so many women are stockholm-ed into it themselves.
and of course there are many authors who’ve written that christianity was largely about claiming the power from female societies, priestesses, etc.
this: “the controlling of the sexual energy of the populace”; how interesting an idea. otoh, viagra is booming! and on a whole ‘nother hand is the gateses of the world promoting eugenics in the developing nations. now i’m not saying that many women wouldn’t want family planning aids, but it still smacks of uber-patriarchal neo-colonialism, doesn’t it?
but then, now it’s said that margaret sanger was, as well.
margaret sanger? don’t know enough to comment but she was harrassed mercilessly for wanting women to have access to contraception, right? the terror of men that women would have some freedom around the debilitations of child birth & sexual intimacy.
100 or even fewer years ago, “the economy” was all about cranking out bodies for the empire. today some goals have changed (depop for some), but top-down statist control of reproduction is still the game. someone like M. Foucault is all over this stuff. the science of demographics was born for nations to study & direct their populations energies to “compete” w/their neighbors. only in the most general sense would a Julius Caesar worry about the fertility of his imperial population, and, depending on class, people’s sexual morality was guided by custom, not state intervention. the medical clinic, the school, the prison, the military, the church, the legal system, all for disciplining the modern populace w/”scientific” interventions for statist ends.
“the things that they did…they didn’t have to ask us…”
ooooh, even foucault’s wiki looks good to read; thank you for pointing me in his direction. but you’ve caused me to recall another quote from the merciful francis in 2015: “deciding not to have children is a selfish choice.”
rats, my speakers make too many echoes to grok the lyrics; when i havve time i’ll find them… i can however, hear chirren crying. paging her doktor zigmund again, but my dreams are often full of caring for neglected babbies, although i do think i know the etiology of that.
yeah, sanger. i was about to beg off hunting down some sources, but in the end, it didn’t take long. wish i could say i did more than scan these three, but you’ll get the gist. when i did discover that she was not what she seemed, i confess to feeling blown away. these mention the pill, but her clinic imported diaphragms and fitted them; one source said emma goldman had, as well. i do hope she not as ‘bell jar’ curvish as sanger. and really, that may be a bad metaphor.
see what you think if you’d care to.
http://www.blackgenocide.org/sanger.html
http://www.academia.org/the-real-nativists/
from the pro-life movement
http://www.lifenews.com/2013/03/11/10-eye-opening-quotes-from-planned-parenthood-founder-margaret-sanger/
https://www.amazon.com/Negro-Project-Diabolical-Duplicitous-Disastrous/product-reviews/1480918628
ugh. i’d heard such about M. Sanger & the foundations of P.P. but never bothered to investigate.
when the misogynist Benedick in “Much Ado about Nothing,” in giving over his misogyny, adduces as one of his reasons for doing so, “the world must be peopled”, in 1600 AD, when London was shut down on occasion from the plague, his sentiment makes sense. Underpopulation was the overwhelming concern of all world history till about 1800, really about 1900 when widespread public health measures were introduced. it was at this moment that people could even consider “over-population” as a problem, when public health created a demographic explosion. “traditional” morality, in its tradition of patrolling the boundaries of female sexuality as the property of the male (father/husband), derives from the “precious commodity” that fertility is.
eugenics, scientific racism, arises in this context. not to justify sanger & co. they did not offer the proletarian woman anything of value (except not being preggers w/inferiors) to replace the only “commodity” she (& working class families) has to offer: the labor of them & their offspring. freedom from the drudgery of bearing 10 kids so five will survive to work the farm is not viewed as a good in itself for women by giving them freedom. freedom period. & relief from the crushing sorrow of infant mortality. nope. we must also remove their ability to dilute the species. this is the apogee of weaponized reproduction. infants exist as a factor of the state. no better than hitler doesn’t begin to cover the awfulness. mass extinction, for some, becomes the order of the day, to “better” the species precisely at the moment that the feared mass extinction from famine, disease, etc., is largely eliminated. very fucked up. it’s not a coincidence that as public health really took off, the largest wars in human history, so far, also really took off.
all well-reasoned, and to the point, jason. and yet it’s still going on by way of ngo’s, covered in pretty words like ‘fewer children, more education, less poverty’. well, yes, but then…they are grooming capitalists, as well. ‘give them smart phones, and watch the $ growth!’.
i liked this from the first link, because it seems to me to be the key issue:
“Sanger’s attack on Catholics appeared to be an attempt to divert attention from the class politics of Planned Parenthood. The Rev. John A. Ryan wrote: “… their main objective is to increase the practice of birth-prevention among the poor . . . It is said that the present birth-prevention movement is to some extent financed by wealthy, albeit philanthropic persons. As far as I am aware , none of these is conspicuous in the movement for economic justice. None of them is crying out for a scale of wages which would enable workers to take care of a normal number of children.”
as w. sanger seeing that wealthy white new yawkers only had four or five chirren. so, beyond her own family consideration, she saw cause and effect at play, no other reasons, for instance: males er…having sex w/ women other than their wives, whatever. they were kings, weren’t they? subject to a wholly different ‘morality’: ‘don’t get caught, i ya do…’
on edit: recent sterilization of peruvian women stories:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Justice-Close-for-300000-Peru-Victims-of-Forced-Sterilization-20160719-0031.html
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Forced-Sterilizations-Trial-Dismissed-Amid-Political-Disputes-20160802-0020.html
forced sterilization. hmmm….
i know it’s a little early for this fine bit of tear-jerking acting…
the hunter shoots the hare in the field.
anyway, what’s up w/the zika thing? are we about to get some *real* chemtrails in the guise of killing mosquitos? Agent Orange type stuff, let me make a wild surmise, probably ain’t the best thing for a population’s sperm count. how effective is zika at discouraging the poors from preggin up? considering that the hysteria over zika is mostly BS, (right?) it’s interesting to watch how panic over an “epidemic” may be used to manipulate people. if as MoA asserted some time back, it’s the pesticide, not the been-around-forever zika virus, causing microcephaly, and the CDC & all know this, what’s the game here? one thing to be sure is to get people used to the idea of GMO organisms being injected into the environment. to fix some kind of “problem.” like this dim bulb of an idea: let’s replace nature’s zika-infected mosquito population w/our gmo population! whoohoo!
FEMA camp here and a FEMA camp there…here a camp, there a camp, everywhere a camp?
oy; yes. almost too hard to bear that. as if being ‘feeble-minded’ is a defense for sterilization, anyway. but oh, my, it was rampant both globally and all over amurika ‘in the not so distant past. the indigenous and PoC are always the hardest hit.
dunno but what b wrote about it more than once, but the one of his i’d red, he’d claimed that it was the microcephaly that was the bullshit, all a limited hangout. one commenter offered that it was the gmo skeeters that some posited were what underpinned that, who knows? but they’re about to release a bunch of them in the keys, having been given fda approval, but…the locals will get to vote on it after nov. ha ha ha. the claim is that the skeeters have developed resistance to the common pesticides (agent orange is an herbicide), so…we’ll see. other trials are going on here and there, no results known yet, of course, and will likely be white-washed when they are.
what.a.world.
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2016/06/not-the-zika-virus-but-fighting-it-is-likely-to-have-caused-birth-defects.html
agent orange is an herbicide? yeah, but I bet it could get the job done. by killing (“defoliating” if you will) everything, that is. in that MoA article, b asserts it’s the pesticide used to kill the zika mosquitos that’s causing the health problems. none of the stuff used in aerial mosquito spraying sounds good. all hormone-disruptors and carcinogens.
there’s a piece up now at NYT about the falling fertility rate of dogs. has the pollution industry at long last crossed a Rubicon by screwing w/America’s puppies?
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/10/science/dog-sperm-fertility.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
wtf on the gmo mosquitos????
well, i just don’t know, jaon, but as i said below to thd, it seems that i’d added the tickell ‘pandora’s box‘ article at CP. and while i don’t understand the science of it, the studies he quotes mirror a lot of the new theories concerning: ‘transposon’ (‘jumping’ sequence of DNA used in the genetic engineering process to introduce the new genes into the target organism). There are several such DNA sequences in use, and one of the most popular is known as known as piggyBac’ that mi shiva had brought to light for us recently.
long ago here, our place was bombed from the air w/ what i believe may have been old ddt by the mosquito district. oh, my, did we and other react in fury! the district heard us, and began hand-spraying areas with NO SPRAY signs, and iirc, they used some biologically specific stuff akin to grasshopper spore. i asked mr. wd if he remembered the names of either substance, he does not. but he said that there’s a yuge ongoing flap between the M district and the rabid three-tea-party commissioners. bet there’s a whole lotta stupid on both sides. yuk and ugh.
Since b’s article in MofA, there have been reports of two studies that not only associate the Zika virus with microencephaly but describe the probable process by which the viral material changes the developmental process. That tie is much stronger than a month ago.
The GMO mosquito story needs more investigation IMO before it can be taken as more than a political argument against GMOs in general.
The pesticide story is strong and most mosquito eradication programs for Aedes do quite a bit more than gratuitously spray pesticides (or herbicides, gah). In fact, pesticides and herbicides are hazardous for predators of mosquitoes, like amphibians and bats.
But for Congress, it was just another way of saying no to the black man in the White House.
The issue of abortion IMO boils down to who makes the decision to abort or not to abort: the woman, her husband, or the government? Which is where the arguments are these days. The Sanger crowd would maintain that as a matter of freedom and equality it should be the woman. Moreover, they would argue it is the woman anyway as the consequences of illegal backalley abortions and suicides show. Make your own decision about this. Not being a woman, I can duck it by saying it is not the government’s decision to make.
Sanger worked mostly with poor ethnic (southern or eastern European) women in New York City. She died in 1966. No doubt she had the rough edges of her age as we all do. I try not to make anachronistic moral judgements without knowing the contemporary debates in the biographical subject’s context. Moral thinking and ideas do evolve at least in different focuses and different forms of expression. I guess it has become fashionable in post-modern civilization to make sport of writing off various people formerly thought of as contributing to society on the basis of one tragic flaw or another.
In a racist culture preserved by the institutions of racism, it is very easy to slip into racist ways of thinking about problems in a way that unexamined stereotypes bubble to the surface.
In the case of Sanger, she was at the nexus of the suffrage movement, a certain kind of left analysis, and in the context of the women’s movement also in a coalition with the temperance movement and the municipal reform (bust the city machines) movement. There are a whole raft of contradictions in that broad coalition that did succeed in getting women the right to vote (which in those days seemed so very important).
i just lost my long comment, links, yada, yada; i’ll need to try again later, especially as i disagree with your de facto sanger apologia. ;-). chores.
on edit: for now, on one of b’s several zica threads, i saw i’d put this one in. it’s long, but regarding mae won ho’s studies, this, in part. it’s what vendana shiva had spoken about recently:
“‘Promiscuous’ jumping genes
On the face of it, there is no obvious way in which the spread of Oxitec’s GM mosquitos into the wild could have anything to do with Brazil’s wave of micrcophaly. Is there?
Actually, yes. The problem may arise from the use of the ‘transposon’ (‘jumping’ sequence of DNA used in the genetic engineering process to introduce the new genes into the target organism). There are several such DNA sequences in use, and one of the most popular is known as known as piggyBac.
As a 2001 review article by Dr Mae Wan Ho shows, piggyBac is notoriously active, inserting itself into genes way beyond its intended target:
“These ‘promiscuous’ transposons have found special favour with genetic engineers, whose goal is to create ‘universal’ systems for transferring genes into any and every species on earth. Almost none of the geneticists has considered the hazards involved …
“It would seem obvious that integrated transposon vectors may easily jump out again, to another site in the same genome, or to the genome of unrelated species. There are already signs of that in the transposon, piggyBac, used in the GM bollworms to be released by the USDA this summer”, etc.
this of zero hedge’s someone had stuck up. no clue as to the veracity, of course.
being a woman, my position is that of course it’s a woman’s decision whether or not to carry a pregnancy to full term or not, without going into all the possible ways she might have to support and rear said child on her own.
but on sanger: yes, when i first had read some of her dark nativist, racialist (at a bare minimum), and quotes on ‘bad genes’, feeble-mindnessness’ (as in the video jason brought) as reason to force sterilizations, etc., i was appalled, having known her as rather heroic in the struggle for repealing the comstock act and more.
and i do actually believe that it’s incumbent upon us to see her invective, classism, and various bigotries through the lens of our times, as we might look at now ‘saint’ junipero sera vastly differently than we might have had we lived in california as whites back then. and similar things are still going on, as i’d indicated, so there’s that, as well.
if you read the quotes attributed to her, you might not consider it ‘one tragic flaw’ so much, but maybe you are able to do that; i’m not. and i don’t believe even her ugly beliefs moot the help she brought for women’s reproductive health overall.
looks like i’ll have to beg off until the morrow. real life has to come first; when it blows up…it sincerely blows up big so often.
sweet dreams of a better world (if you can).