Before I get to the main point of today\u2019s installment, I just have to embed this little tidbit at the outset. Currently, it\u2019s the screaming headline on the Drudge Report, so it\u2019s not like this is the first place you\u2019re going to see it, but this needs to be shared as far and wide as possible.<\/p>\n
[youtube=http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=x8hMJVXt09E&hl=en&fs=1]<\/p>\n
A 500 million monthly job loss in a country of 300 million people is pretty staggering, since it means that every American loses his or her job at least once a month, and 200 million of them are losing it twice. But since I haven\u2019t lost my job this month, that means at least one person may have lost their job thrice. Pelosi still has her job, too, as do a lot of people I know, which leads me to believe that maybe 200 million jobs are safe, and maybe a hundred million or so are fired, on average, five or so times a month. Having been fired myself \u2013 albeit not this month \u2013 that\u2019s gotta really, really suck.<\/p>\n
Anyway, to my point: I want to welcome Abbot of Arbroath and thank him for his thoughtful and insightful comments to this blog. It\u2019s always more fun to discuss things when I can find intelligent people who disagree, and I hope Abbot feels welcome to continue to do just that. It also makes it cooler when I have people from outside the US taking an interest in what I\u2019m saying. This is no provincial digital backwater, no, sir. We\u2019re an international blog.<\/p>\n
You can read Abbot\u2019s comment in full without interruption in yesterday\u2019s comments. I\u2019ll be reposting them in this post, too, but I\u2019m going to break it up with my own replies to create the illusion of a real-time exchange, but it is only an illusion. If you want to read Abbot unfiltered, you\u2019d best go back to the original source.<\/p>\n
Abbot begins:<\/p>\n
apologise for my generalisations which I do, however, feel entitled to given the register of the blog \ud83d\ude09<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Nothing to apologize for. There\u2019s always danger in generalizations, but it\u2019s very hard to discuss big ideas without them.<\/p>\n
Your understanding of homosexuality \u2013 seems to be based on men having sex! The sexualisation of \u201csame sex attracted\u201d people is reductionist and belittling. Their entire lives have been reduced to a physical act. There is no appreciation of homo-social, homo-emotional, homo-intellectual, homo-erotic, homo-ethical \u2013 it\u2019s all been reduced to sex. This is the responsibility of undereducated people on both the left and right as American society seems to need to polarise, emotionalise, and simplify just about everything \u2013 and sex is a great lowest common denominator and has the moralistic superiority element.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Believe it or not, I agree with a lot of this, except I would put it in a contrasting context. That is to say, defining people as \u201cgay\u201d or \u201cstraight\u201d ignores the fact that sexuality is a lot more fluid than these labels would indicate. One reason that some \u201cgay\u201d men get married is they find themselves attracted, at one point in their life, to another woman, and then they become disappointed when, after marriage, the attraction to other men doesn\u2019t disappear. Too many \u201cstraight\u201d men fall prey to this, too \u2013 they think if they marry their one true love, other women will no longer be attractive, and that doesn\u2019t happen, either.<\/p>\n
I have a hard time understanding the significance of \u201chomo-social\u201d or \u201chomo-emotional\u201d relationships, or how they are exclusive to gay men. In other words, I have had, and continue to have, very close emotional relationships with other men that are in no way sexual. Are you saying a close relationship between people of the same gender is the exclusive province of homosexuals? Because if that\u2019s the case, your labels are far more confining than mine are.<\/p>\n
Men don\u2019t leave their wives for just for sex \u2013 heck many men stay married and have it on the side including Republicans with either sex! Gay married men make a choice to be themselves. Sometimes that means staying with the family which might include antidepressants, counselling, non-sexual marriage and sometimes they make a choice to split. Neither choice is made in haste or in a flippant manner and neither choice deserves any ridicule. In fact, its none of our business unless you are a personal friend.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I certainly wasn\u2019t trying to imply that any of these decisions are made flippantly, or that they deserve ridicule. Nor did I think that Republicans have a monopoly on sexual restraint or heterosexuality.<\/p>\n
On the 17th June 2008, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences US Journal, you can find the results of brain scanning of homosexual and heterosexual men and women. Have a read! The brain of gay men and straight women are far more aligned (and balanced) than that of straight men and lesbians. This is significant to use the word scientifically. Interestingly, lesbian brains are unequal in hemisphere size and response patterns which are closer to the heterosexual male.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I can\u2019t really comment on this, as I\u2019m not sure what it means, or what a \u201cbalanced\u201d brain is. If you\u2019re trying to argue that homosexuality has biological origins, I have no counter-argument. I don\u2019t think we\u2019re anywhere near understanding what those origins are, but I do think the idea that people actively choose, out of the blue, which gender they are attracted to is kind of silly.<\/p>\n
\u201cTabloid\u201d thought reduces homosexuals to a mere sex acts. In the meantime, when you listen to music, try and fix your economic problems, read your bible, use your computer to read this blog, thank God for your nuclear defences \u2013 just remember Handel, Di Vinci, King James, Turing, Keynes<\/p>\n
Also deomcracy as we understand it based upon our classsics – generated by homos! Also guardians of christianity during 2 millenia to allow a “restoration” – that would be those darn homos again! I am glad they were not all suffering from compulsive behaviour disorder but actually used their different minds to be someone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Again, we\u2019re in agreement here. I don\u2019t think, for a moment, that homosexuality negates any of the great and good things that people do. My point, for the past three days, has not been that gay people are scum or that they should only be defined by their sex acts. It\u2019s that the nuclear family matters, and that it shouldn\u2019t be redefined to accommodate the changes sexual mores of the day.<\/p>\n
To sum up: Nancy Pelosi is an imbecile. Thank you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BeforeI get to the main point of today\u2019s installment, I just have to embed this little tidbit at the outset. Currently, it\u2019s the screaming headline on the Drudge Report, so it\u2019s not like this is the first place you\u2019re going to see it, but this needs to be shared as far and wide as possible. ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}