"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it."
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Martin Luther King Jr. //
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"There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them."
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George Orwell //
Want to contact the Stubble Jumping Redneck? Shoot her an email @ oldweesie@sasktel.net
Listen sweethearts. Get your aims straight. Going topless, especially in an Arab country, is basically a protest against common sense. It's an admission that you have none. A topless protest has nothing to do with "Ms Tyler" and won't help her. It has everything to do with your own self-centredness.
"At the time of her attack in May 2000, her ex-husband Bilal Khar was the man accused of entering her mother's house and pouring acid over Younus's face as she slept."
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"Her nose was almost completely melted and she has since undergone 39 separate surgical procedures to repair her disfigured face over the past decade."
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"...on March 17 she took her own life, after leaving a message saying she was committing suicide over the silence of law on the atrocities and the insensitivity of Pakistani rulers."
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The horrific attack also burned off her hair, fused her lips, blinded her in one eye, destroyed her left ear and melted her breasts.
After being rushed to hospital she said, 'My face is a prison to me', while her distraught young son said at the time, 'This is not my mother'."
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"More than 8,500 acid attacks, forced marriages and other forms of violence against women were reported in Pakistan in 2011, according to The Aurat Foundation, a women's rights organization."
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"Tehmina Durrani, the ex-wife of Bilal Khar's father, had become an advocate for Younus after the attack, and said the acid attack victim had pledged to bring her attacker to justice when she had recovered.
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"Durrani said Younus' case should be a reminder that the Pakistani government needs to do much more to prevent acid attacks and other forms of violence against women, and also help the victims.
'I think this whole country should be extremely embarrassed that a foreign country took responsibility for a Pakistani citizen for 13 years because we could give her nothing, not justice, not security,' said Durrani."
"A Ukrainian teenage girl died Thursday three weeks after being set on fire in a gang rape attack by youths which shocked the nation and raised doubts about the competence of police.
Oksana Makar, 18, was raped by three men in their early 20s, strangled with a cord, burned and left for dead in an attack in the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolayiv, investigators have said.
The victim was found by a passer-by after she was dumped by her attackers at an abandoned construction site. She was hospitalised in a critical condition with burns over 55 percent of her body, requiring the amputation of one of her arms."
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"She was strangled and they (the attackers) thought she had died. So they burned her. She was lying there 10 hours in the freezing cold and inhaled the by-products of the burning," Fistal said."
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"If convicted, the three face between 15 years to life in jail, although the brutality of the crime has renewed public debate about the use of the death penalty which was abolished in Ukraine over a decade ago."
PS: I don't think women cry as much as we used to, though. That was more true back before the modern women's movement, when women weren't as powerful as they are today. Big girls don't cry.
The comments are interesting, though. Seems the war isn't over and probably never will be.
I don't believe I've ever expressed my views on this topic on my blog, so herewith I intend to rectify that.
First, I will make some assumptions. I presume that most abortions are provided to teen or twenty-something women who "find themselves" pregnant. (I've put the scare quotes around those words on purpose, and will explain my rationale later.)
Secondly, I'll state upfront that my views on abortion have changed since I was young, and I can't categorically say that arguments that I'm about to articulate here would have made any difference then.
Back then I was fertile and quite able to become pregnant. Today I am not. Advancing age does that to women. I'm sure you all know that.
Raising children is very, very hard work and can drive a young, unprepared mother around the bend and only that mother can know whether or not she feels prepared for the task. Of course, nobody tells you how hard it will be. The earth would be depopulated over night, if they did.
But here's what I think:
Throughout the many decades that the abortion debate has been raging (yes, it won't go away), I have never accepted some of the arguments made by the pro-choice side. For example, to state that a woman should be able to choose because it's her body, is fallacious, cockamamie logic. True, the developing fetus is in her body, but it is not part of her body, the way her uterus or her lungs or whatever are.
It is a separate person. Thanks to the science of genetics and the discovery of DNA, we now know that at least 50% of the fetus' DNA is not identical to that of the woman who is carrying it, so how could it possibly be part of her body, and hence, something she should be able to choose, as though it were as simple as a haircut or choosing which type of clothes best complement her body shape?
Now, when does life begin? It's a big question. One of the best arguments I ever heard about when life begins is that it doesn't begin. It certainly ends at a specific moment, the moment of death, but rather than a single moment, such as conception or birth, life is, in essence, a continuum. It is passed on in an unbroken sequence of events that includes both conception and birth. The sperm and the ovum are both human (If it weren't we women would be giving birth to dogs or alligators or something) and both are alive as well (otherwise, infertility would be the norm and our species would cease to exist).
True, the moment of conception is one of the more significant events along the unbroken sequence. It is the moment at which two completely different sets of DNA material unite to form a new potential human being. And while birth itself is also a significant event, the baby that emerges is not a fully-formed, complete human being as it leaves the womb. It takes many years for that new life to become fully capable of surviving on its own (longer than the child itself believes in its teens, I might add, but probably not as long as exasperated parents might believe). There's nothing like being on your own, having to make your own decisions and facing the consequences thereof to make a person grow up, and that's another blog topic, in and of itself.
No, for me, neither of those two definitions of when life begins washes.
But it seems to me, abortion is the cowards way out of a very sticky dilemma. Far too many teen and twenty-something moms can ruin their own lives by having babies out of wedlock and deciding to keep them and raise them alone. Abortion may seem like the better "choice", but in fact, the choice occurs earlier than either conception or birth. The choice a woman has a right to, is whether or not she takes off her clothes, lies on the bed and spreads her legs. She should know that she may become pregnant. In this day and age, ignorance of that is no excuse, hence, the scare quotes around the words "find themselves" above. It's ludicrous to pretend she suddenly discovers herself pregnant and doesn't know how that could have happened.
Of course, there's always adoption, but political correctness has dictated that babies born out of wedlock must be adopted only by families of their own race and we all know that finding such families who are both willing to adopt and capable of good parenting is very difficult. And there are many fine, but infertile, couples who would make good parents, who would love to adopt, but so many young mothers chose abortion over adoption because it's emotionally, and in some ways, perhaps, socially easier to do. We do hear stories of long overdue reunions of mother and child, and the wrenching emotional turmoil both have had to endure. Whether abortion avoids these sorts of turmoils, I can't say. Nor can anyone.
But I wouldn't stop there. It takes two to make a baby and it takes two to raise it. It seems to me men should also be faced with a choice. DNA can prove (or disprove) paternity. If the man (boy) who impregnated the young woman doesn't own up and step up and become a responsible father, I say he should be faced with a choice, too - either own up, or be castrated. I betcha that would stop unwed motherhood and abortions over night. Let 's make it a man's right to choose, too. How 'bout it guys?
I have a daily delivery of an email alert regarding Pajamas Media's video offerings for non-members. This morning, this was one of the videos.
After you watch the video, you will have seen they are talking about the cowardly behavior of the Captain of the Costa Concordia, and blaming it on the feminist movement.
I want to talk about the feminist movement and whether or not I agree with Bill Whittle and his Trifecta buds. In some ways I do agree with them (they blame the "progressives", too), but not entirely.
Here's the thing. Cowardice, which the Costa Concordia's captain had in spades, has been around for centuries, nay, millennia. You can't necessarily pin that on either modern progressives or feminism. I think they are painting with too wide a brush. If someone other than the captain himself can be blamed, let's try his employer.
Still, it's interesting and enlightening to see how men feel about the traditional masculine role vis a vis women. After watching the video, have a read through the comments as well. Do women have to be helpless so that men can feel manly and needed? This is a minefield, if there ever was one, but my gut reaction is "man up" guys.
I will admit the modern feminist movement has gone to hell in a hand basket, but in its early days, it had worthy goals and it spotlighted real problems of inequality and discrimination. I felt it myself in my early 20s.
My younger sister encountered it once when she attempted to enroll in the "Renewable Resources" program at a post secondary college in Saskatoon, and was told by the head of the program that it was not for women. Only men could apply. Being the kind of feisty dame that she is, she made a big stink and the head man backed down. It wasn't long after that, that the program was admitting both men and women and churning out graduates of both sexes.
Indeed, most of the goals of the feminist movement of the early 1970s have been met, and where they haven't been met, they have been altered due to intelligent and truthful debate. For example, the wage differential can be explained, in part, by the fact that women are the ones that have babies and stay home with them when they are tiny and helpless. It just makes sense that the mother would be the one to do this. After all, when is the last time a man successfully breast-fed an infant? Consequently, women's careers are interrupted, leading to fewer years of experience and making them less attractive candidates for certain positions.
It takes sometimes several months to train a new employee who may be hired to replace a woman on maternity leave. With men, that problem doesn't exist. And besides that, I really do believe there are some critical differences between the way men and women think and behave that are hard wired.
Yet this is a topic that still needs discussion. Are there fewer manly men in the world because of feminism? Why should men have to perceive women as weak and needing protection in order to be secure in their masculinity? Why have the concerns of men regarding the consequences of the feminist movement not been addressed? And most importantly, why does life have to be so frickin' unfair?
Speaking of cowardly men and courageous men, have a listen to the recording and translation of the communication between an Italian coast guard man (a manly man, if there ever was one) and the ship's pathetic-excuse-for-a-man captain, Francesco Schettino, or Tiny Shit, as some are rightfully calling him.
Almost 50 years after the modern feminist movement began, it's hard to believe that when I was fifteen, this is what women were supposed to do and be!
Oh, my. What would I have done? Gulp.
But then again, I had my own mother to emulate. She knew how to wear a pair of pants.
And, you know, I don't think you would find many historians who would agree, but I think the development and wide spread dissemination of "The Pill" just a few years later, was a pivotal point in history. I know my mother was one of the first to line up at the doctor's office.
"In Germany, the Islamists found willing listeners above all in the universities, among Protestants, and in the alternative milieu. Here the fear and guilty conscience about doing something wrong with respect to loving the foreigner was great.
“And great too, was the readiness of believers of the Old Left to follow new gods after the death of their deities Mao and Che Guevara: Allahu Akbar! Presumably, the young converts of the so-called Sauerland Group had been participating in the Red Army Faction, one, two generations earlier.”
Even greater than the danger of terrorism is the systematic infiltration of our educational and legal systems by the goals of Islamization. The fact that the third generation of Turkish-Germans speaks worse German than the second is also attributable to infiltration by Islamists: “In the marginalized ghettoes, their seed of contempt for democracy and exaltation of theocracy rises.”"
"...when female peace activists from Israel and abroad come out to Judea and Samaria and demonstrate against the Israeli “occupation,” they are assaulted sexually by the Arab men whom they have come to help. These are not isolated incidents, Aloni-Sedovnik stresses. Rather, this is an “ongoing and widespread” phenomenon that includes verbal and physical abuse. She accuses the 'peace' camp of purposely covering up the trend so as not to offend “the Palestinians and their heritage, which sees women as sexual objects.”"
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"Aloni-Sedovnik cites two specific cases which she has knowledge of – one is a case of rape and another is “severe sexual harassment.” The attackers in both cases, she stresses, were familiar with the victims and knew that they were “peace activists.”
The rape occurred several months ago in the village of Umm Salmona, near Bethlehem. The victim, an American activist, wanted to press charges but leftist activists put pressure on her not to do so, so as not to damage the struggle against the 'occupation.'"
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"Aloni-Sedovnik accuses the Israeli media of complicity in the cover-up.
“How is it that we do not hear the voice of the radical feminists who repeat, day and night, that occupation is occupation, and it does not matter if it is a nation that is doing the subjugation, or a man who is subjugating a woman?
"It appears that there is a gap between the radical-leftist feminist theory about the active resistance to the occupation of the Territories, and the stuttering self-annulment in the face of the violent conquest of women.”"
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"Earlier this year, a blogger and literature buff named Yehudah Bello, who writes in various venues about history and the theory of evolution, wrote a blog post with the striking title: “The Female Leftist Activists are Raped Day after Day, Night after Night.” Bello is no ultra-nationalist, and he supports the creation of a PA state – a fact which makes his claims all the more believable.
Most female leftist European activists, writes Bello, are brainwashed in their youth into hating Israel, and then sent directly into Judea and Samaria, without spending a single night in Tel Aviv, lest they see civilian Israeli society for themselves and find that they like it."
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"It is is easy, explains Bello, “to carry out a sexual crime against a foreign girl, in her first days away from her family, in a place where no police have ever visited. And this is what happens, and has happened.”"
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"These are not just cases of rape carried out to satisfy lust,” he writes. “Usually, they are carried out systematically in order to make the girl pregnant and then take her as a wife – after she converts to Islam, of course. We know about this system from the stories of women who underwent a similar process within Israel and escaped to Europe. But it is hard to escape from the Palestinian territories. Sometimes these women – some of whom are no longer young – are never allowed to leave their homes unaccompanied, in order to forestall their escape.”
If someone were to compare the list of foreign female activists who enter Judea and Samaria to the list of those who leave, Bello claims, the magnitude of the phenomenon would be proven. “Everyone knows about it, but no one dares talk about it. The Palestinians have been turned into martyrs. In the Middle Eastern television channels, IDF soldiers are represented as the brutal rapists, who rape Palestinian women.”
The reports by Aloni-Sedovnik and Bello are of particular interest because feminist groups have been spearheading leftist activism in Israel for many years. According to Gila Svirsky, the former director of the New Israel Fund in Israel and founder of NIF-sponsored Women's Coalition for Peace, “women’s peace organizations, known collectively as the Israeli women’s peace movement, became the most vibrant and persistent part of the peace camp in Israel.” These groups espouse an ideology which equates militarism (by Israelis) with male domination of women. Far from being a fringe element, leftist-feminists of this ilk are a dominant force in the Israeli academic world, the press, the Knesset and the judicial system."
A stubble jumper is a prairie farmer. I'm from Saskatchewan and my dad was a farmer, so the name is apt. "Redneck" needs no explanation. It's anyone who disagrees with a lunatic leftie. My blog is mostly about the Middle East but other issues also catch my eye and get me going. I monitor comments to keep out trolls and lunatic lefties. Anyone who is zealously anti-American and anti-democracy in the Middle East is NOT welcome.
