Happy St Valentine's Day

So, St Valentine's Day has come round again, and in the spirit of Christian martyrdom I'd like to take a moment to reflect on all of the people who were persecuted and killed who do NOT have the good honour to be remembered with saccharine candy hearts and cards featuring Renaissance-era putti misindentified as cherubim, Cupid, or both. People like St Elmo, who had his guts torn out on a windlass; St Eulalia, who was deliberately frozen to death in the snow; St Eustachius, who was baked to death; St Lawrence, who was grilled to death (not the same as baking); St Agatha, who...no, you don't want to know what happened to St Agatha.

This isn't to say that taking any of these people and turning their feast day into a day of love is at all inappropriate; in fact, given the context of what allegedly happened to Bishop Valentine this actually makes a lot of sense. But it is to say that there are many things at play here that he would not have appreciated: The implication that if you're not in a physical relationship there is something inherently wrong with you; the pressure to buy specific types of gifts for people who may want something more lasting or more useful or both; the bizarre misappropriation of both Christian and pagan imagery in ways that are almost as bad as Neon Genesis Evangelion just less obvious because more familiar. While obviously the nature of the Christian saint from whom the day takes its name is not precisely relevant or applicable any more, it should be remembered that the man did more than just perform weddings in catacombs; he was somebody whose legend is of one who supported love and mutual social support between spouses, families, friends, and colleagues, all over the known world.

This St Valentine's Day, if you have a husband, wife, partner, girlfriend, boyfriend, lover, beau, or consort, treat them as specifically and individually specially as they deserve. Also tell your friends you care about them, call your parents if you don't live with them [and are still on speaking terms], and if you run across anybody in need and there's anything you can do to help them, do. (Also, eat chocolate.)

This is a day about love.

Semi-review: Kuragehime

So, a while back I watched Kuraghime. Kuraghime is a show about a bunch of bizarre nerdy girls who live in a house together and the cross-dressing male fashionista who upends their lives, especially that of the young and adorkable marine-invertebrate nerd (titular Princess Jellyfish) Tsukimi.

There's a lot to love about Kuragehime, mainly its honesty about who people fundamentally are. It's been said that everybody is a geek of some description, with things like sports and relationships having obsessive fanbases so huge as to dictate what 'mainstream society' is to everybody else. In view of this, Kuragehime depicts Kuranosuke (the cross-dressing guy) as a fashion geek more than anything else, which makes him really endearing. Also, in one episode where he gives everybody makeovers, he does not do so to this one overweight lady in a kimono--wonderfully not because 'OH SHE'S FAT AND YOU CAN'T FIX THAT WITH MAKEOVERS', but because her personal style is 'very traditional Japanese woman', not 'frumpy slob', and that's not really a problem for his immediate purpose of making this group look presentable in a formal setting.

Anyway, what I realised while watching this, and more fully to-day, was that I'd actually consider dating a girly enough guy as long as it was made clear that the relationship would not be sexual. And I'm...really not sure what this says about me, actually!

'This is where I am' into 'Que si el cangrejo se muere todo en su totalidad...'

A serious and good work of philosophy, focusing on philosophy of the values of acts (otherwise known by the somewhat more imprecise terms of normative and applied ethics) and the 'philosophy of the immortality of the crab' (i.e. the philosophy of the violent cognition that overpowers thinking in times of critical faith or desire), could be written entirely, or almost entirely, on the subject of Yun.

 

Discuss.

Discriminatory Federal Law-chic

Just right now, while browsing through news stories about the repeal of Don't Ask-Don't Tell, I found this one. I'm not sure why it was in the news section but it is. Here's a quote.

And now, we can take the idea of “don’t ask, don’t tell” a little less seriously. After all, there are plenty of things we think actually deserve being put into this category. Liiiike telling us about how wasted you got last night. Or the terrible sex you had with somebody else’s boyfriend. And especially talking about the explosive diarrhea you had this morning after breakfast. So, tell us: what’s on your personal “don’t ask, don’t tell” list? 

...okay.

...okay, let's try this again.

And now, we can take the idea of “separate but equal” a little less seriously. After all, there are plenty of things we think actually deserve being put into this category. Liiiike separating us how wasted you got last night. Or how the terrible sex you had with somebody else’s boyfriend is equal to the dissipation of your life in general. And especially [I can't spin the gratuitously disgusting third example]. So, tell us: what’s on your personal “separate but equal” list? 

 Or this:

And now, we can take the idea of “enfeofed working for all” a little less seriously. After all, there are plenty of things we think actually deserve being put into this category. Liiiike...

You know what? I'm not going to go on with this. There's taking something "a little less seriously" and then there's disrespecting what it really is in every way, shape, and form. No. Please, no. 

In defence of Christmas.

For all the talk about Santa/Father Christmas as a harbinger of a total commercialisation of Christmas, I'd like to actually take some time to talk about what I think this figure means. I think that Santa fills an important role in the Feast of the Nativity in that he is in effect the tutelary deity or prime spirit involved in what amounts to a sacramentalisation of childhood, the same childhood that is seen and worshipped in the infant Christ.

When a parent reads a letter that a child has written to Santa and answers it with gifts, that parent is, in that moment, Santa Claus, in the sense that Santa becomes a role that the parent plays in a mystery play of the child's devising and for the child's benefit. In this role the parent absorbs the mythos of a benefactor and a comforter, whose operation in the enjoyment of the holiday is in effect a translation into material terms of the operation of the Holy Ghost in the enjoyment of spiritual graces. To a large extent the scruples and dedication of the parent are measured, by the child, in a subconscious examination of how this role is filled. The parent in effect becomes a household god, balancing this role with his or her role in the quotidian family unit and thus attaining a sort of priesthood, a position between Earth and Heaven in other times of the year reserved for more formalised religious functionalities.

It's only later that the child's evolving understanding of the spirit of giving and of the nature of parenthood allows for the roles that the parent plays to be collapsed into a more earthly understanding of generosity and the giving of gifts as operations that occur within and lend beauty to the everyday world. In this part of the system the role of Santa goes into abeyance as the child and the parent (and other gift-givers) enter into a more one-on-one relationship of exchange.

Later on, if the child becomes a parent or even just has children in his or her life as an adult, he or she likewise will come into the Santa role, having prepared the child or children for the nature of the mythos as an inheritance from the generation before.

This is not to say the system is not commercialised or filled with shit, because it is, by advertisers among others. But at its heart, the role of Santa in Christmas is a very strong and very real signifier of the transmission of the ideas and experiences of childhood, and as such is certainly relevant to the celebration of the Nativity and God-as-Child.

For God's sake, Mr Fry, no no no.

I mean it's perfectly obvious that if there were ever a God he has lost all possible taste. You've only got to look - forget the aggression and unpleasantness of the radical right or the Islamic hordes to the East - the sheer lack of intelligence and insight and ability to express themselves and to enthuse others of the priesthood and the clerisy here, in this country, and indeed in Europe, you know God once had Bach and Michelangelo on his side, he had Mozart, and now who does he have? People with ginger whiskers and tinted spectacles who reduce the glories of theology to a kind of sharing, you know? That's what religion has become, a feeble and anaemic nonsense, because we understood that the fire was within us, it was not in some idol on an altar, whether it was a gold cross or whether it was a Buddha or anything else, that we have it.

--Stephen Fry, acting like a prick.

The idea that 'religious people aren't creative any more' has absolutely no possible justification or basis in reality outside of the heads of Stephen Fry and people who already agree with him. It's deliberately small-minded ostrich-thinking. Kajiura Yuki is Shintoist and rather devout about serving the gods. Mashimo Kouichi, her frequent collaborator, is Catholic and in a position for the title of 'modern Dante' as far as I am concerned. If he wants to talk about music, and visual art? Philip Glass. Religious omnivore. Olivier Messiaen. Catholic. John Cage. MOTHERFUCKING GAY BUDDHIST ANARCHIST, HELL YEAH. And...honestly, I think most modern painting is bankrupt anyway, but I'd be pleasantly surprised if anybody can point me in the direction of some good stuff.

Let's extend this to the relatively recently deceased in the world of writing. Philip K. Dick and Marion Zimmer Bradley, perhaps a bit surprisingly, were both churchgoing Episcopalians (although both were a little crazy also). Christopher Fry, the greatest modern playwright, was a Quaker who deliberately let it influence his writing. Very surprisingly, Jorge Luis Borges was also a Quaker, at least for some of his writing period. Getting back to the living, we have Catholics Les Murray and Seamus Heaney in the world of poetry and Umberto Eco, who is lapsed but far more disdainful of people like Stephen Fry than he is of the Church, in prose.

For God's sake. I could go on and on.

It's just.

This really pisses me off.

When Mashimo Kouichi gets his hands on lesbians with guns, religion happens.

Church and State

In light of recent legal developments in the United States, a question in law called ‘rational basis’ has seen a lot of discussion both by legal scholars and in the general public. Rational basis is the least stringent test for determining whether or not a law restricting people’s behaviour meets the due-process requirement of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. The stricter level of scrutiny revolves around something called ‘compelling state interest’, but it can be generally held that if a law does not stand up to a rational basis test it will not stand up to a compelling state interest test either, simply because rational basis is the lowest and loosest level of scrutiny in such cases[*].

            In the case of the recent developments in case law, which have occurred mainly in the US District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco but also in the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston, the rational basis and compelling state interest tests have been much discussed as regards the institution of civil marriage. The immediate question at hand is ‘Is there a rational basis for or compelling state interest in restricting civil marriage to couples of the opposite sex?’; the broader question that has to be answered first is ‘What is the state’s interest in registering marriages anyway?’

            Marriage was for most of human history a distinctly ad-hoc and theocratically organised institution—as, indeed, were most institutions, including government itself (the nation-state emerged as a concept in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was only substantially divorced from the religious authorities of the country in question from the eighteenth century onwards). Religious organisations performed nuptials, which were then granted a certain legal cachet by relevant authorities, chief among which were property exchange and heritability and, in the next generation down, the right to not have to inquire too deeply into who exactly one’s parents were. This system, since it was administered by religious law, was (and in many jurisdictions still is) defined solely in religious terms. Common church interests in marriage (in Europe) included legitimising sexual behaviour, keeping track of family units for the purpose of parish registers, and advancing what was seen as a series of divine mandates related to reproduction and biological parenthood. Obviously, these interests were at the time and to a large extent even to-day only served through the marriage of opposite-sex partners.

Ideals of Womanhood and Pride and Prejudice as a Conservative Text

And the third, what my professors (though not me) considered my best paper in my first year of college.

Ideals of Womanhood and Pride and Prejudice as a Conservative Text

By Nathan Turowsky

Feminist readings of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice tend to go in one of two directions. The first reading is that with the character of Elizabeth Bennett Austen sought to create a subversive female figure who belies the gender roles of the time by ending up in the best possible marriage on her own terms (Brown). The other is that Austen was a deeply conservative and antifeminist writer who sought to vindicate traditional marriage and female subjugation to the whims of men (Handler and Segal). Both perspectives take as a fundamental given the idea that there was a generally accepted order in Britain at the time, in which men uncontroversially exercised the upper hand.

            But Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century was not a socially monolithic country and even the most conservative parts of society were not as conservative with regards to gender roles as modern feminists seem to imagine. When Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she was addressing it to a Frenchman, Bishop Talleyrand, from a Britain in which questions of things like education, job opportunities, and social standing for women were already more relevant and heavily debated than in any country since time immemorial (Wollstonecraft; Dedication to M Talleyrand-Périgord).

Not to be taken especially seriously.

Oh, Szymon Wyrda. The post-Polish Idol years have not been kind to you.

Szymon Wyrda, for those poor benighted souls who have yet to bask in his unparalleled beauty, was a runner-up in Idol’s first season back in 2002. He is a vocalist and poet with some genuine talent and an ego approximately the same size that his country became after King Jadwiga married Grand Duke Jagiełło of Lithuania.

In a recent interview Mr Wyrda made very explicit his opinions on legal issues of copyright as they relate to a Web-dominated age. His views, perhaps a bit surprisingly given the well-documented tension that often exists between creators and publishers in matters of copy and patent, are intensely in favour of continued protectionism on the part of the industry. ‘Music piracy’, Wyrda said, ‘is more evil than killing people with a gun.’

Arakawa Under the Bridge: First post with actual content

If comedy is supposed to be about taking human misery and tragedy and glorifying and healing it by making it a source of relatively guilt-free joy and pleasure, it was only a matter of time until a romantic comedy in which one of the principals is an insane homeless woman who lives under a bridge showed up. Arakawa Under the Bridge, the latest anime from director Shinbou Akiyuki, is that romantic comedy.