Aaarrr, Jim Lad, and other pirate noises

Over the weekend, I developed some pain in my lower back. I was rather mystified, as I hadn’t done anything to injure it that I knew of, and it seemed to go away on Monday.

Tuesday saw it come back and be quite painful, and yesterday I was off work all day. It wasn’t a constant pain, but it would twinge and be excruciating, and it seemed to have extended into my right hip, as well. I managed to get up and get dressed, but I couldn’t make it even to the end of the street before it got too bad for me to handle, and so I spent the day at home, saying “Ow…” every so often and feeling self-pitying.

Luckily as it happens, on Tuesday I’d made an appointment with the doctor for today, and I managed to hobble up there this morning to see him.

Apparently the problem is in the Sacroiliac joint, and it is called Sacroiliac joint dysfunction. Basically, it’s a problem of movement where the spine joins the pelvis; it’s very common, usually remedies itself through movement and often comes from simply sleeping in a funny position.

There’s not much to be done about it in the short term except to swallow painkillers and attempt to maintain a normal range of movement. If it remains a persistent problem, I can visit a chiropractor (I would only ever visit a McTimoney’s practitioner, of which there is a school locally). For now, I just have to wait and hope it’ll work itself out.

He also gave me a huge prescription for cocodamol; while I can usually buy it over the counter, it’s also relatively expensive to do so. This way, I get my 200(!) pills for just the cost of a prescription charge, which is cool.

So, nothing to worry too hard about. On the negative side, I did forget to ask about getting a refill on my sleeping pills, even though I don’t use them that often. Oh, well. I can manage without. I have a few left.

* * *

In other news, today is the last day for you to nominate douchebags and arseholes for the anti-carnival; I have a large number, which I will be whittling down to a small core of evil shitheadery for Friday.

Please feel free to nominate anyone who’s annoyed you lately.

* * *

On the opposite end of the spectrum, here are your weekly recommendations in honour of Thor.
Cosmodaddy has an interesting and well thought-out piece on his blog at the moment regarding the intersection of various conflicting rights and freedoms under the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation Regulations) Regulations 2007. Well worth a read.

Despite being a massive jerk most of the time, Robert over at Expat Yank has a legitimate criticism piece up about the rise of sensationalist public service messages by the UK government.

The ever-clever Greg Laden has a guest blogger doing a statistical experiment about the levels of science present in science blogs.

Lottie has A Question of Ethics, in which she discusses the ethics of blogging about personal issues and problems in a truthful manner while using a pseudonym.

Gary talks about Hollywood woo and stupidity, illustrating exactly why Sharon Stone’s opinion on anything besides acting should not be taken seriously.

Helen at Bird of Paradox wrote a little while ago about gender neutral pronouns and the attempt to bring in artificial GNPs.

That’s all for now, folks.

Edit: Ampersand has a good post about the minimum wage over at Alas, A Blog, relating to Krueger and Card’s well-known studies. Definitely worth reading.

A small rant about an unfiltered douchebag…

This guy really is some kind of wankbag.

I say this guy, despite the claim of there being more than one author, for one simple reason: it’s one guy. There is no difference in style or attitude between any of the personalities writing – it is identically bad throughout.

I can’t claim to have found this guy, though; that honour, such as it is, belongs to Lottie, who recently stabbed him in the eye with her post called Speaking for All Men; she is also the one who first noticed the rather obvious lack of difference between the so-called writers’ arrogant, misogynistic little screeds.

This guy is brimming with hatred for women as autonomous individuals outside of the confines of what he deems attractive; they appear not only as objectified individuals with diminished agency as is common in a lot of misogynistic thinking, but as non-individuals. They are not only objectified – they are objects, sterile things with no more value than a car, and no more chance of being seen as human.

This is not to say that the pictures of women are what do this. The guy could be posting pictures of scantily-clad women all over the place, and I wouldn’t necessarily object – so long as they were acknowledged as being people. Sexual pictures of people are not a bad thing per se and don’t cause anyone to do anything, whether good or bad, the rather spurious and desperate connections claimed by some notwithstanding.

However, that’s a tangent. What I really want to discuss is the disgusting pile of hatred recently vomited up by Mr Thoughtful, as he calls himself in this particular incarnation, on the subject of marriage and prostitution.

This is pretty revealing stuff – Mr Thoughtful seems to be under the impression that all women are scheming and manipulative whores who want to trick men out of their rightful inheritance of free and unbridled sex with no consequences while trapping them in marriage¹.

The post in question, regarding the supposed superiority of prostitution over marriage (at least, I think that was his point; coherency doesn’t really figure high on this guy’s list) deals heavily in this topic. Leaving aside the rightness of legalised prostitution, this is pretty sickening stuff; I’ll be addressing Mr Thoughtful himself throughout, because, well, he needs shouting at.

I guess that I need to throw my two cents on the Eliot Spitzer affair (pun intended).

I think you’ve materially overestimated what your opinion is worth here, and the pun sucks.

I’ve never been a big fan of marriage.

I’m sure women everywhere will be hurt beyond all belief by this news, given what a catch you are.

In fact, I’m convinced that it is nothing more than male slavery (more on that in a later post).

This is just… stupid. You might have a point, if men were socially disadvantaged by marriage or rendered unable to do what they desired by law or the usual circumstances of marriage; they are not, however. Calling marriage as we in the West know it a form of slavery is the ridiculous kind of thing I expect to see from Radical Feminists² and misogynists, and you certainly don’t disappoint on that front. Men only rarely suffer any kind if disadvantage from being married; statistically speaking, what happens is that a lot of guys get an unpaid maid who works incredibly hard for not much in the way of reward, whether in terms of gratitude or monetary compensation. Marriage all too often condemns women to a life of domestic drudgery; and even if they later re-enter the workforce, their chances of achieving well-paid or fulfilling jobs are often miniscule because they’ve been out of the workforce for an enormous length of time. So, please, don’t even dare call it male slavery, not when this situation persists, when some people still insist that the home-marking partner contributes nothing to the success of the marriage.

But look at it from poor Eliot’s side. He wakes up every morning next to that same plain looking block of wood also known as his wife.

First thing is that this is a deeply unpleasant thing to say about Mrs Spitzer in and of itself; she is not a piece of wood, and your attempt to dehumanise her and turn her into an unfeeling object undeserving of human consideration is duly noted, you scumfuck.

The second is that if he were that unhappy with his wife, there were options; there’s marriage guidance counselling, or even divorce, and while New York State admittedly doesn’t have no-fault divorce, it’s not exactly a difficult thing to obtain, either. Seriously, stop making excuses for him.

You might have seen her standing next to Eliot looking like a hurt puppy while he apologizes for his misdeeds. But think about it for a minute. Could you really see her as someone who straps her freak on in the bedroom?

So… Wait a minute, let me get this straight: because she doesn’t fit what you call attractive, she has no right to be hurt because her husband broke his marriage vows and betrayed her? Wow. I’m just so glad that you’re not in charge of anything more significant than your own underwear drawer. This goes back to the dehumanisation I mentioned earlier – she doesn’t fit his template of what’s attractive, so she’s not even human anymore.

Didn’t think so. So Eliot wants a little excitement in his life. He’s tired of looking at the same ragged dishtowel that used to be the hot young babe he fell in love with so long ago.

Maybe he ought to tell his wife, first? Maybe, if he’s got any pretensions towards being an adult human being, he ought to actually discuss that he’s not happy with her? And frankly, if his love falls away because she got older, he never loved her or deserved her in the first place.

You know that ploy that women use to trap men into marriage. Long, flowing hair. Make up that is perfectly applied. A body that is slender and athletic looking. Wild monkey sex on numerous occasions throughout the week.

Right, because women are just queuing up to marry guys who are selfish, looks-obsessed and fixated solely on sex. They’re just lined up around the block to trap you into a sexless marriage where they steal from you and get fat. Because, as we all know, women hate sex and are just after money. And they get fat. Right?

Ugh. Just reading this guy makes me feel ill. Not only is he deeply and obviously offensive towards women –we’ve already established that one- but he’s also pretty fucking offensive to me as a man.

Now?

Hair that is short and easy to manage (when she decides to do something with it). Little or no make up which exposes the imperfections, creases, winkles, etc. Ten to fifteen pounds that gets strapped to her ass and thighs every year.

Hey, asshole. Real people get older and mature. That’s something that adults realise and accept as part of life, and some of us even embrace it. Wrinkles are a badge of pride, a sign that you’ve been through life; they’re often formed by laughter or frowns, they can be a sign of character. I’ll give you a minute to go and look it up, chief.

And sex?

Maybe on your birthday.

When she’s in the mood.

News for you, son. You don’t have a right to demand sex from anyone, even from your wife. Hell, especially not from your wife – this is someone to whom you have supposedly made a loving commitment. Demanding sex doesn’t fall under that heading.

Poor Eliot didn’t have a choice. His wife pushed him off that cliff.

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Talk about your archetypal victim blaming! “My wife nagged me until I couldn’t help but kill her, Your Honour.” “She was asking for it.”

Eliot Spitzer was an irresponsible jackass who couldn’t keep it in his pants. Quit blaming his wife, shithead. She’s not accountable for his lack of self-control.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m convinced that most married men will cheat on their wives if there is absolutely no chance that they’ll get caught.

Speak for yourself. I love my wife.

We can’t help it. It is our divine right to plant our seed in fertile ground. We must have sex otherwise our heads will implode. This basic concept is part of our DNA. Who are you to argue with the evolutionary process?

Agh! The stupid, it burns! These goggles, they do nothing! Ack!

This is just more of the same crap we see from other rape apologists – men are lustful beasts who can’t control themselves, and so shouldn’t be held to blame when they stick it anywhere they please. Fuck off, you shit. If we’re all such evil brutes who can’t control ourselves, we shouldn’t be held to blame for rape, right? If they didn’t want to be raped, they shouldn’t have inflamed our uncontrollable passions.

Fuck you, you fucking fuck. What the hell is wrong with you? You’ve just dehumanised the entire species; women are just sperm vessels and men are raping animals.

Eliot did what any normal man (with a shitload of money) would have done under the same circumstances. He just got caught. And every single guy across this country had the exact same thought about Kristin…

…damn she’s hot.

Except the guys who love their wives and girlfriends. And the gay ones. And the asexual ones. And the ones who wouldn’t visit prostitutes. And the ones who don’t find her attractive. I’m sure that even you might be getting the picture at this point. You don’t get to just erase the majority of male humanity by claiming that only rapists-in-waiting like you get to be men. We are better than you, and you don’t get to push us out of the picture, you creep.

Go and play in traffic, you shitty excuse for a human being. You disgust me.

---

¹ That seems to be a theme, by the way: witness the post in which he agrees wholeheartedly with an article by the moronic Tad Safran which compares grown women to two year-olds, the post wherein he wholeheartedly agrees with the concept of divorce on grounds of “declining” physical appearance and the disgusting post he makes concerning “vagina envy”.
² I’m referring to the self-identified current of feminism here rather than any radicalised grouping or current, particularly the kind that seems to rely on warmed-over Marxism and Freudianism as theoretical bases.

Very interesting website…

… from BookBlog, stumbled upon by accident via A Secret Chord: Gender Genie.

Inspired by an article and a test in The New York Times Magazine, the Gender Genie uses a simplified version of an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author. Read more at BookBlog, The New York Times, and The Guardian.

Very interesting results to be had – I either show as somewhat female or heavily male, and not always where you might expect.

Basically, it is supposed to work by analysing the preponderance of words which are typically associated in higher numbers with female writers versus those associated with male writers, assigns a value according to the frquency, and then assigns an arbitrary gender to the author based upon how many of each one there are. The “feminine” words seem, at a glance, to be more conjunctions and words referring to the speaker and other people, particularly where they overlap, while the “male” words seem to refer more to places, things and positions.

A non-scientific test using the feature shows Gary as slightly female, although funnily enough Bekki’s post about needing a man shows as strongly male, and Lottie’s post here reads as very strongly male.

I have no idea how accurate this is; probably not much, to be honest. That aside, though, it makes for interesting thinking material, if nothing else.

Crying

There’s a post at Feministing at the moment about crying men and how we view it in our society, although given the speed that the site operates at, it may have dropped off the front page already.