Quotulatiousness

March 9, 2010

This is why Fark.com has a special “Florida” tag

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:57

The headline really does say it all:

Shows with gay characters could lose Florida tax credits

Florida lawmakers are considering a “family friendly” bill that would deny tax credits to films and television shows with gay characters in favor of those promoting traditional values.

The proposal, which has fueled a heated controversy for its discriminatory nature, would increase current tax credits from 2 to 5% of production costs for shows considered “family friendly.”

I’m not in favour of tax credits for TV and movie production in any case, but if your government is going to be providing them, they should at least be available to all legal forms of entertainment. Discrimination in this way is ridiculous — and I’d be astounded if it was actually constitutional.

February 24, 2010

Sex and the single warlord

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:50

Strategy Page discusses one of the less-well-publicized aspects of life in Afghanistan:

[. . .] in the Islamic world, sex is, well classified. Especially illicit sex. Thus some enterprising reporters have latched onto the ancient practice (in the entire region, from North Africa to India) of using young (well, teenage down to about ten) boys for sex and other entertainments (dancing, cross dressing, camel jockeys). This has been a thing with the rich and powerful in the area, for thousands of years. In some places it is sort of legal, but generally it is tolerated, even if officially forbidden. That’s because this sort of thing is most popular among the wealthy and powerful. Getting this story for Western audiences is dangerous, as those who indulge would rather make Western reporters disappear, than stop. These guys don’t consider themselves pederasts, just the custodians of ancient cultural traditions. Or something like that.

When the Taliban came to power in the mid 1990s, they outlawed the practice, but it continued anyway, just more discreetly. The Taliban tried to crack down on homosexuality in general, especially in the south, around Kandahar (the “capital” of the pro-Taliban Pushtun tribes.) Didn’t work. Casual homosexuality has long been the custom down there, and Afghans from other parts of the country (especially non-Pushtuns) have a large repertoire of humor and insults about the proclivities of those Kandaharis (one of the more printable ones is about how birds flying over Kandahar have to do so with one wing, as the other one must be used to cover the avian backside.)

February 12, 2010

Careful wording of poll questions significantly influences responses

Filed under: Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:09

I know, “duh!”

But most people don’t know how much the choice of questions does influence the outcome of polling. This is a perfect example:

As the Obama administration proposes repealing the policy known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a new New York Times/CBS News poll finds that a majority of the public support allowing openly gay men and women to serve in the military.

There’s less support, however, for allowing homosexuals to serve openly.

Confused?

The results highlight the importance of wording on the issue. In a test, half of the poll’s respondents were asked their opinion on permitting “gay men and lesbians” to serve, and the other half were asked about permitting “homosexuals” to serve.

The wording of the question proved to make a difference. Seven in 10 respondents said they favor allowing “gay men and lesbians” to serve in the military, including nearly 6 in 10 who said they should be allowed to serve openly. But support was somewhat lower among those who were asked about allowing “homosexuals” to serve, with 59 percent in favor, including 44 percent who support allowing them to serve openly.

This is a very simple example. It can get a lot more sneaky:

January 29, 2010

This is more than a slight confusion of terminology

Filed under: Asia, Health, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:33

Jon (my former virtual landlord) sent along a link to this FoxNews story indicating that there is a long road ahead — sociologically speaking — for Afghanistan:

An unclassified study from a military research unit in southern Afghanistan details how homosexual behavior is unusually common among men in the large ethnic group known as Pashtuns — though they seem to be in complete denial about it.

The study, obtained by Fox News, found that Pashtun men commonly have sex with other men, admire other men physically, have sexual relationships with boys and shun women both socially and sexually — yet they completely reject the label of “homosexual.” The research was conducted as part of a longstanding effort to better understand Afghan culture and improve Western interaction with the local people.

The research unit, which was attached to a Marine battalion in southern Afghanistan, acknowledged that the behavior of some Afghan men has left Western forces “frequently confused.”

The report details the bizarre interactions a U.S. Army medic and her colleagues had with Afghan men in the southern province of Kandahar.

[. . .]

Apparently, according to the report, Pashtun men interpret the Islamic prohibition on homosexuality to mean they cannot “love” another man — but that doesn’t mean they can’t use men for “sexual gratification.”

Trying to use a western term, which almost certainly has highly negative connotations to Afghans who may have encountered it, isn’t likely to be helpful in dealing with the Pashtuns. Labelling is the least of the concerns, I’d think.

The U.S. army medic also told members of the research unit that she and her colleagues had to explain to a local man how to get his wife pregnant.

The report said: “When it was explained to him what was necessary, he reacted with disgust and asked, ‘How could one feel desire to be with a woman, who God has made unclean, when one could be with a man, who is clean? Surely this must be wrong.'”

November 4, 2009

Transsexual Jesus

Filed under: Britain, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:53

A play in Glasgow is — all together now — “not intended to incite or offend anyone of any belief system”. In spite of that, some Christians are offended:

About 300 protesters held a candlelit protest outside a Glasgow theatre over the staging of a play which portrays Jesus as a transsexual.

The protest was held outside the Tron Theatre, where Jesus, Queen of Heaven — in which Christ is a transsexual woman — is being staged.

It is part of the Glasgay! arts festival, a celebration of Scotland’s gay, bi-sexual and transsexual culture.

Festival organisers said it had not intended to incite or offend anyone.

Of course, given the parlous state of Christianity in Britain, maybe they really did think that nobody would be offended. Portraying the founder of a different religion in this way might spark a bit more than protest.

October 6, 2009

If you can’t believe Xinhua, who can you believe?

Filed under: China, Europe, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 16:25

Lester Haines had a lot of fun composing this, um, fascinating report from the Chinese news agency, Xinhua:

Chinese media finger Swedish lesbian enclave
Mythical city of Sapphic luuuurv

Chinese media have confirmed what we in the West suspected all along: that concealed in the northern Swedish woods is a city of 25,000 women, many of whom have turned to Sapphic love to satiate their natural Scandinavian sexual desires.

According to news agancy Xinhua, the all-female enclave is called “Chako Paul City”, and was founded in 1820 by a “wealthy widow”. The city is guarded by two blonde sentries who prevent men from entering. Those chaps who do unwisely attempt to force the issue risk being “beaten half to death” by Nordic gender police.

Women, though, are welcome to visit Chako Paul City, which boasts a burgeoning tourist industry with hotels and restaurants catering for international guests. Locals, however, are discouraged from leaving their female paradise, and those who do “are only allowed to re-enter Chako Paul City if they agree to bathe and undertake several other measures designed to ensure that their out-of-town trysts don’t negatively affect the mental state of other women in the town”.

Sounds like an old post in alt.sex.stories.swedish to me . . .

September 10, 2009

More than you probably wanted to know about gender

Filed under: Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:31

By way of John Scalzi’s Delicious bookmarks page, a thoughtful explanation of what people mean by ‘gender’ and why it is different from ‘sex’:

I have been asked at various times what people mean by “gender” and why it is different from “sex’. Also I’ve been asked to explain the multitudinous types of “trans” people, and why they often seen to be at each other’s throats. Hopefully I can traverse the various minefields involved without offending too many people, but sadly there are so many different perspectives out there that I’m bound to offend someone. My apologies in advance.

So, gender, what is it? Many people still think that gender and sex are the same thing. People, animals, even objects in many languages, are either male or female, one or the other, a very simple binary choice. Sadly life is never that simple. I’d like you to consider four different ways in which things are viewed as masculine or feminine.

Biological sex

That’s easy, isn’t it? People have one sort of dangly bits or the other. You either have XX chromosomes or XY chromosomes. You either produce sperm or eggs. Simple.

Well, no. Biology is a fickle thing. Many people are born with ambiguous biology. I don’t just mean genuine hermaphrodites, though such people do exist. All sorts of things can happen to us in the womb, and thereafter, that make our gender difficult to determine by physical tests. These conditions are known as “intersex”, and there are an enormous number of different ones. The Intersex Society of North America has a fairly comprehensive list of them together with data on how common they are. It is reasonably certain that as many as 1 in 1000 people have an ambiguous biological sex in one way or another, and as people get old and parts of their body wear out that can increase significantly.

August 28, 2009

QotD: Trading one right for all the others

Filed under: Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:04

At some point we will come to see that the developed world’s massive expansion of personal sexual liberty has provided a useful cover for the shrivelling of almost every other kind. Free speech, property rights, economic liberty and the right to self-defence are under continuous assault by Big Government. But who cares when Big Government lets you shag anything that moves and every city in North America hosts a grand parade to celebrate your right to do so? It’s an oddly reductive notion of individual liberty. The noisier grow the novelties of our ever more banal individualism, the more the overall societal aesthetic seems drearily homogenized — like closing time in a karaoke bar with the last sad drunks bellowing off the prompter “I did it My Way!”

And in the end even the sex doesn’t do it. In the Netherlands, the most progressive nation in Europe, the land where whatever’s your bag is cool, where naked women beckon from storefront windows, a certain ennui is palpable. Last week, the ANP news agency released a poll showing that the Dutch now derive more pleasure from going to the bathroom than from sex. It wasn’t a close-run thing: eighty per cent identified a trip to the toilet as the activity “they enjoy the most” — or, as the South African newspaper the Witness put it, “The Bog’s Better Than Bonking.” To modify Eliot, this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a flush.

Mark Steyn, “Do you notice anything shrivelling? We’ve never had more personal sexual liberty. And less freedom of almost every other kind”, Macleans, 2008-08-27

August 21, 2009

Stratford: Canada’s gayest town?

Filed under: Cancon, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:36

It’s definitely the slow news season: the Ottawa Sun summarizes an article in Outlooks magazine entitled “The Gayest Small Town in Canada”:

Travel editor Randall Shirley came to see a show or two and met with some of Stratford’s prominent gay and lesbian residents and business owners, some of whom were featured in the article.

The piece — “The Gayest Small Town in Canada” — appears in the July/August edition in print and online. The national magazine is geared toward the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered (GLBT) population.

Shirley wasn’t surprised to find a relatively large gay and lesbian community in the southwestern Ontario city of 30,000, but what did surprise him was the openness he found there.

“Growing up in a small town myself, I know how difficult it could be. I was just really surprised at how open they are about it,” he said from his Vancouver home.

He noted the artistic community connected to the theatre is a draw for GBLT visitors but Stratford is unique because it’s in the middle of a rural area.

Okay, perhaps Ottawa is far enough removed from Stratford that this might come as a surprise to Sun readers, but really? Stratford has two industries: pig farming and the Festival. Historically, the theatre has been one of the few areas where being gay was not an automatic career-destroyer. Stratford’s theatre industry is huge for the town … it literally put the place on the map. Put these facts together, and you’re surprised that the town is gay friendly (or, at the very least, nowhere near as gay-hostile as a typical small town in a rural area)?

The Caster Semenya furor

Filed under: Sports — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:56

Over at the Daily Mail, there’s a surprisingly comprehensive article on the debate over Caster Semenya’s gender:

At first thought, it seems strange that the South African runner Caster Semenya needs to take a sex test to determine whether she is indeed a woman — or a man, as rumours suggest.

One would imagine that sex is something fairly clear-cut: that you are either one or the other.

It seems even stranger to discover that the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) says that the tests are ‘extremely complex’, and that the results will not be known for days, even weeks.

Again, this seems to run contrary to common sense. Surely, one would think, determining one’s sex is as simple as removing one’s underwear and taking a look.

In fact, it can be rather more complicated than that. It is not generally appreciated that gender in humans — and many other species, too — is not just a binary affair, a simple case of being male or female.

While the vast majority of people are clearly either a man or a woman, many others are somewhere between the two — often with tragic consequences.

Indeed, while people have been making jokes for decades about burly, allegedly female shot putters and javelin throwers, who turn out — after often humiliating and invasive ‘investigations’ — really to be men, the fact is that such cases do not always involve intentional deception, and can result from true biological ambiguity.

H/T to Ghost of a Flea, who says “Ban all sports or award points for freakishness”.

August 20, 2009

Testing their hypotheses

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:26

Steve Chapman looks at the opportunities to test all the reasons conservatives oppose gay marriage:

Opponents of same-sex marriage reject it on religious and moral grounds but also on practical ones. If we let homosexuals marry, they believe, a parade of horribles will follow — the weakening of marriage as an institution, children at increased risk of broken homes, the eventual legalization of polygamy, and who knows what all.

Well, guess what? We’re about to find out if they’re right. Unlike most public policy debates, this one is the subject of a gigantic experiment, which should definitively answer whether same-sex marriage will have a broad, destructive social impact.

Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire have all decided to let gays wed. Most of the remaining 44 states, however, are not likely to follow suit anytime soon. So in the next few years, we will have a chance to compare social trends in the states permitting same-sex marriage against social trends in the others.

Oddly, he was unable to find many of the same outspoken critics who were willing to go on record as to the kind of dire consequences we should start to see in those six states, compared to the rest of the country. I did a bit of googling, and thought I’d found one, but it turned out to be something different:

Dr. Peter Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, “biblical”?
Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!

The above is not actually representative of what the critics of same-sex marriage actually said. It’s actually from a transcript of the last Climate Change conference . . .

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