The cesspool that is toxic masculinity, the sea we all swim in, had a newsworthy (aka an effect on people other than women) peak at the Planned Parenthood in Colorado. “Three people were killed and nine others injured after gunfire ripped through a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colo., during an hours-long standoff […]
Tag: Culture
Scripturient: The Last Case of Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes. Iconic detective, 93 years old. Tending his bees in bucolic self-exile near the Dover coast. Mycroft gone. Watson gone. Mrs. Hudson gone. Even the band of villains and criminals who made him who he was are gone. All he has left are his…
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: All You Need to Know About How Equality Works in Society in 2 .gifs
The notion we have a fair playing field, a balance, whatever you’d like to call it is quite patently false. We have not all just fallen out of some sort of Rawlsian simulator into a just society. Injustice and anti-egalitarian ideals are normative in society, they are the water we swim in, the air we […]
Dead Wild Roses: John Bowlby – A Secure Base – Five Therapeutic Tasks
To be honest, I could excerpt most of Bowlby’s book. It is that good. However, little things like time and copyright concerns limit me to providing some of the highlights of attachment theory and how big a change it was from traditional psychoanalysis. “The first is to provide the
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Will Ferrell does a mock music video of gangster rap – and it’s a scathingly hilarious critique of the genre
A musical commentary, followed by social and political analysis, followed by hilarious spoof rap videos, and more This is scathingly funny. Will Ferrell does a mock music video of macho gangster rap. Man, how I despise that music. As Rage Against the Machine said, “So-called rap’s a fraud.” Worse, most
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: The Hollow Men – Poem and Commentary, for All Hallow’s Eve
Want something spooky, even terrifying, for Halloween? Read this. The Hollow Men: I think this truly epic poem (one place where the word is meaningfully used) should be read at least once a year, if not once a month, just to remind ourselves of what is actually going on. It
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: The Hollow Men – Poem and Commentary, for All Hallow’s Eve
Want something spooky, even terrifying, for Halloween? Read this. The Hollow Men: I think this truly epic poem (one place where the word is meaningfully used) should be read at least once a year, if not once a month, just to remind ourselves of what is actually going on. It
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: The DWR Sunday Religious Disservice – Why Oppose Gay Marriage?
If you ask someone why they support homeopathy, they will give you reasons. Maybe that it worked for a friend of a friend, or perhaps their naturalpath gives them a warm fuzzy feeling that they just don’t get from real doctors. Whatever it might be, they will give you a
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: The DWR Sunday Religious Disservice – Why Oppose Gay Marriage?
If you ask someone why they support homeopathy, they will give you reasons. Maybe that it worked for a friend of a friend, or perhaps their naturalpath gives them a warm fuzzy feeling that they just don’t get from real doctors. Whatever it might be, they will give you a
Continue readingScripturient: The Signal
One of the oddest – but most intriguing – scifi films I’ve seen recently was the 2014 movie, the Signal. It is a small-budget film that premiered at the Sundance Festival last year and seems to have gone to DVD soon after. I picked up a copy recently at a
Continue readingScripturient: Houses of Cards
While there are parallels between them, there is no direct, simple comparison between the original, British mini series, House of Cards, and the American series of the same name. The latter, aired 13 years after the original, owes much of its first-season content to the BBC’s production, but it quickly went
Continue readingScripturient: The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproduction
I have been reading the essays of the late critic, Walter Benjamin, most famous for his 1936 piece, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproduction (an earlier translation of this essay is available here). Wikipedia notes of this essay that it has been, …influential across the humanities,
Continue readingScripturient: Ex Machina
Ex Machina – “from the machine” – is a British film that is more about philosophy and morality than science. It opens a can or worms, philosophically, that underscores issues now being raised by advancing and increasingly intelligent technology. Its spare but crisp production reminds me of George Lucas’s first
Continue readingwRanter.com: Refugees: a Jewish issue comes to the fore
A quintessentially Jewish issue has dominated the news and become a prominent election issue ever since the picture of three-year-old Alan Kurdi lying dead in the Mediterranean surf generated headlines worldwide earlier this month. For many, the painful image has crystallized the ongoing question of what the world ought to
Continue readingScripturient: The Missing Frankenstein Movies
I was worried when I saw a new package for the Frankenstein films in WalMart recently. Labelled the “Complete Legacy Collection,” it offered eight original films on the Frankenstein theme, from 1931 to 1948. I snapped it up and read the back. I had to have it. (I always check
Continue readingwRanter.com: Can we talk politics without lashon hara?
Over the course of the election campaign to this point, the Jewish community has seen repeated and sometimes flagrant violations of halachic and ethical prohibitions against lashon hara – wicked speech – and some of the 31 transgressions related to it, such as unnecessarily engendering controversy and division. But although
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: We swim in patriarchal soup
Snapped at a red light on the way home last week This ad only makes sense in the presence of the following cultural subtext: Women’s anger is not valid in the same way that full adult humans’ (i.e. men’s) anger is valid. You don’t need to get to the root
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: A Very Good Start – The Sorrows of Empire
The late Chalmers Johnson knew how to write a pithy introduction: “American leaders now like to compare themselves to imperial Romans, even though they do not know much of Roman history. The main lesson the United States ought to be how the Roman Republic evolved into an empire,
Continue readingScripturient: Anthony and Cleopatra
While Julius Caesar is my favourite of all Shakespeare’s plays, I think Anthony and Cleopatra is my second favourite. I know it’s hard to choose any favourites from his plays, they’re all so good, but this one seems to resonate with me more than most others, enough to encourage me
Continue readingScripturient: The Road Not Taken
I was surprised to read a recent piece in the New York Post that suggests a poem I have long loved was actually not what I thought it was about. It was one of those epiphanies that made me reassess my attitude not only towards the poem but towards what
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