Sex Assault Message Hits Urinals

This post is a little crude, I guess. So you've been warned. Fortunately, I think I lost any younger readers back when I first wrote the word "metaphysical."

(AP) BLOOMINGTON, Ind. Indiana University is taking a message to prevent sexual assault to an unusual place—men’s restrooms. Members of Raising Awareness of Interactions in Sexual Encounters, or RAISE, have placed 600 red drain guards in urinals in Indiana dorm rooms with a message urging students to stop sexual assault.

(Sex Assault Message Hits Urinals, CBS)

Doing that will give some drunk guy pause, he will probably see it and then think, "Huh, well I was going to try to take advantage of the girl I'm with...but now, now this message that I'm peeing on right now, it's really makin' me think man!"

I've seen these sorts of messages in the same place saying don't do drugs. It seems to me it would be more effective if the urinal was hooked into a drug testing system that would lock the bathroom doors and call the police if it went off. That would be something. The don't do drugs message changes color, an alarm goes off and then, "Hey, what the...?!"

But I shouldn't give the ones who want to keep us all safely safe any ideas.

This is probably a better idea, as far as sexual assault:

A controversial device, which its inventor claims clamps itself to a rapist's penis forcing him to seek medical treatment and be revealed to the police, will be launched by a South African woman on Wednesday.

The "Rapex" device is inserted into the vagina by a woman who feels she is at risk of rape, and if she is attacked, small burr-like teeth will attach themselves... explained inventor Sonette Ehlers.

...it is only possible to remove the device by surgery, Ehlers said ahead of a launch and demonstration at Kleinmond near Cape Town.

(IoL)

Alright, I'll end this post now before it gets any worse.

Good and Evil

It's Sunday, so a little theology. Although I am no biblical theologian, hmmm.

Evil seems to want to posses, wants to get inside and be ingested, wants to merge into, eat up, rule over, etc.

"Eat me and let my form of knowledge all inside you in this moment, to merge into you, posses you..." As opposed to, "Eat me and do this in rememberance of me, as me. I do this for you, as you. Trust me in very small ways and you will come to love me for who I am too."

Good seems to want to give as in the gift of grace, wants self-government to be learned, is the Way out of being possesed by Evil, is based on marriage of complementary beings instead of merging all types of being together, etc.

Perhaps both the Prince of this world and the Prince of peace are communicating that to come to be a part of them they have to be symbolically eaten as an act of will. Perhaps one should be careful of the will, as it guides what will be done.

Is this theology? Hmmm...

Evolutionism and Proto-Nazism...

This is a re-write of a comment on uncommon dissent.

I don't have Fox News but apparently the common sense populist fellow there who sometimes doesn't quite seem to know what he's talking about was discussing Darwinism. One of his common sense intuitions may be correct:

Well, I think it’s more than that. I think this is a concerted effort in a fascist way to punish…

(Fox News (Emphasis added))

It's interesting that he should say that. Some history on the fascist way:

The scholars whom we shall quote in such impressive numbers, like those others who were instrumental in any other part of the German pre-war and war efforts, were to a large extent people of long and high standing, university professors and academy members, some of them world famous, authors with familiar names and guest lecturers abroad...
If the products of their research work, even apart from their rude tone, strike us as unconvincing and hollow, this weakness is due not to inferior training but to the mendacity inherent in any scholarship that overlooks or openly repudiates all moral and spiritual values and, by standing order, knows exactly its ultimate conclusions well in advance.

(Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in
Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People
By Max Weinreich
(New York:The Yiddish Scientific Institute, 1946) :7) (Emphasis added)



Some fellows with the urge to merge want to try to engage in "biological thinking" rather than thinking through biology.

E.g.,

Our whole cultural life for decades has been more or less under the influence of biological thinking, as it was begun particularly around the middle of the last century, by the teachings of Darwin...

(Ib. :33)

Since it is weak, the “Jewish influence” must be quarantined and opposing views must be censored somehow and so on.

E.g.,

...in Darwin's Dangerous Idea Daniel Dennett views religious believers who dissuade their children from believing Darwinian evolution as such a threat to the social order that they need to be caged in zoos or quarantined (both metaphors are his).

(Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing
Edited by William Dembski, Introduction)

A similar sentiment:

"When an opponent declares, 'I will not come over to your side...I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already...What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.' And on May 1, 1937, he declared, "This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing." It was not an idle boast; that was precisely what was happening.

(The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
By William L. Shirer. (Simon and Schuster) 1990 :249)



As to the notion that religious parents be quarantined, isn't that what State schools combined with the increasing oligarchic tendencies of the Judiciary do already? Such a notion is not idle talk or purely metaphoric. It is a goal that proto-Nazis have a history of working towards. Yet the “biological thinkers” seem to have no idea what they are writing about as textual degenerates. It’s more of a feeling as in the urge to merge, so they do not deal with their own texts as if they can be reduced to pseudo-scientific notions about their own "biology."

Biological thinking in Nazism:

“And they were all doctors like me, who tried to think biologically, biology as the foundation of medical thought. . . . We didn’t want politics—we were critical of politics—but [concerned} with the way human beings really are—not just an idea or philosophy.”

National Socialism as Applied Biology

The nation would now be run according to what Johann S. and his cohorts considered biological truth, “the way human beings really are.” That is why he had a genuine “eureka” experience—a sense of “That’s exactly it!”—when he heard Rudolf Hess declare National Socialism to be “nothing but applied biology” (see page 31). Dr. S. felt himself merged with not only Hess (he told me, with some excitement, “I was standing no more than ten meters from him at the time!”) but with the Führer himself... S. quickly joined the Party and devoted himself to the realization of that biological claim.

He pointed out proudly that these early SA doctors formed the nucleus of the National Socialist German Physicians’ League (Nationalsozialistischer DeutscherArztebund), the doctors who, as he put it, “were the first intellectuals to have complete confidence . . . in National Socialism to march in the streets”—in effect, to put their bodies on the line.

(The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the
Psychology of Genocide
By Robert Jay Lifton :129) (Emphasis added)


E.g., modern proto-Nazism:

I say, screw the polite words and careful rhetoric. It’s time for scientists to break out the steel-toed boots and brass knuckles, and get out there and hammer on the lunatics and idiots. If you don’t care enough for the truth to fight for it, then get out of the way.

-–PZ Myers/Paul Myers

Translation: “Let me at them! Why, I just put my smarty pants on and I’m feeling a bit scientific now. It may seem that I like Mommy Nature a bit too much but I'm not effeminate, I'm really not!”

Lifton notes that "Professionals and intellectuals have additional susceptibilities [to proto-Nazism] as an antidote to isolation and weakness...as a denial of effeteness..." and that scientists "...may do [evil] things with the conviction that they are 'in accord with the natural history and biology of man,' and that one is acting as healer and savior." (Ib. :491)

I think that Karl Kraus’s answer was best. Satire is also the most fun. To have fun, you have to make fun. You have to make something to have something, which makes a lot of sense if you have the sense to think about it.

Telic Thoughts had fun with proto-Nazi metaphors:

As for the brass knuckles and hammers, those must go. Instead...
“I say, their pastries have a bad taste. It’s time for scientists to break out the aprons and mixing bowels, and get out there with a better cake.”

Or what about drawing from metaphors of knitting and weaving?

“I say, their sweaters have holes. It’s time for scientists to break out their knitting needles and multi-colored yarn and knit something that is much more pleasing to the eye.”

Good comment...

No time to write tonight, a good comment on "Philosophical materialists [who] have the preternatural urge to inject their religion into science..." is here.

Perhaps that urge is similar to their urge to merge.

The "God of the gaps"

That is an old canard typical to those with the urge to merge. It is symbolic of the fact that they want to fill every gap instead of looking at gaps and separations for what they are empirically. The simple fact is, sometimes there are gaps and separations. Just as one cannot deny the existence of self-evident truths and circles to avoid the logician's condemnation about circular reasoning one cannot deny gaps just to suit those with the urge to merge.

The typical reaction of a materialist to a gap in empirical or physical knowledge opening an opportunity for faith is that any mists of mysticism or singularities can then be filled with anything at all because all faith is at the same epistemic level, so enter Santa, pink unicorns, etc. That's because materialists are mental retards that do not realize that gaps are not necessarily so empty of meaning that they can be filled with anything at all, although when dealing with a child or childish half-wits, bringing in Santa, Tooth Fairies and so on might actually be appropriate.

One cannot say anything about the transphysical or the spiritual, there can be patterns to gaps that contain meaning, as sure as there can be patterns to which neurons fire over synaptic gaps to allow you to think through your brain right now. Interesting to note that most of the time you actually aren't intervening in most of your physical brain events, you just go on breathing and so on. Yet you could intervene in things that you are for the most part sovereign over, if you willed it so. Typically your will can be thought in your own brain thanks to being created in the pattern of a Being who can also intervene in what He is sovereign over, even if it was never His will to intervene, the fact of ultimate sovereignty would remain.

Newman describes the role of a traditional God in terms of providence, or the laws that bring about an orderly universe, and intervention, in which the Creator infuses new and special levels of order, whether in the creation of life or in the individual human being and human consciousness. He agrees that the notion of an intervening God raises again the “God of the gaps” problem, but insists there are gaps nevertheless.

You’ve either got a God of the gaps or a natural law of the gaps. So you look at what kind of gaps they are. Some gaps are pretty large. In those cases, when you have to theorize billions or trillions of universes for natural law to fill those gaps, then I begin to suspect that we’re really looking at evidence of some kind of intervention.

(By Design: Science and the Search for God
By Larry Witham :52)



Although it seems that God has left enough evidence that one only needs a small mustard seed of faith to have the eyes to see it, those that are blind will believe in millions of universes and so on as there are none so blind as those who will not see.

Related posts:
(The supposed argument from ignorance...)

On treating the inanimate as if it is animate and the inanimate as if it is not.

It is a Leftist tendency to begin to blur basic categories together. Given that, the Left will begin to try to treat inanimate objects as if they are persons and persons as if they are inanimate objects. From guns to animal rights to the way that the Left seeks to treat the poor or addicts as if the only issue is one of economics or medical "treatments" the basic confusion and disordered thinking is similar. The essential and primary issues that must be placed first are of philosophy, spirit and will, with therapeutic and nurturing treatments being secondary. It is not as if nurturing is inferior to ethical teaching, yet it is secondary and can become inferior if vanity drives people into a denial that it is secondary.

Social change is in the language first, prisons gradually become Departments of Corrections (as if Walmart could run prisons and correct criminal's lives with therapeutic treatment or perhaps an economic solution) as they cannot be a penitentiary, where a penalty is due and some transphysical notion of "justice" served. In the Socratic dialogue the culture has come to be on the side that argues for a lack of justice in any essential, transcendent sense. Yet we still have to get along somehow, so subjective therapy and medicalization will have to do. Besides, that's probably scientific, which always leads to safety and nurture.

Bad: Obsolete; superseded by insane, mentally ill, sick.
Good: Obsolete; superseded by sane, mentally healthy, healthy
Ethics: Obsolete; superseded by the diagnosis and treatment of disease.
....
The therapeutic ethic: convict and punish the innocent, and call it mental hospitalization; diagnose and excuse the guilty, and call it the insanity defense.

(The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary
By Thomas Szasz :57)


Despite the tendency to venerate science there may never be a way to implement the effete Leftist dream of a Scientific State ruled by Mother Nature for the benefit of all. Perhaps one can model the impact of one pebble on a pond as its effect ripples out, yet the issues involved are more like measuring the impact of many pebbles of different sizes being dropped at different rates and all the ripples constantly changing each other. Change and flux is a part of Nature, in seven years you will not have the same body given the amount of cells dying and being replaced in your physical body right now. Yet here "you" are, and you may feel like pretty much the same person you were seven years ago. Maybe that is because you are in fact a person, with a mind and will capable of causing small ripples of cause and effect in Nature.

The Leftist mind does not seem to grasp that point. The other day I was answering a Leftist mind going into its typical murmurings about science and a littany of problems. And it is always a littany! This one was something like, "Leftists go with science all the time, from global warming to abstinence education it's all just scientific or somethin'. Hey, I bet giving teenagers pieces of plastic to keep their sex safely safe is like the theory of gravity too. Saftey first!" Is it scientific? The truly scientific answer may be much more Socratic than the scientism typical to the Left, as I noted to this mind murmuring about science and its littany of problems like abstinence education, there is the issue of condoms and seatbelts. That is because most persons are more like small versions of Aristotle's notion of an unmoved Mover and less like inanimate objects than the Left typically feels, so the primary issue for young people is ethical and not a piece of plastic.

But leave it to the Left to feeel otherwise in its touchy feely feelings. Most of their minds are probably smothered by now.