Discussion of transgender issues on twitter 5/23-24/16

Anybody trying to read this: I am still editing it.  It's not finished

I had a long twitter conversation with some folks about trans issues.

This has been bouncing around a lot in my head.  First, having my ex and my eldest child be trans makes it very personal, but also the format of this discussion being on twitter was confusing and alienating.  Twitter is not a great place to discuss issues that take more than a few interchanges. Blogs are more sophisticated.  So I wanted to add some more information.

Safety issues

One issue had to do with the safety of restrooms.  

Some people participating and reading seemed to be unaware that transgender people are being attacked.  I tweeted a link to wikipedia where someone is keeping a list of trans people who have been attacked for being trans.   wikipedia list of trans people being attacked  Plus there was a huffington post article Huffington Post article about trans people being attacked  Clearly trans people are being attacked.

Then there was the issue of women being attacked, specifically, at Target.  Here's some information about that. women attacked at Target . I pointed out that none of the attackers were alleged to be trans.  

My ex told me that he goes to some event called Transgender Day of Remembrance about trans people who have been killed for being trans.  This is obviously one of those high drama events about tragic loss of people.

On the other hand, in retrospect, I do have to concede that the number of cis women who are attacked for being women dwarfs the number of trans people who are being attacked for being trans.

Detransitioning

There was an assertion that most trans people regret their decision, and specifically that Caitlin Jenner regretted her decision.  With respect to Caitlin, she has most emphatically denied that she regrets transitioning.  Caitlyn Jenner denies sex change regret 

I have certainly heard trans people denying that most regret it 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brynn-tannehill/myths-about-transition-regrets_b_6160626.html

Pretending

This person I was talking to had the impression that "trans" people are "pretending" to be the other gender. This word is wrong. I would accept words like "obsessed" or "delusional," but not "pretending."  "Pretending" implies that people know that what they are doing is fake.  That is not the case with trans people.  That is the case with many cross dressers.  Many cross dressers know they are pretending to be of the other gender.  Trans people believe they are of the other gender and are in the wrong body.

Biblical interpretation

I'm not sure why I care about this. I'm not a fundamentalist.  I don't believe that the Bible is literally true. I did grow up in Christian churches, though, so I do care what the Bible says.  A lot of fundamentalists don't seem to recognize that most Christians are *not* fundamentalists.  They seem to think that fundamentalism is the only way.

The following instances of scripture were cited to me.  

Deut 22:5 Gal 3:28 Deut 23:1 Mat 6:25 Ro 1:24-32

Let's just look at these passages in more detail.

Deut 22:5

5 A woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this.

Of course, a transwoman does not think she is a man, so her desire to wear women's clothing, in her mind, would not violate this provision.

But, even putting that aside, this passage is part of the Torah, the firs five books of the Bible.  For Jews, this part of the Bible is particularly important, and is to be paid the utmost attention to.

Most Christians, however, while enjoying reading the Torah, typically do not obey many of its provisions.  During this interchange of tweets, I gave the example of eating pork, which most Christians do, even though the Torah prohibits it.  Some Christians even take the position that the New Testament supercedes the Torah, despite Jesus having said that he would not take on jot or tittle from the law.

Still, I have to be a bit skeptical of a person who may eat pork, swear oaths on the Bible, &c citing the Torah to me, when they don't observe other provisions of it.

It's also ironic to me, because conservatives were asserting, when Hillary Clinton was running against Rudy Giuliani for NY State Senate, that he was more conservative than she and that she was a dangerous liberal.  Then we saw photos of him dancing on stage in a chorus line in drag.  I always wondered what all those conservative Republicans thought, when they were asserting that he was more conservative.

Gal 3:28

28 There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

I find it mysterious that this passage would be cited as prohibiting people from doing gender reassignment.  This seems to be a statement of acceptance, not a statement of prohibition.  If anything, I would cite this as an argument for why it would be ok, and not make a difference if one was to transition, since everyone is one anyway.

Mat 6:25

25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?

This statement seems to be about trusting God and not worrying about whether will have food, drink, or clothing.  I fail to see how this could be interpreted as relating to the appropriateness of transitioning.

Ro 1:24-32

24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

28 Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. 29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. 32 Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

I see this passage as relating to gay people -- not that I agree with it -- but it does not seem to be dealing with trans people.  I don't think my ex or my son is having sex with anyone, actually.  Caitlin has said she is asexual.

In any case, I don't think that a Christian need worry about whether these passages are prohibiting people from changing gender -- not that the person who cited them to me was willing to consider that her interpretation might have been wrong.

First, some screen shots of the discussion.  It's hard to capture the sequence in a 3 way twitter conversation, because people are writing responses sometimes not seeing that other responses have already occurred. If you open a tweet, you can see what conversation it is part of, but sometimes several tweets share the same history.  

This has been bouncing around a lot in my head.  First, having my ex and my eldest child be trans makes it very personal, but also the format of this discussion being on twitter was confusing and alienating.  Twitter is not a great place to discuss issues that take more than a few interchanges.  Blogs are more sophisticated.

Safety issues

One issue had to do with the safety of restrooms.  

Some people participating and reading seemed to be unaware that transgender people are being attacked.  I tweeted a link to wikipedia where someone is keeping a list of trans people who have been attacked for being trans.   https://t.co/17SSil5ouA  Plus there was a huffington post article https://t.co/4tfLYvBTPq  Clearly trans people are being attacked.

Then there was the issue of women being attacked, specifically, at Target.  Here's some information about that. https://t.co/FOeuRSF0MK . I pointed out that none of the attackers were alleged to be trans.  

My ex told me that he goes to some event called Transgender Day of Remembrance about trans people who have been killed for being trans.  This is obviously one of those high drama events about tragic loss of people.

On the other hand, in retrospect, I do have to concede that the number of cis women who are attacked for being women dwarfs the number of trans people who are being attacked for being trans.

Detransitioning

There was an assertion that most trans people regret their decision, and specifically that Caitlin Jenner regretted her decision.  With respect to Caitlin, she has most emphatically denied that she regrets transitioning.  https://t.co/dwfyLZOQIy 

I have certainly heard trans people denying that most regret it 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brynn-tannehill/myths-about-transition-regrets_b_6160626.html

Biblical interpretation

I'm not sure why I care about this. I'm not a fundamentalist.  I don't believe that the Bible is literally true. I did grow up in Christian churches, though, so I do care what the Bible says.  A lot of fundamentalists don't seem to recognize that most Christians are *not* fundamentalists.  They seem to think that fundamentalism is the only way.

The following instances of scripture were cited to me.  

Deut 22:5 Gal 3:28 Deut 23:1 Mat 6:25 Ro 1:24-32

Let's just look at these passages in more detail.

Deut 22:5

5 A woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this.

Of course, a transwoman does not think she is a man, so her desire to wear women's clothing, in her mind, would not violate this provision.

But, even putting that aside, this passage is part of the Torah, the firs five books of the Bible.  For Jews, this part of the Bible is particularly important, and is to be paid the utmost attention to.

Most Christians, however, while enjoying reading the Torah, typically do not obey many of its provisions.  During this interchange of tweets, I gave the example of eating pork, which most Christians do, even though the Torah prohibits it.  Some Christians even take the position that the New Testament supercedes the Torah, despite Jesus having said that he would not take on jot or tittle from the law.

Still, I have to be a bit skeptical of a person who may eat pork, swear oaths on the Bible, &c citing the Torah to me.

Gal 3:28

28 There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

I find it mysterious that this passage would be cited as prohibiting people from doing gender reassignment.  This seems to be a statement of acceptance, not a statement of prohibition.  If anything, I would cite this as an argument for why it would be ok, and not make a difference if one was to transition, since everyone is one anyway.

Mat 6:25

25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?

This statement seems to be about trusting God and not worrying about whether will have food, drink, or clothing.  I fail to see how this could be interpreted as relating to the appropriateness of transitioning.

Ro 1:24-32

24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

28 Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. 29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. 32 Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

I see this passage as relating to gay people -- not that I agree with it -- but it does not seem to be dealing with trans people.  I don't think my ex or my son is having sex with anyone, actually.  Caitlin has said she is asexual.

In any case, I don't think that a Christian need worry about whether these passages are prohibiting people from changing gender -- not that the person who cited them to me was willing to consider that her interpretation might have been wrong.

Reply to Onion Article

I tweeted a link to this article at the Onion God clarification.

I wanted to put a comment after the letter, but, so far as I can see, you can't comment on an Onion article.  That's a bit surprising, but I suppose they get too many crazies.

Anyway, I do like this article.  It does mostly reflect the way I see God.

The Onion is uniquely situated to issue this type of article, without qualifying it with something like "I believe God wants ...."  They can just baldly assert that "He" actually had a press conference.

I'm pretty sure they would, if necessary, issue another article where "He" makes some qualifying statement about "his" gender.   I personally find the assertion that God has gender baffling.  Surely God: can appear as whatever God chooses;  does not always choose to appear human and with gender; and does not have fixed divine genitalia floating out somewhere in outer space?

There is just one point that I want to address here and that has to do with identifying elements of scripture as being due to human error.

I prefer the interpretation which Baha'ullah gave.  He said that scripture was issued with a message to people in a particular time and place.  Taking it out of context in another time and place can yield results that were not intended at the time.

Thus, in particular, with respect to the teachings against same sex relationships in the Bible, I believe that they were intended to address marital infidelity.  The "do not lie down with a man as with a woman," implies that this person is doing both.  I don't think, at the time, people were really thinking about people who might want to marry someone of the same sex.  I doubt that occurred to anyone, so people saw no need to address that issue.

Spelling reform

Now here is a question, which I think is totally inadequately discussed

I am interested in spelling reform.  Studies show that countries, such as Italy, which have had spelling reform, have much lower rates of dyslexia -- maybe even NO dyslexia.  Currently incredible numbers of person hours are spent teaching children spelling.  It takes years to get kids to spell properly and even then it is unlikely that most of them are always successful.  If we have spelling reform, all those hours could be spent with these kids actually reading, rather than learning irregular spelling.

How do you feel about spelling reform?

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Aside: I can't help but wonder, if the people who were spending all these hours teaching irregular spellings to small children were men, wouldn't we have had spelling reform a long time ago?

Trying to organize information about my Quixotic Quest

My quixotic quest for the world anthem was inspired by learning about Michael Jackson’s ideas on this topic.

Michael Jackson believed that if we could achieve the whole world singing an anthem together, it might make war more difficult.  This was based on watching his audiences unite in singing with him when he was on stage — and seeing racial/ethnic/religious/gender differences dissolve in those audiences when people sang and danced together.

Michael Jackson wrote or co-wrote at least three songs focusing on uniting the world: “Cry,” “Heal the World,” and “We are the World.”   Here is a list of some videos showing people singing these songs

Michael Jackson's "Cry" video

Kris Philips singing Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie's Song "We are the World"

Connie Talbot singing MIchael Jackson's song "Heal the World"

I’ve been writing a lot about this quest under another pseudonym.  Here is a list of blogs that focus on the quixotic quest.  A lot of these blogs have been inspired by my interest in Pop Music, and the incredible power that this music has to unite fans all over the world.

https://skysong263.blogspot.com/2020/01/thehuofficial-and-quixoticquest.html
2019 allegations against mj
Miss Saigon and the Quixotic Quest
Wonder Woman and the Quixotic Quest
Latest on the Quixotic Quest cc @joshgroban
World Hip-Hop Dance Competition and the Quixotic Quest
Progress on the Quixotic Quest

Judith Hill appearing with Josh

Open letter to Stevie Wonder

Singing for World Peace

Letter to Josh Groban of October 2010

A bit of Autobiography

The Mayan Apocalypse and the Quixotic Quest
Questions for the Republican Political Debate

Here are some blogs that mention the quest as an aside

Does one buy or listen to MJ's works now?
Elton John at Madison Square Garden

Afterthoughts about Blogs about Josh

Eric Whitacre at Alice Tully Hall March 2013
Josh Groban at the Beacon Theater 9/29/15

I recognize that many people now detest Michael Jackson because of the TV special with allegations that he molested children. I don't know whether he did or he didn't, but his observations of the unifying effect of music, dance, and children remain very valid.  You could say many things about him, but no one could dispute that he knew his audience.

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Addendum 7/1/15

There was a great video with an interview between Ethan Bortnick and David Foster about the power of music.  In this video David Foster posited that music brought the Berlin Wall down.  I had an embedded youtube video of this interview here, but the link is broken now, so I had to delete it.

This interview was particularly poignant to me, because I was an exchange student in the USSR in Leningrad in the summer of 1978.  That summer there was a protest in Leningrad when a concert by a western rock band was cancelled.  

The Americans in my program were suddenly given surprise tickets to the Kirov Ballet that evening, which were normally never available, so we wouldn't be out on the street when the protest, which was anticipated, occurred.  When we came out, we could see water on the streets in the area of the protest, where the government had opened up fire hoses on the protestors.

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Addendum 1/3/16

The anthem of the European Union is Beethoven's "Ode to Joy."  This seems like another candidate for World Anthem. I had another great embedded youtube video here, showing a flashmob relating to this song.  Unfortunately, the link is now broken.  BTW singing/dancing flashmobs were inspired by people impressed with the unity message of Michael Jackson.

*****

Addendum 7/5/18

This video shows again the power of music and dance in international communication

Addendum 11/9/18

They're still singing "We Are the World" in China! 

Addendum 2/16/19

I've been trying to draw Josh Groban's attention to my #QuixoticQuest for a while. I don't think he accepts this concept.  However, he does have a related concept, about the unifying effect of music -- see, e.g. this recording, where, near the end he talks about Bridge Over Troubled Water

https://chirb.it/OwbcHP

Sometimes, I think that YouTube is really the realization of Michael Jackson's dreams for singing around the world -- as people all over the world are listening to each other sing and singing the same songs.

Addendum 8/25/19

Here's another article about the political effect of music

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/how-k-pop-is-tempting-young-north-koreans-to-cross-the-line/2019/08/19/0f984654-839f-11e9-b585-e36b16a531aa_story.html

This article reminds me of the interview between David Foster & Ethan Bortnick that I referred to above, but which seems to have been deleted from YouTube.

*******

Addendum Feb 2025

I recently found out that Carol Burnett had a song on this topic, maybe before MJ came up with it.  She wrote "If I could write a song." 

Ramblings with Ruslan Sirota on Consciousness, the provability of morality, the nature of truth subjective/objective

I don't believe this.  I was on and off twitter most of the day debating philosophy with Ruslan Sirota.  I actually never checked Josh's Groban's timeline all day, even tho I was on and off twitter.  This is fairly shocking for me.

It was fast and furious at times tho.  hard to reconstruct.

This is more like a scrap book than like a blog

Twitlongers:

@ruslanpiano @elizzzibeth  Ruslan's song so wonderfully describes the universe as "The big dreamer's jar."  I would defy you to prove that you are not merely a character in God's dream or a hallucinating psychotic in an asylum. Any proof that you would offer would necessarily depend on your faith on your own perceptions. I'm sorry I did not yet get a chance to read the wikipedia article that Ruslan sent a link to, but if I go based on the TED talk, that was not at all rigorously reasoned. It was an emotional appeal to faith, faith in a certain world view.  I'm not going to say that that world view is unattractive to me, but it has a certain arrogance to it, blinders to the world views of others.

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@ruslanpiano I am not a neuroscientist, but I have been reading the results of neuroscientific research. As far as I can understand based on popularized articles, neuroscientists are concluding that the conscious mind is a delusional egomaniac. Our behavior is governed by subconscious processes. The conscious mind creates post hoc rationalizations.  

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@ruslanpiano My lack of faith in my own perceptions comes from long experience of discovering how wrong I've often been. I also am intrigued by the celebrated case of the unabomber, who hit the US news at a time when perhaps you were not here. This was a man with an IQ of 170, graduate of our finest educational institutions bachelor's degree from Harvard, PhD from the University of Michigan, assistant professor of mathematics at UC Berkeley-- yet, he choose to go off into a tiny cabin in the mountains and send hand crafted letter bombs to ideosyncratically selected people, in the hopes if effecting social change.

/par When he was brought to trial, the defense and prosecution attorneys agreed that he was a paranoid schizophrenic. He asked to be allowed to defend himself, because he feared being stigmatized by an insanity plea. The judge considered him too insane to defend himself and refused his request too dismiss his attorney. 

/par I am often bemused by this example: a man so brilliant. How, though, do we conclude that he is insane?  We reach this conclusion by consensus. There is no proof that he us insane and we are sane, only the gut feeling of most people meeting him and considering his acts. How sane is anyone?

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@ruslanpiano It is interesting that you should mention Occam's razor. I was a physics major. One of the reasons I elected not to pursue physics as a career was that very principle. It seemed to me that physics theories were becoming ever more elaborate and complex. Every time a theory was seemingly established, some fact would be uncovered that would render it incomplete. This tendency of physics to become ever more complex, to require more and more study to seemed to me to violate Occam's razor, to make the likelihood of God greater.

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@ruslanpiano Now you're taking me back to the first time I did natural childbirth, at home, with no possibility of pain killers. When things got dicey, I did ask for pain relief. Fortunately, I had put myself in that situation where none was available.

But the midwife said to me that I was impeding my labor, that I must say yes to the pain, that the pain was good, that the pain brought the child. So I sat there and said "Yes, yes, yes..." Hardest thing I ever did.

Anyway, physical pain alone is not a bad thing. Not being able to experience physical pain is actually a fairly serious disorder. There are several medical conditions that cause this. Lack of pain sensation results in severe damage to the body, because people do not realize they are getting hurt.

So pain is not objectively bad in and of itself.

(Happy I'm back on my desktop, where I can put paragraph formatting on twitlonger)

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Addendum 10/4/13

Unfortunately, this conversation, which I thought was a fun conversation, apparently was not so fun for Ruslan.  He got upset after a while with what he perceived as moral relativism from me, and no sense of right and wrong.  I was sad that he got upset.  Later, he deleted a lot of tweets to me, so I can't put them up here.  It was late at night.  He must have thought the better of it in the morning.  Anyway, I did post one more tweet the next day, to answer what he was saying, so I'm going to add it here.  

I inserted paragraph breaks, because I could not do that on twitlonger.  There is some weird incompatibility between my Android phone and twitlonger.  If I try to type in to twitlonger, the cursor jumps all over the place, making it impossible to enter coherent text.  If I paste from a prepared document, the paragraph breaks are lost and I get this weird narrow column.  I don't have this problem with twitlonger from the desktop.

Anyway, this was my response to some of his comments.

@ruslanpiano I finally went to bed last night after 4 a.m., with some of your questions still unanswered. 

It seemed to me that you were concocting absurdly oversimplified examples, in an attempt to corner me into agreeing to violence in an unknown situation. I am a religious pacifist. I will not absolutely say that I would never be violent, but I will not agree in advance to be violent. You accuse me, in an angry sounding way of being a relativist. I am not a complete relativist at all. I'm not sure where you got that idea. I am somewhat relativist, and certainly always try to understand and empathize with others' points of view. 

/par (back on my cell phone, where somehow paragraph structure disappears, when pasting to twitlonger) You also attempt to convince me that I am causing someone to suffer, by not agreeing to be cornered into your oversimplified example. No. No one is suffering due to my failing to accede to your hypothetical. The hypothetical is not real. 

/par This argument did not come for me from a point of saying that I have no moral values. The point was that my moral values come from faith, not from science. Certainly, the idea of rushing to act, with an oversimplified world view, and lack of attempt to understand the points of view of others, is highly repugnant to my moral values, because I do have moral values. 

/par I understood the TED thing to be an attempt at a science of moral values. It was so labeled. This is what I was disagreeing with, not all individual positions that the speaker adopted. I was arguing that people's beliefs come from what is emotionally attractive to them, and cannot be justified scientifically. Indeed, it seems to me that when you felt unable to prove your point of view, you got very emotional indeed, essentially proving my point. 

/par It also seems to me that your certainty that you are right leads inexorably to a controlling world view that is dangerous, and in fact likely to lead to maximal suffering, rather than minimal suffering.

Ramblings about ḥijāb, honor killings, sharia law, triage, and health care during tweets with Ruslan Sirota

This blog is to memorialize some twitlongers that I sent to Ruslan Sirota.

Normally I have a different twitter ID that I use for politics, when that politics does not relate to Josh Groban or pop music, but here we have a mixed situation, where I was talking to Ruslan, who is a musician for Josh, and who is so kind as to actually dialog with fans.

This conversation began with a discussion of sharia law and the use of traditional veils in Muslim countries.  We were, as I understood it, discussing first whether women in Muslim countries really want to wear the veil or not.  Then we got into the topic of honor killings, where men kill female family members who have been raped.  Then I got into the general topic of triage, difficulties in making moral decisions about who lives and who dies.

Also, Ruslan sent me this link to a YouTube video,

http://t.co/hxKLxoHmcH

I want to emphasize here that I do not believe in forcing women to wear veils, to get married, or in honor killings.  What I was trying to offer was some food for thought that might help us understand why people behave the way they do, rather than having a knee jerk negative reaction.

Probably these twitlongers are too disorganized and will give people wrong impressions of my opinions, but maybe they will be interesting.

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Twitlonger #1

I certainly do not agree with honor killings. On the other hand, I do believe that we are like goslings. 

Goslings, when they hatch from their shells, imprint on the first thing that moves. If that thing is their mother, they are in luck. She will teach them how to take care of themselves and will protect them. If that first thing is something else, they are permanently screwed.

Similarly, I believe we imprint on the first person we have sex with. Afterwards, we lose that ability to imprint. The more people we have sex with, the less our ability to imprint becomes. This has to do with internal hormones in the body, like occitocin.

People think that by having sex with more and more people they will eventually find the "right" person. No. They will become less able to bond with anyone. 

In some real sense, a girl who has been raped will never be quite right psychologically. I do not favor murdering her for that reason, but I can see where a culture decides that she will never really be able to function in their culture.

I do think that, ultimately, the public discussion of abuse of women will lessen this abuse. We see women in these countries, increasingly, inspired by public discussion, standing up for themselves and demanding change. I am very inspired by that.

Still, there are reasons for some of this stuff that we fail to understand. And we should not assume that women dress the way they dress only because they are forced to do so.

I believe that the Muslim world is going through a Puritan period. I am half WASP and half Jewish. My mom's ancestry was WASP, so I am conscious of British history. The Puritan period was a fearsome one, back then, and certainly not one that I would want to revisit. 

Still we should note that extreme measures to cover the body and become more modest prevailed in Europe during the mini-Ice Age that occurred during the Renaissance and early modern periods. Again, climate caused dress, that was later rationalized as religion.


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Twitlonger #2

Still listening to this guy, who apparently does not understand that, in 120 degree Fahrenheit heat, a person is cooler covered head to toe and well insulated than she would be in skimpier clothing. Ignorance.

Also the skin gets damaged by exposure to the sun in the desert, resulting in premature aging, which offends women's' vanity.

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Twitlonger #3

Unfortunately, you will see that I have diarrhea of the keyboard. Once I start writing, I keep thinking of more and more stuff.

I was reminded after that last post -- which unfortunately went up twice, so I deleted the second one, which I hope was not confusing -- of something I heard about Native American cultures. 

There were some where if a woman delivered a child at some time other than between March and June, she would be abandoned by the tribe and left to die with her child. That was due to the extreme conditions under which they lived, that they felt that they could not risk having to deal with the consequences of a younger baby facing fall and winter weather.

Similarly, there were some that would abandon older people to die, as well, at an age that we might consider fairly young, again because they felt that they just did not have the resources to care for the aged, if they could no longer hunt and follow the tribe properly.

These things seem shocking to us, because we have had more resources to care for people who are sick. But then we are not hunter, gatherer, nomads, living in a harsh wilderness. 

While I don't like hearing about these historical practices of some Native American tribes, I cannot say that they were evil for doing these things. They did the best they could.

Perhaps, had there been public discussion back then, as there is now, things might have changed.

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Twitlonger #4

Oh, now you've really got me going. 

I'm on to another concern I have, regarding health care in this country. 

We are making a decision to fund insurance for everyone for unlimited funds to maintain people alive in the face of extreme health conditions.

I have a friend who was treated for leukemia a few years ago. He had health insurance. His insurance paid for his treatment to the tune of well over one million dollars.

How do we really think we can afford this for everyone, when in fact not everyone has enough food? Is this not really a denial of our own mortality? A failure to accept that it is God's will that all people should eventually die?

Sometimes we go to far, I think, in the direction of never making hard decisions in life.

I feel this is related to the examples I gave before about the Native Americans, who left some people out to die, and also the decision in some cultures that a woman whose ability to bond with her husband has been damaged cannot be sustained in the culture.

I'm not saying what is right and wrong here, for sure, just that there are hard decisions that get made.

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Twitlonger #5

Oh. One more example. In my county, we have too many deer. Occasionally, one will become tame and start taking food from the hands of people going by. If the county animal control officer learns that a deer has become tame like this, the county will send someone out to shoot that deer. This offends me, but I guess they have some scientific reason why they think it's necessary. Another example of triage.

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Twitlonger #6

Also, I do totally believe that this thing about covering up women in Islamic countries is a head game. If guys believe that they will lose control sexually at the sight of a woman's body, then that's exactly what will happen.  On the other hand, in our culture, where we're getting used to seeing less and less clothing on people, then we have to keep escalating what we look at to get the same effect. Whereas, once we looked at Marilyn Monroe standing on an air vent, with her skirt blowing up, now we have to watch Lady Gaga to get the same effect. I wonder whether men in Islamic countries have less erectile dysfunction, because they're psyched into believing that it takes so little to drive them mad.

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Tweets while watching the youtube video (remember tweets are read bottom up)

Some earlier tweets to Ruslan on this topic