Discussions of cargo cults usually begin with a series of movements that occurred in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The earliest recorded cargo cult was the Tuka Movement that began in Fiji in 1885. Cargo cults occurred periodically in many parts of the island of New Guinea, including the Taro Cult in northern Papua New Guinea and the Vailala Madness that arose in 1919 and was documented by F. E. Williams, one of the first anthropologists to conduct fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. Less dramatic cargo cults have appeared in western New Guinea as well, including the Asmat and Dani areas.

The most widely known period of cargo cult activity, however, was in the years during and after World War II. First, the Japanese arrived with a great deal of unknown equipment, and later, Allied forces also used the islands in the same way. The vast amounts of war materiel that were airdropped onto these islands during the Pacific campaign between the Allies and the Empire of Japan necessarily meant drastic changes to the lifestyle of the islanders, many of whom had never seen Westerners or Easterners before. Manufactured clothing, medicine, canned food, tents, weapons, and other useful goods arrived in vast quantities to equip soldiers. Some of it was shared with the islanders who were their guides and hosts. With the end of the war, the airbases were abandoned, and cargo was no longer dropped.

In attempts to get cargo to fall by parachute or land in planes or ships again, islanders imitated the same practices they had seen the soldiers, sailors, and airmen use. They carved headphones from wood and wore them while sitting in fabricated control towers. They waved the landing signals while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and torches to light up runways and lighthouses. The cult members thought that the foreigners had some special connection to the deities and ancestors of the natives, who were the only beings powerful enough to produce such riches.

So, a conversation I had with Mary, and something beattiedee  posted got me thinking about this. Happiness. How you get it, how you don't get it.

There are two approaches, I think.

1. Do stuff until you find something that makes you happy. Do more of that. Repeat until you're happy enough.

This has advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantage is you sometimes have to do a lot of stuff to find out what makes you happy. It can seem aimless and weird, and externally it looks simply like hedonism, but it's not.  The advantage is you usually end up happy, unless there's something wrong with you, or you deeply need the approval of other people, or society at large (which arguably means there's something wrong with you).

2. Go by the manual. Work out what has made other people happy, and then do what they did.

There are two disadvantages to this approach. First, you're not other people. Second, there's a good chance they were lying. People don't like to admit that they are unhappy, as it's seen as failure or weakness.

This latter approach leads to what I like to call the Cargo Cult of Happiness.

People don't really understand where happiness comes from. It's ephemeral and individual and fleeting and strange. Without sounding cliche, if there were an actual formula for happiness, the world would be uniformly happy (as most people would choose to be happy) and uniformly dull (as everyone being happy the same way would be like a mental ward)

The simple fact that you can look around and see this isn't true is all you need to tell you that there is no prescriptive formula.

And people don't like not knowing how to get what they want. If you're in a bad way, it's bad. If you're in a bad way and don't know how to fix it, it's much worse. If there's no light at  the end of the tunnel, the tunnel's a shit place to be. All you can do is go for a panic wank and wait for the end, run over by a train or eaten by rats in your sleep. If you're unhappy, it's twice as hard when you don't know how to get happy. So they cling to talismans and rituals and rabbits feet. A nice car. A nice house. A nice spouse. 2 nice kids. 2 weeks in greece. A nice TV.

Only they compromise. They may not be able to get the spouse that makes them happy, but the list has a spouse on it, so they get the best spouse they can, but they're never satisfied. They settle. They may not be able to afford the perfect house, but a house is on the list, so they get themselves into way too much debt to get a house they can't really afford. They may be a shitty parent and have no real desire to look after someone for the rest of their lives, but they have kids anyway, then sit at home wondering what the fuck happened to their lives.

They painstakingly collect all these things, as best they can, then arrange them in neat order around their lives, then just wait for happiness to arrive like crates parachuting out of a blue sky.

Needless to say, this does not often lead to actual happiness arriving on silken parachutes, and if happiness does arrive, it's often very little to do with your car, or your washing machine, or your DFS sofa. Cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.


Here's a list of what makes me happy.

Nick, Mary, Lol, Selga, Lisa, Jenny, Alison,  Nell, Helen and Beth and their parents, driving in the countryside, glasses that suit me, a really nice tie, dancing in the parking lot with my iPod on, driving a pretty girl in my car with a top down (the car's top, not hers. Not that I'd object), the Pennines, especially the view of Bleak Low Hill coming down the back of Holme Moss.. sitting on a blanket at night at Bolton Abbey watching shooting stars, music in general but at the moment Rural Alberta Advantage, going to gigs, going to the movies, pulling the couch out onto the balcony and using the new projector to project movies on the wall, sitting in a parked car with Lol just listening to tunes and talking shit, playing the ukulele, shiitake and pinapple deep-fried burritos, driving at night, hell.. just driving, a really good joint, dancing in the woods in the rain at Latitude, but really dancing in general, the seaside, having plans to look forward to, especially if those plans involve the seaside.

A decent cocktail

Doing the crossword puzzle.

Good noodles.

Kissing.

Sleeping.



Clearly this is my list and not your list. This list wouldn't be a lot of good to you.

"A "radical rethink" of how the UK produces and consumes its food is needed, Environment Secretary Hilary Benn has warned.

He was speaking at the launch of the government's assessment of the threats to the security of what we eat.

The UK's food supply is fairly secure, but he warned that climate change and population growth could damage this."

I've been whining about this for a while, and finally started putting my money where my mouth is in terms of meat consumption, so it's comforting to see it echoed in the government's talking points memo this week.

"He said last year's sudden jump in the price of food and oil, which most fertilisers are based on, was a "wake-up call".

"We saw last year when the oil price went up and there was a drought in Australia, which had an impact on the price of bread here in the UK, just how interdependent all these things are," he said."

 

Great! You're grasping the obvious! Someone listened to a scientist! I feel valued.

But then..

"He also encouraged British consumers to buy more UK-grown produce"

NO YOU SPECTACULAR DUMBASS. THAT'S HALF THE PROBLEM.

Look. We live, essentially, a country that's half cold, damp swamp, and half cold, damp moorland, with a couple of nice allotments.

Left on it's own, trust me, Scotland would not be a forest of strawberries in midwinter.


You've all been beaten to death with facts about the carbon footprint of your cars, your plane trips, etc etc blah blah, but it's half the picture. Literally. Your carbon footprint from your diet is, on average, twice that of your travel, and a large part of that is inappropriately grown crops. Yeah, we can make the desert bloom (or the swamp), but the cost in fossil fuels is pretty fucking high.

We CAN grow food here, without huge oil input in the form of heating, processing, fertilizer and so on. It's nice food! We have an ideal climate for potatoes and cabbages and beets and  apples and oats and so on.

What we can't grow on an industrial scale is year-round strawberries, peppers, large amounts of unpastured meat, and.. christ.. a whole list of stuff that takes huge oil input to "grow locally" when we could just buy the crap from warmer places and ship it here for a lot less net oil use.

For "buy local" to be any kind of solution, growing local has to have a smaller carbon footprint than growing remote and shipping, which means climate appropriate crops, sensible distribution and processing systems, and.. let's face it.. fewer cows.

Now, it's very well for me to rant, but the truth is, the calculations behind the carbon footprint of food are fiendishly complex. Lamb produced in one place can have a completely different carbon footprint than lamb produced in another place. Did the flock need heated accommodations? Do they graze on pasture most of the year, or do they need fodder? How far does the fodder come? Is the fodder grown and stored organically or does that require fertilizer and mechanized farming? If pastured, is the pasture fertilized? How mechanised are other elements of the farm? How dispersed is the pasturage? How centralized or dispersed is the processing chain? Do they get slaughtered locally or are they trucked hundreds of miles to a big central processing plant?

Or take farmed fish.. are the farmed fish herbivorous or carnivorous? If herbivorous, what's the carbon footprint of the crops used to feed them? If carnivorous, what's the source of the fishmeal and fishoil used.. is it small schooling fish, which are caught in tonnes at a scoop and don't take a roaming fish fleet to catch, or is it waste of something tuna, the fishing fleet for which has a carbon footprint, just for transport, equivalent to the Netherlands.

Anyway, I'm rambling now, but hopefully I've got across how hard the math behind all this is. Simply slapping a "Food Miles" label on something isn't helpful.. it's not even a bandaid, as it can actually lead to a higher carbon footprint, not lower, if you choose stuff that was grown locally but needed year 'round heating to grow.

So I'm encouraged to read that Tesco is putting 5 million quid into doing basic research into how to calculate the entire carbon footprint of their supply chain, with the intent of labelling their food accordingly. Someone needs to pony up, and it's a cheering bit of corporate responsibility on their behalf, which means they just got my business. I'll be buying all my beets and spuds from them until everyone else follows suit.

"A small group of brain scientists is now investigating misidentification syndromes, as the delusions are called, for clues to one of the most confounding problems in brain science: identity. How and where does the brain maintain the “self”?

What researchers are finding is that there is no single “identity spot” in the brain. Instead, the brain uses several different neural regions, working closely together, to sustain and update the identities of self and others. Learning what makes identity, researchers say, will help doctors understand how some people preserve their identities in the face of creeping dementia, and how others, battling injuries like Adam’s, are sometimes able to reconstitute one. "

After Injury, Fighting to Regain a Sense of Self - The New York Times

At comedy night at the Oak, in Michaela's jacket.

Ok. Weekly roundup, since dividing this mess up into week and weekend seems a bit arbitrary at this point.

Monday - dinner at Jellybean's with Lisa. Jen cooked us ace chicken and veg and fed us crumble. Win.

Tuesday - korean BBQ with Hannah in Manchester at this ace basement place on King St, then drinks at Corbiere's

Wednesday - drinks with Nick at Nation, and delivering his present from Hannah. Hannah gutted 'cause it wasn't as good as my present. I win.

Thursday - comedy club at The Original Oak with Mary and Michaela and Spud and Nick and Michaela's brother and his girlfriend. Free entry (thanks Mick!) and two amazing Edinburgh festival preview shows. Loved it sooo much. Nick laughed like a drain, and Nick has the best laugh in the world. I might actually pay just to watch Nick watch funny stuff. We were going to go on to the Box with the comics afterwards, but Mary was knackered and so I drove her home.

Weekend no less full.

Friday - Cockpit! Dancing, DJing, cockblocking. Staggering in at 5am and perching on the window sill with Jenny sharing a cigarette and watching the river drift by, filled with detritus and drunken skinnydipping scousers, and watching chinese fire kites float in lines down the river.

Saturday - Unity Day. All my mates are going, but I cannot fucking abide the dull reggae and general stench of right-on-ness mixed with pot and bad jamaican takeout. Watching dreadlocked children stagger around clutching 2 liter bottles of cider, and stumbling in synch to the bowel-disturbing strains of The Iration Steppas would frankly make me want to kick the nearest person in the cock, repeatedly. Honestly I'd rather sit at home with a pencil in my eye.

Thankfully Mary feels exactly the same way, so we're having one drink in the park at Unity day with Anna and crew for politeness, then me and Mary are being misanthropic and sneaking off together to get drunk and watch movies. I cannot emphasise enough how much of an epic win this is.

Sunday - fuck I think I actually have a day off! That can't be right. I must have made a massive error. Only possible solution is get so fucked up with Mary that I don't notice Sunday actually happening.

Monday - triple booked. Final Fantasy playing Manchester, Grammatics playing Leeds, and it's Hannah's only free night before she starts her new Accident and Emergency rotation as a proper doctor, so she wins and we're off to a movie.

And then it all starts again. I think next week is actually relatively free. No gigs until Friday. May actually get to sleep.

Tuesday night was actually really great, and made me think a lot. Had a long chat with Nick about how he felt weird getting a nice present from Andrew's parents for his birthday, partly as thanks for looking after Andrew when he collapsed after the 10k run, and staying overnight with him in A&E.

He felt odd because he didn't think he should be rewarded for doing the decent thing. Like he was going to go "Ok.. you're safely in A&E now Andy.. cricket's on.. I'm off!".

Just wouldn't occur to him. Or for that matter me, or Mary, or Anna, or really any of that lot, to *not* do that. It's not being selfless, he wasn't painting himself as some kind of dalai llama. It's just nice looking after your mates, making them feel cared about. Just stupid little shit that we do for each other.. like Mary bringing me raisinettes to the movies, or making sure to sit next to me when she knows I've had a bad day, or me going to a footie match with Nick, or Nick just being... well.. ace. Just had that realisation that there are people who *don't* think like that, and just trying to get our heads around what that might be like.

Or another anecdote.. he was dating a girl, and she went away for a day, and came back on the train, and he went and met her. Just because it was what you do. And she was shocked, and happy. Like no one had ever done that before and she was surprised.

Who the fuck wouldn't do that? Why is that a surprise?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not nearly as nice as Nick, or Mary (who teaches remedial math to some kid who she met at a bus stop whose mom doesn't really take an interest in him.. jesus.. these people are my friends?), but I know where he's coming from, and I like that they're my friends.

Since mine are all on film, stolen my friends' photos. Mostly Hannah's. Thanks Hannah! Lots more after the (very necessary) cut.



( Read more... )

Today in The Martin Show, a fourth-wall breaking sequence in which Martin hunts down the writers of The Martin Show and kills them.

It was spectacular. Amazing music, amazing people, beautiful and weird and drunken and fun and getting caught in thunderstorms and dancing in the woods in the rain and hiding a bottle of whisky in my underwear and Fever Ray and a guest list ticket and vip party passes and curry goat and The Pet Shop Boys and crying with laughter and Jenny's dad emptying the entire contents of the caravan waste tank into the long drop toilet while making groaning noises and and about a gallon of Red Bull and finding the bacon sandwich stall open at 5am and Thom Yorke and Nick Cave and pie and mash and The Pretenders and dancing for four hours straight and sneaking Hannah through into the guest area and 4 hours sleep in 72 hours and those two cute, drunken Glaswegian poetry girls at 5:00am the last morning and Lisa and Ali and Deeps and Sian and Miller and Hannah and Mary and Michaela and Jenny and Chloe and Jules and Nathan and Nick and Nell and and I am fucked and I need chapstick and a shower and calomine and at least 12 hours sleep.

originally from Brady Lea:

“OUCH! What the f*ck are you doing?” Instructions: Grab the book nearest you. Tiptoe around until you are hiding off to the side of a doorway. Wait for someone to pass. Hurl book at them. Record what they said here, and post these instructions.

Two parties on the 4th

First one at mine. Bunch of lovely friends, HAMAZING stars and stripes apple pie (from Mary), barbecue (when I finally went and bought one), rain (30 seconds after I'd bought the barbecue), no ice.. none! What the hell, Horbury? Singstar, charcoal accidents, a bullwhip, Becky's enormous rack (of ribs), and finally fireworks. Wonderful music, several near-death experiences involving fire, lots of amazing food.

Then we all piled into a pile of cars, and headed off to Dr Steph's for a circus themed party. Got there about midnight. Was alright, but way too crowded and hot, and because of a dispute with neighbours we couldn't hang out in the garden. Plus the more time I spend with strangers the more I like my friends, so we went and hung out over the road under a flowering rose bush and talked and got stoned.

OK. Mary and I got stoned. Nick had a toke, and everyone else looked at us like.. big stoners I guess.

Came back in eventually, sang unchained melody, which made the entire houseful of people crowd into the front room. Stopped a fight by singing. That was nice.

Finally got back to Becky's about 5:00am, and played with the kittens a bit before falling asleep.

Woke up before my alarm at 9:30, went up to Steph's to pick up the car, and find one of my hats, before going home to maybe have a shower and a powernap.

No nap, but spent 30 minutes sitting in the shower with a cup of tea in a sippy cup, before heading over to Lisa's to pick up her and Jenny, then took Jenny home to get changed, picked up the charming Miss Alex, and then off to the seaside!

It. Was. Ace.


( Cut for Pictures )

Haven't been in ages. We went to Scarby first (Al had never been), walked along the south bay promenade, ate cockles and oysters and icecream, Lisa bought a wolf t-shirt, we rode the funicular, and did stupid trashy seaside stuff, then piled back into the Mini and headed off to Robin Hood's Bay.


Much squealing (from the switchback roads), and Ooooh's and aaah's (from seeing Bay for the first time), and then we arrived. We wandered around the tiny streets, peered in windows, saw a lost seagull chick, got a bit lost (quite impressive in a town that's about 4 yards square) then sat by the slipway and drank cocktails in the sun, made each other laugh, and looked at Lisa's bruises from last Saturday.

We left there about 6 because we were getting hungry again, and headed over to Whitby. The Abbey was closed and it wasn't foggy enough to sneak in, so we took a few photos and wandered around up on the headland, then went and parked down by the Esk and walked through the old town, peered in weird shops, visited a ship, then walked down to the Magpie, where we had spectacular fish and chips, and walked back along the harbour to the car.

Drove home, and Lisa put a couple of her CDs in, and somewhere around Malton The Cars "Just What I Needed" came on. Such an amazing song. I pulled off onto a layby in a cloud of dust, and we all scrambled out of the car and, car doors open, headlights on, danced in the dusk by the side of the road.

Everything else about the day was great, but that was just perfect.

Finally got home about 11, dropped Jen and Al off, had a cuppa and a redbull at Lisa's to recharge, then went home knackered and happy.

More photos to follow when everyone's uploaded them.

The weekend started with eating arabic food while a man set fire to himself next to us, as we watched a tribute to Michael Jackson on Polish satellite TV

The weekend ended with a girl in pajamas in my mini, holding a watermelon
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Gav: So how was your weekend?
Me: Alright. Family party on Sunday, saw my cousin who I haven't seen in 20 years or so. Village fete too.
Gav: Sounds good
Me: Well, yeah, except for my uncles and aunts trying to fix me up, and  except for the church bandstand. If I ever hear another village fete cover band perform "Obladi Oblada" I'll end them. Is there like an approved list of cover songs permissible for village fete church bandstand cover bands? They covered Police, Joe Jackson..
Gav: Oh I like a bit of Joe Jackson
Me: Me too. I just don't like church bandstand cover bands doing Joe Jackson
Gav: Actually I bet Joe Jackson wouldn't like that too
Me: No. He'd take 'em out with an axe. Chunks of bloody flesh splattered all over the jam stands. At least they didn't do any Black Lace
Gav: No, even church bandstand bands have limits. And Black Lace were shit. No one covers them
Me: Well, except Black Lace. There're no original members now. One killed in a bus crash, one in hiding for kiddy fiddling. They just cover their own songs. They're like a tribute band to themselves.
Gav: That reminds me. We used to have the guy from Jive Bunny call us at Sound Control all the time
Me: Did you call him a talentless twat?
Gav: He really had no idea about anything. He said "I just got all my records, like, and just sort o' threw 'em together, like"
Gav: And I'd say "Yeah mate, it shows."

Did you know that there are signs on trains in japan warning of random frottageurs? Clearly it's a national sport.

http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Chikan-(body-contact)

This is a specific warning at a bicycle rack where apparently pervs wait until someone bends over to lock their bike, and then rushes in for a fast grope.

That has to be the single most specific kink i have ever heard of "likes to grope men and/or women bending over to lock their bikes"

http://www.jlist.com/SEARCH/SHIRT-CHIKAN

T-shirt with the train warning sign

This has been another episode of Martin Explains Why People Are Messed Up. Brought to you by our sponsor, Dial Soap "The Best Soap for Compulsively Scrubbing while weeping in the shower for an hour after reading something Martin wrote!"

So I haven't been sleeping very consistently lately, but I'm not posting to whine about it, but about it's unexpected upside

I live in a pretty nice village. I sometimes get complacent about that, but was recently reminded by annakey's reaction when she came to the village for the first time, and by things like the last few mornings.

It's a small village, fairly rural and surrounded by meadows and paddocks and full of trees, which means the birds are everywhere, and they like to tell you. If you keep your eyes closed and the window open when you wake up, the chorus of them is like you're waking up in the woods. Every fifteen minutes the bells at the church go and get them even more worked up.

Except there are no bells in the woods, obviously. Analogy fail. But the bells are wonderful as well. Even the bellringers, who used to drive me mad, I'm coming to appreciate. It's a bit like living in a 1950s technicolour movie about an idealised version of England, only without any Americans faking English accents in the lead roles. Except me, of course.

Anyway I digress. I listened to the birds for a while, then I went outside and watched the remnants of the sunrise, with huge pink and orange clouds floating over the valley towards the wooded ridge at Thornhill edge, and took a few photos, and listened to the milkman rattle around, and watched the old chap who I swear grows pot in his greenhouse potter around in the flower garden beneath the balcony, following his progress by the line of pipe smoke drifting up from between the rows of green.

At night it's wonderful as well. Standing on my balcony smoking last night I could hear the owls that live in the stand of trees behind my place, and that's one of my favourite sounds in the world.

It reminds me of nothing more than holidays spent in cottages as a kid. I used to dread the idea. The prospect of a week in the country as a child held no particular attraction. Nothing, to my childish mind, except the promise of boredom. And cows. I didn't like cows much. Looking back though, I remember how amazing I found it waking up in a peaceful place, without the roar of traffic or the yells of neighbours or drunks.

It's like I live in a holiday cottage full time.

Maybe I should keep it as a holiday cottage. I've been planning on moving back into the city.. for the social life, and to have my friends closer, but I know I'll miss this place terribly. I'm not going to rent it out, and if I miss it too much I'll have it to spend the weekend in.

Ok, so some background.

There's a conversation going on, in the supreme court topic in the politics conference on the Well, about sexual harassment (it started with the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill thing)

I'm not supposed to repost anyone else's words from their without permission (it's a closed, private conferencing system, and very old), but I'm just reposting mine, with the names of people I refer to replaced.

The basics are

1. We've got an old construction contractor saying "But they're nice guys! When they wolf whistle it's a compliment! They'd protect you if you felt threatened... they work hard and are just letting off steam! Ii f you felt afraid, those guys would stick up for you! I compliment people all the time!"

Yeah, this is a logical fallacy (special pleading) and is the easiest one to deal with, but included for completeness.

2. We've got one person stating that sexual harassment is not about sex, but about power. We have a counter argument that no, what if the guy just really likes the girl and asks her out and is too dumb to read the "no" properly. That's harassment, but it's about sex, not power

2a as a sub-argument to that, there's some chatter about how sometimes people do that because they want to get dates. In Quebec, apparently this is alleged to be how you meet girls.

3. Complimenting strangers is rude, even if it's well intended. They don't know you, they don't want your opinion

4. But everyone In the South, everyone flirts with everyone all the time! Why can't it be like that?

5. They're not innocent compliments. If a guy on the street says "Smile" to you and you don't, sometimes abuse follows.

Ok, all up to date? (please note, the above are not *my* points or arguments. I'm late to the thread, just paraphrasing what has gone before)

And we have this going on for 200 posts. Epic thread. Everyone talking past each other, not getting anything, and so on. The same old years long thrash. Bear in mind we've been arguing with each other for going on 20 years now. (only 10 years for me, I'm still a newbie)

So, in an uncharacteristically conciliatory move for me, I tried to get both sides to see the other's point of view. I don't know, call it boredom

I dunno. Maybe I'm some kind of freak, but the idea of wanting to date someone just because they looked attractive seems a bit.. well.. dumb.

But say that's the case. How stupid does one have to be to think that yelling from across the street "You look HOT!" is more likely to contribute to that goal then walking down and saying "Hi, look, I know this is a bit weird, and please feel free to tell me to fuck off and I will gladly, but I find you remarkably attractive and while that's a terribly shallow thing to say, if you're single, could I buy you coffee.. or.. um.. you buy me coffee?"

Personally I wouldn't do either, but my sense is, it's a lot harder to interpret the latter as harassment or threatening, (provided you take the likely knockback in good grace), and it would, you know, be a shitload more likely to work, inasmuch as 1% is considerably higher than 0%

And, it's a compliment? I wonder how many guys wolf whistle at, say, bank tellers at the counter. Oh wait, they're not in a gang, and there's a chance that the woman might have them escorted from the bank.

Social context does matter. In some cultures, complimenting strangers politely is fine, and goes both ways, and in that context, no it's not harassment.

Note: that's culture dependent, and *polite*, and gender reciprocal.

Wolf whistles are *never* polite, and in cultures where that is not common, (good rule of thumb, where a female is just as likely to compliment a strange guy as vice versa) then just .. don't be such a dick.

I never found those rules particularly hard to navigate, nor to understand, nor to explain.

That we've had a couple hundred posts of people not getting it is just.. I dunno. I don't get *that*.

And <personA> and <personB> butting heads. Am I going to get myself in trouble here?

Even if the original motive is not power, as <personB> makes a good case for, the dynamic does involve a power imbalance, given the assumptions about women prevalent in our culture. Granted the guy may be unaware of it, but like it or not, or acknowledge it or not, that interaction, even if it's from ignorance, involves a power imbalance, and leverages it.

There's no way for sexual harassment *not* to have that component. It's like trying to have fire without oxygen. Even if the guy is an innocent dumb fuck.

My worry is I'm just throwing fuel on the fire, rather than resolving things. Any body have any suggestions about how I could make these points better?

Backstory: Japanese scientists plan to crash-land a moon orbiter to see what debris it kicks up. Berkeley astrologer takes exception to this.

Original article here

Orbiter crashing into the moon
------------------------------

There is a Japanese lunar orbiter named Kaguya that is scheduled to crash into the moon today at about 2:30 pm ET. Scientists hope to learn something about the moon's composition by observing the debris that is kicked up.

In many traditions, including astrology, the moon represents the feminine. It is the yin, the intuitive, the emotions. Women are connected to the moon by their menstrual cycles while they are fertile, and all beings, including the earth herself, are affected by the pull of the tides.

Purposefully crashing something into the moon just to watch what happens is akin to a schoolboy cutting up a live frog to see what makes it jump. It is an example of the domination of the left-brained rational scientific approach over the intuitive.

Did these scientists talk to the moon? Tell her what they were doing? Ask her permission? Show her respect?

When we are connected into the web of life, we know that what we do to one part is what we do to all. Gaining knowledge by destruction is an empty victory.

We're supposed to ask the moon? I can picture it now.

"Hello..um.. Ms. Moon.. do you mind if we crash an orbiter into you?"
"..."
*whispered* "Hmm.. she's not talking to us."
"Maybe she's asleep?"
"Maybe she's ignoring us?"
"What have we done to piss her off lately? We haven't landed on her in ages! Jesus we can't win with this moon!"
"What if she's on the rag?"