Category: ThinkableWords

I stumbled upon a great website yesterday. If I Can’t Dance Is It Still My Revolution. Before I proceed, it must be said, if I could dance I probably wouldn’t. I’ve never been comfortable or drunk enough, for that matter, to seriously “cut a rug.” But I love the analogy.

And within said site were these words, by Tanya Titchkosky, speaking of “Supercrips;”

“Those people who can exclude attending to disability by attending fully to their ability to participate in society, as normally as is possible, and they ultimately and inevitably signify having a ‘positive effect on others,’ ‘contributing fully to the community,’ and ‘maximizing their potential’… The stories of the abled-disabled demonstrate that even disabled people are able to fit in and take up an appearance which shows that their conduct is undoubtedly oriented to an unquestioned normalcy. Through this way of conceptualizing disability, disability becomes the space in which the value of normal shines forth without ever having to be directly spoken of, and disabled people are held to be asserting their individual ability (value) when they can be seen as oriented to serving this normal order.”

Wow, Supercrips, sound like truly amazing people…

Continue reading It’s Still My Revolution

On today’s show, DemocracyNow.org‘s Amy Goodman, interviewed British MP George Galloway on a recent decision by a Canadian judge;

“A Canadian judge has upheld the Canadian government’s decision last month to ban the outspoken British lawmaker George Galloway from entering the country for a speaking tour.”¹

I know, this isn’t so much news, as it is a couple days old now, but what was most compelling, personally, was what he happened to say concerning my government;

“… I’m touring the United States to big audiences, north, south, east and west. I’m sitting in the British parliament, as I have done for the last twenty-two years. It’s a bit odd to be branded a security risk in Canada, which I’ve toured many times, spoken at meetings in all the major cities there. […] Well, the book that’s banned is always a bestseller, and the speeches that have been banned are now taking place through the internet, through the ether. And a thousand people turned up at church in Toronto on Monday night to hear me speak, and 500 last night in Mississauga. […] But it just shows that it was a foolish move politically, as well as quite a dangerous one. It’s a creeping problem, I think, in Canada, that their government is the last bastion of dead-end Bushism in not only North America, maybe in the world…”²

Continue reading ‘Last Bastion of Dead-End Bushism’?

I stumbled on this article at Newsweek yesterday, The Rights Of Animals […] Will We All Soon Be Vegans? Which piqued my interest. What if? And appearing in Newsweek? Impressive. At first…

Before too long my instinct was proven correct. It’s full of some fairly problematic logic. Some new welfarist thinking for ya. I’m pretty sure the whole animal rights issue revolves around not subjecting nonhumans to an existence where their exploitation is the accepted necessity of sustenance? 

And growing animal flesh in “vats?” Where does the material needed to do something like this originate? An animal? So the author eventually disproves his own original premise? We won’t all be vegan if we continue to eat meat. Whether grown in a lab or not, it’s still animal flesh. A vegan avoids ALL animal products. Because a vegan is concerned about an animals suffering, sure, but putting something in our mouths, at least, that once was a part of a living, feeling, sentient being is objectionable to most vegans. Myself included. 

Exploitation by any other name is still exploitation…

Continue reading This Can’t Be