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JimStaple
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Name: Jim
Gender: Male
Interests: Truth, Justice and all that stuff
Expertise: Sniffing out B.S. and setting the record straight
Occupation: Free-lance Mentalist
Industry: Mentalism
Message: message me
Member Since:
5/25/2006
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| I'm Not Dead!About a month and a half ago I realized that life and work were ganging
up on me and I was going to have to take a short break. Well....
Almost 6 weeks later I am just now able to get back to Xanga and do some blogging.
There will be new entries soon. It's nice to see that even though I wasn't posting for some time,
people were still responding to each other and debating in the Comments section of my last blog.
There is some really good writing, reasoning and debating in there.
(And then there's Bokanovskopia's comments. Ah me, some things will never change.)
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| The Truth About Al GoreSince my last post was about Al Gore, I've gotten a few responses, publicly and privately, that have the same tone to them. They basically have the tenor of Oh, you know that Al Gore, you can't trust anything he says, he's a well-known liar. And there stands an interesting fact about 21st Century life in America and it's relation to the Media. Everyone knows that the Mainstream Media (or MSM, as some bloggers like to acronymize it) is overwhelmingly Liberal. Everyone knows this. If something even a little bit Conservative makes it to the MSM, well, it's a miracle and/or it's a mistake and it doesn't happen very often. Or does it? If you go to mediamatters.org, you can see on a daily basis how the MSM skew news to the Conservative side. And they don't just state it, they back it up with citations and proof. I would submit this to you: Any large corporation is going to be Conservative, generally. A large corporation has to follow government regulations, they have to work with the Congress and the Executive Branch, and they need to have good public relations and not offend any significant portion of the general population (read: current or potential customers). News organizations in America, and world-wide, are large corporations. They are generally Conservative. I know, this all comes as quite a shock because we've all been told countless times how the MSM is Liberal. People will always trot out polls that show how a majority of news reporters are Liberal to prove their point. Well, I've got news for you folks: the reporters don't get to pick the stories that they want to cover, they don't have control over how they're edited and they don't decide which stories make it to the paper/air or if they are instead buried or totally quashed altogether. Those decisions are made by editors, publishers and owners. And those people tend to be on the Conservative side.
It's like this: Let's say there's a wealthy Evangelical Christian who has just constructed a Bible factory in a small town in America. For whatever reason, this town has had a recent influx of Middle Eastern Muslim refugees to it.
(What could they possibly need refuge from? Never mind, back to the point.)
He hires these people to work at his factory, printing the Bibles, binding the Bibles, boxing and shipping the Bibles. It's obvious that his Bibles aren't going to be legitimate Bibles. Why? Well, he's got Muslims doing all the production of these Bibles, and they don't believe in Christ, therefore, they aren't legitimate Bibles.
But how is that? This owner is a Conservative Christian, the foremen and supervisors are all Conservative Christian, and the product is the Holy Book of Christianity. So how are they not legitimate Bibles?
Well, they are, of course. It really doesn't matter that the people at the lowest end of the production are Muslim. It has absolutely no effect on the end product at all. Someone who accuses these Bibles of not being legitimate doesn't understand the product and the process and really doesn't know what he or she is talking about.
And so it is with the media, it doesn't matter how Liberal reporters are, it's the Conservatism of the organization that really decides what will go out or not and how it will go out or not.
For a good primer on news and whether it's really Liberal or Conservative, or for that matter, generally trustworthy, you should read "The Press vs. Al Gore: How lazy reporting, pack journalism and GOP spin cost him the election" from November 26, 2001 in Rolling Stone magazine. It's an eye-opening piece of journalism that shows what really drives stories, and it's not necessarily Liberalism or Conservatism.
Here's the address for the article:
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/5920188/the_press_vs_al_gore
Enjoy!
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| The War On Reality(Or, How Al Gore Wrote A Book Dealing With A Great Concern Of Mine)Al Gore has a new book coming out entitled "The Assault on Reason". It deals with what I've been referring to for several years as the Right-Wing "War On Reality". His book and my thinking seem to go hand-in-hand from what I've read so far. It's worth checking out an excerpt.
BTW, he doesn't spare too many people or groups in the bit I read; there's enough blame and shirking of responsibility to go around, he feels, and I agree.
Here's the link to the excerpt:
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1622015,00.html
I will be getting around to writing the blog regarding homosexuality and the Bible, as promised, as soon as possible.
It's just been an incredibly busy week.
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| HomosexualityPhase 1The following article is for both public and private responders of my last several blogs.
I initially read it in the syndicated column "News of the Weird" many years ago. The study seems to validate both my claims and the very old idea that what some people violently hate in the world is really just a manifestation what they really hate and fear in themselves.
New Study Links Homophobia with Homosexual Arousal
August 1996 Press Release
WASHINGTON -- Psychoanalytic theory holds that homophobia -- the fear, anxiety,
anger, discomfort and aversion that some ostensibly heterosexual people hold
for gay individuals -- is the result of repressed homosexual urges that the
person is either unaware of or denies. A study appearing in the August 1996
issue of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, published by the American Psychological
Association (APA), provides new empirical evidence that is consistent with
that theory.
Researchers at the University of Georgia conducted an experiment
involving 35 homophobic men and 29 nonhomophobic men as measured by the
Index of Homophobia
scale. All the participants selected for the study described themselves
as exclusively heterosexual both in terms of sexual arousal and experience.
Each
participant was exposed to sexually explicit erotic stimuli consisting
of heterosexual, male homosexual and lesbian videotapes (but not
necessarily in that order). Their degree of sexual arousal was measured
by penile plethysmography, which precisely measures and records male
tumescence.
Men in both groups were aroused by about the same degree
by the video depicting heterosexual sexual behavior and by the video showing
two women engaged in sexual behavior. The only significant difference in
degree of arousal between the two groups occurred when they viewed the
video depicting male homosexual sex: 'The homophobic men showed a significant
increase in penile circumference to the male homosexual video, but the
control [nonhomophobic] men did not.'
Broken down further, the measurements showed that while 66%
of the nonhomophobic group showed no significant tumescence while watching
the male homosexual video, only 20% of the homophobic men showed little
or no evidence of arousal. Similarly, while 24% of the nonhomophobic men
showed definite tumescence while watching the homosexual video, 54% of
the homophobic men did.
When asked to give their own subjective assessment of the
degree to which they were aroused by watching each of the three videos, men
in both groups gave answers that tracked fairly closely with the results
of the objective physiological measurement, with one exception: the homophobic
men significantly underestimated their degree of arousal by the male homosexual
video.
Do
these findings mean, then, that homophobia in men is a reaction to
repressed homosexual urges, as psychoanalysis theorizes? While their
findings are consistent with that theory, the authors note that there
is another, competing theoretical explanation: anxiety. According to
this theory, viewing the male homosexual videotape may have caused
negative emotions (such as anxiety) in the homophobic men, but not in
the nonhomophobic men. As the authors note, 'anxiety has been shown to
enhance arousal and erection,' and so it is also possible that 'a
response to homosexual stimuli [in these men] is a function of the
threat condition rather than sexual arousal per se. These competing
notions can and should be evaluated by future research.'
Article: 'Is Homophobia Associated With Homosexual Arousal?' by Henry E.
Adams, Ph.D., Lester W. Wright, Jr., Ph.D. and Bethany A. Lohr, University
of Georgia, in Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol. 105, No. 3, pp 440-445.
The American Psychological Association (APA), in Washington,DC,
is the largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology
in the United States and is the world's largest association of psychologists.
APA's membership includes more than 142,000 researchers, educators, clinicians,
consultants and students. Through its divisions in 49 subfields of psychology
and affiliations with 58 state and Canadian provincial associations, APA
works to advance psychology as a science, as a profession and as a means
of promoting human welfare.
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| Smelting Down "SwordAndSacrifice"
(Part 3 Of A Series That Will Be Longer Than Should Be Necessary)So, what is all this leading up to? Well, if you've been following along so far you can't be surprised by what I'm going to write next. I believe SwordAndSacrifice is a closet homosexual. That's right. It's all there:
His hatred and fear of gays and his citing of Biblical references to support his positions, his belief that homosexuality is a disease that you can catch, his rejection of the genetic/heredity/biological evidence regarding homosexuality. Because, he has members of his family that are gay, and if he admits to the scientific evidence relating to gayness, he might have to admit some things that he's kept bottled up inside of him for his most of his life. His extreme Right-Wing, homophobic views presumably help him to drown out the voice in his head that keeps urging him on to come out and stop living a lie. He probably hoped his religious beliefs, along with his marriage and children, would finally stop the nagging feeling in his soul that the heterosexual life isn't right for him. More than anything, he wants that feeling to go away. But the attraction can't be denied for him, so it erupts out in religiously righteous rants about homosexuals and "their ways", "their recruitment agenda", "their secret plans", "their disgusting behavior", and the like.
It's all sooo transparent.
And all it has resulted in is a man who is almost constantly, furiously angry and unhappy; and he may not even realize why he's so angry and unhappy. He sees it all as a conspiracy theory because he feels trapped by his gay feelings and deep down he wants to believe that he's simply being adversely affected by this great evil gay juggernaut.
As Bill Maher once said, after the umpteenth gay scandal involving a Right-Wing preacher and/or politician,
"I don't mean to say that all these Religious Right folks that vigorously condemn homosexuality are all gay, but, all these Religious Right folks that vigorously condemn homosexuality are all gay."
So let it out SAS. I know, it will require a radical reorganization of your thinking, but, come on, it's been a long time coming and you know it. And besides, you'll have finally released your burden and biggest fear.
Because, someone definitely "Protesteth Too Much", and it surely isn't me.
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