Cav's Place

It probably is time to say how the first few days of 2011 have been for me. And if it isn’t I’ll do it anyway, since I can’t think of much else right now. Don’t expect a long post in any way because I’m not up for it. Just throwing some things out here… The problem being that my brain is barely functional anymore due to being too frightened…

The brain issue was very obvious a couple of hours ago when dad called me over to ask me how to properly phrase a very simple question in English and I simply couldn’t answer. And my vision kept getting cloudy as well. Was too afraid that he was going to mention what he eventually did mention after seeing just the kind of state I was in, at which point I ran away. And since then I’ve mostly been sitting here staring through the screen, even more at a loss for any words whatsoever than I usually am.
That’s because, due to being more and more aware that it’s imperative to have quite a lot of aspects of my health checked out, I did cry out for help in a few e-mails I sent him lately, including twice during the past week or so. But, as always, too frightened of both doing and not doing anything about it to even say what it’s about, which is why I got to this point in the first place. I mean, some things are relatively new developments, but the issues that most obviously need immediate attention have very slowly but steadily been getting worse for years. But, on top of being absolutely terrified by anything involving doctors or medical institutions or equipment, there’s the fact that there’s nobody I trust nearly enough to go through this with. Or, more exactly, I don’t know anyone I’d feel even marginally at ease going to a doctor with, even if they’d be willing to take me. And dad is certainly nowhere near the top of the “trust” list under any circumstances. Not to mention that I’m obviously afraid of what may be discovered, which would also be quite pointless since I’m really not going to accept ending up in a hospital, if it’ll be needed, nor any long-term treatment. In fact, even short-term treatments would be next to impossible, considering how I live. Of course, my lifestyle is the first thing that would need to be changed, but that’s completely impossible until I’ll live with someone I’d actually want to live with and feel at ease around, which is also utterly impossible in itself. On the other hand, I’m also afraid of looking like a fool once again by getting so worked up over things that’d prove to not be so serious after all. So, as always when it comes to health issues, there’s nothing but sheer terror on all sides and no way out under any circumstances.
Otherwise, I also fear him because he finally decided to make a site for his little firm, bought the domain and a hosting package and wants me to make it, which obviously resulted in a lot of panic because I don’t know anywhere near enough to make anything fitting for a company, and especially for one from the media sector. I even gave up trying after a couple of days and he hasn’t mentioned it since, so I don’t know what is going to happen with that… What I do know is that I’ll feel like crap either way, whether I’ll somehow end up making it and unavoidably produce a stinking pile of worthless shit or even he’ll see that any effort of mine will result in exactly that and have someone else do it.

On top of that and not connected to any of it, the unavoidable finally happened and Ami really stopped talking to me for good. I can’t say that I didn’t fully expect this ever since the end of 2009, when she really started to reflect her own image of herself and demand that everyone else shares it at all costs, seeing that I don’t and won’t, but that doesn’t make it feel any better now that it happened. Especially since this makes it five out of five people who I’ve ever seen as really important to me and who I’ve felt really close to at least at some point who have stopped talking to me. Also, second one of them who does it clearly because we disagree on an issue, despite the fact that the disagreement had been there ever since we started talking, years before.
At least it did make me finally put my thoughts on sex, gender and gender roles in a post, though I later noticed that I had forgotten a couple of things. Good enough though, especially since I even had to write it twice and spent a good ten hours on it. And perhaps even better that she also offered the perfect opportunity for me put a link to it on a rare public entry posted on her blog the next day, which not only somehow didn’t get deleted (yet), but even resulted in a little discussion on the topic. Not with her, as she didn’t deign to reply anything, but with a few of her friends. It obviously didn’t go anywhere, with them basically saying that my general arguments are completely irrelevant when it comes to them and me basically saying that their personal arguments are completely irrelevant when it comes to anyone who doesn’t already share that view, which includes me, but nobody was expecting to convince anyone of anything anyway…
I just find the whole thing really sad for their cause as well, not to mention any others that are connected to it in any way. Such an “if you don’t agree with me 100%, go fuck yourself” attitude drives away a whole lot of potential support and I’d think that a cause, especially an unpopular one, needs any shred of support it can get, even if only partial. When you basically label someone who otherwise fully supports your right to think, act, look and even alter your body as you see fit as an “enemy” simply because of the third person pronoun chosen to refer to you, especially since that choice is backed by plenty of arguments, I somehow doubt you’re likely to get too far anytime soon…

(So much for this not being a long post…)

Since it would appear that Ami decided yesterday (or two days ago, considering the time) to stop talking to me for good over our disagreement on this matter, as opposed to just ignoring me for weeks or even more than a month whenever the issue came up and I expressed said disagreement in any way, I thought it’d be a good time to post my take on it here. She’s the reason why I even have a detailed opinion about this, after all, since all I had to say about it before we started talking was that gender roles should not exist.

Let’s start from there, shall we? There are, of course, physical differences between the males and females of pretty much all animal species that reproduce sexually, and when those result in different hormone levels and brain makeup there will be mental differences as well. If those differences are noticeable, it may indeed mean that one sex is better suited for certain activities and the other is better suited for others. However, while the males and females of a pretty large number of species differ significantly, there are few true physical differences between the average human male and the average human female, at least when it comes to the things that could influence the ability to perform any activity that is not purely sexual in nature. What’s more, that only applies on average, as there are individuals whose bodies bridge that gap without their sex being questioned in any way.
Sure, some differences do exist and, on average, can make certain activities that rely very strongly on purely physical attributes slightly more difficult for individuals of one sex than for those of the other sex. However, such small differences tend to only be relevant for professional athletes, as even a slight variation in perceived difficulty can result in a noticeable difference in peak performance. In other words, while true that they are not quite equals in every aspect, the tremendous majority of perceived differences between men and women are in fact created solely by society. The way boys and girls are raised, taught, even fed, the environment they’re brought up in, the way they’re told they should look like… All these things conspire to, on the one hand, greatly exaggerate the few existing differences and, on the other, create a whole slew of others that have no basis in physiology. Bottom line is that there’s not a damn thing that a person could be unable to do well simply because of their sex. Not one damn thing!
Quite frankly, a person’s sex is only truly relevant when it comes to two things: Personal relationships and medical matters. I don’t think I need to point out that the sex of those involved is crucial when it comes to sexual and romantic relationships, but it can also be a very important aspect when it comes to friendships for those who tend to rely on physical contact to express affection, especially if they’re either heterosexual or homosexual. As for medical matters, it is well known that every little detail can be important, so in some situations taking note of these slight variations generated by a person’s sex may even mean the difference between life and death. Other than that, a person’s sex is also used in order to determine how to refer to said person, but that is strictly a matter of linguistics and has no other relevance whatsoever. Or at least it shouldn’t…

So far so good, right? But what do you do when some people take the fact that there is no real connection between a person’s physical sex and their personality, turn it on its head and pretty much shoot any efforts to abolish gender roles in the foot with their attitude, while at the same time making languages far more complicated than they need to be? Yes, I’m talking about those who came up with and are enforcing the idea that there is such a thing as a person’s gender, which may well be different from their sex, that there may be a very large number of such genders and even that people should be referred to according to the gender they feel they are as opposed to their sex.
The first problem with that is that it’s an incorrect use of the term. Gender is in fact a linguistic concept that refers to a method of separating words into groups that are seen as being somehow related to each other for the purpose of creating grammatically correct sentences. Now there are languages that have well over a dozen genders and languages that basically have no concept of gender whatsoever, just like there are languages that use genders for very many words and others that only use this concept for a few, but something that a significant number of the languages spoken by a large number of people have in common is that they use the masculine gender to refer to, among other things, male humans and the feminine gender to refer to, among other things, female humans. As a result, the term gained another meaning when people whose societies were going through a puritanical phase decided to make use of this fact, taking the term out of its usual context and starting to use it as a synonym for a certain meaning of sex, cloaking this word that they were so afraid of uttering. (And I got this last part from Ami, mind you.)
Now we could have solved that little issue by reinstating sex as the only proper term to use when referring to a person’s sex and kicking gender back into grammar where it belongs, so we could then quickly get back to the truly important matter, which is that of abolishing gender roles. (Notice the word gender in that term as well…) Yet the people I mentioned above decided to go the other way, having a stance that could perhaps be summarized as: “Gender roles seem to be here to stay, so let’s accept the fact that a gender implies a gender role, but let’s make that work for us by dissociating it completely from physical sex, basically ignoring sex altogether, coming up with enough genders to suit everyone’s chosen gender role and demanding to be seen as defined by said gender role.”
Such a view clearly goes against any fight to abolish gender roles, instead fully supporting the idea that there need to be boxes and labels for people according to social behavior patterns, appearance, preferences, interests and other hard to define and subjective criteria. That, of course, actually enforces the argument of those who support traditional gender roles, allowing them to, for example, tell a woman who has no problem being and looking like a woman but does not desire to take on the gender role that society says should be associated with her sex something like: “Now listen here! Those people who don’t act like proper women should say they’re not women, so you make up your mind and either act like you damn well should or pick something else to be and look like and stop messing with us!” Therefore, this stance actually risks forcing a large number of people, many more than those who could in some weird way be aided by this, to choose between the body and appearance they desire and the behavior and thought patterns they’re comfortable with. Which I thought was just what these people claimed to want to avoid… But maybe it was just me thinking that.
This attitude would appear to prove that such people only care for their own interests, demanding their individual rights to be recognized and throwing aside any larger goals and any larger groups they could be fighting with and for. That would seem to imply that they’re either misguided or selfish, but in many cases this behavior is actually a result of being desperate for an escape from the torment society heaps upon them. While it’s true that some truly are selfish and don’t care about anyone else and some others simply don’t know any better, a large part of the people that take this path are actually very intelligent, rather caring and, no matter what they think of themselves, strong individuals. They’re simply forgetting the bigger picture at times due to being desperate, frightened and insecure, which is under no circumstances their fault, but simply how society usually makes those who dare to be different feel. Saying that, all I ask of them is to stop for a moment every so often, take a deep breath and remember that, for example, the suffragettes didn’t earn the right to vote by saying “we want to vote and women aren’t allowed to vote, so we demand to be recognized as something other than women”, nor did Blacks earn the right to ride in the front of the bus by saying “we want to ride in front and Blacks aren’t allowed to ride in front, so we demand to be recognized as something other than Black”! We either fight together or die alone people. Remember that…

To clarify some matters, a person’s sex is very easy to determine through the kind of science that uses clear definitions and specific methods to reach exact conclusions that leave little room for error. The only thing that could perhaps confuse some people is that, even though so far I tried to keep things simple and only refer to males and females, there are in fact four possible sexes. Defining male organs as penis and testicles and female organs as vagina and ovaries, an individual with at least one male organ and no female organs is male, one with at least one female organ and no male organs is female, one with at least one organ of each kind is a hermaphrodite and one with no organs of either kind is neuter. Transsexuals who have made the switch completely, by going through with the operation and being on the full hormonal treatment, obviously need to be seen as being the sex they currently are and not the one they used to be.
That’s all there is to it when it comes to personal relationships and medical matters, and the linguistic issue is also settled very clearly for males and females through those same definitions. The only issue left is that of referring to hermaphrodites and neuters, as that can be a little tricky in languages that don’t have a clear neutral gender that can apply to humans as well without making things confusing or complicated. That can usually be solved by referring to neuters who weren’t born that way according to the sex they had before losing their sexual organs and to hermaphrodites either according to which type of sexual organs are more developed or simply as either male or female, according to what the person referring to them thinks is more appropriate. However, if something more scientific is desired, it is possible to choose how to refer to them according, in order, to which secondary sex characteristics, such as breasts, facial hair, to some extent tone of voice and so on, are more developed, which sex hormones are present in higher concentrations in their bodies, either naturally or as a result of hormonal treatments, and finally according to their sex chromosomes, where XY or XYY means male and XX or XXX female.
That’s quite simply all there is to it and all the meaning it has. Having a certain sex isn’t supposed to feel a certain way any more than being a certain race or nationality is supposed to feel a certain way. While this information may tell you something about the average person, it tells you nothing about any specific individual. Having a certain sex doesn’t mean that you need to think, act or look a certain way, just like it doesn’t mean you need to have certain skills or interests. It’s simply an easily proven fact about you that, except in the couple of situations presented above, has no meaning other than the one people choose to give it. And from this point of view those who support traditional gender roles and those who push for this newer concept of gender are equally wrong and equally harmful. Keep in mind that the more you struggle to deny something, the more important and meaningful it becomes, and usually not in the way you want…

(PS: I had to write this twice, because it somehow vanished when I was just about finished and I found out that the autosave hadn’t worked ever since I finished the first paragraph…)

As you probably noticed, I finally bit the bullet and decided to actually launch the other sections of the site as well, though there isn’t much there yet and there’s still work to do even on what little is there. Be sure to read the descriptions if you want to check them out, since that’s where I’ll list any known issues and any plans for the more or less near future.

Though this old theme used by the blog is written in XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS level 2.1, the actual code for the new sections uses HTML5, CSS level 3 and quite a lot of JavaScript. Perhaps someday I’ll get around to changing the theme as well, or in fact to writing an equally simple one myself that’ll follow the same standards as the rest of the site, but that’s not a priority at this point.
I tested everything in Internet Explorer 9.0 Beta and Firefox 3.6, so it should work just right in these two browsers, and likely also in Chrome 8.0, since Shiri was kind enough to test a few things in it for me. If you do somehow notice any issues while using any of these browsers, let me know. And that also goes if you’re using Firefox 4.0 Beta or whatever the latest Chrome beta is, since they apparently can’t be bothered to specify. Still, if you’re using Chrome and the problem has to do strictly with the way it handles JavaScript, I’d kindly ask you to complain to the developers, since I’ve had just about enough of its quirks when it comes to that.
I know that, while the site is still perfectly functional, a couple of things don’t look right in Internet Explorer 8.0 and I have no intention of fixing that, since that browser is outdated. As a general rule, if you’re using an older version of any of the listed browsers and notice any problems, my only advice to you is to upgrade! And if you see anything wrong while using a browser that’s not listed above, either change it or complain to your browser’s developers until they improve its standards compliance. I’d recommend the former, but it’s your choice. Keep in mind that as soon as the final versions of both Internet Explorer 9.0 and Firefox 4.0 will be released, I plan to make some changes, to take better advantage of some basic but quite useful features of HTML5, which may result in more significant issues if you’re using a browser that doesn’t support it.

In case anyone’s interested, I did write to the two artists whose works are currently included in the fantasy art gallery some time ago, asking for permission to display them there. Got no reply from either of them, though something I saw on Google Analytics would indicate that one of them did check out the gallery, so I can only assume that they have no problem with it. Of course, anyone who’d ask me to remove such images would get their entry replaced with a scathing comment about the whole thing…

It’s about time for another WikiLeaks update. You may not believe it, since even the WikiLeaks staff seems to have taken a break for the holidays, but quite a lot of things have happened since the last one. It’s not an open war anymore, but the combatants are gathering forces and making plans. And, of course, a lot of people and organizations weigh in, especially since a year just ended. As a result, I’ll really be hopping from one thing to another in this post, likely also grouping together some issues that should be presented separately, in an attempt to cover every new development, so you are strongly encouraged to read the articles I’ll link to in order to get more details.

To start with what’s happening on the Internet, WL Central has posted an updated list of whistleblowing sites and WikiLeaks-related games, though they point out that neither they nor WikiLeaks endorse any of them and at least a few may well be fakes, including attempts by intelligence agencies to recapture leaked material or persuade would-be whistleblowers to reveal themselves to them and therefore get caught. Yet they didn’t stop there, posting links to even more sites shortly afterwards, not to mention showcasing the Internet’s power to keep something interesting and in the public’s eye.
On the other hand, when it comes to what’s left of the front lines of the war, Bank of America did end up under attack, as expected, but so did Anonymous. Yet what’s more relevant is that the FBI is cracking down on Anonymous as a direct result of PayPal’s actions, which makes PayPal and its parent company eBay the top corporate “bad guys”. (You may notice that I didn’t even link to either of those sites.) Now there is a new weapon being developed to aid those who choose to lead the on-line battle against just such corporate “bad guys”, but its power and potential seem far too hard to control and I fear what may happen if it’ll end up being used on a large scale.

But let’s take a break and look back, as many have done at the end of the year, choosing to award various honors to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Actually, the honors were mainly awarded to Assange, since the focus tends to be on people instead of organizations, WikiLeaks as a whole only being named top newsmaker of 2010 by Al Jazeera, which I’m not even sure is exactly something to brag about…
Personally, I really can’t stand the way Julian Assange speaks. It’s not as much about what he says, though there are obvious problems there as well, but about the way in which he says it, which I find quite infuriating. And, based on all I’ve gathered about him as a person, he seems to be quite an asshole… But you don’t have to like someone as a person in any way in order to support what they’re doing, and this particular asshole is doing something that really needs to be done, so he deserves all the support he can get at the moment. And that I assume to be the rationale behind the latest bunch of honors awarded to him, such as Readers’ Person of the Year from The Nation, Readers’ Most Intriguing Person of 2010 from CNN.com, top newsmaker of the year according to Postmedia editors and canada.com and even the “Free Dacia” award from Romanian on-line publication Cotidianul, “for his struggle to defend the freedom of the press and democratic values“. Yet of course there are always some who decide to go the other way, perhaps the weirdest recent example being the fact that Peruvian shamans have sentenced Assange to “spiritual punishment”.
Under these circumstances, there’s no surprise that the deals he signed for his autobiography are expected to be worth over one million pounds. In fact, that amount could even appear rather low, considering how many people are likely to want to read that book. Then again, if I’m to assume that his writing is not significantly different from his speaking, many of those who would be interested in reading something about him may be far less keen on reading something actually written by him.

Moving on to what traditional media actually does together with and in support of the whistleblowing site, shortly after Russian weekly Novaya Gazeta announced its partnership with WikiLeaks, El País editor Javier Moreno explained at length why did he choose to publish the cables, making it very obvious that the major Spanish daily is fully committed to seeing this operation through despite the associated risks. I can only hope that the other publications are just as committed and that even more will join in as time passes.

On the other side of the pond, Amazon’s and Apple’s contracts with the government are being exposed and generally considered to be the reason why these companies have so swiftly distanced themselves from WikiLeaks. At the same time, things look unsurprisingly grim at the highest levels, as the federal government is demanding a firewall meant to block employees from accessing WikiLeaks documents regardless of their source and, in an obviously related story, the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act is reported to have been blocked anonymously, through the use of cowardly tactics. That is perhaps particularly relevant for Bradley Manning, who probably is the actual whistleblower in this case and whose health is declining as a result of the harsh conditions of his imprisonment.

Still, I’d much rather end this post with good news, and for that I need to get back to Europe, as the UK information commissioner thankfully points out the obvious in an interview, stating that “the best form of defense is transparency” and that “if all of us just accept that this is the people’s information and 99.9% should be out there in all its tedium, you wouldn’t have WikiLeaks“.
Now wouldn’t that be nice? But does anyone really think that the powers that be would ever willingly allow those they rule over to know about all their plans? Right, I didn’t think so… Which means we need to keep up the fight and force them. And, unlike a certain other individual who used this slogan only to prove he actually could not, yes we can!

A year ago, I wrote a post containing something disturbingly close to New Year’s resolutions. To make something very clear from the very start, I’m not going to do that again. But I should see how I fared, how many of those goals I managed to achieve during the past twelve months.

It looks almost well enough when it comes to the primary goals, but not quite, since “well enough” can only mean achieving all of them. There was one obvious failure, however: I did not manage to play and finish five games, not counting Planescape: Torment. In fact, I did play seven, but only finished four, abandoning two without being anywhere near the end and currently dragging my feet with yet another. I do intend to finish this one I’m dragging my feet with and one of the two I abandoned, as well as give the other abandoned one another chance, but didn’t do it this year, so that’s a failed goal.
Well, there was also the fact that I didn’t reach out nearly as much as before this February, during Global Population Speak Out. I wrote my post and even made a very simple Firefox persona, but didn’t pester people nearly as much and didn’t point out the event to pretty much every publication I could think of, as well as a few TV and radio stations, as I did before. Not that anyone paid any attention to my messages when I did send them, but… Let’s see what I’ll feel up to doing next February, since it’s just around the corner.

Moving on to the secondary goals, the picture becomes really bleak, as the only such goal that I reached was the one about earning and redeeming Care2 butterfly credits. And even there you can say that I could have done more, as I was trying for 25000 or 30000 credits and earned about 28000 and redeemed 28400, the difference being caused by the fact that I had about 500 earned and not redeemed before the end of 2009.
To take the others one by one, I didn’t increase the difficulty of any of the types of exercise that make up my little daily routine, the number of non-personal posts exceeds that of personal ones by only six, read only six books, played only two games released in 2005 or later and only got rid of one of the games kits that were on my computer at the start of the year, wrote only six reviews on MobyGames and only three of them were for games played in 2009 or earlier, and unfortunately was probably even somewhat less of an activist than before.

As I said, there will be no such goals listed for 2011. I obviously have some, but they’re less clear and I’m even less determined to do pretty much anything. Don’t see how that could possibly change, considering how things stand.

May the coming year be better than any that went before it and worse than any that’ll come after it. And may all your wishes come true as long as they don’t require causing undeserved harm to others or to the environment. (The first condition for that being, of course, that you won’t have any children. If you’re actually trying to have any or aren’t going to immediately terminate an accidental pregnancy, then may all your sexual organs painfully rot away while you get to watch it happen.)