And sore everything else, at the moment.  I am n ot a happy camper here, and I’m a little too floaty to do a regular sane post, including either of the ones I was going to do from the set up yesterday. But a couple of things that are going through my head. First, I…

Okay, sorry to do this, and sorry for the amount of shouting I’m about to do, but this is making me crazy. Robert just posted a comment to today’s post, and in doing so, he did what about two thirds of the people who commented on the first post did– He confused “standards for good…

This is going to take a little while to do, so bear with me–I may have to use multiple posts. But before I start for real, I want to take the occassionon to point out that my “aarrggh” in the title of the last post has nothing to do with assertions that “standards are relative,”…

I could go into a lot of things here. For instance, standards are objective.   If they’re not, they’re not standards.  Tastes are subjective, and what people usually mean when they declare that standards in art are subjective is that their own tastes to not fit whatever they think the standards are. I qualified that as…

I’ve been having a very distracted week–it’s a long story, and I’m not going to go into it–but in the midst of it all I’ve been thinking about two things:  bad writing, and con men. By bad writing  now, I’m not referring to student writing.  Student writing is often truly deplorable, but it tends to…

Okay, before I start this, I want to warn anybody reading it that it contains a great, big, enormous SPOILER–I’m supposed to cap that–for a book called The Old Wine Shades, by Martha Grimes. There’s simply now way for me to talk about what I want to talk about here without revealing the ending.  That…

Lymaree says: >>And I don’t see a conflict between “all types of sex where consent is possible and given is okay” and “sex with the unconsenting is absolutely forbidden.” >> My problem with that statement  is with the “is possible.”   It is an attempt to make it legitimate to condemn all kinds of consensual sex…

And then I’m going to run off and actually do something with my day. Lymaree said this: I do think it is possible to isolate and limit an entire class of sexual behavior by defining it properly, and then by discouraging it extensively. And that class is sexual behavior involving the non-consenting. This covers child…

Well, let me start with an aside, to jem–I wasn’t saying the  Catholic Church should get off scot free on the pedophilia scandal, I was wondering why clincial psychology got to make mistakes like that, over and over and over again, and still be heralded as “experts” practicing “science.”   I’m sure there were one or…

Okay, before I get started on this, to answer jem:  I have no idea if the psycholigist the Church consulted in the Sixties were Catholic or not, but I do know that standard professional opinion at the time was that a) people who were attracted to pre-pubescent children could be cured and b) people who…