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When the church doors open, only white people will be allowed inside.
That’s the message the Asatru Folk Assembly in Murdock, Minnesota, is sending after being granted a conditional use permit to open a church there and practice its pre-Christian religion that originated in northern Europe.
Murdock council members said they do not support the church but were legally obligated to approve the permit, which they did in a 3-1 decision.
“We were highly advised by our attorney to pass this permit for legal reasons to protect the First Amendment rights," Mayor Craig Kavanagh said. "We knew that if this was going to be denied, we were going to have a legal battle on our hands that could be pretty expensive.”
City Attorney Don Wilcox said it came down to free speech and freedom of religion.
“I think there’s a great deal of sentiment in the town that they don’t want that group there," he said. "You can’t just bar people from practicing whatever religion they want or saying anything they want as long as it doesn’t incite violence.”
After permit approved for whites-only church, small Minnesota town insists it isn't racist
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 25 2020, @04:28PM (12 children)
OK, I've only spent hours listening to them explain how it's all about power and "punching up" and so on, but I'll give you a fair hearing too:
What's it all about?
Break it down for those of us on the short bus.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 25 2020, @08:25PM
Sorry, but experience around here says don't feed the trolls, they just want more excuses to push their own talking points. Too bad if you're even halfway serious. Maybe we can have better discourse in 2021!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 26 2020, @02:03AM (10 children)
Why don't you come back when you actual read Patricia Bidol and Andrea Dworkin. A nice first step in actually criticizing their work, instead of caricatures of it. It would also require less effort than "hours" spent listening to those who aren't explaining it, can't explain it, or are not doing so through a mechanism you understand. Much easier to pay attention to the nuance and subtlety of the complex arguments they presented that you are apparently missing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 26 2020, @05:20AM (9 children)
I did read Dworkin. She was very plain about:
a) women are, as a class, oppressed
In fact, this could be said to underpin pretty much everything she wrote
b) oppressed individuals can not be taken to have autonomy within an oppressive system, especially not with respect to what the system's favoured people may require of them
Over and over again, in fact.
The rest simply follows, and before you say that it was a twisted version, may I point out that the whole PIV-is-rape thing gained substantial currency among her own followers.
Now go ahead, and explain these supposed mystical subtleties that I, and many of Dworkin's followers, are missing. Book and page references would be better, so that I can confirm.
Go on, do your scholarship.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 26 2020, @07:27AM (1 child)
Foul! Foul!! Foul!!! No kicking the ball through the goal posts! Foul!!!! Ref, can we get someone to move these goal posts again?
I read about Critical Race Theory and they lost me at experience based reality. What a crock of shit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @05:55AM
That's actually an interesting example of a concept pulled from postmodernist theory - where the subjective experience and interpretation leads to reinterpretations that can actually be in flat contradiction to evidence of authorial intent through notes, correspondence and so on.
Poor Wittgenstein. He never meant what those morons derived from his work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 26 2020, @08:34AM (6 children)
Doesn't mean that she actually claimed that. There are plenty of examples of her clearing that up. Probably the most direct example occurred in an interview where she gave his response to the question, "After "Right-Wing Women" and "Ice and Fire" you wrote "Intercourse". Another book which helped me clarify confusions about my own sexual relationships. You argue that attitudes to conventional sexual intercourse enshrine and perpetuate sexual inequality. Several reviewers accused you of saying that all intercourse was rape. I haven't found a hint of that anywhere in the book. Is that what you are saying?"
Another good one was from another interview. She replied to a similar question with the following answer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 28 2020, @07:14AM (2 children)
Different AC, though I too must yet read Dworkin. Hmm,
Mostly I conclude that I must get around to reading Dworkin because my first reaction is that she hasn't heard of woman superior positions. That cannot possibly be it. Can it?
But mostly when I read things like that I get a sneaking suspicion that I'm reading somebody describe having sex with somebody they aren't attracted to. It cannot possibly be the case that she hasn't heard of woman superior positions or is homosexual but unaware? Maybe she is transmasc and not aware?
Male feminists eat this up, because it perfectly describes how a heterosexual guy might experience sex with another guy, especially a guy with a dick. The other shit they bitch about perfectly describes how a cisgendered guy might experience being forced to present feminine.
When I get right down to it, every time I realize that what I'm actually reading is a man describing the experience of having a menstrual cycle (with additional gender dysphoria on top of normal PMS-type dysphoria), being forced to present feminine from birth, and experiencing discrimination on the basis that he is (somehow--cisgendered people and their social constructions of gender make no damn sense) is a woman, I just sort of have to lol.
No actually looking over her bio that is almost certainly her trauma talking. I will not be reading Dworkin. I'll stick with Marxism. Marxism isn't perfect but at least it's not a bunch of drivel that assumes that everybody's experience of sexuality and gender is the exact same as the writer's.
If Andrea Dworkin finds penetrative sex violent, then perhaps she should have stopped being an incel and gotten a girlfriend.
I mean, fuck, I'm about to drive to somewhere in Nevada and drop $1k I could instead use to rebuild my gaming rig, or just imagine how many hot meals I could buy the local homeless population!--so that I can stick my girl cock in a vagina, already knowing full fucking well that the only thing it will prove is what I already know, just so I can say that I'm not an incel and actually, really, provably, objectively am not attracted to women, even if I am the only person on the planet it seems like that is not attracted to women! I like dicks--excepting my own of course, and Andrea Dworkin does not like dicks!
Guess what!!!! Here's a fucking revelation for feminism! Sexual assault is sexual assault whether or not the assailant has a dick!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 28 2020, @07:32AM (1 child)
argh, I let my own trauma get ahold of me toward the end.
But this is why I'll always be an anti-feminist. Feminism dismisses survivors of sexual assault right out of hand when the assailant is a woman.
It really is a problem. That and other problems cast doubt on whether there is a feminist road to gender equity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @05:58AM
I think you are viewing violence as some sort of zero-sum phenomenon, which she did not claim. The violence is inherent into the act of sex itself. Whether the penetrator is the one actively pushing the object into another or the penetrated is the one pushing themselves onto the other. This also holds for other types of sexual activity as well. After all, if you aren't initiation contact with the other and stimulating erotic areas, you aren't really doing "sex" so to speak. Penetrative intercourse takes this one step further by taking one person's body and overcoming whatever resistance is provided to insert said penetrating object into the penetrated entrance. Who is doing the active part doesn't really change that underlying requirement.
Now it is true that her own abuse and proclivities may color how severe that problem is. In addition, she was writing said pieces decades ago before civil rights for those she saw as disadvantaged had advanced in popular culture and pornography. Today, I think it is easy to see that the violence, despite being inherent, is not necessarily a requirement given adequate work and it is clear that she didn't either back then. Instead, she made clear many of the issues and their solutions that have subsequently been worked towards. Many people at the time had no idea or otherwise internalized such features that they couldn't see them until pointed out and that is the purpose she tried to fulfill.
Regardless the underlying violence also doesn't mean that there are not other sex acts that are even more violent. Sex with a loving partner (or five) can have positive aspects that override and outweigh any negative aspects. Proper consent can negate any violence conveyed. Assault perpetrated against you can outweigh any violence in any sex acts that are also done by multiple orders of magnitude. You point out that people can often be shortsighted and only see problems that affect them directly, but to assign said individual views to the field as a whole is a mistake. But it does make me wonder, if your ally in ending sexual assault is not the feminist, who is it? After all, women not being equal doesn't somehow stop them from sexually assaulting others.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @05:51AM (2 children)
This would almost have been persuasive, if only for a couple of problems:
First, Dworkin was very clear, and very consistent, about women being oppressed, as a class, period.
Not some women.
Not on the second Sunday after Lent.
Not only between the hours of 4 and 7, or south of 40th street.
Not only married women.
All the time.
This means that her postulated possibility of sex between equals remains, given her oft-repeated position, is at best a theoretical possibility, and more aptly a disingenuous deflection based on what she realised was robbing her of credibility.
She said then that sex shouldn't put women in a subordinated position - but her rhetoric about women's liberation was the rhetoric of revolution, not compromise, not even detente, and she repeatedly spoke about how men relate to sex as dominant predators and conquerors.
She didn't, even, point at a bunch of heterosexuals and say that they were doing it well, and others were doing it poorly. She made some handwaving references to lesbian sex, but her entire view of heterosexual sexuality appears to have been bound up in her abuse.
So while those quotes from interviews are all heart-warming, they're directly contradicted by her writings, and the interviewers were too clueless to demand a differentiation between practical facts and theoretical possibilities.
Case not proven. Next evidence? Title, edition and page.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @06:20AM (1 child)
Is that the best you could come up with after 4 days is to just reiterate the same points again? Points that she denied. Points you also later denied in your parent post as being hers either, interestingly enough. At this point, you do not seem honest. Short of a multivolume analysis, and maybe even then, I'd just point to another thing she wrote and you'll just reiterate those same misunderstandings of her corpus as contradicting them. The evidence stands on its own but feel free to chalk this up as a great moral victory against those evils you disagree with, since everyone else can see otherwise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2020, @07:06AM
Denials are cheap. The transcripts of the trials at Nuremberg are full of denials.
Dworkin never gave a coherent answer to how a woman, as an oppressed person, might give a man, as an oppressing person, meaningful, independently considered consent.
Or if she did, I've never seen it - and I looked for it. There are no Dworkinite Consent Processes. There is no Dworkin's Guide to Non-oppressive Intercourse.
She didn't even, that I saw, give any kind of verifiable checklist on how you might know that consent might have been theoretically freely given.
No, all we got from her was women are oppressed, men are the oppressors, and that's pretty much it. Denying after the fact that her writings lead to where they lead is about as convincing as Goering on the witness stand.