Obsidian Wings

Open Thread

by JanieM

As I think about the fact that there are too many topics to choose from, and I don't have time to put together something usefully focused on a single one of them, a phrase comes to mind. But it needs some background.

When I was an undergraduate at MIT, the head of the psychology department (now Brain and Cognitive Science) was one Hans-Lukas Teuber, one of those engaging and popular professors whose name was known to everyone. When I was there he taught the intro to psychology class, or 9.01 ("nine-oh-one"), psychology being "Course 9."

It was a popular class, so the lectures were given in one of the biggest lecture halls on campus (Room 26-100....). I never took the class, but I attended a few lectures with friends who were taking it and thus got a taste of why Professor Teuber was so popular. He was engaging, challenging, funny, smart, and clear.

Watch the first minute of this video, and then imagine him walking to the front of the lecture hall, looking out and up at a few hundred students, and saying, "Who vants to know vat?"

A variation of that question, in Teuber's accent, popped into my mind when I decided we were due for a new thread.

"Who vants to talk about vat?"

Kansas, Bloody Kansas **

by wj

For this week's Open Thread, let's lead off with some election returns.

Perhaps the most significant, to my mind, was the attempt to amend the Kansas Constitution. Currently, the right to an abortion is enshrined in the Kansas constitution. This was an attempt to remove that (so that the legislature could make it as illegal as possible). It was carefully slotted in for the primary, rather than the general election in November, because primaries tend to attract fewer, and more ideologically motivated, voters.

Well it didn't work. Kansas is a deep red state. In fact, it is the 8th most red state in the country. It hasn't voted for a Democrat for President since 1964. Trump won in 2020 by a 56-42 margin.

So what happened? The amendment went down 62-38. With abortion likely to be a serious issue this year (unless the Democrats an exceptionally inept in their campaigns), Republicans may have a problem. It will be ironic if their triumph in finally overturning Roe v Wade is what does them in.

** For those outside the US, it's a reference to how Kansas was characterized in the run up to the American Civil War.

The Basics

by JanieM

PS: Open thread!

*****

nous, from downstairs: Sick puppies. So full of hate and disdain for women.

Sex is so fraught, for so many reasons and in so many ways. Someone on another blog I used to read once wrote that everyone has a right to have sex -- she was trying to be compassionate to lonely people (summarizing madly) -- but there was shockingly little discussion of the fact that you don't in fact have a "right" to use another person's body for your own purposes without their consent. And surely this little problem is at the heart of the hatred and disdain for women that that particular kind of sick puppy feels.

A mess.

So I'm posting this ancient page from a 1995 issue of the Whole Earth Review as a starting point (or 17 starting points) for discussion of a difficult topic. Maybe too difficult for a public blog, or maybe we can thread that needle.