Wide Awake in Dreamland

So I’ll fill the time with some links.
•”By getting married the woman consented to sex” so marital rape is impossible, according to Phyliss Schaffly.
•Tipping is part of what you pay for service. You shouldn’t refuse because your waitperson is gay. Nor is leaving religious advice a good substitute. Though it’s not unknown: I’ve heard stories about diners who leave a tip in the form of a Christian pamphlet that looks on one side like a $20 bill.
•A blog post from 2005 seems still timely almost a decade later, as the author speculates about how much the media keep from us.
•Slacktivist concludes that when you’re telling the people you’re keeping down to be meek and Christlike and submissive (not that Jesus was that, actually) You’re Doing It Wrong. And both Slacktivist and Rachel Held Evans discuss how accusations of being “divisive” are used to silence people who question the status quo.
That really struck home because I’ve seen the same thing so much on racial issues. Abolition was bad because abolitionists were pushing Southerners to destroy the Union. The civil-rights movement was bad because it set Americans against each other—couldn’t they move more quietly? Less stridently? It was weakening our country in the face of our enemies (a common theme in 1950s films). Obama’s preacher, Jeremiah Wright? Dangerously divisive and anti-American for his racial views. And recently a friend of mine proclaimed that Al Sharpton and other black activists are divisive because they’re attacking whites.
Notably the oppressor is never the issue. The white segregationists aren’t being divisive. People like Orson Scott Card who write about how Obama will lead black armies against white people aren’t divisive.
It’s another variation of the getting out of Egypt problem: if the Israelites would just stay quiet and make the bricks, we wouldn’t have all these problems.
And here’s a variation of the same: if the victims would just stay strong and proud, the oppressor couldn’t touch them.
•LGM argues that if we don’t act to prevent it, global warming will perpetuate injustice: the rich will find ways to stay rich and comfortable, the poor will suffer.
•Former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said in 2012 that he didn’t expect to take a new job in the financial industry. Wow, he changed his mind. Who’d have seen that coming?
•The idea that stillborn babies and aborted fetuses go into heaven is not unknown. But it has some disturbing implications …
•A reminder that old technology has a longer after-life than we credit.
•A fairly prescient look at 21st century video revolution, as seen from 1986.
•As my recent reading has reminded me, modern non-representational art used to be incredibly controversial. For some right-wingers, it still is.