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Woland Special user 680 Posts |
And you wanted to know why Europe is in trouble:
Quote:
A Swedish political party is taking a stand against upright urination. Is that so? |
motown Inner circle Atlanta by way of Detroit 6127 Posts |
Backward thinking.
"If you ever write anything about me after I'm gone, I will come back and haunt you."
– Karl Germain |
tommy Eternal Order Devil's Island 16544 Posts |
Paris is a more interersting place.
If there is a single truth about Magic, it is that nothing on earth so efficiently evades it.
Tommy |
Woland Special user 680 Posts |
Yes, tommy, it is. Although those old-fashioned vespasiennes that provided privacy only from the shoulders to the knees, allowing you to continue your conversation, smouldering maïs mégot dangling from your lower lip, are disappearing.
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acesover Special user I believe I have 821 Posts |
Progress is wondcerful.
Makes you want to say, WHY DIDN'T I THING OF THAT.
If I were to agree with you. Then we would both be wrong. As of Apr 5, 2015 10:26 pm I have 880 posts. Used to have over 1,000
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NicholasD Inner circle 1458 Posts |
Geez, I figured out over thirty years ago that my bladder emptied better while seated. I should have done a research paper on it.
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stoneunhinged Inner circle 3067 Posts |
Fascinating.
This leads me to a couple of observations: First, as an ex-janitor, I am skeptical. Although it might be more sanitary for people at home to all sit down while urinating, in public bathrooms it would seem (and this may only be anecdotal, but my guess is that it is fairly accurate) that women hesitate to actually place their buttocks on the toilet seat, preferring to hover above it in a sort of three-quarters squat. The consequence is that the toilet seat becomes splattered with urine, which of course results in an escalation from hesitance to outright refusal. Which means, of course, that within minutes of the janitor's heart-felt and diligent work, the toilet seat is entirely unusable. Men's toilet seats are generally cleaner because of the urinals. Second, at most public events I have ever attended in arenas or stadiums (or rather, in EVERY public event I have ever attended in arenas or stadiums), the line to the women's room is much longer than in the men's room. Removing troughs at a baseball stadium would create chaos. Here in Germany, the women simply line up at the stalls in the men's room, essentially turning every men's room into a unisex bathroom. Should any of you not know this about Germany, be forewarned. If you go to a basketball/soccer/whatever game, there will be women lined up to use the stalls in the men's room. Third, I am skeptical of the medical evidence. Also here in Germany (apparently this would also be the case in Sweden), it is extremely common for household's to have a sign requesting you sit down to urinate. My personal experience is that I feel less relieved after urinating while sitting down than after urinating when standing up. |
Woland Special user 680 Posts |
Thanks, Stone. I don't think the supposed hygienic (both public cleanliness and personal health) benefits are what is driving this group. They want to erase sex differences altogether. Here's another example.
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motown Inner circle Atlanta by way of Detroit 6127 Posts |
Quote: I what way?On 2012-06-18 08:58, tommy wrote:
"If you ever write anything about me after I'm gone, I will come back and haunt you."
– Karl Germain |
Woland Special user 680 Posts |
There's no end to it:
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Activists are lobbying for parents to be able to choose any name for their children (there are currently just 170 legally recognized unisex names in Sweden). The idea is that names should not be at all tied to gender, so it would be acceptable for parents to, say, name a girl Jack or a boy Lisa. A Swedish children's clothes company has removed the "boys" and "girls" sections in its stores, and the idea of dressing children in a gender-neutral manner has been widely discussed on parenting blogs. This Swedish toy catalog recently decided to switch things around, showing a boy in a Spider-Man costume pushing a pink pram, while a girl in denim rides a yellow tractor. |
stoneunhinged Inner circle 3067 Posts |
Quote:
On 2012-06-18 11:19, Woland wrote: AHA! So THAT'S what's driving the law forward. Well, gender theory is a case of the Emperor's New Clothes. They can make their attempts to eliminate gender distinction, but in the end everyone will see that the Emperor is naked. Just recently I started to read Judith Butler's "Gender Trouble", and I'm fascinated by how powerful and lucid a thinker she is. At the same time, she is simply wrong at an epistemological and ontological level. The premise of her book is basically this: feminism is in a serious crisis, because [given our presuppositions as modern critical theorists following people like Foucault and Kristiva] we cannot define what "women" are. So we have to recreate an understanding of the feminine which is consonant with an absence of natural gender distinctions. The result is an understanding of feminity and masculinity as "performance" within a cultural context. This is called "performativity"--obviously a contraction of "performance" with "normative". Performativity is the performance of gender within cultural normative contexts. So feminism is saved, because although we don't know what women are, we do know that people are exploited, misrepresented, and discriminated against because they perform their genders within restrictive and oppressive cultural contexts. The salvation of feminism is for it to make the step from seeing women as socially oppressed to seeing EVERYONE as being socially oppressed via society's opressive categories of performativity. Feminism becomes anti-binarism or anti-gender-specificitism. So making everyone pee the same way will save us all from bigotry, oppression, and exploitation. Sounds good to me. |
Woland Special user 680 Posts |
Hi Stone,
The fact that academic intellectuals can't see the obvious is a continuing problem in a number of disciplines. The Canadian Thomist Charles DeKoninck wrote (in "The Lifeless World of Biology") about the futility of biologists trying to define "life" on the basis of extreme outlying cases, such as viruses. Quote:
Modern biology, if some of its distinguished representatives are to be believed, dare not call itself true science unless it avoids and ignores all that naturally comes to the minds of ordinary people when they think of familiar animals and plants. Nor have I been provoked to this general comment by one or two radical works like Mr. N. W. Pirie’s The Meaninglessness of theTerms Life and Living (1937), or his more recent The Origin of Life (1953). Long before I was aware of his opinion, I had pointed out in an Introduction a l’etude de l’ame (1947), that neither the courses in biology followed by myself more than a quarter of a century ago, nor anything I have read since,offered any reason why the terms ‘life’ and ‘inanimate’ should be used at all except as ‘linguistic conveniences’. The reason is that the biology I am talking about is resolved to be sternly empirical, while it can find nowhere any definite, empirically defined property able to separate, once and for all, the animate from the inanimate. Irritability, self-repair, nourishment, growth, and reproduction, as described in typical modern treatises, can be no more than provisional hypotheses, if they amount even to this. It may of course be granted that, as a matter of method, we can and should attempt to explain so-called living phenomena in terms of what we call the inanimate, as far as possible; and that, when we cannot, we should at least keep an open mind on the question. However, even this apparently broad view will lead to difficulties. ‘Inanimate’, after all, is a negative term: I mean that, linguistically, it is a negation of ‘animate’, so that it looks none too easy to get rid of the living when, without at least the idea of it, the ‘non-living’ cannot be named. |
gdw Inner circle 4884 Posts |
How is that not MORE sexist?
"You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one."
I won't forget you Robert. |
Woland Special user 680 Posts |
Hi gdw, to what does your comment refer?
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stoneunhinged Inner circle 3067 Posts |
Quote:
On 2012-06-18 12:33, gdw wrote: Surely you are referring to this sentence: Quote:
So making everyone pee the same way will save us all from bigotry, oppression, and exploitation. Because, when you think about it, men can stand up and shoot urine away from themselves--something more difficult for a woman. There is no bigotry, oppression, or exploitation involved. It's just the way we're built. Again: Emperor's New Clothes. And such. |
Tom Jorgenson Inner circle LOOSE ANGLES, CALIFORNIA 4451 Posts |
I'm against it. You can't write your name in the snow from a crouch.
And now that the US school system is killing cursive, kids won't be able to do it standing up either. Why not modify the urinals so women can use them standing? That would be just as fair. ...and I don't think men raise the seat to pee...you almost have to blowtorch those things to sanitize them. I seriously think there should be a federal law making all public accessible toilet seats' default position upright. National Sanitation Law. Those Swede's liberals are as nuts as our right-wing is.
We dance an invisible dance to music they cannot hear.
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S2000magician Inner circle Yorba Linda, CA 3465 Posts |
Quote:
On 2012-06-18 14:14, Tom Jorgenson wrote: Your argument is moot: with global warming, soon there won't be any snow anyway: problem solved. |
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