I’m Addicted to Information

I’m lik­ing what David Gre­nier has to say about Gay Mar­riage.

From democ­ra­cynow:
RNC Warns TV Sta­tions Not to Air MoveOn Ad
Mean­while, the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee is warn­ing 250 tv sta­tions across the coun­try to stop run­ning ads from MoveOn.org crit­i­ciz­ing Pres­i­dent Bush. The RNC claims the ads vio­late fed­er­al elec­tion law. MoveOn defend­ed the ads and said it is not sur­pris­ing that the Repub­li­can par­ty QUOTE “con­tin­ues to make false claims about the legal­i­ty of our cam­paign in order to silence us.

Nobody can car­ry on a ver­bal attack alone. It takes two peo­ple — one to be the attack­er, and one to be the vic­tim. Peo­ple who use ver­bal abuse do so because they want the fight or the scene — they want your atten­tion — and they enjoy the hav­oc they cre­ate. When you take the bait in their attacks and go along with their plans, you’re not show­ing them how strong and assertive you are, you are giv­ing them exact­ly what they want. The more you do that, the worse the sit­u­a­tion will get. Every time you take the bait in a ver­bal attack, you are par­tic­i­pat­ing in a self-rein­forc­ing feed­back loop.
–Suzette Haden Elgin in GENDERSPEAK: Men, Women, and the Gen­tle Art of Ver­bal Self-Defense

Our brains and spir­its are the freest things in the uni­verse. Our bod­ies can live in chains, but our intel­lects can­not. It’s that sim­ple. The mind will be free, or it will be dead. It can be numbed, qui­et­ed, and restrained so that it mem­o­rizes names of Por­tuguese explor­ers and plods through grades 1 to 12. If it is fierce­ly alive and teamed up with a for­giv­ing spir­it, it may find a way to be free even in school and stay awake that way. But these strate­gies are defens­es, not full-fledged learning.
…
Are you tick­led pink to have your mind pro­grammed into Obe­di­ent Work­er mode? To cash in your cul­tur­al her­itage for Main­stream Sub­ur­bia-think? To be baby-sat 35 hours every week?

–Grace Llewellyn in The Teenage Lib­er­a­tion Handbook

Some of the things Dru Blood says about how blog­ging has changed her writ­ing real­ly res­onate with me.

Well, to be hon­est I was­n’t doing a whole lot of writ­ing just pri­or to start­ing a blog. Every­thing else was always pri­or­i­tized over the writ­ing. For some rea­son, the blog had an imme­di­a­cy to it that allowed for me to swoop past with the babe in arms and just tap out a ran­dom some­thing and then swoop away…and then, over time, there was the feed­back ele­ment of com­ments that was real­ly encouraging.

I think blog­ging, and writ­ing pub­li­cal­ly has forced me to real­ly think about what I’m say­ing and the WAY I’m say­ing it. I can’t always take the time to craft the posts, and I don’t real­ly proofread…so I have sort of become hyper-con­scious (in a good way) about what I’m conveying.

How­ev­er, since I start­ed blog­ging, I have a real­ly dif­fi­cult time NOT writ­ing for an audi­ence. My paper jour­nal is sparse…just lists and action items, real­ly. I’m not sure if this is a good or a bad thing, and I’m def­i­nite­ly not sure if my writ­ing has got­ten any bet­ter in the almost 2 years that I’ve been blogging