I usually try to be pretty level headed about stuff like this, but here we go. The first thing that you have to assume is that Matt and Trey’s living is made off of pushing people’s buttons. That having been said, the reason that so many people like the show and by consequence their selling point is that they don’t spare anyone. They even make fun of themselves on several occasions. It’s subtle, but it’s definitely there a good amount of the time. I think that they picked out Muhammad to poke fun at because of the recent events surrounding him. In this context I’m talking about the comic strip writers being threatened for depicting Muhammad in a negative light. However, while the comic artists were kind of being malicious about it, Matt and Trey are using it more of an example to poke fun at a concept that seems ridiculous to them. This concept is that someone can be prevented from speaking their opinion based on fear of being harmed by another group. Having said that, them being threatened is a tad ridiculous. I think that they are rather brave for continuing to support their work after being threatened in such a way. If the press statement released by them is true, they did not desire to have and bleeps in the episode, and Comedy Central placed them in the episode. More interesting to me is the statement that the entire end speech, which was bleeped out, contained no mention of Muhammad. It was a general speech about fear and free speech. I think that it is unfortunate that a few radical people have turned this into such a big deal, especially when it seems that Muhammad is represented with much more dignity than many of the other religious figures in the show. The show outright calls Joseph Smith dumb, and shows the Catholic clergy consulting an inter-dimensional spider queen about child molestation. The worst treatment I saw Muhammad get on the show was the ability to wield fire in the Super Friends parody that they always revert to. In the end, what happened is exactly what I expected to happen. Assuming that they weren’t lying, the creators showed individual courage while a larger company that they are worth millions to protected them. I don’t think they episode itself is outrageous at all, especially since the show has always at least been fair in their inclusion of all groups for making fun of. I don’t know, in part they are only doing it because that is what they do well, and maybe not 100% to make a point. However, the context of the threat makes it more about the ability to say what you want without fear of being harmed. I think that is a very important message overall.

I'm going to catch a large amount of flack for this if anyone actually reads it, but I think I'm prepped. First of all, I am a guy, but I actually have a good amount of things to say about the class we had on these issues, and I will try to keep this concise. I tended to agree with many girls in the class that commented "As long as you have self -esteem, these things shouldn't matter." The counter-point was brought up that you may not be able to have self esteem if you are constantly feeling like you aren't attractive physically. Now, while I can see how this works, here is how I look at it. Every person is beautiful in their own way...mostly true. Everyone is physically attractive to the majority of the populace...has always been and will always be false. That is just the way the world works. Some people are much more physically attractive to most of us than others. I feel like we are equating beauty and physical attractiveness, and they are one hundred percent not the same thing. It was so weird to watch the play in class because I feel like a big point was missed. Society didn't deem smaller breasts alone to be more attractive, quite the contrary in my opinion. It's just that people with smaller breasts tend to be thinner or more athletically built. I think it is pretty difficult to argue against the statement that the majority of people find thinner members of the opposite sex more attractive. Being thinner itself is usually a sign of better health anyway, it's just biological. It's a big picture kind of thing. You have to understand that while physically you may be inferior to your peers, you have a plethora of other qualities that make you a person and define your beauty. My sister used to get called fat by my other family members all the time, but she's got enough confidence in other areas of her life that she could just go whatever. Sure, it was painful sometimes but she learned to get over it. So two things need to happen. One, people need to get over that they might not be the best looking person in the world. Two, you have to remember that we are multi-dimensional people. Someone can be much less attractive based on nothing in the physical world, like if you find them to be morally flawed or not intelligent or just the wrong kind of charm. Honestly this is getting to be annoying, it seems like every time we get away from the interesting parts of this class (Which to me is drawing interesting conclusions from the data presented), we move class in a direction that just reinforces every stereotype about sociology that there is. In conclusion, I agree with the girl here, all women are beautiful. Don't fixate yourself so much on the physical, because it's only one of many dimensions.

I feel like I should preface this by saying that I by no means have a great understanding of the welfare system or the inner workings of it. This happens to be my humble opinion of what would happen if we chose to abandon the welfare system. Should you get rid of welfare altogether, there would be a massive wave of homelessness across the United States. This is just because the economy at this stage would not be immediately able to handle the amount of people that would have to find employment. However, the money used for welfare eventually would get poured into jobs and hopefully at equilibrium everyone could find employment. While this does give more opportunity for advancement for children born into the system, it also has a few problems associated with it. The first is that there is no safety net in case someone gets screwed by the system, which inevitably will occur. The other problem is that as opposed to now when a common misconception about being on welfare is that you are lazy and cannot get a job if you are on welfare. Eliminating the welfare system I feel would give a certain incorrect but sort of implied validity to the statement more, and may not necessarily directly affect the class system, but it will definitely convince people that the struggle isn’t worth learning about. Another point that I feel needs to be brought up is the issue of the welfare system being better than actual jobs. I know this is a point of contention, but even if this isn’t true, no one can dispute whether or not the gap is too small. There should be a large difference between minimum wage at a full time job and the money gotten on welfare. If this happens, there will be an actual incentive to leave the welfare system behind because it will blatantly be too ineffective compared to a normal job to support someone. I think the whole generational wealth thing would remain for the most part unaffected by the elimination of welfare, but it at least could give people a fighting chance to get ahead. It’s pretty universally agreed that the current system keeps way to many people in it. You are never going to start out rich if your parents were poor, and even if you make it big you still have a lot of ground to cover to make up the difference. However, if they money spent on welfare let you get a job at a young age and you had an opportunity for advancement, then you have a chance to work your butt off and hopefully catch a break, which you would not have had when the system was in place before.

Alright so let me answer question one. Why aren’t men more educated about women’s menstrual cycles? Well I think the question implies that in general, men don’t know that much. I could be giving us more credit than we deserve but it seems to me that more “education” about the matter isn’t really going to change anything. Being more educated on the issue involves nothing more than a few minutes on Wikipedia and then you can probably know everything that you already wanted to know. Sure, there are certain pieces of information about how the cycles affects different women in different ways, but for the most part it is pretty straightforward. I don’t understand the reason to talk about it in the manner that was shown in class. Most people aren’t uncomfortable talking about things but you have to understand that it’s usually to easier to talk about it when it’s relevant. You know, like when there’s a reason to talk about it other than straight up shock value. Talking about a girl’s period can be likened to talking about your morning wood. It’s a natural body function that occurs with a certain regularity in a particular sex . But that doesn’t mean that the first reference that I make to something is a metaphor to my morning wood. I think that topics like this have their place, and if you want to talk about them, that’s ok. However, you have to make sure that everyone is on the same page. The general point that I want to make is that there is nothing wrong with you if you get a little uncomfortable talking about menstrual cycles in front of a couple hundred people, it just means that you have class. Second question: Would tampons be free if men had periods. Probably not, human biology tends to make a lot of money. Anything that affects a large population of people is too profitable to be made free. Think about it. Viagra is far from free, and that’s about as close as you can get to an equivalent. Granted, it really isn’t that close at all, but I think it illustrates the point that I am trying to make. Personally, I feel like we aren’t even talking about something relevant anymore. I understand the parallel between not wanting to talk about this and not wanting to talk about race because they both make people uncomfortable but are a reality. However, there are certain people that want to make issues out of nothing just to be different. It doesn’t make you an enlightened thinker or better individual, you just want to make everyone else uncomfortable so you can distinguish yourself from them.

I tend to agree with the fact that not allowing an entire prom to occur based on one homosexual couple wanting to attend is a bit of an overhaul. On some level though, I can understand why a school wouldn’t want to allow homosexual couples to purchase tickets as a couple. Here is the way I look at it. When a school creates a prom, they do so out of a tradition, not because they have to it’s just expected. It’s already enough that the school puts up with the trouble caused by some students, so the school would much rather make the prom just a nice evening. We as a culture, and I think wrongly so, have turned prom into this whole big romantic event, where there’s late night drinking and trying to get laid. When in reality I think it carries zero weight on the rest of your love life and isn’t that big of a deal. So the school’s life is made easier by this being an event that you attend just to see your friends. Now, as soon as the school has homosexual couples attending, and I mean this in the most objective way possible, the prom does become something that is sexually in nature because couples are attending based on who they are sexually attracted to. Now of course this applies to straight people too, but the difference is that Jane and John can attend the prom as friends only with no intentions of anything else happening. Jim and Ted HAVE TO be sexually attracted to one another to really attend prom as a couple. I know it’s a little weird, but this forces the school to recognize prom as something sexual in nature, which they really would rather not do. Now should homosexual children be allowed to attend prom? Absolutely, and they should be allowed to dance with someone they like. There exists a difference in my mind between saying that something can’t occur and allowing it to occur without endorsing it. At face value, not selling a homosexual couple a couple’s ticket is super discriminatory, but in high school, where they are trying to keep things non-sexual anyway, I don’t think it’s really that outrageous. Obviously shutting down your whole prom to avoid this is a little bit ridiculous. I think that this gets to be a much bigger deal in college though. I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with a school making a decision to preserve some of the innocence associated with the younger years, it is kind of the last time you get that.

Before I share my opinion on any of this, I think that a point needs to be established. Theme parties as a whole almost never have a race based theme. One did, and it just made the national news. So saying that there are a plethora of theme parties with race at the center of the theme is just plain wrong. Regarding the party at USCD, the whole thing is totally out of hand. However, I think the part of it that makes it out of hand is that it was thrown in response to Black History month. Honestly, I would have thought about this party a lot differently is the invitation had just called it a Compton Cookout with no descriptors attached. People’s interpretations may have come off a little skewed, but the point I want to arrive at it that there is a difference between making fun of a race and making fun of a culture. I don’t think anyone should really have a problem with people having Jersey Shore parties or things like that. Sure, you may be from there, and it may be mocking you a little, but making fun of a culture is fair game in my eyes because it is something that you choose to be a part of. For example, I may get slightly annoyed when people make fun of the culture that I associate with, but I at least can laugh at myself when people take small eccentricities to an extreme. The problem with how this was thrown was really one big thing. If you had a party that said dress ghetto, and included all the descriptors on the invitation that have been mentioned, I don’t think it really would have been that bad. Obviously the purpose of this party is to make a mockery of whatever its guests represent. However, again the big problem is that you have associated a culture that you are mocking to an entire race. Race unfortunately is not something that you can realistically choose to be a part of or not. The net effect is that people who have nothing to do with this culture that is portrayed are sucked into the stereotype that they have distinctly chosen not to be a part of, for one reason or another. I can see both sides of calling this racist or not calling it racist. I think that it is, but just omitting that black history month statement would almost make me argue the other way. That’s kind of interesting to me, that just the wording makes me change opinions without really taking into account the intentions of the people behind the party. Maybe they are racist, maybe not, but there is definitely a thin line in this case in my opinion, thinner than most might believe.

I feel like I am having a different reaction to the video in class than most people did. I wasn’t surprised at all by the reactions of people in the store. In fact I was surprised how many people actually said something. I mean the problem I have with this experience is the scenario. You went to a bakery… IN TEXAS. Not to call everyone from Texas racist because they are certainly not, but you have to remember where this controlled environment actually is. If the same results had been obtained in a state like New York, I probably would have been shocked. The experiment definitely had conclusive results regarding people’s willingness to stand up to injustice in a social setting, but for you to get any real data in your favor you have to go to the deep south. I don’t know, it just seems like bad science to me, and saying that this represents the majority of Americans absolutely isn’t true in my mind. I think that excluding the fact that this isn’t exactly what I would call fair conditions (conducting a discrimination experiment in Texas, you kind of get what you are asking for). I feel like the number of people who did not make a statement or a vocal opinion about what was going on may not have done so because they were in the store at the same time as someone who did make a statement. The idea that one can choose to make a statement silently can easily be confused with just being outright uncomfortable, but I don’t think that being vocal about something makes you so any more right or wrong than someone who silently leaves and tells his or her friends to stop shopping there. There are many ways to fight. Some people are good at the upfront part, and some are good at the subtle part. I think that only idiots think what the store clerk said to her was right, but I can’t say with any certainty that I would have said something if someone else had already been giving him flack for it. No one wants to be a sidekick in that situation, it’s just a weird situation. I was rather impressed that the man who had a son in Iraq was one of the people who said something. People are complaining about store customers saying nothing, but you have to consider that a man who’s son could be killed any day by someone who shares an ethnic identity with the woman had the balls to stand up to someone in a place where voicing your opinion like that isn’t always a good idea. That video didn’t disappoint me in my fellow citizen at all, save for the store clerk. We performed admirably.

So I can’t figure out if you’re playing devil’s advocate or not, but I will play along. The problem with this entire issue is that one assumes that the bible is the word of God himself. My understanding is that as a Christian one believes that the bible was written by men. Granted they had divine guidance, but still men none the less. Because of this, many of the issues addressed in the bible are contextual to the time period. As such, you can never really apply the passages in the bible literally when dealing with modern day issues. There are reasons to condemn homosexuality in the time period when the bible was written. It cuts back on population growth, which would have been pretty important given the number of battles fought in the Old Testament. Imagine looking at two men with each other the same way a man and a woman are with each other, knowing nothing about biology. Of course you would think that the act was unnatural and condemned by God, you have never seen anything like it. Given new understanding of nature, specific examples of immorality have to be changed. For example, the bible tells the story of Sodom being destroyed by God due to it’s sexual immorality. Now it is basically indisputable that the reason in the bible for its destruction was that the people of the town held no regard for traditional sex. Of course you would think it was wrong. There aren’t any forms of birth control other than family planning (Catholic Roulette as my grandmother calls it). Having sex with many people means many illegitimate children. We have ways to prevent it these days, so our perception of what is acceptable is way different. Now assume that God is omnipotent. I would assume that time has no meaning to him, so changes in the science of men doesn’t affect what he judges as right and wrong. In biblical times, God condemned sexual promiscuity. As such, if he were consistent in his judgment, we would be seeing random frat houses and cheap motels hit with fire and brimstone every night. While this is hilarious and I would totally support it, this obviously doesn’t happen. God’s definition of wrong and right hasn’t changed, only our perception of it as time changes. Assuming that one is Catholic, both John Paul II and Benedict XVI have stated that evolution is basically the truth, and that belief in both it and God are not mutually exclusive. So homosexuality occurs as a means of evolutional population control and increased resource gathering (feeding less families=more total food). The main point here is that you can’t really use such a contextual piece of literature as absolute proof that the divine being one worships condemns such a specific action.

In relation to the idea that everything comes back to “white v black”, I can’t help but feel a few things. While some of me tends to think that the whole thing is a little bit exaggerated. Personally, my conditions have never really made me confront these issues realistically. However, I understand that some other people have, and that is why this is important. I tend to agree with the statement that the issues surrounding race relations today do not have as much to do with slavery as they do with the civil rights movement. The fact that it is something that was actually viewed by us does indeed have significance, but I think that the timing of it has a lot more to do with the issues today. As communication channels become more global, we really are open to the plight of others throughout the world. The civil rights movement was in the 1950’s and 60’s, which means that the majority of the members in current families who experienced it are grandparents and parents of the current generation. I don’t think that there is any question that the beliefs of your parents and grandparents, while they may not dictate the way you think entirely, are definitely large contributors to how you view the world. So the majority of a time of great strife was experienced by people who directly contribute to the opinions and prejudices of the current generation. I think that is more of a reason why everything may come back to black and white. Similar kinds of strife exist other places around the world. Older Chinese citizens sometimes harbor intense prejudice against the Japanese because of Nanking in WWII. I don’t have any data to back this up, but I am pretty sure that because of this, prejudice exists in the current generation. I know that some of my older relatives carry racist tendencies from back in the day. While I don’t consider these exact prejudices part of my personality, I do have derivative versions of them that are apparent in how I speak or approach a thought sometimes. Our almost immediate elders experienced a time of strife and have kind of had time to reflect on it. I think that there are going to be a few other battles that may not be as significant, but our future generations may thing that everything is coming back to “latino vs white” because our generation is still dealing with the issue of immigrants from Mexico. On the other hand, things in my generation seem to be getting a lot better with not tying everything back to race. I think the more removed we become from large events in race relations history, the more the effect of these events will decrease exponentially.

I think that there are many not so subtle messages in Avatar, but they are not necessarily as race related as one might think. Obviously, the film is very derivative. If you took Dances with Wolves and Pocohontas (and Aliens. The drop-ship pilot is the same character), their children in the year 3000 would be this movie. I think that the more accurate message portrayed is not that the white man has to come and save everyone, but more that the more advanced civilization can’t be defeated without a member from that civilization helping them. Now I agree that the way most movies portray this (Last Samurai, Pocohontas, etc) is with a white man being the hero. However, I thought one of the big things that Avatar went for wasn’t a racial difference but a difference in species. Race, interestingly enough, doesn’t really translate into the movie for me because the main character really ceases to be human as he embraces his role as a hero. It does still, however, imply that the other civilization is still inferior without the help of him and his human friends. So with the backdrop of a superior civilization in those times, most of these stories take place in colonial era. While the social aspects of these civilizations can be debated, I don’t think that anyone really argues the countries in Europe, who were mostly white, were the most powerful in a pure military sense. They were also very aggressive in their conquests, and this is very easy to label as wrong or presumptuous. So if I were to choose a bad guy to portray taking away things from less superior cultures from a military standpoint, I would absolutely choose the white guy FROM EUROPE taking from a native person in another world, and I don’t really feel bad about that. Again, I think that the thing we need to deal with is the issue that only the person from the “superior” culture can save the native peoples from destruction. It is basically implying that all their spiritualism/pride as a nation is all for naught unless they can convince someone from the other side to see their way. There are so many stories about an inferior culture or people defeating a near invincible foe against the odds. The 300 Spartans at Thermopylae or the Russians during WWII. The movies made about those also catch flack for depicting the villain in a certain way (yea, maybe Persians had a case for 300.). The point is that the story structure is such that the superior army is always evil, and it is sheer coincidence that it happens to cross racial boundaries. On an end note, Ferngully is a sweet movie, and there should be more movies based off of it.