and another thing ...

vruz

A three-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. If our concern is about suffering in this universe, it is rather obvious that we should be more concerned about killing flies than about killing three-day-old human embryos… Many people will argue that the difference between a fly and a three-day-old human embryo is that a three-day-old human embryo is a potential human being. Every cell in your body, given the right manipulations, every cell with a nucleus is now a potential human being. Every time you scratch your nose, you’ve committed a holocaust of potential human beings… Let’s say we grant it that every three-day-old human embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. First of all, embryos at this stage can split into identical twins. Is this a case of one soul splitting into two souls? Embryos at this stage can fuse into a chimera. What has happened to the extra human soul in such a case? This is intellectually indefensible, but it’s morally indefensible given that these notions really are prolonging scarcely endurable misery of tens of millions of human beings, and because of the respect we accord religious faith, we can’t have this dialogue in the way that we should. I submit to you that if you think the interests of a three-day-old blastocyst trump the interests of a little girl with spinal cord injuries or a person with full-body burns, your moral intuitions have been obscured by religious metaphysics.

— Sam Harris, on stem cell research (via bostonwalkforchoice: nefariousnewt: themockingcunt)

vruz: I can appreciate Sam Harris’ eloquent deconstruction of religious hipocrisy. However I’m not hopeful that we can help to drive society to a more sane situation through reasoning alone. Die hard religious people have proven that they’re impermeable, and even reluctant to engage in such an activity. I think further separation of church and the state is needed, and phasing out religious teaching from any schools. If you want to inject lies in your children’s brains, I contend that not even parents have a right to do so, but I’m willing to compromise in allowing this liberty as long as they keep it out of the public discourse, and outside of other people’s children’s brains.

(via vruz)

Source: bostonwalkforchoice-blog Isabeli Fontana Joyce Pascowitch Revista Moda hair eyes lingerie l4e

guardian

Mapping the world with Flickr and Twitter

guardian

Photo by Eric Fischer on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Self-described map geek Eric Fischer has released a fresh batch of data visualisations that merge Flickr and Twitter geographic data.

Source: Guardian eric fischer flickr twitter maps data visualisations

sexxxisbeautiful

For many Western men — and women, for that matter — it is beyond unacceptable for a woman to have hairy legs or armpits: it is inconceivable. The perception that ‘normal’ women should be virtually hair-free is a young one: it began in the 1920s when the struggling Wilkinson Sword Company decided to boost its sales by targeting women, with an advertising campaign that claimed female underarm hair was unfeminine and unhygienic. (Of course, if the latter were true it would have equally applied to both genders, but then again advertising campaigns are notorious for preying on women’s insecurities.) This kind of attitude in advertising and the media is pretty one-sided: the target is almost exclusively women who are effectively told they are too ugly unless they buy into certain products or services, ranging from hair removal to diets to tanning creams and so on.

A hairy proposition — Dollmag.ca (via sexisbeautiful)

bohemianarthouse

When I was thirteen, my grandmother told me a story about the Second World War. She was a nurse at a military hospital in Sydney, Australia. For two years, she healed and comforted American and Australian soldiers.
One day, she tended to a wounded Maori soldier, who had lost his legs to an artillery attack. He was very dark-skinned. His hair was black and curly and his eyes were black and warm. His face was covered with bright tattoos.
‘Are you Maori?’ he asked my grandmother.
‘No,” she said. ‘I’m Spokane Indian. From the United States.’
‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘I have heard of your tribes. But you are the first American Indian I have ever met.’
‘There’s a lot of Indian soldiers fighting for the United States,’ she said. “I have a brother fighting in Germany, and I lost another brother on Okinawa.’
‘I am sorry,” he said. ‘I was on Okinawa as well. It was terrible.’
‘I am sorry about your legs,’ my grandmother said.
‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘What’s funny?’
‘How we brown people are killing other brown people so white people will remain free.’
“I hadn’t thought of it that way.’
‘Well, sometimes I think of it that way. And other times I think of it the way they want me to think of it. I get confused.’

Sherman Alexie - “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” (via swintons)

Source: mizoguchi