nihil architecture blogs

2003, a great time for liberty and democracy in the Greatest Nation on Earth. Lawrence v. Texas was ruled. A landmark Supreme Court ruling that ruled that the ban on sodomy was unconstitutional; thus we see the fine work of constitutions in practice. The very fundamental laws that challenge not citizens but governments to protect the citizens against them. Well, it didn’t go right immediately, a similar case was tried in 1986 which ruled in the negative. Apparently the flaw was that the Supreme Court [held] that it had viewed the liberty interest too narrowly.

Perfectly understandable looking at the text of the Fourteenth Amendment:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Hell, I would make mistakes interpreting that too. Because I have no idea what the fuck it actually is supposed to mean. Nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. What the hell is this shit even supposed to be telling me? Obviously if I make it a law saying that I can do it, then it is not without due process of law therefore not unconstitutional? liberty, the most vague term ever? So if without a due process some state stops me from walking around naked, that is unconstitutional? These words are so retardedly vague that you can conceivably argue any fucking law to be unconstitutional or constitutional given enough imagination.

But hey, let’s talk about another favourite, the second one:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Crystal clear honestly. So I take it that when I’m arrested on the streets with a nuclear bomb or an RPG, maybe a tank or whatever, then I could of course fall back to my constitutional right to bear arms right? Well, evidently not because it only goes so far. Great we established that obviously the letter of the law doesn’t mean to imply all arms, just some that don’t go too far. Great, vote for me for right honourable genetically engineered executive monkey of the US of A, I will just outlaw any piece of firearm except water guns. Constitutions: difficult is instant, the impossible takes five minutes. So obviously the truth is in the middle, as: What goes too far? which is going to be decided by someone. So in other words, if the constitution was there or not doesn’t make a flying fucking difference because the person who’s going to decide it is going for what he or she thinks goes too far anyway.

How about the first one, the holy grail:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Almost every piece of moral convention has a religious basis. Okay, so enforcing things like male circumcision would never fly because that’s enforcing religion? Great, let’s legalize murder while we’re at it, after all it clearly originates from the bible. You can argue in every single instance that whatever you’re doing isn’t because of your religion but something you’d do regardless of it. Freedom of speech is of course always a good one. For some retarded reason prostitution is illegal, except if you film it, because pornography is protected under the First Amendment. Okay, so apparently the First Amendment makes it legal to perform an unlawful act as long as I film it because freedom of speech? Cool, so why isn’t child porn legal to make or a good old fashioned snuff film? Of course, your opinion isn’t free if it’s ‘hate speech’ of course, where hate speech just means not liking some group where most people have no problem with them. I swear, if this piece of text did not exist wouldn’t make a flying difference, some Supreme Court justices were just okay with porn and decided to frivolously search in the constitution for a reason to make it legal.

Okay, so the US is basically the only western country that still actively practices capital punishment, so there’s the eight guy:

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Are you shitting me? Did the grand minds that wrote this text down really think it would change any-thing. excessive hmm? the vaguest term ever. I’m pretty sure what whoever imposes bails or fines imposes what is in his or her mind just right and not excessive? And cruel and unusual? What kind of flying drooling retard actually authors laws with these vague kinds of words.

Which you can do with anything really because this entire piece of text is worded so purposefully vaguely that with enough imagination you can make pretty much anything legal or illegal on constitutional grounds.

And that brings us to the point of Judical Activism. Let’s face it, the fact that the constitution is so vague doesn’t help it and all 9 of those justices are massive judical activists. You don’t have to be a genius transform a list what Scalia thinks the constitution says into the party he votes for. You also don’t have to be a genius to realize that as long as præsidents nominate justices and the senate has to approve it with a mere 50% majority that each and every one of those justices is going to be a judical activist. If you’re a politician who believes in something, why would you not appoint the biggest Judical activist to champion that cause? The people who appoint and nominate justices have no fucking interest in appointing neutral people who interpret the constitution free of political ideology. It’s in their fullest agenda to appoint the biggest judical activists in the history of judical activists.

It’s been a hell of a week being a woman for a week, and by that I mean completely uneventful with the highlight of the day the fifteen minutes in the morning try to convincingly get a feminine voice jarred in. My mother stopped taking it seriously 3 days ago and reverted back to my given name. I decided to not correct her as it was kind of awkward, I suppose a true transwoman would get offended over that, so maybe I’m not doing it completely correctly.

The one thing I learnt from all this though, is how badly men have it, having to shave every day, luckily I can go back to shaving once per month now, like women do.

In my quæst for rare items being able to help me kill off my corrupted heart, I sawr a stand, as I recall it was a chip stand. So I put up my fine feminine voice I’ve been breeding for these past two days, no one notices a darned difference or even acts like ‘Oh, did he turn insane?’, they reacted like they would if I had a cold I suppose.

This still returns us to the philosophical issue of what defines womanhood, what makes one recognise something as feminine? There are some præ-hormonal transwomen who have been able to put up quite the likeness, bringing it back to Sasha Hostyn, she doesn’t seem to wear makeup, as far as se said she’s not started HRT yet, she dresses quite similarly as I, so what does she have that I don’t hmm? Perhaps beating top rated Koreans in video games is the epitome of womanhood.

Maybe I do need the dress to pull this off. I’m but a woman on the inside, a woman, a wannabe woman, ehh—let’s make that a moman perhaps?

Well, one girl, came over for the barbecue, expert on feminosity, or so she claims, I don’t think any womanoid guilty of appreciating the fine humour of Jonti Picking is in a position to make a claim to that coveted position. She completely understands the difficult situation I am in, doesn’t stop her from laughing at me but she does her best to help me and coach me with my newfound weekly gender identity.

Be it so, her motives weren’t completely altruistic, apparently this implies feasting out her life long dream of applying makeup to my mug, I feel the rouge doesn’t quite suit my features. Apparently a girl also doesn’t burps, she said while having burped five minutes prior due to iced tea.

Furthering my point though, as usual she again managed to smuggle two articles of my wardrobe through my customs of guilt which she’ll end up wearing like it’s nothing, she might want to just bring some clothing in that oversized purse in case of rain, or you know, bring one of those 20 articles that are located some-where in the darkest crypts of under her bed back for that case, if the weather god’s are pleased with those deeds, she can even actually consider to return them. Also, my hair is longer than hers.

As expected, after the initial choices to make and the daily vocal training, life has been rather uneventful in my new gender-identity. I told my family and friends about it and the reason I’m doing it, mostly by just showing them this blog since it’d become a rather cumbersome story to repeat; a few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent.

I suppose it sort of was the point of this experiment to demonstrate the insignificant nature of assuming a different gender role for a week and how little extra experience it gives you. A lot of people would be telling me that I’m doing it wrongly and I’m not actually living like a woman, but what more can I do? As I said, there are women that don’t wear make-up and to just assume I’m going to have to wear make-up and pink skirts or what not because I’m living my life as a woman for a week is nothing but an insult and making stereotypes of women.

Modern day western society is simply open-minded enough that even though there are correlations between the behaviour of men and women, these are far from absolute, and women do exist which basically behave completely the same as some man could do, except for the fact that their voice is different, and they are physically different; physical stuff I apparently do not have the right to control until that real life experience period anyhow. There are transgendered tomboys you know, a prominent example is this female progamer Sasha Hostyn, she’s a tomboy, she’s a progamer, look at her, she dresses like most other progamers do, she doesn’t wear skirts, doesn’t seem to wear makeup. So she’s got long hair, so do several other male progamers, so do I. And I’m pretty sure there are transwomen with short hair as well.

I’m just not sure what difference it makes that I’m living my life as a woman for a weak except my morning vocal training, except that some people find it very amusing to mock me with it.

I woke up today with my newfound assumed identity, tried to shave again but realized that testosterone in general was never too much on my side and it wasn’t needed to head towards the mirror, practise a more feminine smile and then contemplate the issue of makeup, to wear or not to wear?

While makeup has been traditionally associated with women in western culture, assuming that I was born in a female body, I doubt I would actually use it all that much, I’m not the person to especially groom myself a lot, or to get outside for it to make a difference. Furthermore, I know a lot of women who do not wear makeup, and I even know some guys who do. Surely to make makeup a part of my new gender identity perhaps is a bit patronizing and stereotypical to women, is it not?

However, it might be exactly what a practitioner would so very much require of me in that time of real life experience, I’m actually not completely sure if I should do it, for the moment though, I’ll keep working on the voice, since it’s actually pretty hard and I doubt I’ll even get close in a week.

I’ve since tried to some-what bring my intonation to a bit more feminine slide, since I usually have a pretty breathy voice (especially when I just wake up.) I suppose it’s a bit easier for me to manage since that’s where those voices tend to go to. Reading up on it though it seems that that’s a thing you should avoid and you should focus mostly on the intonation. Apparently the fastest therapies take more than 3 months to successfully complete, so I have a very long road ahead of me here it seems…

It’s actually ridiculously hard, I just spent an hour or so on the phone with a female friend who against her wishes was slyly manipulated into helping me out with my new found feminine powers of making people feel very guilty. I’m very good at imitating people’s voices, even of the opposite sex and copying their intonation, but getting my own feminine intonation is pretty darn complicated.

It’s actually very tempting to give up here, but I won’t, I will hold strong to prove the ridiculousness of it as well as gain a perspective on how hard it is to try to pass as a member of the opposite sex. Where others have fallen, I shall stand defiant.

For those who don’t know, typically undergoing sex-reassignment therapy, surgery or hormonal, in most countries requires meeting pretty strict criteria, honestly, independent of whatever stress it might cause for people to be born in the wrong body, I feel people have the right to change and modify their body in whatever way they want, chopping of your own arm? Well, it´s your body, not mine, you can’t have mine, but if you want to surgically let your arm be detached, your party. That transgendered people have been known to suffer great psychological trauma from having a body that does not conform to their identity makes it even more stringent. (Note that I also think that transgendered people are silly, just as I think that people with a gender identity at all are silly, gender identities are silly and probably a product of society placing a lot of emphasis on things that are very much irrelevant.

Part of the silly criteria to take in hormones is to have lived your life for a certain amount of time as the opposite sex, getting accustomed to your “new identity”. Okay? So what the fuck does that even mean? Do I have to wear a dress? I know women who dress pretty identically to how I dress, do I have to grow my hair long? I already got that. Do I have to wear makeup? Well, that’s getting a bit patronizing isn’t it?

However, to demonstrate the absurdity of this, I am going to live my life as a woman for a week, maybe more if I like it. This will involve telling everyone to swap pronouns and act a bit more like a woman, I act pretty indifferent to gender roles in general so it shouldn’t be too hard, am probably going to have to change my intonation up a bit though. Since my name is clearly masculine, I’d have to ask people to call me something else.

We’ve ventured into the unknown territories of being a woman, this has started by assuming the name Kim, going to the hassle of explaining a lot of weird shit to a lot of people, and actually getting down to shaving. Kind of ironic, since men tend to be the people shaving their facial hair. Makeup is for bimbos for the time being.

Okay, so let’s say you have to be operated. You go to meet your doctor, he shakes your hand, he’s friendly, he makes a little small talk, tries to ensure you that it’s not a big deal, that this operation is routine work for him and that he’s done it for years and the risks are really quite small, he’s friendly, and he seems genuinely concerned for your well-being. There’s just one catch.

He’s some-one who look to be in his twenties, and he has long, green hair and an eye-brow piercing.

Now, as you go to the operating table, you see him there again, he’s removed his piercing, his hair is tucked back, he’s wearing his white coat, his gloves, and he’s wearing an operating mask and all that good stuff. Obviously none of this interferes with his task at hand.

However he’s still a youthful bloke who’s got long green hair and an eye-brow piercing when he first introduces himself to his patients. The quæstion at hand is if people can, or should, be able to be refused for a job like this regardless of meeting all other qualifications because they don’t radiate the authority with that that they should.

Where-ever you go, laws regarding this are opaque at best, the concept of ‘discrimination’ is vague and arbitrary. Discrimination was illegal when it was legal to not hire women into executive functions because they didn’t radiate authority enough. And it is still illegal this day while for a lot of legal things the only qualification one needs is to be older than a certain age. What is ‘discrimination’ and what is not, is quite simply just translating the mass consensus of the people about ‘how far you can go’.

And quite obviously, there are a lot of people who would not feel that women radiate enough authority to be able to be a doctor. However not hiring women because of that rule is out of the quæstion in most western countries these days, that’s ‘discrimination’. And of course being a woman is irrelevant for one’s capabilities as a surgeon. Just as having green, long long and an eye-brow piercing is. However people grow a lot more sympathetic to requiring doctors to change that, because people might not feel safe then. Even though obviously it’s just conceding to their præjudices.

Of course, there is a fundamental difference between being a woman and having a piercing and green hair, you can change the latter easily, but not the former. Or is that entirely true? Quite absurdly one can say: ‘You can also change your sex!, and that’s quite true. But of course, a very big sacrifice to make for most people to be a doctor. But perhaps not bigger than for some people to live their lives in a hair colour they do not like just because some people are small-minded bigots?

Piercings and green hair are again different, you can take out a piercing quite easily, but to die your hair back and forth from every interview is quite cumbersome, to cut it and let it re-grow is again completely impossible.

But this is all still the public service. Let’s say you are a commercial entity with a for-profit raison d’être, if the law would require you to hire women, even though the sad reality is that hiring women in certain positions will simply mean less profit—then you’re stuck with that. You might even think that this is a sad thing and honestly want to give these woman a chance to prove themselves, but the reality is that you’re primary responsibility as a ceo is delivering profit to your shareholders, and not hiring women accomplishes that. You cannot let your political convictions interfere with your job, so to speak.

As said, what the law requires and what not of employers is opaque. However it seems to have been established some-what by præcedence that sex and ethnicity are not a quality you cannot hire people on. Even though it will eventually hamper your profit because the world is simply filled with small-minded bigots. You can also argue that this has a good reason, as you cannot (easily) change these qualities of yourself. It’s imaginable that you for same reason also can’t disqualify short people on the argument that clients are simply still small-minded bigots.

But it seems to go deeper than that. Long hair poses a risk in various job situations, but women seem to never be required to cut their hair short even though it could hamper their performance. Women simply in various cultures conventionally have long hair, and you can’t ask them to cut it, because it would be seen as quite hard for a woman to live without long hair should she desire to have it.

However, say you’re a male waiter in a classy restaurant, it’s quite imaginable that they require you to cut your long hair. Admittedly it hampers with your job performance, and not even for a tangible reason, but only because the world is filled with small-minded bigots. But because it’s ‘unconventional’ for males to have long hair, this can be required of them. Even though some security risks that are far more important cannot require women to cut their hair short. It would be unsurprising for me if some men have just as much troubles having short hair as some women. This can also be a cultural thing though, indeed, to ask a Sikh to cut his hair, a thing his religion forbids, is again more complicated.

A fundamental difference between public services like health-care and commercial things is though that health-care is seen as a right provided free of charge, at least in the civilized world outside of that isolated greatest nation in the world. While those commercial things are privileges you pay, if you pay for it, should you not be able to demand that you are assisted by some-one who is not a foreigner if you so please? While if it’s a thing the government provides free of charge, you have nothing to complain, take it or leave it. If you don’t like it, then try to pay a doctor out of your own pocket.

There’s been a lot of confusion and fighting over this so called ‘Mosque’ that’s being built at Ground Zero. Opponents noting the insensitivity, proponents saying this is religious freedom and one of the principles that Nation Under God was built on. Then there’s still the debate of Okay, it should be legal, religious freedom says it is, but is it wise?.

Well, wise, maybe not, probably not, but only because of the stupidity of man. Why is this ‘insensitive’? Is it ‘insensitive’, if a crime is done by Christian people to place a church close to that site? Many of the most infamous US criminals were Christians of course. Don’t ask me how they combine this, and don’t ask me how people combine Islam with suicide bombings either; people find their ways. There seems to be a sliding scale of acceptability of bigotry here. If your girlfriend was a bitch, to hate all women thenceforth is unacceptable and bigoted. If your boyfriend was one, to hate all men, well, that’s more acceptable. If you’re robbed by a black man, to then say all black people are scum goes too far and is præjudiced. But to think the same after being robbed by some obscure ethnicity such as Slovenes, that’s more acceptable again. To don’t trust punkers after a group of them beat you up, that’s just a nice argument to demonstrate why supposedly they [all] are scum.

So what is this ‘considering the sensitivity of the issue’ really but compromising for the bigots that can’t see the difference between different people who just happen to all profess being ‘Islamic’; that’s really all it is. Islam, unlike various schools of Christianity is not monolithical in nature, there is no One Supreme Authority such as a pope, there are no churches and people above churches, no bishops and so on. There are people who say they are Muslim, and they of course each all mean a totally different thing with it. For some, being Muslim is little more than faith into The One God and his righteousness and almightiness, and to others, this involves covering women in elaborate cloths. So basically, wise as it may be to be ’sensitive’ to avoid further polarization, it’s still basically giving people what they want for their bigotry and ignorance.

And ignorance is quite the word to describe what most people know of this place, on the right we have a picture of how it’s going to look. Looks kind of like modern architecture nay? And it’s more like a plaza than a Mosque really. These are some of its features accordingly New York Daily News:

• An auditorium
• A theatre
• A swimming pool
• A child-care area
• A basketball court
• A performing arts centre
• A book-store
• A fitness centre
• A restaurant, serving kosher dishes
• … last but not least, an Islamic praying centre

Obviously this thing has more in common with a plaza than a Mosque, indeed it’s modeled after 92nd Y. It’s just a plaza with a place people can also pray, how insensitive.

To put matters worse, the thing is not planned at Ground Zero at all, rather so near, three blocks to be præcise… do we really have to pay that much for bigots that people who are part of some religion cannot built a modern art centre three blocks away from some sight that other people who are part of the same religion did some crime?

And I think the simple answer is yes, it’s stupid, but we have no other option. It will polarize people even more and lead to more deaths if they do not give. Just because people are so damned stupid and do so damned little research. Stupid people—alas—are surprisingly powerful when in large groups, and alas surprisingly numerous. Thank you Sarah.