The cause of a man’s death?

The death of a homeless man in Dublin city centre is being blamed on last night's cold weather by local representatives.

The body, believed to be a 30-year-old man who was originally from Latvia, was discovered in the garden area of Dominick Street flats this morning.

Local Independent Councillor Christy Burke said the man was one of three Latvians who had been living there with sleeping bags and cardboard boxes for a number of months.

"Every year someone dies of hypothermia in Dublin city," Cllr Burke said.

Did the cold weather kill him, or his homelessness, or a political economy that left him living on the streets while thousands of housing units lie vacant?

Man's death caused by homelessness

What a victim’s mother had to say to the offender ….

"You could have been such a better person, a better father, a better man, but you chose to be a coward and give in to your sexual perversions," said [the offender’s ex-wife and mother of the victim] who said she first learned of the abuse in 2002. "The damage you have caused will last our lifetime."

A fair comment I think.

Source here

Hateful trolls after women journalists, commentators and columnists

Today's Guardian newspaper contains an interesting but scary article on the extent and viciousness of hate comments and emails directed at women journalists, commentators and columnists.

The last three paragraphs comprise a quote from psychotherapist and writer Susie Orbach:

"If you set women up as sexual objects which society has, no matter what we are doing, that makes women into objects rather than human beings and what you create is a situation in which women who then stand up and make arguments about things, terrify these men who have no access to real women and so they beat them up in the terms in which they've been offered by society, which has nothing to do with the content of what they are saying. Women are supposed to be sexual objects, we're still not supposed to be thinking, feeling, complex human beings. It is due to the continual representation of women as just beauties, the attempt to reduce women to a surface on which we project sexuality. So we're not real people.

"The deeper question is the disenfranchisement of men who find themselves in such depraved circumstances that all they can do is expel the fury that's inside of them on to women. The reaction these men are having shows they are very, very threatened by something and that threat is to their masculinity.

"With sexual violence, what the victim is receiving is the self-hatred of the individual who is expressing that pain and upset that is inside of them in a very explosive manner. Rape is different to the threat of rape but nevertheless it's a very, very serious and threatening experience."

I wonder how much the idea of the "disenfranchisement" of people can be used to help us understand the outpouring of hate we see everywhere on blogs and comments everywhere on the web?

Opera Users Are Clever

It is official. I always knew it. Opera users are much more clever then Firefox and Chrome users never mind Internet Explorer users. We have know for years that IE users are 'borderline deficient' in their IQ. Now we got research to prove it!

The study from Aptiquant, producers of
"easy to use psychometric assessment" tools, concluded that:

The results suggested that Internet Explorer surfers had an average IQ in the low eighties. Chrome, Firefox and Safari rated over 100, while minority browsers Opera and Camino had an "exceptionally higher" score of over 120.

Source BBC

Geee am I glad I have been using Opera for the last 8 years! Bad enough being a sex offender without being labelled as stupid as well.

You can download Opera from here.

It runs on everything including your mobile. For years it has been on the cutting edge of browser design back to the days when it was the only browser with a download manager and pop up blocker - features that you so take for granted now most users are not even aware that they exist. Most of the 'modern' features that you enjoy on your current browser were pioneered by Opera and it has features such as 'save session' and built in email client that I can't live without. Don't expect it to be like your current browser, take a little time to get into its way of doing things and you will not want to go back.

The Golden Rule

del.icio.us Tags: morality,self injury,self-injury,ethics

... do to others as you would have them do to you.

Is this a 'good' rule to follow?

I have spent most of my life hating myself - starting from the age of 14 - violently physically injuring myself, deliberately behaving to injure my career prospects, causing myself financial injury and provoking others to hate, hurt and deride me. That is how I have mostly wanted others to "do onto me". It has given me a sense of satisfaction and completeness.

Still I don't think I am right to behave in this way. Is the golden rule really an acceptable basis for moral or ethical behaviour?

What is my part in the story …

Quote I read to day:

“The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who has written powerfully about the loss of virtue in postmodernity, put starkly the necessity of narrative in building character: "I can only answer the question, 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question, 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?'"

There is a very deep rooted story about myself that I was taught by my mother. It is not a pretty one and I come out of it very badly. It makes me very angry at myself and I have to punish myself for who I am in it. One, but only one, way I have done that is by quite violently physically injuring myself and I have been doing that since I was 13 or 14 years old. Beating myself up is what I have to do as part of that story.

Of course telling you that is telling you how weird I am and inviting you to despise me; it is part of my acting out. That tells me I am feeling low and in a dangerous place.

But the story most people know about me and one that I hear about or read about at least a couple of times a day is that of the sex offender monster in our midst. What am I supposed to do as part of that story? What is my role and how should I behave?

Technorati Tags: personal reflection

Rape Survivors Testimony

del.icio.us Tags: PBS,TV,programme,rape,victim,survivor,documentary,testimony,USA

A programme from PBS in the USA documenting the story of a female rape survivor.

It is an untypical story in that the offender is usually some one known by the victim, but it is a harrowing and truthful story and in many other ways I suspect it is typical

Almost one and half hours long but worth watching.