Medium Dawn Felagund of the Fountain

I am crawling out of Green-Knight-induced lurkdom for a few minutes to point my fellow LJ citizens to the following links on dark_christian, a.k.a. the folks who helped bring you the Warriors for Innocence connection to LJ Strikethrough the First.

This first post discusses religiously motivated child abuse/neglect being promoted in communities on LiveJournal. Keep in mind, these are real children suffering and dying here, i.e. not might-be-fifteen-might-be-eighteen-but-certainly-fictional Harry Potter doing the naughty with certainly-fictional Professor Snape in a certainly-fictional drawing.

This second post discusses the response of LJ Abuse when the activities of these communities were called to their attention.

And ... this final post is furthermore interesting because of the connection made between "judgment calls" LJ Abuse is expected to make when investigating obscenity complaints versus situations involving illegal activity and abuse.

Some of the posts linked are pretty long, and it's also terribly easy to get sucked into the link labyrinth that is dark_christian (as I do on pretty much a daily basis upon coming home from work), so I don't blame those of you who don't want to read all that I've linked above but remain interested in the matter nonetheless. And the bottom line is pretty straightforward.

Communities that encourage religion-based childrearing practices that include starving and beating newborn babies, infants, and toddlers are acceptable. The practices that are being advocated have led to the deaths of real children, i.e. children who exist in flesh and bone, not just paper and pixels, as well as severe injury, anxiety, starvation, dehydration, and failure to thrive in children subjected to these practices.

But communities or journals that show fictional characters doing "obscene" things to other fictional characters are unacceptable.

Real kids ... fictional kids. Whom do we value more? Hmmm ...

And furthermore, it's interesting to consider that much of the Strikethrough hullabaloo on LJ has been spurred by Christian fundamentalist groups aiming to cleanse the Internet of what they feel is obscene "in the defense of children," even when no children are actually harmed.

But yet these child-abuse communities that are run by Christian fundamentalists and do lead to the harm of real children are okay.

The pie-eyed optimist in me says that LJ was simply blindsided during the recent Strikethrough/Boldthrough mess and are still disorganized about how things should be handled and made some mistakes, but all will be well in the end. The more discerning optimist in me thinks that it's all corporate/money-related. The pessimist/conspiracy theorist/radical/militant agnostic in me notes that two themes common to daily life in the One Nation under God are also present here: 1) sex is always worse than violence and is the true cause of all that is wrong in the world and 2) we can't possibly stand up against something that's Christian because this might insult their beliefs and we can't be doing that. (And for the record, I have no problem with Christians who practice their faith quietly and without constantly needing to bury their pointy elbows in my agnostic side. You can believe in whatever you want to believe in; I have some pretty wonky ideas too and appreciate my right to hold onto them within my own private sphere. I have a problem with fundamentalists who think that the United States is a Christian nation and that those of us who don't believe in what they believe in are "un-American" and deserving of punishment, loss of rights, and death because of it.)

Anyway. I have a novella to finish. I need badly to escape back to Fantasyland ... dark_christian is a great comm, highly enlightening (and highly recommended to those on my flist who are into such things), but it's also depressing as hell.

Back to lurkdom.

I am doing something wholly unethical for money. And here I am, admitting it.

My boss has a friend--an ex-State trooper--who is taking a statistics class for his MBA. And struggling with it. So my boss got us hooked up--being as I know a thing or two about stats--so that I could help him along. So he came over today and brought a whole stack of work...due Tuesday.

While working on it, it evolved from Dawn tutoring into Dawn doing the problems into "Dawn, will you finish this for me and I'll pay you?"

And I said yes.

Bad 'gund! Bad bad 'gund! *hangs head in shame*

It's tax time, I admit. I could use the money. Bobby and I live a simple life with no children and lots of savings and that means that we owe money, despite the fact that my income puts me just above the poverty line (and Bobby's isn't anything stellar). This country punishes people who want to save by taxing their interest year after year...after taxing the income that put the savings there in the first place. We're saving for a home and a business--two supposed "American dreams"--and apparently that's not as acceptable as squeezing out a few kids and settling into a life of debt.

Anyway.

So the stats stuff is...well, going. It's been literally years since I did any of this stuff. My boss' eyes cross when I mention anything more than an average. (And he doesn't even know that there's more than one kind of average! I tried to explain this once, and his eyes crossed and his head spun....) Never mind the fact that I don't like the program I have to do it in, and one of the exercises apparently has a bug that prevents it from recognizing the correct null and alternate hypotheses even when I put them in correctly, meaning that it's impossible to complete the exercise. Of course, I wasted a half-hour figuring this out.

And while I'm on a roll, I might as well admit as well that I am becoming an intolerant person. My sister posted an LJ entry about the South Dakota abortion ban, and she got me thinking (as she has a tendency to do). I remember past conversations with my sister where we discussed whether we should be ashamed to be Americans and whether the current political climate is fostering intolerance (in us) for Christians. Not just the nutjobs...but all Christians.

( Read at your own risk.... )