I am clearly not meant to be a diarist. My posting has truly been pathetic, and all I have to offer is the same old whine about no time, tiredness, child care duties, etc. Is that lame, or what?
I was once again at another GC dinner party. (Yes, I know this seems to be the only thing I do. Well, it's either write about that, or write about the many games of Candyland I've been playing. And no-one, least of all me, really wants to discuss that. I could write about the war, but I'm not talented enough, and it just bums me out.) Anyway, I was talking with Edie and Laura about the Internet. I said that the big problem that I had with that is that it legitimizes and normalizes certain behaviors, and leads people into directions that they may not have taken otherwise.
Now, my point with this was directed more at many people's inability to separate good information from bad, and how the Internet provides a haven and even a recruitment tool for subcultures that don't deserve the legitimacy that this affords them - the no-vaccinations groups, for example, or the "breastfeeding your kids when they're 8 years old" bunch. Laura, however, took this in a different direction. As a criminal defense attorney (and a very good one, at that), she sees the Internet as providing an opportunity for people to commit crimes - essentially those of a sexual nature - that they probably would never have acted on otherwise. The sheer availability of particular areas of Internet pornography encourages and fuels certain sexual urges and deviancies, and provides and legitimizes forums for acting out these urges. She thinks that without the web, many of these people would never act on their sexual impulses that were of a criminal nature.
It's an interesting area for inquiry - at least I think so.
By the way, dinner was really, really good.
File this next bit under "Things that make me go "Huh?"
From Tuesday's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
Other teens are firmly opposed to affirmative action, period. "Affirmative action is often abused by minorities to receive equal educational opportunities," said Patrick Keating, a senior at Marquette University High School.
Huh?
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