Cuddle Party Finally Airing!

The media-friendly Cuddle Party in which I participated a couple months ago, during which I was interviewed, will finally be featured tomorrow night (Saturday, 26 April) on CBS3 in Philadelphia, at 11 pm. If you're intrigued by what you see, visit www.cuddleparty.com for more info.

P.S. If you missed the broadcast, you can see the video at http://www.breitbart.tv/?p=85033.

Greens Holding Presidential Caucus Next Week

I will be casting my first-preference vote for John Sweeney (president of the AFL-CIO), and second preference for None of the Above. The official announcement follows.


Title: Green Party of Philadelphia Presidential Caucus
Date: Tuesday April 29, 2008
Time: 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Location: Philadelphia Ethical Society Building, 1st floor
Street: 1906 South Rittenhouse Square
City State Zip: Philadelphia, PA 19103
Phone: 215-243-7103 (GPoP msg)

This is the quadrennial local event where registered Greens express there preferences for a national presidential candidate. We will use instant runoff voting (irv) tallied at the state level to bind our delegates to the national Presidential Nominating Convention to be held in July.

The candidates include:

Jesse Johnson (WV)
http://www.jesse08.org

Cynthia McKinney (CA)
http://www.runcynthiarun.org

Kent Mesplay (CA)
http://www.mesplay.org

Kat Swift (TX)
http://voteswift.org

One can also write-in another choice or vote for "no candidate".

See www.gpop.org for additional info.

I've discovered a really cool site.

It's called The Frame Problem and concerns "the intersections of cognition, politics, and religion" among other things. I hope to find much material there that may be of aid to me and my study group on Psychology and Social Change. The URL is http://theframeproblem.wordpress.com.

YouTube video of Anonymous vs. Scientology

You can view it here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=gqi9I2nMzPw.

New meeting, reading set for Psychology and Social Change study group

Hello people, I have arranged with Larry Robin, owner of Robin's Book Store, to hold the next meeting of our study group there on Sunday, 6 April, from 6 to 8pm. We will meet on the first floor. For a change of pace, we'll turn our attention to a narrative, Alexandra Stein's Inside Out: A Memoir of Entering and Breaking Out of a Minneapolis Political Cult. This especially interests me since realizing, only year before last, that I belonged to such a group for part of my adolescence. But probably everyone has had some experience with them. Incidentally, I've learned that Stein will be speaking at the International Cultic Studies Association's annual meeting this June at Penn. Robin's is located at 108 S. 13th St. 

The Trouble with Spikol's Column (Against Dualism)

If I tried to respond every time I saw or heard someone taking philosophical dualism for granted, I'd probably have no time left for anything else. But when a whole opinion piece is organized around this assumption, it's a good occasion to try and straighten out some people's thinking. Such an occasion arose the other day in the form of Liz Spikol's latest column for the Philadelphia Weekly. Here's my response:

Liz Spikol's column typifies a sort of muddled thinking about mental illness that unfortunately is very common. This can be illustrated by considering the following sentence: "Equating circulatory illnesses with physical illnesses tells us that circulatory illnesses are biological illnesses whose primary treatment lies in medication." This statement is plainly false, as it overlooks the importance of non-pharmacological treatments for circulatory problems such as diet and exercise. Yet it's a paraphrase of what Spikol wrote, with "circulatory" simply substituted for "mental." My point? Recognizing the physical nature of the brain, and therefore of its function (mind) and malfunctions (mental illnesses), does not imply the primacy of drugs as a treatment, because there are lots of other possible inputs to a physical organ besides synthetic compounds. The remedy for public policies that are skewed by the power of drug companies and other corporations is not to perpetuate false distinctions of mind vs. body -- or "me" vs. "my brain" as Spikol puts it -- but to create a material force that would be stronger: a working-class party based on the power of the labor movement. The potential seed of such a political organ, a party that refuses corporate money, already exists: the Green Party. 

Free the MOVE 8

Parole hearings are approaching for the surviving members of the MOVE 9. You can get the facts of their case and sign a petition on their behalf here: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/move9parole/.

160 Area People Hail Xenu

It was part of a global day of protests against the Church of Scientology, and that's how many participants local organizers counted. It was probably the most theatrical demonstration I've ever been part of. Many of those in attendance wore suits and "V for Vendetta" or other masks, while carrying signs like "Audit $cientology" (an apparent effort to fit in with St. Patty's festivities), "Battlefield Earth sukked. I want my 8.50 back," and "McCult: I'm Leavin' It." We also sang songs such as "When the Thetans Come Marching In." There's more info at http://www.xenu.net/. 

"What's the Harm?"

That's the title of a new site mentioned in the latest PhACT newsletter. It's dedicated to documenting instances where the publishers believe people have come to harm because of failure to apply critical thinking skills. The URL is www.whatstheharm.net In related news, the James Randi Education Foundation is now selling a James Randi doll, with stainless steel pins included in case you're in a bad mood. Another interesting item in their catalog is a children's-size Critical Thinking wristband. 

Rogers Changes Ballot Line

Marakay Rogers, who last month accepted the Green Party's nomination for state Attorney General, has announced that she will instead seek this office as part of Ralph Nader's Populist Party ticket. While I disagree with her decision, I am still supporting her candidacy. You can learn something about her by viewing the website for her gubernatorial bid in 2006. I'll supply new contact information when I find it. 

Tell Spitzer: Do NOT Resign

In light of the current pressures on New York's governor Elliot Spitzer to resign, I just sent him the following message:

Dear Governor Spitzer,

I am troubled by the simultaneously vague and sweeping character of your recent statement -- especially when you said your actions violated "any" sense of right and wrong, without specifying which actions did so.

To make plain what concerns me, let me ask: If you had had an affair with someone who was not a prostitute, would anyone be calling for your resignation? Similarly: if you had blown the same amount of money at a race track, would anyone be calling for your resignation?

I must suspect that in both cases the answer is no. What the public reaction -- including yours -- to this news reeks of is sexual puritanism.

For you to resign without further explanation would reinforce public intolerance toward prostitutes and their clients -- even those who aren't in sexually exclusive relationships. For this reason, I urge you not to do so.


His web form and other contact info can be found at http://www.ny.gov/governor/contact/index.html.

Quotes for the Day

Lem Sharkko! It's so good to see you again after all these years -- especially here, where there are no cops or courts! -- Peter Jairus Frigate, in Philip Jose Farmer's novel To Your Scattered Bodies Go.


The similarity between science and religion is that both enjoy the occasional "Eureka!" moment. The difference between them is that science also enjoys the occasional "Oops!" moment. -- Albert Fonda, at the PhACT solstice party.


Love your enemies. It really messes with their heads. -- seen on a button for sale at the PA Green Party convention last month.

Online Forum to Be Held on Sex Work, Trafficking, and Human Rights

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Petition the FDA for Emergency Contraception

Advocates for Youth and Choice USA are campaigning to get the FDA to support access to emergency contraception (EC). The decision is expected 7 March. You can download petitions here.

NCSF Action Alert: The Task Force Under Attack

NCSF Action Alert
Religious political extremists attack The Task Force for "Leather Leadership Award"

February 13, 2008 - The American Family News Network posted an inflammatory article condemning the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force for honoring Guy Baldwin with their Leather Leadership Award at the 20th National Conference on LGBT Equality: Creating Change, on February 6-10, 2008 (www.thetaskforce.org).

According to the February 7th article:
Peter LaBarbera, executive director of Americans for Truth commented that he is not sure if he is more surprised by one of the sponsors of the event or by one of the activists who will be honored. "It's incredible to me," he continues. "But the Democratic Party is endorsing an event where they're actually presenting an award for sadomasochism."

A sponsorship acknowledgement notes that the Democratic National Committee gave at least $2,500 to help pay for the event. The recipient of the "Leather Leadership Award" is Guy Baldwin, a psychotherapist who has successfully lobbied against treating sadomasochism as a mental health problem.

To see the entire article, go to: http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=66629
In point of fact, the Democratic National Committee did not sponsor Creating Change or the Leather Leadership Award.

The Task Force does have a strong history of supporting the BDSM-leather-fetish communities. In previous years, this included awarding their Leather Leadership Award to Dave Rhodes of The Leather Journal and Tony DeBlase, creator of the Leather Pride Flag, as well as providing tracks and roundtables for activists dedicated to leather community issues.

"Those who persecute our communities know that The Task Force and the BDSM-leather-fetish communities have shared agendas in promoting tolerance and non-discrimination for sexual minorities, including those involved in alternate lifestyles. We grow stronger the more we stand together," says NCSF pokesperson Susan Wright.

From Guy Balwin's acceptance speech for the Leather Leadership Award at Creating Change:
"One of the many reasons it is important for The Task Force to be sending these signals of acknowledgement and legitimacy out to the LGBTIQQ world is that when our enemies in the struggle for self-determination look in our direction, they can't see the amazing diversity represented in a room like this one. No, to our enemies, we all look the same. They make none of the distinctions that we, ourselves, have made. To our enemies, garbage is garbage, no matter what color we are.....how old we are.....how we smell, or how we play. And that's just one reason it's important that we build bridges between our diverse communities and that's why this award to me today matters to all our communities. But the effort to build these bridges will be wasted unless they are vigilantly maintained from both sides."

We ask you to send a short note of appreciation to the Task Force:
Roberta Sklar, Communications Director
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
rsklar@thetaskforce.org

Dear Ms. Sklar,

Thank you for your recognition and inclusion of the BDSM-leather-fetish communities in your annual conference, Creating Change. The Leather Caucus and workshops on alternative sexuality have been very important to the LGBT members of our communities, providing a place where we can gather with our peers and discuss activist issues.

I congratulate you on choosing to give your Leather Leadership Award this year to Guy Baldwin for his activist efforts on behalf of the leather community. I proudly support The Task Force and am glad to join together on our common and shared goals of equality for all Americans.

Sincerely,
(your name)
###
Guy Baldwin is a Los Angeles-based psychotherapist, author and activist on behalf of "erotically uncommon people." Baldwin may be best known for his monthly essays which appeared in Drummer Magazine and were collected in his 1993 book, Ties That Bind. Baldwin is a former titleholder, having served in 1989 as Mister National Leather Association and also as the 11th International Mr. Leather. In 1987, Baldwin launched the DSM Project to mobilize mental health professionals worldwide to press for changes to the official clinical definitions that had long been used to label leather people, gay and otherwise, as pathological. The DSM Project succeeded with the publication of new and substantially improved language in 1993 in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom is a national organization committed to creating a political, legal, and social environment in the United States that advances equal rights of consenting adults who practice forms of alternative sexual expression. NCSF is primarily focused on the rights of consenting adults in the SM-leather-fetish, swing, and polyamory communities, who often face discrimination because of their sexual expression.

National Coalition for Sexual Freedom
822 Guilford Avenue, Box 127
Baltimore, MD 21202-3707
410-539-4824
media@ncsfreedom.org
http://www.ncsfreedom.org/

Study Group Holds Second Meeting, Sets Third

My study group on Psychology and Social Change held our second meeting Sunday evening and continued our lively discussion of the information presented in Robert Cialdini's book Influence and how we can apply it to our activism.

We will meet again Sunday, 24 February at 7pm, to continue this discussion and possibly decide on what materials to study next.

A Letter to Green Party Presidential Candidates

I've just sent the following letter to the four currently declared candidates for the Green Party's presidential nomination -- Jesse Johnson, Cynthia McKinney, Kent Mesplay, and Kat Swift -- as well as to Ralph Nader, who hasn't declared but has formed an exploratory committee.

As a member of the Green Party of Philadelphia I am trying to decide how I will vote in our caucuses on 29 April. While there are many factors that could affect my choice, the crucial one is likely to be this: which candidate favors an electoral strategy that will be most conducive to growing the Green Party and getting its message out? My conviction is that attracting masses of working-class people and progressive activists requires two things: having a program that is clearly better than those of the two corporate parties, and having an electoral strategy that allows us to get that program to the public without the distracting issue of whether our campaign is helping elect the more reactionary corporate candidate, rather than actually elect a progressive candidate. This will become a non-issue as soon as we can get a large segment of the progressive movements, and especially organized labor, to break from the Democrats and become a mass base for our party instead. But if we're to accomplish this, we can't give the battered-spouse-syndrome labor leaders the excuse that if anyone supports the Green nominees, s/he's really just helping the Republicans. So we have to establish in the minds of rank-and-file activists the confidence that supporting us can only help get our progressive message out -- and, along the way, offer a radical critique of the Democrat which can only make her/him appear more moderate and reasonable in the eyes of "centrist" voters -- and not help elect the Republican instead. Ironically, the Electoral College system gives us a means of doing so without having to ask people to trust us up front. This would simply involve campaigning vigorously in all fifty states plus D.C., but only placing our nominees' names on the ballot in the "safe" states. The ticket would still have an important role to play in "close" states, by way of communicating our national platform to the public as well as mobilizing support for our state and local candidates. If we win the progressive public's trust with this approach in 2008, it would then be possible to run officially in all fifty-one states in 2012, because people would have confidence that we'd withdraw from the ballot by deadline wherever it appeared necessary to avoid a "paradoxical result" as voting theorists like to call it. And having won this confidence may even make it unnecessary to do that, as we might accumulate enough support during the campaign to win the election outright. Would you support this approach? 

Look for me Friday at 11

Last night I attended the first Cuddle Party I'd been to for a while -- one that was free because it was "media-friendly." CBS-3 (KYW-TV) was there and I was one of those they interviewed. The segment is supposed to be broadcast Friday at 11pm.

Green Party Nominates Rogers for Attorney General

From the site Philadelphia Front Page News:

Thursday, February 7, 2008
Green Party Nominates Rogers for Attorney General
North and Murphy to run for Congress; Sweeney for State Rep.Harrisburg, PA - Yesterday [actually on the 3rd -- E.H.], the Green Party of Pennsylvania approved nominations for four candidates to compete in the November general election. Marakay Rogers will be at the top of the ticket once again as the Green Party candidate for Attorney General. Rogers was the party's nominee for the same position in 2004 and was its gubernatorial candidate in 2006.

Rogers, a civil rights attorney from York, outlined a broad campaign vision for restoring justice to Pennsylvania. She noted that current AttorneyGeneral Tom Corbett is backing corporations against townships across Pennsylvania who have adopted local laws designed to protect residents from usurious businesses. Said Rogers, "My campaign intends to restore zoning rights to local governments."

Rogers is also an anti-death penalty advocate. "Nationally, the death penalty is starting to go the way of the dinosaur," remarked Rogers. "It is time that Pennsylvania, like our neighbors did, realizes that killing people is not justice," said Rogers, referring to the fact that New Jersey recently banned capital punishment.

The Green Party also approved the nominations of two candidates for U. S. Congress. Titus North of Pittsburgh will run again Rep. Mike Doyle in the 14th District race. North faced Doyle in 2006 and won 17% of the vote, one of the highest percentages for a third party candidate in Pennsylvania history. John Murphy will face Rep. Joe Pitts in the 16th District which covers Lancaster County and parts of Chester and Berks Counties. Murphy previously ran for this seat as an Independent in 2006.

Also running will be Jay Sweeney of Wyoming County who will be seeking a seat as the 111th District State Representative. Sweeney will be challenging Sandra Major for the third time in a row and like the other Green candidates hopes to build on his previous attempts.

"Each of our candidates will benefit from increased name recognition let alone greater experience simply from having run before," said Party Chair Hillary Aisenstein. "Many elected officials don't win their first time out," she continued. "I am confident that we will make great strides on Election Day because our candidates will be talking to voters about the issues they care about."

The Green Party of Pennsylvania is an independent political party that stands in opposition to the two corporate parties. The Green Party of Pennsylvania stands for grassroots democracy, sustainable economics, nonviolence, and ecology. The Green Party of Pennsylvania stands in firm opposition to the war in Iraq.

P.S. As of 10 March, Rogers has decided to run instead on Ralph Nader's Populist Party ticket.

"No One Could Have Imagined"

Here's what I wrote Speaking of Faith after yet again hearing that ill-informed statement, this time on their episode titled "Remembering Forward":

I regret that because I wasn't fully awake, I didn't catch the context in which it was said that in the 1980s, "No one could have imagined that in a few years' time the Soviet Union would break up with a whimper." But it grates me whenever I hear statements like this. Actually, people with some imagination had been imagining such things for a long time. For instance, in 1938 Trotsky wrote in The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, "The USSR thus embodies terrific contradictions. But it still remains a degenerated workers’ state. Such is the social diagnosis. The political prognosis has an alternative character: either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back to capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism." Unfortunately the first prong of that alternative is pretty precisely what did happen. And, if anything, it took longer to happen than I would have predicted when I first became politically active as a teenager.