Dildo – RAnt(hony)-ings

The Best Illustration of What Freedom of Speech Means Today

I’ve seen this Youtube video pop up in my Twitter feed a few times today. Stonekettle Station posted it to his Facebook page with the comment “This damned near killed me.”

Alex Jones Rants as an Indie Folk Song – Jul 14, 2017

What nearly kills me are the trolls convinced that Alex Jones has somehow been silenced. That kills me. He’s not banned. He’s not silenced. You can go to his website and download anything you want. Watch anything you want. If he wants his content to be offered on a platform, he has to conform to the platform’s rules. Don’t like it? Tough. There will always be rules like that. Who are the snowflakes now? That is the question I want answered.

(Twitter has banned Alex Jones, August 14th, 2018. His website is still up though. -ed.)

As for being kicked off the various platforms that he’s been kicked off of? It couldn’t have happened to a more appropriate person. Remind me to send him a nice fruit basket full of dildos. When Twitter actually gets the balls to ban the Orange Hate-Monkey for his violations of their rules, I’ll send him the same tasteful arrangement of dildos.

By the way, do not Google that phrase. You have been warned!

facebook/Stonekettle

Alex Jones or the OHM, that used rubber of an excuse for a human being, should be flushed down the toilet like his compatriots. Just joking, don’t flush your used rubbers down the toilet. Plugs up the drains. Do try and give Alex Jones a free swirly for me, though. Seriously, I hate that guy. I’ve hated him longer than most of you have known about him, because he started out on Austin public access TV. Yes, I’ve already apologized for that.

These events do point out the difference between what we think of as freedom of speech today, and what freedom of speech really is. Alex Jones has not been censored. His freedom of speech has not been curtailed in any real way. His voice is still magnified beyond the range of any other narcissistic conman except for one, and that one is going to be censored eventually. The Orange Hate-Monkey will be censored, because that will be part of the act of government that ends his freedom. After his conviction. During his sentencing. Banning him from speaking will almost certainly be part of his punishment, and a justified punishment in every sense of the phrase.

Postscript

This article was assembled from multiple comments across several social media platforms. This was the other one of note. Alex Jones’ rising popularity here in Austin spelled the end of my time as a libertarian. If you have the freedom to defraud, as he has done over the course of his career, then I have no use for personal freedom the way that libertarians, Alex Jones’ fans, envision it.

Alex Jones was sued by the parents that he slandered and they were awarded staggering sums of money when they won their lawsuits. Like the fraudster that he is, he squirreled the millions of dollars that he was given by his adoring fans away in secret bank accounts all over the world, apparently. The tax shelters that fraudsters utilize need to be targeted and destroyed along with the fraudsters themselves. He will spend the rest of his life playing cat and mouse with the accountants that the parent’s attorneys will hire to track down all his money. He should be thankful because it could have been much worse.

There is no freedom to lie without consequences. Alex Jones lied to make money off the corpses of those dead children at Sandy Hook (Death Cult) He lied because that’s what his crazy-assed fans wanted to hear. He did it again and again even after the lie he was telling was no longer defensible and he would still be lying about it now if the parents had not taken him to court.

He violated the law. That is what the judgement proves. He violated the law and the rights of those parents and their children; and, If the parents had been as crazy as his fans and had killed him for his slanders, they would have most likely been exonerated due to the overwhelming stresses that they were subjected to by Alex Jones fans. Subjected to death threats while mourning their dead children. That is the magnitude of his crimes. He should be thankful to be still breathing after what he has done.

There is no defense for Alex Jones’ behavior, which is why he never bothered to mount a serious defense in the first place. There is no freedom to defraud, even though fraudsters use free speech as their cover of choice over and over again. Stop defending these fraudsters. It’s a waste of your time to even try.

His speech consequences come with 12 zeroes behind them. Be thankful, Alex.

The Astonishing History of Vibrators

The title of this article is identical to an article I saved on delicious way back in 2008. Originally hosted on TBD, written by one Michael Castleman for that site, it has since been taken down and can be found archived on the Wayback Machine. I found the story and book it was taken from to be quite entertaining, and for a long time I hosted a copy of the article here for my own amusement as well as the potential enlightenment of others.

Unfortunately for everyone concerned, the author of the book either made up most of her citations for historical information, or purposefully misinterpreted the historical record in order to promote the popular misunderstanding of the use and origin of vibrators. I was duped. Everyone who read the book and made the movie based on the book were duped, because we wanted to believe something that was not true.

The idea was that massaging the clitoris would calm down the hysteria. The vibrator’s origin story became so popular that it spawned a historical romantic comedy called Hysteria in 2011 starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, as well as the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-nominated play In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play). The thing is, it’s not true.
lfpress.com

No one took the time to follow up on the research until years later when Hallie Lieberman was writing her dissertation on technology and technology’s use in orgasm. When she went back to do her due diligence work on the subject before publishing her dissertation, she discovered the injustice that had been perpetrated in writing Rachel Maines’ book.

It is important to remember that massagers were no different than any other type of snake oil back in the years when they were invented (Granville’s Hammer) and they were thought to be a good treatment for everything including the made-up female disease labeled hysteria. When someone is acting hysterically, it has nothing to do with their uterus wandering all around their bodies, just to be clear here. You can’t cure that with pelvic massage, either.

Yes, some doctors did use vibrators as described in Rachel Maines’ book. Snake oil salesmen and quacks used them for those reasons and for a whole host of other legitimate and made-up reasons. However, there wasn’t an accepted medical practice associated with their use. That never happened.

(H/T to the SGU episode 904)

I find the repression of sexual information which pervades US culture almost intolerable, but the fabrication of a false history of sex is just as much of a disservice as the repression of sexual information is. If we ever want to get past pornography dominating all our information services, the US is going to have to come to grips with the reality of sexuality in all its various forms. The place to start is to admit that women like sex, need sex, just like men do. Men need to stop pretending that sex is about them. Sex is about what the couple creates with their coupling, together. The interplay between yin and yang, dark and light, negative and positive, male and female.

More information on the subject of the history of vibrators can be found at the Antique Vibrator Museum. If you are more of a youtuber, or just want to explore the subject of sex with someone who clearly enjoys talking about the subject, let me suggest a further resource in the YouTuber LaciGreen, specifically her video titled SEX TOY HYSTERIA. I laughed my ass off watching Laci Green explain about the history of the vibrator. Laci Green is the featured guest of this episode of Point of Inquiry, from the Center for Inquiry.

Point of Inquiry – Laci Green – Truth And Myths About Sex And Love – February 14, 2015

It is also worth noting that the Texas law outlawing vibrators is no longer on the books. (This should have been the first warning sign that the book and the movie that this article was originally about were not well researched. -ed) In 2008 it was struck down after being challenged by two shop owners who wanted to be able to sell these devices in their stores. I actually blogged about this at the time in this article and I just found an article on Lonestar Q debunking the I09 article that I stupidly relied on previously.

Our sitting governor was the defender of the law in federal courts as the Texas A.G. He spent our money all the way up to the SCOTUS trying to deny women sexual satisfaction for as long as possible, because that is what Republicans exist for.

Misinformation corrected on December 22, 2022. My apologies to my readers.

Jane Fonda & The Seven Deadly Words; Texas ban struck down

I’ve had this post in the draft queue since the day (Feb. 14th) Jane said cunt on network television. Maybe I just wanted to be able to type the word cunt (more than once) and not have the wife throw bricks at me. Or maybe I just have my suspicions about why her slip of the tongue (rimshot here, please) still goes unpunished.

True, the word cunt is only the horrendous insult that English speaking American women think it is, in America. Everywhere else, it doesn’t even strictly apply to women. In Britain it could just be the stupid guy next to you.

Strictly speaking, it’s just a low brow word for the female genitalia. But it does rate the list of deadly words on the FCC list. The seven deadly words that will curve your spine, grow hair on your hands and maybe even bring us, God help us, peace without honor; um, and a bourbon. George Carlin at his best.

youtube – George Carlin: Filthy Words – FCC v. Pacifica Foundation

The reason Jane’s language malfunction is going unpunished, the only reason that makes sense, is that the FCC knows that they will not win this battle; no matter what they say, they will be made to look like the paternalistic jerks that they are. Jane was on with the author of The Vagina Monologues, and I wouldn’t put it past the two of them to have cooked this up (much like Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction was completely staged) as a publicity stunt to do exactly what Jane Fonda’s apology says she wants to do; change the way that the word is perceived by the average American.

Good luck with that.

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
Aldous Huxley

Speaking of paternalistic jerks getting what’s coming to them (rimshot again, please) the Texas legislature and the court system have been told that they need to stay out of bedrooms and stop trying to count or control who purchases and uses sexual aids in the state.

On Feb. 13, sex-toy retailers in Texas rejoiced when a federal appeals court ruled—just in time for Valentine’s Day—that a Texas prohibition against the sale of dildos and pocket pussies violated the 14^th Amendment.

According to the Texas (ahem) penal code, it is forbidden to sell or to advertise an artificial penis or vagina “primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs.” The statute makes an exception for instances in which the purchase meets a “medical, psychiatric, judicial, legislative, or law enforcement” need. Even so, in Reliable Consultants v. Ronnie Earle, the normally conservative 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the ban on the grounds that it violated the right of ordinary citizens “to engage in private intimate conduct in the home without government intrusion.”

One of only four states banning sexual doodads (the other three are Virginia, Mississippi, and Alabama), Texas is not about to take this insult lying down. Last week, state Attorney General Greg Abbott petitioned the appellate court to reconsider the matter
Slate

Sexual aids. Really, it’s a dildo law, I might as well say dildo just as blatantly as I said cunt a few minutes ago (third time, I better start looking over my shoulder) Texas’ dildo law has been overturned. Women can finally ask for and purchase a dildo by name without running the risk of being punished for it. Salesmen can now market a device for it’s real use, rather than having to resort to euphemisms about glow and vitality, without having to face fines and/or jail time.