queer revolution

One of my favorite radio programs, All in the Mind, usually compered by the very hot Natasha Mitchell aired the first of two parts of a piece from Chicago Public Radio's This American Life. It discusses how psychiatry changed the definition of being homosexual from a disease to simply something different. It is well worth listening to, and the audio will be online for the next 4 weeks.

81 Words: the inside story of psychiatry and homosexuality [Part 1 of 2]
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/default.htm
The transcript is up there and will remain there permanently.

For those of us in Australia the radio program is broadcast on ABC Radio National Australia, Saturday 1pm, and repeated Monday 1pm. Next week, the second part.

I like how one of the central characters was a lesbian librarian who convinced a gay, male, closetted psychiatrist to make the big step of speaking up at a conference while wearing an elaborate disguise. If you wrote this kind of stuff in a fiction piece nobody would believe it. Real life is pretty damn insane. I still don't get how some people can think that love can be wrong.

Yeah... we're sane

We develop bombs based on the astonishing power of nuclear energy, then amass such stockpiles of these weapons that if just a thousandth of them was used it would kill most life on Earth in a nuclear winter that would last decades, perhaps centuries, leaving the place a radioactive wasteland for millions of years.

Some less self-destructive people insist on controlling and dismantling these weapons, but we actively fight them and find any way we can to get around such restrictions on our right to mass murder. We insist that mining and selling uranium, the basis for nuclear weapons is somehow necessary for our survival and that safe power is not realistic given that excessively wasteful lifestyles are so very important for... ummm... something.

Only a short while ago the major nations were frightening children half to death with their appropriately named M.A.D. theory of war where each side threatened to blow up the whole Earth if anybody made a mis-step. On at least one occasion we were about 6 minutes from wiping out the planet when somebody realised a mistake had been made and the bombers were recalled just in time.

That period of insanity ended with one side crumbling into economic ruin under the strain of financing all the weaponry. You would think that would give good reason for reducing such stockpiles of weapons, right? After all there is no need for them anymore -- not that there ever was. But sadly, no. Weapons of mass murder are flourishing, and the most powerful countries, those who are most hysterical about other "rogue states" are the very worst offenders.

All negotiations to reduce numbers of nuclear weapons have now been cast aside as we rush headlong toward nuclear madness again. But it is worse now than before. New research shows how to make a nuclear bomb with very small amounts of fissile material -- literally a handful of plutonium from a nuclear power plant's waste -- so that anybody could get a bomb that would vaporise an entire city.

How many of these can we afford?

Do we reflect on the dangers of flooding the world with material to enable any nut to have bombs that could end our civilisation? No. Instead we shout ever louder that we need nuclear power. If we shout it loud enough and often enough maybe we will even believe it.

Yeah... we're sane.