Return Of The Ladyboys!!

After living part of my adult life in Asia, specifically in South East Asia, at first I found it very difficult to understand the American reluctance to accept and tolerate people who were either Lesbian, Gay or Transsexual. I had seen many. Some were my friends. In Thailand there is nothing wrong with having a highly educated ladyboy as a friend to advise you on meeting a nice highly educated upper middle-class Chinese woman. So I never really thought anything of ideas like homophobia until I came home to the United States. It seems to me that Thai's are much more honest about things generally and about sexuality in particular without all of the stigma we associate with it. You can read about ladyboys here: http://www.thai-blogs.com/index.php?blog=8&cat=290

Any offense against a Thai ladyboy may wind up getting you beat to a pulp as many are experts in kickboxing and can be quite aggressive. If only the same were true in America. I am sure things would change overnight here for a homophobe redneck the first time a guy that looks as hot as Angelina Jolie kicked the shit out of him.

Much like the "banned" portions of Benjamin Franklin's racy writings that some 19th century Victorian decided violated a social code that no self respecting 18th century gentleman would have ever believed in let alone followed in the "land of liberty." What I find is that people who are different from a definition of normal about as long as a fingernail are somehow deviant in our intolerant social climate.

Gays are stigmatized, Lesbos, ladyboys, even using the names I used provoke sensitive reactions in some people who are gay or lesbian despite the fact that I am so comfortable with my own sexuality and woman worship, I am also comfortable and will defend everyone else's orientation no matter what.

I still find it interesting, that the tolerant attitude of my Quaker heritage in Delaware, is exactly the same as the tolerant heritage of the Buddhism I practice with regards to the LGBT community and neither of us attach any stigma to the people who choose to live and are the way they are. What cultivated tolerance and reason and sometimes idiosyncratic weirdness in us, and left others out? Anyone want to help me understand the phenomena of this intolerance?

And while I do not think that the radical pornography of the Thai tranny mafia is a good thing. It shows one just how clearly that the third sex has been accepted into social life without the paralyzing stigma that affects so many homosexuals and bisexuals in the United States. The lady boy mafia in Bangkok controls parts of the city now and have become a potent political force in the social dynamic of the metropolis.

All of this begs the essential question: Why should people not be accepted and treated and respected and integrated into society just as they are and NOT as we want them to be? It is a question I have no answers to, and I still do not understand American attitudes that seem to contradict the libertarian spirit of our national heritage. Are the Puritans still in charge?

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here: chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.” The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...

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