Reinforcing stereotypes

So last Sunday there was this protest in Paris by the traditional Catholics who oppose the possibility that homosexuals could have the right to marry.

These believers are among those who think that 1789 was the beginning of the end for France and that they are the ultimate worshippers of Jesus' bleeding heart.

Well, they're not exactly the people I feel spontaneously close to but if they want to protest so be it.

And then come less than ten topless girls wearing black veils similar to that of the nuns of yesteryear and spraying the protesters with their fire extinguishers filled with some kind of white smoke. The indication "sperm" is written on the fire extinguishers (see the pic).

Talk of a clever thing to do! What did the girls expect from such a counter protest but be brutalized and vilified? (one of them apparently lost a tooth). 

I fail to see how this sort of street action can be of any help to the feminist movement or the gay cause. For the majority of people it will be understood as another evidence that "feminists" are a bunch of hysterical banshees associated with queers.

What FEMEM does in Paris I don't know. None of the girls I've heard speak French and I have no idea of what they do in their spare time when they've finished parading half naked in the streets.

But yet I don't oppose their raison d'être and how they've deemed the most appropriate way to protest. I even suggest they march down the street where I live to protest the male chauvinist pig that lives here (me).

Go girls go!

Oh no, I'm not one of them...

On the (relative) morality of the Hiroshima bombing

Ever since I learned of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings I've always wondered why these acts of war were considered the epitome of barbarity and of the utmost inhumanity men are capable of.

Six months prior to the 6th and 9th of August 1945, there has been an aerial raid on Dresden which cost the lives of maybe 200.000 people who perished in an inferno of flames. Most of the same number of Japanese victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki evaporated within seconds.

The raid over Dresden simply was an act of revenge and retaliation with no military targets and which didn't alter the course of the war nor significantly shortened it.

Before the bomb was dropped over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, an ultimatum was sent to the Empire of Japan which disregarded it and one bomb wasn't enough to make the military clique open its eyes, the generals and politicians accepted that another bomb be dropped and dozens of thousands other civilian casualties perish.

The A. bombings weren't acts of revenge or "punishment" over the Japanese population, they had the moral purpose to make the war come to an end asap and they fulfilled their mission within days.     

The only thing that makes anybody's death different is whether it is or not associated with pain. Is being burnt to death trapped in the back seat of a car after a crash on the motorway or with one's throat slit by some deranged thug a lesser plight that being suddenly atomised? 

It is the enormity of the damages that are caused with one single object that raises fright and terror but at the end of the day, since it is a matter of bringing chaos and destruction, it is just a question of scale.

Paradoxical as it may seem, what happened on August the 6th of 1945 was perhaps the less immoral act of the Second World War since it precisely put an end to said war, a result that the supposedly more "moral" traditional bombings of Tokyo with its 100.000 casualties failed to achieve.