I’ll be hanging out at the Bellagio for the next few days, with a very busy schedule. You’re going to fill this thread up fast, aren’t you?
(Episode CCCII: Happy Lupercalia!.)
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Re. Zions, I, too, stand corrected. I misread the article in the 1st link. :(
SQB @500 asks if a mormon temple recommend could be faked. It used to be easier to fake one, now not so much. They have incorporated barcodes, and barcode readers.
I can point you to a photo of a blank temple recommend:
http://packham.n4m.org/recomm.htm
Wow. That’s some exclusive club they have, Lynna. Are those barcodes tied to a central system, or are they identification in and of themselves?
Looks like the Jabberwocky thread has turned into a drinking game. Such fun!
pelamun
I am absolutely in agreement with that.
I think what “gets” lots of people and makes them very disappointed with our political system (and economic) is that the “big fish” never seem to lose anything for fucking up big while ordinary, hard-working people lose everything for merely being accused of having cashed in pennies in vouchers.
Soo…
I just spent a rather absurd amount of time reading the Mormon Necrodunking thread.
All I can say is this:
OMGWTFBBQ
The fail is strong in this one.
And now, I’m off to read the Jabberwocky thread.
Giliell:
Very possibly not — since she’s a minor it may be that legally all her property (that he paid for, at least) is actually his. “My money bought it, I can do what I like with it” is the braying cry of this kind of jerk.
Yes! Thank you! I was trying to put my finger on this. In a universe where everything and everyone is perfect, they imagine themselves completely unchanged. Unbelievable tiny-minded hubris. They are exactly like children, very small children to whom the world exists to provide for them. But they’re supposed to be adults. I shudder at the thought of having to deal with one of these stunted people in real life.
Pteryxx:
That struck me too. In a completely unlimited paradise where literally everything is possible, created by and modeled after an all-powerful being, the most exotic thing they can imagine is … time travel. To look pretty in period dresses (enjoy that white-lead facial cosmetic!) Doctor Who is more imaginative than these people.
Re fantasy candyland heavens: Libby Anne posted again in her series on the Rapture.
https://proxy.freethought.online/lovejoyfeminism/2012/02/17/the-end-times-part-vi-rapture-anxiety/
and, possibly related, I was watching Wall-E. >_>
I think that Jabberwocky thread needs to be allowed to die with dignity. Needlenose (or whatever) keeps turning the life support machinery back on.
Perhaps if I chain myself to this thread, I won’t succumb to the temptation to go back there.
One more little fact about Lance Armstrong: he was once spotted in public kissing one of the Olsen twins. I forget which one; the twin in question probably forgets which one she is, too. IIRC, he was 36, she was 19.
I’m not real judgmental, they’re both adults, and I know my personal squick factor doesn’t mean anything, but there was something kind of ewww about that.
Also, he’s from Texas. And it’s likely that he cheated (though I’m not sure there are any top cyclists that haven’t), and his career as courageous cancer survivor may well have begun by his giving himself cancer.
(Apologies to any intelligent persons from Texas; I spent a summer there a long time ago, and evidently still need to get over it. But gah, what a hole.)
his career as courageous cancer survivor may well have begun by his giving himself cancer.
How do you give yourself cancer?
I don’t have enough information to answer this question definitively.
As far as I can tell, the barcode distribution and use thereof is tied to each mormon Ward’s computer system, and those computer systems are, in turn connected to a central database in Salt Lake City.
According to paranoid mormons, all kinds of apostate mormons were entering the temples in order to create mischief, so the barcodes were a security measure. I can’t find evidence of apostates storming the temples, but there is plenty of evidence of apostates finding LDS Temples so boring that you would have to pay them to go there.
Temple recommends are tied to tithing, so I assume that LDS Leaders are just trying to be more careful about protecting their income stream. That and just a sprinkling of paranoia.
The LDS Church is highly organized when it comes to harassing the members. The barcodes must make it much easier to track temple visits, and therefore easier to harass members.
Besides baptizing dead people in the temple, ordinances such as marriage, the sealing of children to parents for eternity, etc. are performed in the temple. The marriages in particular are a means of extracting tithing from recalcitrant members. You cannot attend the temple wedding of your son or daughter without a temple recommend.
I think the recommends have to be renewed every year (maybe every two years?), and they require the signature of a mormon bishop who has interviewed the applicant and confirmed that a full tithing has been paid, and that the sacred underwear was worn while performing yard work. (The yard work question is a new addition. There’s a whole list of questions, including whether or not you hang with apostates.)
Uhm… Dignity? I think dying with dignity is no longer an option.
Well, you could develop a bad cigarette habit. In Lance’s case, it would be performance-enhancing drugs.
Although I must restate that this is definitely not a verified fact.
dianne: I hate to mention South Park, but I believe this thoto may answer your question: http://southparkstudios.mtvnimages.com/images/shows/southpark/vertical_video/season_14/sp_1403_clip04.jpg
On another forum a True Believing Mormon posted his thoughts on the temple recommendation cards that include a barcode:
As I thought, as the better for Big Brother to track the LDS sheeple.
kristinc
Law-fail on my side. Well, on my side of the pond small people called children have rights.
One of them is that their property is their own. If a gift is made (I can reject it as a parent acting in their best interest), it is theirs. The law differenciates finely for what businesses they can engage in at what age, but my rights as a parent are limited (as they should be. Did I mention “my rights”? Shouldn’t have any).
So, her bed is her bed. I can replace it in her best interest. But not destroy it.
But yeah, as long as you put your feet under my table…
BTW, how are the lice hopefully not doing?
It is actually not that difficult to give oneself cancer.
For example, it is distinctly possible that my thyroid cancer was caused by exposure to acrylamide in the biochemistry labs that I work(ed) in. Somewhat unlikely, as I had symptoms of thyroid problems before I started routinely handling acrylamide, but then again, I may have been more susceptible than the average person to acrylamide-induced tumors because of my pre-existing thyroid abnormalities.
But in any case, there are many cases of inducible cancer. HPV infection loading to cervical cancer, smoking leading to lung cancer, etc.
feralboy: You’re welcome. ~;>
I have been to Texas once in my life. It was to El Paso (or thereabouts) in the mid-90’s. It was for a wedding.
All I really remember is large amounts of big hair. That may simply be a mid-90’s thing, but maybe it was just bigger (in every sense) there.
Re: Mormons, I’m not really a fan. On the surface of it, they’re no more or less batshit than any other religious group, but their authoritarian tendencies are a bit much. I remember when I was a kid when the family of one of my friends suddenly packed up and moved to Utah, because someone at the Temple decided that they had to (for some reason that was never really explained). Maybe that could have happened in another religious group, but the fact that this family just walked away (including from their mortgaged, newly-bought house) is really what skeeves me out.
The fact that they also had 12 kids also sets of warning bells.
from Libby Anne:
. . . . .
I know y’all find my naivete amusing at best, but DAMN.
Pteryxx, out of curiosity, where did you grow up and where do you live now?
I only ask since I grew up in the country and have always known this shit because I was surrounded with it.
Lynna, thanks for the info. I’m sure glad their influence over here (NL) is negligible.
====
But even with Lance Armstrong being a doped up asshole, he still may be right in how he deals with his
fathersperm donor.====
I recently found out that we all have our own CSS class for our comments. The upshot to that is that it should be possible to adjust the killfile to kill users based on their username instead of their ‘nym-du-jour — that’s why I was looking at the page source in the first place. Negative by-effect for me is that when transitioning from Scienceblogs to FreeThoughtBlogs, I used my real name as my username.
<li class="comment byuser comment-author-USERNAME odd alt thread-odd thread-alt depth-1" id="comment-269373">Mormons: All I can say is that they disturb me on multiple levels. On another note, I just heard a radio commercial by ROF (the Romnaypac) that was essentially calling Santorum a liberal. Oh how primaries amuse me.
I am with Pteryxx, I thought religion was a prop for occult films.
And miss out on the drinking game
The style of parenting of that laptop shooting idiot reminds me of Bill Casby:
In other words, I own you.
kristinc @222, that was awesome of you. My coworkers and I applaud you.
Smaller kid still has them, or has them again, not sure which. There’s a distinct possibility she brought them home from her “previously-infested” friend’s house. Twice she’s gone over there and twice she’s suddenly complained of itching and I’ve found a louse on her.
OFFS. It was 45 degrees this morning when I left for work. Now, it is snowing.
This is assholish as hell, right? A PETA advertisement, short: boyfriend gone vegan fucks so hard he gave his girlfriend a neck brace and bruises, but she keeps coming for more. Advertisement wants you to go to their page and learn to go vegan safely (you know, without your amazing new sex drive leaving your partner barely able to walk).
Ok, it’s consensual, but there is just something very creepy about it. She looks like a domestic violence victim.
In Lance’s case, it would be performance-enhancing drugs.
Lance had testicular cancer. I’m not aware of testicular cancer in particular being associated with any performance enhancing drugs. (Though couldn’t definitively rule it out either.) I don’t know what he took…epogen can enhance cancer growth, but not sure if it can cause cancer de novo or not.
Oh my. ‘Our’ prince Friso was caught in an avalanche. Now of course, as a person, I wish him the best, but why did it have to be the only one of them who is not eligible to succeed?
Esteleth: the fundie school training comes from the east coast and here in Texas where my relatives are. I ended up back in Texas after losing my job, home etc. which also got me away from my abuser finally because he refused to come here with me.
I was raised by Seventh-Day Adventists, but beyond the weird diet and behavior rules and gender roles and dinosaur denial (all of which affected me directly), I don’t know anything about the belief system or even how SDA relates to other branches of Christianity. I just know most businesses closed on Sunday but were open Saturday, so by resting on Saturday we were doing something different. I really did fail Bible studies consistently, and I remember nothing about them except that they were heavy on rote memorization, which I’ve always been terrible at regardless of effort.
I don’t really know why I’m so completely clueless about things that everyone around me must have absorbed by social osmosis. Mostly I blame aspie-ish literalism and social insensitivity combined with bad memory… when something makes absolutely no sense to me, and I’ve got no framework of reason to hang it on, I autoforget it. But I also was bullied and had no friends or anyone much to talk to before the internet, so maybe topics like how many people in the US believed in an end-times just never came up. There also might be denial and repression involved (how would I tell?)
So I just say I was raised by fundies, but I never was one, because I was such a terrible student. I’m just an imaginative science geek loner raised by bible-wolves. Dunno if that answers your curiosity but there it is.
…and now I’m realizing that maybe I should be a bit more intimidated and quiet among Pharyngula people who know so much more about Christianity than I do. Way to go, social skills. *blush*
I don’t really have any hope that Tommy Jordan will be prosecuted for child abuse. I don’t even hold out hope that being criticized by the authorities would change his mind (he’d probably get paranoid about the gummint coming to take his guns and raise his kids for him).
I was so upset thinking of his daughter though, surrounded by people all telling her that what her dad did was not only okay but awesome!eleventy! and I thought well, maybe if they had a visit or a call from Social Services, even just to fact check without any further repercussions, maybe that would be a way to confirm for her that she’s not living in a bizarro world where pretty much any jerk move her dad makes is acceptable.
And hell, if he knew Social Services had their eye on him maybe he would back off a little.
Beatrice,
I dunno, I think a neck brace crosses the line regardless. PETA don’t care though, they will lie and co-opt seemingly anything in order to garner exposure.
Pteryxx,
I misread your naivete as being my naivete. Sorry for the assumption.
Good Lord, it’s like Twilight, Breaking Dawn.
Ah, okay. No worries, Pteryxx. From one aspie to another, I only got this shit because I got bludgeoned with it (incidentally: autocorrect wanted to turn ‘aspie’ into ‘ass pie’).
Myself, I was raised in Bumfuck Nowhere, in downstate Illinois, in a town with more pigs than people. My parents were fundie refugees (that is, they had been members of a church that stomped away from the AoG on the grounds that the AoG was liberal, but had later left after realizing how batshit all this was) who left their church and started attending a mainstream (Calvinist) church without abandoning (immediately, at least) their fundie belief system. Over the past 20 years, they have gradually moved into the midrange (more or less) of mainstream Christianity, though they do have some fundie tendencies yet.
So I was raised in a fundie-lite household by parents who at the time were struggling with their faith and had decided that maybe the solution to batshit cult-like groups attempting to destroy them was to slavishly submit to a larger organization that had (supposedly) controls and accountability. In a town that is, by and large, fundamentalist Christian of various stripes (including Catholic). The biggest landmark in town is (I shit you not) a 198-foot-tall white fiberglass cross. It’s not easy being an aspie tomboyish lesbian living in a town like that, so I had to learn the rules and jargon to survive.
Since I left town to go to college (one thing my parents never compromised even in their worst moments on was their fervent belief in education, especially higher education), I’ve done a lot of reading to see how what I experienced fit into larger themes.
Beatrice, holy shit WTF? That is freaking misogynistic!
It
smellsstinks to high heaven of “I am happy to accommodate my master”. I understand the campaign is BWVAKTBOOM (Boyfriend Went Vegan And I Don’t Give A Shit About The Rest Of TheAcronymInitialism) and not GWVAKTBOOM (why not? I wonder), and there is even one with a gay couple for good measure (I wonder if they’re called ‘To’ and ‘Ken’), but in most of the series there is an aspect of domination and submission that doesn’t seem… quite right.Admittedly, I’m not into the submission scene, so I don’t know, but I doubt that people who are, would find these examples very healthy.
If anyone can stomach it, here’s the whole series
I’ve managed to secure a large quantity of fresh basil in February. I’m thinking pesto!
As a general rule, I find power-exchange dynamics presented to the general public as if they were the norm to be disconcerting at best.
SQB,
The adds reek of surprise I hurt you, not consensual boundary exploration. And then it’s okay because the hurt partner wants more. This is not a healthy script.
Oh, there’s a series.
I started watching, but it never ends. I managed to get as far as that one with the girl with an eye patch.
Yes, interesting how only the boyfriend has gone vegan, never the girlfriend.
Those where women are not actually physically injured are marginally better, but still make me a bit queasy.
I haven’t watched them all, but I did watch the last one, which was from the perspective of the boyfriend. That one was the only one I saw that wasn’t creepy — that one was just “we’ve been having great sex for four hours now, we’re just taking a break — oh, here we go again”.
Yeah, I’d say that ad is over the line.
Leaving aside the question of whether or not there is any evidence that a vegan diet has any effect on one’s sex drive, I would say that having a sex drive so powerful that you either don’t notice, don’t care, or can’t stop yourself from injuring your partner to the extent that medical attention and neck stabilization gear is required would not be a good thing.
Injured females tend not to put me in a laughing mood.
I think a funnier take on the supposed heightened sex drive would be to have the guy so uncontrollably horny that whenever his girlfriend leaves for a few minutes he’s forced to start humping the furniture. And when he’s done with that, all the appliances.
Girlfriend comes home to find boyfriend out in the yard doing it stallion-style with that big oak tree.
Anything but injured female. I’m really not interested in a diet that turns me into Ted Fucking Bundy.
Ghehe, saw a nice T-shirt on one of those shirt.woot clones. Empty roll of toilet paper, with the words “Where is your god now?”
Esteleth: I guess my folks must’ve been fundie-lite or something, too. I don’t know why they didn’t try to pound obedience and church attendance into me, much less why they didn’t have me committed or sent to a re-education camp to beat the queer out. They certainly had the money, and dad was a prominent leader in the church community…
…maybe it was easier for his reputation to just ignore me, let me stay home from church and pretend I didn’t exist, instead of me becoming a public humiliation to the family.
okay, that’s gonna need some breathing room. Fuck.
…That sounds horrible. At the risk of being an even bigger aspie-jerk, can I ask how, practically, knowledge of religious rules helped you? I thought I only survived due to ignorance of same.
also,
I am SO keeping that as moral support, along with TLC’s Japanese butt eyeball guy.
10-year-old gives birth. Issues with Mexican abortion laws.
Varenicline puts people off nicotine and alcohol.
====================
Wow. So krokodil causes necrosis. *headfloor*
Less gruesome quotes from the article:
====================
How about “happy about” instead of “grateful for”?
In Texas?
Yes, it’s not right to have that in there. 47%
No, it’s been there since the 1950s so leave it. 53%
I have to add that the purple cow is the logo of a chocolate brand.
I hate their “Alpine Milk” chocolate because there’s so much hazelnut in it (which hurts when I eat it, because I’m allergic). What’s wrong with cocoa!?!
The poll is gone, the link leads to the article alone.
I don’t know if anyone in Austria so much as stands up because… it just never occurs. The anthem is played at extremely few occasions other than international (!) sports games, and I’ve never been to a stadium.
…Wait. It was played at my graduation ceremonies, and I dimly remember that my conservative great-aunt stood up and slowly got more people, perhaps the entire room, to stand up. But I’m not at all sure I’m remembering this right.
The German anthem has even less existence.
Allons, enfants de la Courtille,
le jour de boire est arrivé !!!
Duck fat is better.
Just for context, the reevangelization of Europe is something JPII officially proclaimed he wanted people to do.
:-) :-) :-) :-) :-)
:-}
:-o
Details, please!
That is near-mainstream in the USA?
…
*freeze*
…Are you sure that wasn’t caused by headdesking or facepalming?
Even stupidity can get lost in translation – what with German not distinguishing “skin” and “hide”.
Good!
Crash still required.
Yes, I’m really glad it’s coming, and I agree with their political stance. 8 (2%)
Yes, it shouldn’t matter who businesses support as long as they offer a good product. 210 (73%)
No, not even really good chicken makes their position acceptable. 67 (23%)
Other: see my answer in the comments. 0 (0%)
Total votes: 285
This is not a scientific poll.
In den Himmel kommen.
And face it, most believers do localize heaven somewhere “up”, somewhere behind the microwave background or so *handwave* *handwave* (or actually just beyond the atmosphere when they don’t think about the fact that the rest of the universe exists).
I’ve never seen quail meat.
I’ve seen quail eggs, but only in France. (Smaller than the yolk of a chicken egg.)
Thanks. That confirms what I generally think.
Being in bliss. You know, a high that never ends or something.
Thanks!
*twitch*
It was. (After it was deemed impractical to change the text with every new emperor, it became “Gott beschütze, Gott erhalte unsern Kaiser, unser Land”.)
And before that, it was… you have to remember that Josef Haydn came from the Burgenland. It’s (one version of) the tune of a widespread Croatian love song. “In the morning I got up early […] oh, Marica, my soul”.
Yes, and recycling each other’s national anthem tunes was normal as well. The (last) German imperial anthem was to the tune of God Save The Queen.
That would cover all except the jump from “chaotic” (as in “huge civil war”) to “interesting”.
…Wwwwwow. That is old-time religion.
(Chimpanzees threaten the rain when it goes on for too long.)
Seconded.
And please, Jadehawk, read your e-mail and respond. I’ll send you toothy goodness of this beast as soon as you do. :-)
Please explain.
…That reminds me. I still haven’t told you what was in a cupboard drawer (there were no drawers under the nightstands) in the luxurious hotel at the conference last week: a New Testament in German, English and French, and “The Teachings of Buddha” in German and English by a Japanese publisher!
The cupboard was opposite the bathroom, now that I think of it. But there was plenty of toilet paper. :-)
Sounds exciting! Just be sure to keep the thiol under tight, tight wraps.
That’s quite obviously what’s meant. As in “you don’t know shit!”.
It’s amazing stuff with covalent bonds between carbon and magnesium !!
Strange cat. The cats I’ve experienced simply use me as a piece of landscape to scratch themselves against. :-)
Please explain.
Seconded. :-(
If you like Microsoft and Yahell! better than Google, that is. Ecosia isn’t actually a search engine, it’s an input mask for Bing and Yahoo!.
Awesome!
Live long and prosper.
…who therefore shows up in their names a lot. Elijah? Eliyahu. El = god; -i = my; yahu… yahw…
Take to task for what?
Heh.
(I feel obliged to kill the joke by pointing out that it is one. I’m told it means “smelling harbor”.)
“The School of Assassins was easy to get in, and easy to get out. The trick was to get out upright.”
– some Discworld novel
Funnily enough, snakes actually have very short necks. In development genetics terms, most of their necks, along with the entire shoulder region, have been transformed into middle trunk. That’s why there is no trace of a shoulder region in any known snake.
With very few exceptions, they’ve got very short tails, too. That’s common in limb-reduced vertebrates.
Destroy All Monsters.
LOL!!!
It’s funny because it’s true.
Yes!!!
WTF.
Are any of them carcinogenic?
PETA gets scarier and scarier.
Besides, it doesn’t even make any sense. Why should your sex drive, let alone your muscle power, increase when you go vegan? Perhaps if you’ve been obese before and lose weight, which would mean they’re implying everyone who’s not vegan is fat? ~:-|
*hug*
Shit, I miscounted the links, so my comment ended up in moderation. I’ll try again…
10-year-old gives birth. Issues with Mexican abortion laws.
Varenicline puts people off nicotine and alcohol.
====================
Wow. So krokodil causes necrosis. *headfloor*
Less gruesome quotes from the article:
====================
How about “happy about” instead of “grateful for”?
In Texas?
Yes, it’s not right to have that in there. 47%
No, it’s been there since the 1950s so leave it. 53%
I have to add that the purple cow is the logo of a chocolate brand.
I hate their “Alpine Milk” chocolate because there’s so much hazelnut in it (which hurts when I eat it, because I’m allergic). What’s wrong with cocoa!?!
The poll is gone, the link leads to the article alone.
I don’t know if anyone in Austria so much as stands up because… it just never occurs. The anthem is played at extremely few occasions other than international (!) sports games, and I’ve never been to a stadium.
…Wait. It was played at my graduation ceremonies, and I dimly remember that my conservative great-aunt stood up and slowly got more people, perhaps the entire room, to stand up. But I’m not at all sure I’m remembering this right.
The German anthem has even less existence.
Allons, enfants de la Courtille,
le jour de boire est arrivé !!!
Duck fat is better.
Just for context, the reevangelization of Europe is something JPII officially proclaimed he wanted people to do.
:-) :-) :-) :-) :-)
:-}
:-o
Details, please!
That is near-mainstream in the USA?
…
*freeze*
…Are you sure that wasn’t caused by headdesking or facepalming?
Even stupidity can get lost in translation – what with German not distinguishing “skin” and “hide”.
Good!
Crash still required.
Yes, I’m really glad it’s coming, and I agree with their political stance. 8 (2%)
Yes, it shouldn’t matter who businesses support as long as they offer a good product. 210 (73%)
No, not even really good chicken makes their position acceptable. 67 (23%)
Other: see my answer in the comments. 0 (0%)
Total votes: 285
This is not a scientific poll.
In den Himmel kommen.
And face it, most believers do localize heaven somewhere “up”, somewhere behind the microwave background or so *handwave* *handwave* (or actually just beyond the atmosphere when they don’t think about the fact that the rest of the universe exists).
I’ve never seen quail meat.
I’ve seen quail eggs, but only in France. (Smaller than the yolk of a chicken egg.)
Thanks. That confirms what I generally think.
Being in bliss. You know, a high that never ends or something.
Thanks!
*twitch*
It was. (After it was deemed impractical to change the text with every new emperor, it became “Gott beschütze, Gott erhalte unsern Kaiser, unser Land”.)
And before that, it was… you have to remember that Josef Haydn came from the Burgenland. It’s (one version of) the tune of a widespread Croatian love song. “In the morning I got up early […] oh, Marica, my soul”.
Yes, and recycling each other’s national anthem tunes was normal as well. The (last) German imperial anthem was to the tune of God Save The Queen.
That would cover all except the jump from “chaotic” (as in “huge civil war”) to “interesting”.
…Wwwwwow. That is old-time religion.
(Chimpanzees threaten the rain when it goes on for too long.)
Seconded.
And please, Jadehawk, read your e-mail and respond. I’ll send you toothy goodness of this beast as soon as you do. :-)
Please explain.
…That reminds me. I still haven’t told you what was in a cupboard drawer (there were no drawers under the nightstands) in the luxurious hotel at the conference last week: a New Testament in German, English and French, and “The Teachings of Buddha” in German and English by a Japanese publisher!
The cupboard was opposite the bathroom, now that I think of it. But there was plenty of toilet paper. :-)
Sounds exciting! Just be sure to keep the thiol under tight, tight wraps.
That’s quite obviously what’s meant. As in “you don’t know shit!”.
It’s amazing stuff with covalent bonds between carbon and magnesium !!
Strange cat. The cats I’ve experienced simply use me as a piece of landscape to scratch themselves against. :-)
Please explain.
Seconded. :-(
If you like Microsoft and Yahell! better than Google, that is. Ecosia isn’t actually a search engine, it’s an input mask for Bing and Yahoo!.
Awesome!
Live long and prosper.
…who therefore shows up in their names a lot. Elijah? Eliyahu. El = god; -i = my; yahu… yahw…
Take to task for what?
Heh.
(I feel obliged to kill the joke by pointing out that it is one. I’m told it means “smelling harbor”.)
“The School of Assassins was easy to get in, and easy to get out. The trick was to get out upright.”
– some Discworld novel
Funnily enough, snakes actually have very short necks. In development genetics terms, most of their necks, along with the entire shoulder region, have been transformed into middle trunk. That’s why there is no trace of a shoulder region in any known snake.
With very few exceptions, they’ve got very short tails, too. That’s common in limb-reduced vertebrates.
Look Destroy All Monsters up on Wikipedia.
LOL!!!
It’s funny because it’s true.
Yes!!!
WTF.
Are any of them carcinogenic?
PETA gets scarier and scarier.
Besides, it doesn’t even make any sense. Why should your sex drive, let alone your muscle power, increase when you go vegan? Perhaps if you’ve been obese before and lose weight, which would mean they’re implying everyone who’s not vegan is fat? ~:-|
*hug*
Part 1 of 2.
Shit, I miscounted the links, so my comment ended up in moderation. I’ll try again…
10-year-old gives birth. Issues with Mexican abortion laws.
Varenicline puts people off nicotine and alcohol.
====================
Wow. So krokodil causes necrosis. *headfloor*
Less gruesome quotes from the article:
====================
How about “happy about” instead of “grateful for”?
In Texas?
Yes, it’s not right to have that in there. 47%
No, it’s been there since the 1950s so leave it. 53%
I have to add that the purple cow is the logo of a chocolate brand.
I hate their “Alpine Milk” chocolate because there’s so much hazelnut in it (which hurts when I eat it, because I’m allergic). What’s wrong with cocoa!?!
The poll is gone, the link leads to the article alone.
I don’t know if anyone in Austria so much as stands up because… it just never occurs. The anthem is played at extremely few occasions other than international (!) sports games, and I’ve never been to a stadium.
…Wait. It was played at my graduation ceremonies, and I dimly remember that my conservative great-aunt stood up and slowly got more people, perhaps the entire room, to stand up. But I’m not at all sure I’m remembering this right.
The German anthem has even less existence.
Allons, enfants de la Courtille,
le jour de boire est arrivé !!!
Duck fat is better.
Just for context, the reevangelization of Europe is something JPII officially proclaimed he wanted people to do.
:-) :-) :-) :-) :-)
:-}
:-o
Details, please!
That is near-mainstream in the USA?
…
*freeze*
…Are you sure that wasn’t caused by headdesking or facepalming?
Even stupidity can get lost in translation – what with German not distinguishing “skin” and “hide”.
Good!
Crash still required.
Yes, I’m really glad it’s coming, and I agree with their political stance. 8 (2%)
Yes, it shouldn’t matter who businesses support as long as they offer a good product. 210 (73%)
No, not even really good chicken makes their position acceptable. 67 (23%)
Other: see my answer in the comments. 0 (0%)
Total votes: 285
This is not a scientific poll.
In den Himmel kommen.
And face it, most believers do localize heaven somewhere “up”, somewhere behind the microwave background or so *handwave* *handwave* (or actually just beyond the atmosphere when they don’t think about the fact that the rest of the universe exists).
I’ve never seen quail meat.
I’ve seen quail eggs, but only in France. (Smaller than the yolk of a chicken egg.)
Not frequency-dependent selection.
Or disruptive selection. :p
PETA has never passed by a chance to throw women under the bus to try to score publicity.
Part 2 of 2.
Thanks. That confirms what I generally think.
Being in bliss. You know, a high that never ends or something.
Thanks!
*twitch*
It was. (After it was deemed impractical to change the text with every new emperor, it became “Gott beschütze, Gott erhalte unsern Kaiser, unser Land”.)
And before that, it was… you have to remember that Josef Haydn came from the Burgenland. It’s (one version of) the tune of a widespread Croatian love song. “In the morning I got up early […] oh, Marica, my soul”.
Yes, and recycling each other’s national anthem tunes was normal as well. The (last) German imperial anthem was to the tune of God Save The Queen.
That would cover all except the jump from “chaotic” (as in “huge civil war”) to “interesting”.
…Wwwwwow. That is old-time religion.
(Chimpanzees threaten the rain when it goes on for too long.)
Seconded.
And please, Jadehawk, read your e-mail and respond. I’ll send you toothy goodness of this beast as soon as you do. :-)
Please explain.
…That reminds me. I still haven’t told you what was in a cupboard drawer (there were no drawers under the nightstands) in the luxurious hotel at the conference last week: a New Testament in German, English and French, and “The Teachings of Buddha” in German and English by a Japanese publisher!
The cupboard was opposite the bathroom, now that I think of it. But there was plenty of toilet paper. :-)
Sounds exciting! Just be sure to keep the thiol under tight, tight wraps.
That’s quite obviously what’s meant. As in “you don’t know shit!”.
It’s amazing stuff with covalent bonds between carbon and magnesium !!
Strange cat. The cats I’ve experienced simply use me as a piece of landscape to scratch themselves against. :-)
Please explain.
Seconded. :-(
If you like Microsoft and Yahell! better than Google, that is. Ecosia isn’t actually a search engine, it’s an input mask for Bing and Yahoo!.
Awesome!
Live long and prosper.
…who therefore shows up in their names a lot. Elijah? Eliyahu. El = god; -i = my; yahu… yahw…
Take to task for what?
Heh.
(I feel obliged to kill the joke by pointing out that it is one. I’m told it means “smelling harbor”.)
“The School of Assassins was easy to get in, and easy to get out. The trick was to get out upright.”
– some Discworld novel
Funnily enough, snakes actually have very short necks. In development genetics terms, most of their necks, along with the entire shoulder region, have been transformed into middle trunk. That’s why there is no trace of a shoulder region in any known snake.
With very few exceptions, they’ve got very short tails, too. That’s common in limb-reduced vertebrates.
Destroy All Monsters.
LOL!!!
It’s funny because it’s true.
Yes!!!
(The ads for that show actually feature Raab in boxing gear acting aggressive.)
WTF.
Are any of them carcinogenic?
PETA gets scarier and scarier.
Besides, it doesn’t even make any sense. Why should your sex drive, let alone your muscle power, increase when you go vegan? Perhaps if you’ve been obese before and lose weight, which would mean they’re implying everyone who’s not vegan is fat? ~:-|
*hug*
I just had two of the most powerful headdesks of my life on the Jabberwoky thread. That troll is a very special kind of stupid.
Heya David M:
Yep – in Dallas, a few years ago now. It’s not a confusing artsy mutant photo either, it’s just a young cow standing in a field.
I couldn’t believe it either.
Pteryxx,
Odder things have in fact happened.
Breathe. Hang in there, you survived.
You were raised SDA? I was raised Calvinist. Calvinism, as a theology, is very big on understanding and comprehension. It also has lots of jargon (for example, the core theology is expressed as an acronym, TULIP) and people are expected to know, and understand just what it is they are believing in. So, in order to properly play the role, I had to know what TULIP was (Total depravity, Unconditional election, Limited atonement, Irresistible grace, Perseverance of the saints) and what each of those bits of jargon meant.
It helps, I think, that I have a head for trivia.
The Assemblies of God? Wow.
+ 1
Wonderful.
David Marjanović:
Near-mainstream amongst Christians in the USA. Not quite the same as near-mainstream in the USA, but close.
Yeah, more or less.
Question: if you were looking for a therapist, how would you feel about getting a reply that said “You have placed many parameters around your request for counseling. I can only tell you that I am a professional and do not bring my personal beliefs or practices to the table”? (My parameters are 1. you have to not see me as a sick freak for doing BDSM, 2. you have to think women are people, and 3. I have to be able to afford you and still pay rent).
Also and not about the same therapist: would you go to a Catholic Community Services counseling center if they swore up and down that they have therapists who are alt-sexuality-friendly and feminist-friendly? I’m poor, man, and these people have a really good sliding scale and are easy for me to get to by bus.
Thanks Esteleth.
All righty then… next question, Esteleth or whoever else, I was raised more or less by SDAs. What’s Seventh-Day Adventism actually like? I’d guess, big on science denial and pointless traditions? They also seem to really like converting colored heathens overseas – I had some kids’ books to that effect.
From Cracked.com (which is still too often sexist and homophobic, but seems to be slowly changing): The 8 Stupidest Defenses Against Accusations of Sexism
I don’t know much about SDA, Pteryxx. Sorry, you’ll have to get that answer from someone else. I know AoG (and its batty offshoots), Quiverfull, Dominionism, conservative-to-mainstream Presbyterianism (specifically, PCUSA), and conservative Quakerism (FGU).
Woohoo for a parade of jargon!
Re: Wish-machine heaven
Somewhere in my impressionable youth I came across the idea that hell was the place where you got everything you wanted with no effort. This is probably not part of any official Christian doctrine, and is probably linked to the Protestant work ethic thing that infuses much of American life, but it amuses me that these RR people are, in this concept, actually in hell.
That should be FGC, not FGU. To my knowledge, FGU is not a thing.
… ironically, very soon here I’ll probably lose my ability to load long FTB threads, because I’m using SDA church wireless and they shut it down every Friday at sunset. ~X>
—
kristinc:
NO. No, no, no. I don’t even know how to make that a safe attempt. Catholic services lie to pregnant women to make them miss safer abortion windows; Catholic hospitals let pregnant women die. THEY LIE.
I know there’s probably decent people working at some of these charities, but I have no idea how you could find one without putting yourself at risk. Counselors can legally call down law enforcement or testify that you’re a risk to yourself and have you committed – I would not fuck with one I couldn’t trust.
Not to mention that fat people don’t have high sex drives, good endurance or strong muscles. ‘Course, depicting fat people as sexless is anything but new.
I remember from my days in the Natural! Health! Hippie! Granola! scene that “health” was really taken to imply near-supernatural things. “Health” was something akin to the Clear state of Scientology, a state in which you never suffered illness, dysfunction or disability of any kind and were beautiful with clear glowing skin and glossy hair. Of course, this mythical state could only be achieved by living the most pure of lives in diet and lifestyle, so unsurprisingly few people actually experienced it.
Yep – in Dallas, a few years ago now. It’s not a confusing artsy mutant photo either, it’s just a young cow standing in a field.
Dallas is the 9th largest city in the US and is in eastern Texas. Far from the cow pastures of west Texas. It’s not terribly surprising that Dallasites aren’t particularly familiar with what cows look like. Why would they ever have seen one?
I haz been hoist. Of course you are right. Disruptive selection will only increase variance.
Imma idiot.
kristinc, I would say that your first therapist sounds a bit indignant, “how dare you accuse me of having prejudices?” Not an understanding response, that would’ve been more along the lines of “I understand your concerns”. You may be better off with the Catholics on this one, but IANAT and I have not much experience with this.
You don’t know what he took because there is no proof he took anything.
Seriously? Gave himself cancer?? WTF?
Evilisgood,
There is however pretty compelling evidence that he took some things, none of which would have impacted his cancer and the evidence for those things is from post cancer team mates. Lance is a lot of things, but he didn’t give himself cancer to make some attempt at creating a charity brand for his name.
Robocall from Romney.
And remarkably persistent. I mean, he just won’t fucking stop. Eventually he’ll think of this as his “they all laughed at me at university” period, right before he shocked the world and upended the dominant paradigm or whatnot.
Oh, tell me about it. My adopted hometown of Eugene, Oregon is widely referred to as Granolaville and shit like that. Hey, I like granola, and diet matters, but shit…and it’s funny how many of them end up eating weird supplemental shit, crap that looks like paint flecks, processed from some weird plant or something so obscure that only .00001% of humans ever encountered it until 1970 or so…and then try to tell you that nature knows what’s best for your body.
But really, I love this town. I’d rather deal with that than Christian yahoos. At least the hippies and vegans and new agers don’t expect me to eat the paint flecks.
Books? TV? Internet? Grocery stores? Classrooms? They EAT BEEF. They also get hospital-acquired antibiotic-resistant infections – for petes sake, SOME basic knowledge is required for people to even stand up for their OWN interests.
kristinc:
The first sounds reasonable (that’s a boiler-plate type of reply, but it’s also potentially true for professionals).
The church one – well, let’s just say I was recommended by a well-meaning priest to a therapist who ended up being anti-gay (priest didn’t know this and later apologized profusely). Good news is that I made his life hell for two months in sessions and blew his arguments apart in a very proto-TET way on our last session; I heard a few months later that he’d given up the practice and moved to Canada. I have no idea if it was related to me in any way, but I’d like to think I helped. People who hate that much should be in therapy, not supplying it.
So, I’d probably say ix-nay on that one.
Playing Brownian’s drinking game using Kwak (8.5 % alcohol) might not have been a good idea…
Ah. OK.
Come over here, where robocalls are illegal.
Also, W00T! I got this one, just by feeling an guessing (they come in opaque bags, in a series of 16 different ones &mdas; this is the one I wanted).
Anyone who needs a little reason to stay on this planet, go see Stephanie Zvan’s latest – apparently GOP Aspirin is now a Meme.
https://proxy.freethought.online/almostdiamonds/2012/02/17/i-need-an-aspirin/
Fortunately, the choice is not between the first therapist and the Catholics; I found about a dozen therapists to send my little introductory email to and about half a dozen have replied.
The most promising so far is someone who said she’s fine with BDSM, although that if I wanted my therapy to be primarily about it I might want to ask for references from the sex-positive community. My therapy wouldn’t be primarily about my kink, and even knowing there’s such a thing as a sex-pos community is, sadly, a major plus.
Awesome!
Oh, typical “ancedotes != data” statement to my last, sorry. But I think anyone explicitly associated with a religious institution is more likely to embody the extremes of that institution and one without such an association.
The first, I didn’t necessarily read arrogance so much as someone trying to walk a very fine professional line of not endorsing your opinions nor expressing hir own but still trying to reassure. It really does read like some of the legal-approved boilerplate we have around here in the social work offices.
Breaking News: NJ governor Christie vetoes same-sex marriage bill. What an asshole.
Esteleth,
I don’t know why I wasted so much time on that troll in the Mormon thread.
But OTOH, those on the jabberwocky thread don’t know that either, looks like.
I heard on the TV that Russian and Chinese netizens saw the resignation of the German president as a positive thing, as it would show how democracy can work. I’ve tried to find these (Chinese, my Russian is no good) websites, but to no avail. I don’t think they care much in China about who the ceremonial president of Germany is. I’ve tried to find any kind of post that generated any kind of discussion on the topic on sina.com.cn, a very popular portal website in China. I don’t doubt that there might be some Chinese netizens who’ve had something to say about this, but I think the media again overexaggerated the importance of the issue internationally.
Giliell, I agree re the hypocrisy. Welfare recipients are demonised as fraudsters and exposed on reality TV shows, but the state is always hesitant to do something about the big wigs…
Pelamun,
Time spent on an argument where there is an audience does not only show value via making progress with your opponent. The readers like. (I said little once it became apparent that Skephtic would not engage me.)
David M. @550
I’m not sure I can adequately explain, but I’ll try.
So, Christ arrives back on planet earth. The wicked are destroyed. There’s a millennium of peace during which there are several levels/types of righteous folk who prosper, but in particular the most righteous of all, the Latter-day Saints. One of the tasks of the most righteous is to restore knowledge about family histories. More genealogical records are created, checked, etc. More proxy baptisms are done. (This is where some of the logic breaks down unless you assume that god and jesus need the LDS records to sort out the righteous from the less than righteous. Also the connection of the genealogical data to necrodunking is rather unfortunately highlighted. Mormons don’t do genealogy for free for you out of the goodness of their hearts. They do it so they can necrodunk everyone.)
Righteous dead people will be resurrected when Christ comes back, and one of their main tasks will also be to restore genealogical records. Put those zombies to work.
I think this record keeping may all relate to one’s assignment to one of the three heavenly kingdoms, Celestial, Terrestrial, and Telestial — or to Outer Darkness if you are a Pharyngulite. You see these levels of glory depend on how many commandments you obeyed, and, crucially, whether or not you were baptized the mormon way. I’m guessing that god uses the mormon baptism records to assign everyone to their proper kingdom. (God is ineffective on his own, as usual. He needs help. He requires guidance.)
In addition, the record of ordinances performed is used to reunite husbands, wives, children, grandparents etc. Normal family associations don’t count. The relationships had to have been formalized via “sealing” in a mormon temple. You could, theoretically, miss out on the complete eternal family experience if the records are wrong, lost, or incomplete — or if you did not baptize your atheist father-in-law, for example.
If a woman is sealed in a mormon temple to husband #1, she will end up with him in heaven. Husband #2 doesn’t count. The woman’s children, if she has any, will also end up with husband #1. (There is such a thing as a temple divorce and an “unsealing” but these are rare and hard to come by, being usually reserved for celebrities, famous athletes, and veddy veddy rich mormons.) Jesus and God need the mormon records to know to what man each woman and child should be assigned in heaven. (God has some discretion here when it comes to single women.)
If a man is sealed to woman #1 in the temple, he will end up with her in heaven. But if he remarried in the temple, he may also end up with woman #2 and woman #3 (and so forth) in heaven. Heavenly polygamy.
Seeing how crucial these mormon records are may cause you some anxiety. Not to worry, the precious records are stored in granite vaults carved into a mountainside in Little Cottonwood Canyon east of Salt Lake City. http://blog.longnow.org/2007/04/09/the-granite-vaults-of-geneology/ The records are safe. Steward Brand of The Long Now Foundation wrangled a tour. I drove past the entrance to this place many times when I was working on my book about Utah’s wilderness areas. If you don’t know what it is the place registers as a very strange mining or quarrying operation. It’s a mining WTF.
know any good examples?
Marjanovic:
The short explanation is that I was ‘feeling down’, which is something I occasionally do. These little depressions rarely last long, and through them I’m at least rationally able to tell myself that this feeling will go away soon enough. They still suck though.
Longer explanation:
What do you call an animal that absolutely sucks ass and fails at being the type of animal it was born as? You call it ‘dead’, because natural selection comes along and recycles it into feces and nutrients for animals that DON’T suck at being what they were born as.
I fail at being a ‘human.’ I can grow to accept this fact and find enjoyment in life despite it, and for the most part I have, but the fact remains: I look exactly like something I absolutely suck ass at being.
Income tax? RRSPs? Retirement Funds? I comprehend none of these fucking things. I just want to eat and mate and raise offspring and roam and have companions in life. That is literally all.
And so I fail at being a human. And yet here I am, in a human body, and if humans hadn’t pretty much stopped natural selection for themselves, I would have been recycled into poop long ago.
That’s pretty much the long explanation.
Now I’m no longer feeling so ‘down’ ATM, and I really don’t want this entire post to come off as a pity party. Because I do find some happiness here and there. Because sometimes pretty things grow in this giant log of shit I call ‘life’. That’s good enough for me, I suppose.
And because going by other people’s descriptions of the absolute crippling, crushing hopelessness of depression that absolutely defies rational thought, I have it pretty easy just the same. This is not me.
Despite being a failure of natural selection.
Cross posted from the “…revealing Mormon bigotry” thread.
Pulitzer prize winning cartoonist, and ex-mormon, Steve Benson has been working his connections ever since the necrodunking of Jews resurfaced as a major story.
He reports:
More details here: http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,420695
Sweet Jumin’ Jebus, I’m reading the Jabberwocky thread. I’m at comment 395, I observe that there’s lots more to come, and I’m not sure if I want to keep reading. Does the stupid get funnier?
Esteleth,
Repetitive perhaps, but there are gems.
No, just more repetitive. Nettlesome is very unenlightened…;)
Ooh, I’ve now seen him accuse scientists of willfully ignoring 50% of their data! :D :D
David M.,
Schlag den Raab
I was referring to his actual boxing fight against world champion Regina Halmlich, who just beat the crap out of him.
http://www.womenboxing.com/regina.htm
Destroy all monster
That’d be Alla monster skall förstöras
But according to this article, it probably still is a refernce to the movie, since they also talk a lot about the movie, and liken the North Koreans to film zombies, and of course the fact that they have a dead eternal president etc.
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/35/bartas_ekman.php
I’ll probably read theophontes’ book first though.
Dhorvath,
well I didn’t mean to imply it was all for naught. But I’m certain that those who contributed most on those two thread do indeed think that it went on a little bit too much…
And now, I have a much more important question. Do I want to go to a fundraiser (in a gay bar) for a semiprofessional women’s rugby team or stay at home and play the Sims tonight?
I would so go to the bar. Just me though.
Yes, but I have to drive. So no drunken makeouts.
Makeouts can be fun sober…
If both parties are sober, yes. Drunk/sober makeouts are just awkward, in my (admittedly limited) experience.
Esteleth,
Oh, yeah, that’s just kind of creepy. I meant that you won’t be the only one there who isn’t drinking alcohol.
There sure are some beauties in there, but I fear readibg the entire thread for those few gems might not be worth it.
I’ve said most of this before, but I lived in Texas (in the Houston area) from age 2 until I left for grad school, and I had a perfectly cromulent life there, blissfully free of fundagelical nonsense (except for the brief period during which I voluntarily sought it out) or other large-scale social asshattery. Of course, there are some caveats:
1. This was the 60s and 70s, and while I wouldn’t claim Texas was less conservative then in absolute terms (because society now is more liberal than then in general), I do think it was less conservative relative to the larger culture. FSM knows many of the folks who seemed humane, rational, and openminded when they were my HS friends now seem like wingnuts (all hail the Book that is Face for teaching me this valuable lesson).
2. I was living in what was mostly a bedroom community serving NASA (Johnson Space Center) and its contractors… which means it was populated almost entirely by college-educated middle-class folks from Someplace Else®, rather than “typical” Texicans.
3. I was a straight (despite my father’s occasionally expressed doubts) male middle-class white kid, so… yeah… privilege no doubt blinded me to a certain amount of Bad Shit™.
All that said, my memories of Texas don’t match up with the red-state hive of scum and villainy it seems to have become. 8^(
***
Tangential to the Lance Armstrong discussion, I have a crazy theory about Floyd Landis (which, no doubt, someone like Dhorvath will be easily able to shoot down; I did say it was crazy): I think Landis was actually not guilty (note: not guilty, not clean), and eventually lied about being dirty because, at that point, being a repentant snitch was his only route to fame and money.
Bear with me for a sec: AFAICT (normal disclosures about the vast extent of my ignorance; what follows is just based on what I read in “the papers”), the specific sort of doping he was “caught at” — taking synthetic testosterone in the middle of the TdF (remember, he’d tested clean several times during the race before he tested positive) — would’ve been a stupid and ineffective way to cheat, since T is more about building strength than turning it on for immediate short-term performance, and since there’s so damn much in-race testing. My guess is he didn’t knowingly take anything (at least not during the race), and either the test was a false positive, or (more likely, IMHO) he unknowingly ingested something (I’ve always wondered if there’s any doping sabotage in the peloton, with riders or teams setting others up for positive tests… but that’s probably too paranoid on my part).
The reason I think he believed he was not guilty is that his subsequent behavior was transcendently self-destructive if he didn’t: He spent two years, and AFAICT every penny of his own money (not to mention large sums he begged from fans) on his legal defense. If he knew he was guilty, he could’ve spent the same two years quietly on suspension (he needed hip surgery, and probably would’ve been sidelined that long anyway) and then been right back on the bike.
By the time he eventually did get back on the bike, he was done, and broke, and quickly forgotten; “telling tales” became a way to get back in the spotlight and make some money (IIRC he put out a book).
Alright, I know that’s all crazy talk, no doubt the product of a frustrated fiction writer who watches too much TV. The most parsimonious explanation of the irrationality of both what he got caught at and how he pursued his defense is that irrationality is a side effect of the doing. Still, it always trips me up the way people can protest their innocence at such great cost if they know they’re guilty, and they know admitting their guilt would be the path of least resistance. And it would be darkly hilarious if the time Landis was really lying was when he “came clean.” </FeverDream>
my goodness, nettlewit is back again..
Also, why is it up to Lawrence O’Donnell to forgive Lisa Chan for her participation in the unforgivably racist Hoekstra Super Bowl ad? I didn’t know he was Asian?
@598: “…side effect of the doing.” should, quite obviously, be “…side effect of the doping.”
I, myself, am guilty of derping; I will make no disingenuous attempt to defend myself.
Finally got my child to watch some Abbott and Costello (meet Frankenstein). He is falling over himself laughing so hard. :D
Alright, I’m off to a gay bar to hang out with ruggers. Maybe I’ll get a makeout in.
Dhorvath,
The evidence you’ve cited is hearsay and a disposition to dislike Armstrong*. This is not especially compelling to me. The CAS stripped Contador of his title, as you know. If they could prove Armstrong had been doping, wouldn’t they pounce on that?
I don’t think he did it. He may be an asshole, but he’s not a juicer. If I’m wrong, I’ll be disappointed, but that’s nothing new for a cycling fan these days.
*Thank you for not jumping on the “gave himself cancer” wagon. That was some pretty ridiculous stuff right there.
I’m watching Thor. So far, not too bad.
David,
For hypocrisy and for an unwarranted claim, as I thought my parallel formation intimated.
Books? TV? Internet? Grocery stores? Classrooms?
The original comment was about how outrageous it was that a Texan wouldn’t know what a cow was. Just pointing out that all Texas isn’t the wild west with cows wandering the streets (paths?). Texas has actual cities. Admittedly, they’re kind of…strange…cities, but they exist.
They EAT BEEF.
Some do, some don’t.
They also get hospital-acquired antibiotic-resistant infections – for petes sake, SOME basic knowledge is required for people to even stand up for their OWN interests.
Wouldn’t that be nice?
TLC,
It just isn’t true that you “fail at being human.” I understand how it feels to be down, and to feel like you don’t fit anywhere, so I’m sure the words of some random person on the internet aren’t going to change those feelings, but it had to be said. You seem pretty human to me. Hope you feel better soon.
Chris Christie is an unmitigated jerk.
I think my ether symptoms are back. Off to the ER I suppose.
evilisgood,
Of course it isn’t true, any more than I fail at it.
(In different ways, both TLC and I march to the beat of a different drum, as do other commenters here)
Dammit, will y’all quit posting so fast.
@David M: Varenicline definitely works, at least in terms of making smoking unpleasant (and ultimately, unrewarding).
Recidivism is a problem, though.
Jerry Garcia’s favorite movie.
will y’all quit posting so fast.
No! Post faster! Back to back endless thread posts!
Again, apologies to any intelligent, reasonable person from the state of Texas. I know they exist, and I certainly met some in Austin.
My feelings about the state probably aren’t entirely rational, due to the bad experience I had there (which I won’t go into), and likely colored by the sorts of news stories that I encounter from that place. But I do remember some things…
My impressions of Texas, in the short time I was there, include:
1)A very strong, and largely mistaken, sense of state pride. It’s kind of a state’s version of American exceptionalism; they seem to have a hard time imagining that anyone would want to be anywhere else.
I had been there about three days when the band I was in did its first gig, a large private party. Word went around the room that we were from Oregon, and that night about 78 people came up to me and said “how y’all like Texas? Helluva lot better ‘n Oregon, ain’t it?”
2)Need a fucking bottle bill. Beer bottles and soda cans lining the side of every road just looks horseshit.
3.Really, fire ants? At least in Oregon, I can go outside barefoot. Really, the cowboy boot thing starts to make sense when you watch a friend’s feet get eaten in the back yard. I’d probably wear some plate armor or something on my feet if I went back there.
As for Lance Armstrong, is it really so absurd that one of his drug combos could give him cancer? I will defer to people here that I’m sure are much more knowledgeable. And I know he’s never tested for such things, but like most people, given the evidence of drug use within that profession, I find it hard to fathom the idea that he didn’t, yet dominated the competition for seven years. We know there was some dangerous shit going around that circuit, what with guys stroking out and shit.
Sorry if I started a “bandwagon.” Sometimes I get them rolling, jump off, and forget about it, and only later do I hear the thing crash.
I don’t have the giga-science credentials that, say, a nettleingenting packs.
I mentioned gems.
Re: Newton’s laws of gravitation:
ok thor, not bad, now time for Captain America.
It’s a Marvelous night.
I am not sure, but I think they fail (i.e. are false) at a certain point, and quantum mechanics apply
Yeah, that was a good one.
I understand germ theory of disease fails at the quantum level as well. Once you approach the Planck length, the germs are just too small to make you sick.
Evilisgood,
I said the evidence is compelling, not conclusive. As in it requires consideration. If the word I used is a poor one, I am open to suggestions. I only brought it up because the things that he would have been taking A)Wouldn’t give him cancer, and B)Were still being reported after his cancer survival. So the accusation came across as dismissable. Yes, I should have leaped on it faster, but as you have no doubt noted, I am not impartial about this topic.
The strength of the evidence is unimportant to me regardless, as I mentioned off the start, I know that many of his direct competitors have been caught or admitted to doping. So if it came out that he was doping too, it would really not impact on my opinion of him save to include him in a group I already have good reason to classify him within. Nor would I blame him for doing so to maintain competitiveness with the rest of the peloton; this is an endemic problem, not one of personal character.
And on that note, Bill D, given what transpired after the positive, especially the suicide of Landis’ close friend and the subsequent things Landis said about how the two related I truly find it hard to credit that he was clean and then claimed the mantle of dirty.
Feralboy12,
Oh, that is priceless.
evilsgood:
IIRC, the most credible and damning accusations came after his post-cancer comeback (as did, BTW, all 7 of his TdF wins). I recall hearing someone speculate that it was during his cancer treatment that he learned stuff he applied to his alleged doping. That may be a crazy theory, but certainly it’s likely he would’ve had doping-relevant drugs and procedures (e.g., epogen, steroids, blood transfusions) as legitimate parts of his treatment.
And speaking of crazy theories…
Dhorvath:
Yeah, I know it’s a pretty wacky idea (though I didn’t know some of the things you mention); it’s probably just the frustrated TV writer in my head. It’s just that when guilty people go to such unproductive extremes to maintain their innocence, I struggle to think of rational reasons… when the most likely explanation is that guilty people simply don’t behave rationally.
The thing you have to remember about natural selection is that is an is, not an ought. There’s no sense in separating what was “natural” then from what is “unnatural” now.
I keep thinking that PETA is really the world’s largest and longest running performance art pieces.
David M: I just mean that I think it would be amusing to see the citizens of Cranston react to Ahlquist being flanked by a couple of huge black guys in suits with bowties.
Bill D,
Standard op in cycling is to put an instant denial out, then find anything irregular in the specific instance under scrutiny (the thing about regulations is they are so seldom perfectly adhered to,) then spin the hell out of that. Contador’s case was completed in 2012, his positive was in 2010. Armstrong has been in and out of court despite being retired. These people don’t sit back and accept it, because the money is big. And some of them do succeed, not to mention that a long and protracted defense makes it easier to convince future sponsors that a racer is serious and committed to not being caught doping, (do not mistake the trend for sponsors wanting athletes who aren’t getting filtered by the doping controls for them wanting athletes who aren’t taking every effort to win.) Pro cycling is rife with issues, money is part of that problem.
Damn, but I feel like shit. And I fear that the MRSA may be back.
Does anyone know—is there a reliable lag-time between exposure and evidence of infection? Or is this crap allowed to just loaf around in my system, waiting for my immune system to blink? Enquiring Minds…are giving some serious thought to throwing up, actually.
–
Cicely,
that is no manner of fun at all. I hope you are fearing with no reason.
cicely, that’s not good.
IIRC you’re in the USA, so I am loath to suggest you pay $$$ for a doctor’s consultation to address your worry. Grr.
(How lucky I am to be here in Oz!)
Dhorvath,
I see what you’re saying. I get a bit defensive about Lance because I’m a huge cycling fan, and these doping scandals really sully my favorite sport. Seems like every other day they’re kicking someone else out of pro cycling, and it’s a real damn bummer. It’s clear that you’re very passionate about it as well, so much respect to you for that. *fist bump*
Bill D,
That wasn’t me you quoted, it was feralboy12. No harm done, just letting you know.
feralboy12,
It’s absurd that he “gave himself cancer.” Blaming the sick dude for being sick is so… Republican. However, the bandwagon thing made me laugh; I can’t stay mad at someone who makes me laugh. Pals?
Dhorvath, me, too. I know that I am prone to psychosomatics, but that sure as hell does look like an incipient abscess to me.
Thing is…previous incidences (not sure about sp???) didn’t co-occur with a vague feeling of nausea (that may or may not be gas), a pounding headache (which may or may not be sinuses), and an inability to feel warm (which may just be because…I tend to be the coldest person in any given room). I tried sacking out (on the theory that if I am a boring enough target, the causative (sp???) agent/s may go off in search of whatever passes as a Good Time, for them; but the shivering prevented sleep, or even rest. So now, tada! here I am. Unloading on y’all just like you deserved it or sumpthin.
:(
–
Thread bankrupt!
I have made the lemon Jell-O/ketchup/shrimp/celery/olive/onion/pea “salad”. It looks… well, disgusting, frankly.
But! I think I might understand the hatred for peas *cough* cicely! *cough*. I opened up a can of peas* and HOLY FUCKING SHIT. The smell… the smell almost made me vomit.
On the bright side, I’m also making a chocolate chip white cake to bring to this shindig and the smell of baking cake almost overrides the *shudder* smell of canned peas.
*I figured that if I was putting canned shrimp into the damned thing, I wasn’t going to waste my time cooking fresh peas.
Thanks EvilisGood and John Morales.
Like I said, I’m not feeling so ‘down’ now. I just sometimes feel that way.
It’s weird sometimes.
(Oh, yes; and also inclined to weepiness, but I blame that on a profound sense of “Ah, fuck no, not again“”
–
Cicely,
Well, don’t fret about the unloading. I would be pretty worked up given your recent forays into MRSA land. I do hope you just have a passing bug.
___
Evilisgood,
I have worked in a bike shop for pay since ’99 and for fun since ’94, so I get the desire to enjoy pro cycling, I just can’t get past my cynicism any longer. I will try to keep my bitterness under control. I still love participating, so hey, it’s not like I am ruined.
@evilisgood:
Sure.
I probably overstepped with the “giving himself cancer” remark, though I think I said “might have.” I’d go look, but I’m too intellectually lazy.
It’s an easy connection to make, though, that those guys could seriously fuck themselves up with the shit they do to themselves. But again, Armstrong never actually got caught doping or anything, so I should probably shut up. And I can be sure there’s people around here with more medical knowledge than I.
Maybe I confused Lance with that guy in that episode of House.
For the record, I like cycling as well; I worked in the bike business for 14 years making bikes & trailers at a company called Burley. We used to make the best bike trailers out there. They don’t make anything anymore. IIRC, all the trailers are made in the Philippines, and they stopped making bikes five years ago.
I still commute by bike.
I wrote a topic page at Cracked on Lance Armstrong. I was actually pretty nice to him. I may repost it at my blog one of these days–they didn’t feature it or pay me. Of course, it’s Cracked.com, so I had to make a testicle joke and make fun of French people. But like somebody said, maybe it’s changing over there.
Oh, but don’t call me Republican. I’ll have you know I’m a Whig in good standing. (Well, I tried to register as a Whig, back in 1980; the card came back with “Independent,” so I went with it.)
cicely, sorry you’re feeling crummy. I hope it’s nothing serious.
Tea and scones will be arriving through your USB port; you can save them for when you’re feeling better.
Hope you feel better very soon, cicely.
FWIW, Pteryxx, my friend who was also raised SDA says that the Pffft! article on SDAs is pretty accurate if you’re looking for that sort of information about the religion.
Nation of Islam bodyguard-type bad dudes
Very intimidating, I think.
Of course, Nation of Islam would not agree to provide service to a white person.
@ Pteryxx 495
Yes, this is what I meant to say. “that the successful conversion”. A clear case in point is the use of bacon in salads in Spain to catch out “false converts” (or so I have been told). This was a huge concern for the Catholics, who worried that new converts from the (largely tolerant Islamic areas) would secretly practice their old religions. They would try and catch such recidivists out. My conjecture was broader than that. I shall try and restate it in the following form. “Given that foxes in Siberia have been selected for the trait “tameness” over a mere 35 generations. Can humans under an equal number of generations (about 900 years) display changes to human character traits (here I use “obsequiousness” but we might also consider “authoritarianism”)? We might also consider memetic evolution, but I was originally intrigued by the changes expressed genetically by the sibfoxes (tamed siberian foxes).
No, please post at any time. I am fairly good at keeping up with TET and appreciate your comments. They are very helpful in forcing me to think more deeply about the issues raised here.
@ Antiochus 497
I can try and express it better. One way that it can occur is when the child, who has always been the centre of the parents world is forced to realise that it is a Great Big World out there. Suddenly their life is brought into perspective. They are meaningless relative to all of this. They accept this insignificance but then realise that GAWD is in charge of everything. And GAWD has a plan for them personally. They are relevant to the whole. Critical in fact. They are reborn to the new parents jeebus and sky-daddy.
That is the gist as I understand it. Notice, importantly, that there are other ways this can happen. A good example are “rum converts” who “find the LAWD” and mend their self-destructive ways. I doubt most people go through such experiences of a crisis of faith though. More likely ego all the way down.
@ Lynn 498
Thanks, I was wondering.
You forgot to mention that we would do this with the entrails of kings. (or vice versa)
holey moroni!
@ Giliell 505
I think it was Noam Chomsky who described this as “privatising profits and socialising debt”.
@ dianne 510
How do you give yourself cancer?
Incredibly easily. (In my case, self inflicted chemical burns. But consider also smoking, sunbathing and injecting shit into your system.)
Do not google Marjolin Ulcer.
@ Brownian 525
What is a “shkler” and a “schklee”?
@ AR 540
I dream of pesto. My basil bush survived the winter so I has a happy.
@ David Marjanović 548,550
Ideal way to spend Eternity ™:
in heavenin Nirvanain Schlaraffenlandon a Marjanović-ed TET with a bottomless cup of coffee …. ;)In days of yore, heaven was “beyond the moon”. (This obviously had to be adjusted after advances in astronomy.)
Waay cool. Please tell more.
PUleez! “Fragrant Harbour”
(If you are rich, it really is Schlaraffenland.)
IIRC, bovine growth hormone can be used for bulking muscle and is at the same time carcinogenic (amongst other problems such as inducing early puberty in girls and breast growth in boys.)
@ kristinc 563
I understood quite the opposite was true (I am too lazy to apply my google-foo at this juncture, so leave this as an exercise to those interested.)
@ Lynna 582
Mormons are Vogons?
@ TLC
Sounds a perfectly natural and human response to me. We live in a world that is very different to the one our minds and bodies evolved for.
They care what shape the cow’s in.
Narf!
(Professor Hubert Farnsworth voice):
Ooooh, my! Such activity on TET since last I visited. To the discursitorium!
I have spent the past seven hours preparing for 1950s Food-Stravaganza Chez SpokesGay, the hit of every February. This included:
1. Buying the entire liquor store
2. Buying most of the supermarket
3. Cleaning my bedroom and the upstairs guest room, which is no mean feat. Also airing them out and washing all the bedding and putting down extra throw rugs.
4. Sweeping every cobweb from every corner of the house, to be collected with Wretched Longhair Cat’s Dust Bunny Colonies Under Everythang. Yes, thang.
5. Doing ALL the laundry.
[Wine break]
6. Closing blinds and dancing to Katy Perry (Daisy Dukes, bikini on top. Oh-oh-oh-oh oh-oh-oh-oh)
7. Cleaning refrigerator and microwave.
8. Dusting blinds, bookcases.
9. Allowing Dow Scrubbing Bubbles ™ to clean my bathtub.
[Wine break. Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oho-oho]
10. Sweeping entire downstairs, then vacuuming all crevices (bite your tongue).
11. Polishing collection of art deco cocktail shakers, table lighters, and ashtrays. Positioning same for easy cocktail access.
[Wine break. No singing, too tired]
12. Washing downstairs floors by hand
[Wine break. I’d kill for a cigarette]
Girl, I am exhausted, and I haven’t even set up the chafing dishes. Fuck them Swedish meatballs. . .they can wait until tomorrow afternoon.
When Audley, Mr. Audley, and Ms. Strange show up.
Huh.
Via Token Skeptic
My tear ducts leaked a bit as it sank in.
(I’d have commented there, but alas Kylie has asked me not to)
Josh,
Thanks, you’ve taught me some nomenclature.
(Not to mention amuse the 10-yo in me)
I aim to please, John. :)
So, I was around when Monty Python’s Contractual Obligation Album came out. ObSample*: I Like Traffic Lights
—
* Hee heee heeheehheeeeee
theophontes,
shkler, shklee, and shklim are gender-neutral pronouns from Futurama. Not being a Futurama viewer, I needed Google to tell me.
(Gender-neutrality is a very frustrating topic in German, as there are many instances where you can only do the “he or she” / “Bürgerinnen und Bürger” routine, which might be fine for political speeches and legal texts, but otherwise is way too bulky. But one should at least acknowledge the problem, instead of just saying “don’t be sily, masculine forms can also refer to female referents, nyah nyah nyah”.)
pelamun,
Not so the converse, apparently.
Hope you are ok cicely and it turns out to be a minor and transitory bug/malaise of little import.
I worked at a pea-processing factory back in my student days. All I can say is never, ever, buy canned peas. There’s stuff going into the cans that shouldn’t be. Every tin had an inch of light green liquidy stuff, to keep the peas green (They naturally go brown in tins).
The frozen variety on the other hand, get from field to packet in less than 4 hours, and are delicious, and guaranteed 100% pea substance. They’re probably better than ‘fresh’ peas in a shop.
In the factory, peas were graded by size – the smaller ones went to the better quality/higher priced outlets. The smaller the better, and sweeter. Only the larger ones got canned.
If you see a tin of peas on a supermarket shelf, just walk past. Buy the frozen petit pois. Well worth the price difference.
John Morales,
theirs is an argument from etymology.
There is one strategy, I’d call it “gender switching”, to use masculine and feminine forms alternatively.
The city council of Kiel once decided to use feminine forms throughout when amending the city charter, i.e. “die Bürgermeisterin”, “die Stadtverordnete”, “die Referatsleiterinnen” etc.
Kiel was also the place that had the first female state governor in history. They had to add two letters on the wall of the Staatskanzlei and change the article, from
“DER MINISTERPRÄSIDENT” to “DIE MINISTERPRÄSIDENTIN”
Also, Angela Merkel has contributed a lot to more awareness. Though even the UNESCO guidelines recommend not changing the form in compounds, i.e. the federal chancellery
“Bundeskanzleramt” does not become “Bundeskanzlerinnenamt”
and
“Studentensekrätariat” does not become “Studentinnensekrätariat”, though I’d advocate a gender-neutral participle form, “Studierendensekrätariat” (this would be the “Registrar’s Office” in US universities, in Germany it’s the “student secretariat”)
For instance, while discussing possible options for a new president, people kept talking in generic scenarios,
“so the question is does a chancellor want a strong or weak president”
if the “generic masculine” crowd were right and their usage generally acceptable, it would have been sufficient if they kept saying “der Bundeskanzler” in these instances. But they kept using the “or” strategy, usually self-correcting:
“der Bundeskanzler, oder vielmehr die Bundeskanzlerin”
I know that the situation in Spanish and French also seems to be changing, wrt to ministers, for example.
Being a conservative, Angela Merkel hasn’t contributed by pushing for gender neutral forms, just by virtue of becoming the most powerful person in Germany. Now, I think she often uses masculine forms to refer to herself. Some German women do this, using constructions like
“Ich bin Student” (I’m a student)
The argument is by using the feminine form
“Ich bin Studentin”
they would draw the focus away from the occupation or whatever and to the gender. I frankly oppose this, because I think that perpetuates the generic masculine idea. Whenever referring to specific individuals, I always use the the corresponding gender. If gender is unknown, I try avoidance strategies, like using non-gendered plural forms, which is not always possible. The last resort would be the unwieldy OR constructions.
– die Studierenden (nominalised participles, like other adjectives are not marked for gender). as opposed to “die Studenten”/”die Studentinnen”
[flight of fancy]
So, in physics terms, tradition has historical momentum?
(Stretching the metaphor, where the inertia corresponds to its degree of ubiquity*, and the velocity to its historical extent)
—
* from the jargon of geology; I miss Josh (the geologist).
Well, I just watched A Monster in Paris:
My official review: It has a few weaknesses, in being a bit cliched, and yet not quite following through with its cliches (we have one typical scene during the climax where a small ‘wimpy’ character is like “I’m mad, and for the first time in my life I’m gonna do something about it!” Great, except we see nothing in the movie to indicate that he particularly gets pushed around and then represses it or anything, except the fact that the character is indeed small of stature.)
However, I’m a sucker for movies about ‘gentle monsters’, and the monster in this one is pretty damn cool. Overall I enjoyed it. It was nice to see a CG movie where the characters aren’t all sold on whatever big name celebrity happens to be voicing them. The animation was also well done.
I definitely recommend.
@ pelamun
I was going to tell you a story about “Our Dear Leader”, but I’ll wait ’til you have read the book.
Instead, here is a nice story for you about what happened to me today: You know I told you that I am attempting to learn Mandarin by “osmosis” as I find myself (through lack of time) unable to attend studies?
Well today I went to organise an art canvass for theaphontes. Unfortunately the craftsman had only made the frame and not added the canvass. I tried in English to explain (he is Cantonese but speaks some English) the problem, but he could not understand properly. In exasperation I tried explaining in Mandarin and he suddenly understood. We arranged to send off the frame for covering and a price, when, where and how. We both speak equally badly, but it was like releasing the handbrake to our mutual understanding. Such a sudden feeling of relief.
So poor putonghua is our lingua franca and we are both the better for it.
(That idjit the other day telling us multilingualism sucks! Huh!)
John Morales,
I think the problem might even be worse in French and Spanish.
les étudients / les étudientes no avoidance forms
though I guess in Spanish it’d be los etudiantes, the noun would be fine, but then the gender difference is in the article.
I think in French it’s now normal to say “la professeur”.
There was a time where they said things like “Madame le ministre”, but I understand that it’s now common to say “Madame la ministre”.
I can’t find the reference right now, but originally in German, the -in suffix was reserved to derive female animals forms and refer to wives of men by way of their function: “die Müllerin” was either the miller’s wife, or the wife a man named Müller.
So Doktorin / Ministerin all would refer to a doctor’s wife/to a minister’s wife etc.
But after this type of usage has been rightfully discarded on the heap of history, it was freed up to refer to female doctors, ministers etc.
theophontes,
nice story, though one thing. To a Cantonese speaker, Mandarin is like German to a Dutch speaker. Closely related and you’ve been exposed to it a great deal. You might not speak it well, and your pronunciation might be off, but you’d understand it a lot better…
Cicely, don’t take any chances! I hope it’s not a re-emergence. Tentacles crossed for you.
here’s a potentially divisive issue about language. Latvia’s been in trouble before with the EU because of this
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-17083397
Well, in English there has been a move away from the gender specific forms. Things like poetess, authoress, songstress, heiress, aviatrix, executrix, and even actress are on the way out. Some odd coinages, as women entered the workforce didn’t last very long, like doctoress, pilotess – thank goodness.
A simple generic form to apply to both sexes, why not? Even if “poet” was once male, it was only so by social convention that assumed all social actors were male, and female was an odd special case that needed marking. But why should it?
Alethea,
I have to go now, but the big difference to English is that German, French and Spanish are full of gendered forms elsewhere: pronouns (including relative pronouns in German) , adjective endings what have you.
Using the male form for the noun would usually force congruence effects in all these domains, a problem English does not have.
and articles of course, but fortunately in German articles aren’t marked for gender in the plural, which is why a common avoidance strategy is to use plural forms of nominalised adjectives/participles:
die Lernenden instead of die Schülerinnen und Schüler
die Lehrenden instead of die Lehrerinnen und Lehrer
That’s fucked up on so many levels I can hardly count.
It just plays into the trope that women really need and want to be fucked hard, no matter what they say.
As a man you have to show them, right?
They may scream and beg, but that’s just because they’re playing prudes.
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,if you want to enhance your sex-drive and performance via food, I recommend seafood. It may just be one gigantic case of placebo but at least you’re getting a tasty meal.
When I was in the care of the university hospital during my last pregnancy, the OB/Gyn and I were casually chatting about the age of the mothers, like that you hardly see anybody give birth between 22-30 when it would be “ideal” from a physiological standpoint, but either before, often as teens, or later with the increased risk, and he mentioned that the youngest patient in their care at the moment was 12.
And that’s not because of abortion laws.
Yes, and since she has no idea about god, Jesus and the afterlife, she literally thinks people living in the sky.
That was her issue with Pipi Longstockings who will tell everybody that her mum’s in heaven and her dad is in the South Pacific: Why does she never come to visit. Dad does it, why doesn’t mum? And I tried to explain that Pipi’s mum is dead an that’s what people say, and I really got that “are you stupid?”
look and she insisted that Pipi says “Himmel”, not dead. She talks to her and you can’t talk to dead people, so I must be obviously wrong.
I have, but on the other hand I’m living close to France.
kristinc
Hmmm, how much would you lose if you went there for an initial get-to-know-session?
I would say that not being a judgemental asshole should be a prerequisite for being a therapist, but then I also think that women are people, and atheists are people, so I may not qualify for making a general statement.
If the catholics were in German, I’d trust them, in the USA not that much.
That sounds promising indeed.
TLC
I think your failure is not so much being human, but understanding that “human” is a very broad category with near infinite variation.
I doubt that “understanding retirement plans” ever was a major factor in human evolution.
*hugs and chocolate*
Re: Lance Armstrong
The accusations I heard were that since he gets exceptions for several medications, he made very good and clever use of it.
But on the other hand, about 90% of professional cyclists suffer from very heavy asthma that allows them to take medication…
Josh
Where are yo living again? ;)
Köttbullar are beloved by my kids (and by me since I buy them frozen as emergency dinner)
Good news: Two of the three Dr. Who DVDs I ordered in Britain have arrived.
Bad news: my mum is having another “episode”
Yes, but I guess what I don’t quite get is why you can’t say DIE MINISTERPRÄSIDENT, or Die Schüler, even if you must have a gendered article if it’s a woman in question. Why is the suffix necessary?
Obviously it’s not in my background to just get that point. The only languages I learned in any depth were Dutch (all people are “de”, only things are “het”, though you do get the -in feminine ending); and Latin, which is not very conversational or modern so it doesn’t really arise.
yeah, the Scandinavian languages, except for Norwegian and certain Swedish dialects, and the Dutch dialect of Dutch, have merged masculine and feminine.
Problems with “die Ministerpräsident”:
0. that’s not how language usually changes, it’s too abrupt. granted if you can push it through, it wouldn’t matter after 2-3 generations.
1. German nouns in he singular are inflected. for instance compare nominative with genitive
der Präsident / der Schüler
des Präsidenten / des Schülers
feminine forms are often uninflected
die Präsidentin / die Schülerin
der Präsidentin / der Schülerin
the discongruence would increase if you had
die Präsident / die Schüler
der Präsidentin / der Schülerin
3. like many inflecting languages (as opposed to agglutinating languages), German grammatical endings are multifunctional. die is the nom. acc.pl. article for all genders, also the fem.sg. nom. and acc.
likewise, der can be nom.sg.masc., gen.sg.fem., also gen.pl. for all genders
So again, more discongruence (or rather, incongruence)
I be in Sydney next week for a conference, it’s a 12 hours a day thing for 3 days, but if anyone is keen, let me know and we can still go for drinkies maybe.
Der Turm stuerzt ein
Pelamun,
I’ve seen, and that’s mostly in publications connected with University life here in Quebec, things like “étudiant-e-s,” “étudiant-es,” or even “étudiantEs.”
I don’t know if that’s a viable practice for wider use, though.
I’ve been learning French for the last year and a half. I can’t imagine how one would go about de-gendering the language.
Remembering to change all the endings in feminine form has been one of the most difficult things to get used to. It’s starting to come automatically, but when you have to think about it… there is the noun, then pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, in some cases verbs. It never ends.
Well, I have been taught le/la professeur as the word for both genders.
NuMad,
is it pronounced differently?
in German, there is the so-called Binnen-I
SchülerInnen, LehrerInnen
BundeskanzlerIn
but ortthography is.a secondary system, if there’s no accepted way of pronouncing it, its usefulness will be limited
pelamun
You love your Äs, don’t you? ;)
You’re right that Spanish would have “los estudiantes” with the forms el estudiante y la estudiante for singular.
Spanish has a lot of male/female forms, even in the pronouns and as soon as one man appears, the masculine form is used.
I can’t see that change in a hurry with machista culture still going strong.
And they couldn’t bear to add an A to canciller (R is a masculine ending and gets you pairs like senor/senora), so Merkel is “la canciller alemana”
But it has changed in other places so you have at least a “jefa” running around.
Aletha
@ Rorschach
Oder Einsturzende Neubauten ?
(Overly prescient. Don’t watch this if krokodil upthread freaked you out.)
davem:
Now you tell me.
Meh, it’s no big deal. I’m not eating the damned “salad”. I’m inflicting this unholy terror on Josh and Sally.
(I would also like to take this opportunity to apologize to my fb friends for the picture of the “salad” that I posted last night. Yes, I know it’s hella disgusting.)
Anyway, the cake is waiting to be frosted. I just didn’t have the time or energy to do it last night. It didn’t rise as much as I was anticipating, but it doesn’t seem too dense or heavy, so my fingers are crossed that it turned out okay.
Between the layers, I’m putting an egg yolk (cooked, thank goodness!), cream, and chocolate filling, then I’m frosting it with a regular butter cream and drizzling melted chocolate/butter over the top of that. OM NOM NOM.
cicely – hugs and hopes for better. Unloading always allowed, even if I “abuse” the opportunity.
Josh – can I hire you to help me clean house? Sounds like a fun time for you folks. Wish, wish…
@ Dr. Audley
{theophontes looks around furtively, whispers:}
Now that Josh and Sally aren’t around I can ask you to give them each a RL hug from me when you see them…
{steps back into shadows, exeunt}
Oh joy, Eric Pickles is up on his hind legs again and is intending to use the localism act to restore the right of councils to have prayers on their agenda. Since in his words, atheists and others are perfectly free not to attend the prayers, why is it such a big deal to put them on the agenda as item 1, by which time the meeting is called to order? Surely it would make more sense for the xians to have their prayer before the meeting so that all those who aren’t into fairy magic turn up for the meeting and business starts.
No, we are a christian nation, it’s important.
Time for the militant secularists to really start pushing disestablishment to get rid of them… or, get elected head of councils and call some really weird prayers so that the xians challenge it and it goes to court to see if anyone else gets this remarkable right.
theophontes:
[whisper]
Of course I’ll squeeze them for you. :)
[/whisper]
Ooops. Forgot the scare quotes around “militant secularists”, that will never do.
@ Serendipitydawg
Actually I think it looks far more scary without the quotes….MRAWR!
X’DDDDDD
Nonononono!
The European Union is the beast, and Roman Vampyre Hun is the antichrist.
—
Plate tectonics says this is a certainty.
Then it’s not at all a well beast! What does this portend?
@ Changeable
They sound like medieval millennialists. All those portents… teh Ebil World is about to end! Only it didn’t, so they start again. They have been at this shit for the last two millennia.
@theophontes,
Indeed, but I can generally hear them whenever that phrase is used… oddly, Eric Pickles has such a flat delivery that the quotes are replaced in my mind with an implicit hochhhh ptoooi when he spouts the phrase.
The interviewer on the BBC lunchtime news came right out and asked Eric if he is a christian and he actually had to pause and look a bit hunted before answering yes… mind you, that may have been comms delay and my vivid imagination XD
If anyone has itchy fangs, a real creobot is infesting Pharyngula over on SciBlogs.
I have to admit that survivorship of most major diseases is a sorely missed aspect: the medical establishment tends to be largely focused on getting you to the point of being a survivor, but then turns to focus on the next person who needs such help.
Most major diseases don’t have a survivorship aspect because they aren’t curable. PZ’s not a survivor of coronary artery disease, for example, he’s an active CAD patient and will be the rest of his life barring major advances in medicine. Similarly, diabetes, hypertension, virtually all autoimmune diseases, etc are controllable rather than curable.
So cancer, despite the occasional complaints that we haven’t “cured cancer” from people who want to cut funding to the NIH, is one of the few life threatening diseases that is actually curable. (Infectious disease and pregnancy are the other prominent examples I can think of right off.)
And you’re right. There’s not enough done about what to do next. Even simple questions like, “When do you no longer need to see an oncologist?” have ambiguous answers. It is an area of active study, but not a particularly well advanced field.
Threadrupt, thanks to a weekend houseguest and a bout of ear/nose/throat crud.
I offer up this viciously biting comment, which merits a trigger warning for child sexual abuse, about the “moral authority” of U.S. Catholic bishops.
Giliell,
Oops, well to me, ä is a purely orthographic construct anyways, with the exception of subjunctive II in certain strong verbs with the stem vowel /e/.
Gender-neutral forms
de-gendering languages can be very hard.
English has extended masculine forms to cover both men and women, and since English has lost gendered forms in many grammatical domains, this is no longer perceived as a generic masculine. Probably to argue that it is, would be an argument from etymology.
There are some exceptions in English. Take, for instance, the recent trend to no longer differentiate actor / actress and use actor for all. I would say that many English speakers would still feel that this would be a generic masculine, and by using “actor” many female actors would not feel included. This is one major problem with generic masculine nouns in gendered languages. For German, studies have shown that women often do not feel included when such forms are used.
However, at the other end, there is the other problem, namely that of markedness. The masculine form is unmarked, while the feminine one is marked, as you add the suffix -in.
This is why in the former GDR, the generic masculine was used throughout and women would say
Ich bin Ingenieur. (I’m an engineer)
instead of
Ich bin Ingenieurin.
Also some labour activists have made the argument that some employers justified paying female workers less by saying that
Arbeiterinnen sind keine Arbeiter. (lit. female workers are not male workers)
There is also the problem of sentences like “Women are the better drivers”:
– a. Frauen sind die besseren Autofahrer (masculine)
– b. Frauen sind die besseren Autofahrerinnen (feminine)
a. would only work if you accept the generic masculine, and b. is illogical. Of course a solution would be to use a different sentence structure:
– c. Frauen könnne besser Auto fahren (als Männer) (Women can drive better [than men])
The solution to all this would be to have a third, ungendered form. I can’t find it right now, but a German linguist once proposed such forms.
I was talking about linguistic incongruence earlier, but Giliell’s example of Spanish shows that some languages indeed allow this kind of mixing. Probably the fact that in Spanish nouns aren’t inflected for case helps too.
In German, there are some nouns referring to women that are grammatically neuter. While not in the same clause, if a female referent was introduced using a neuter noun, in the next sentence, a feminine pronoun was permitted, instead of the grammatically correct neuter one.
E.g.
Das Mädchen/Das Model war gestern in der Innenstadt. Sie/Es hatte eine große Tasche.
(the girl/the model was downtown yesterday. She/It had a big bag).
In the GDR type usage mentioned above, it was also normal to say:
Sie ist ein tüchtiger Schlosser.
(she is a capable locksmith).
So the subject is a feminine pronoun, and the copula complement is a masculine noun phrase. In such contexts, incongruences like this are to a certain point permissible.
But the problem is language change is gradual, and usually unconscious. Of course people create new forms all the time, but this is usually limited to the lexicon, and even then these are:
– borrowings
– using already existing lexical roots and various assorted affixes
The number of word totally created out of nothing are slim. Even the word usually cited as an example for this, gas was actually formed with the word chaos in mind.
This is also why I’m against forms like xe/hir etc.
In the German debate though, many linguists just point out that feminists misunderstand the difference between Sexus and Genus, and should just accept the generic masculine. But the fact that many women don’t feel included in that type of usage is something they seem to be ignoring.
Studies about this (as per Wikipedia)
Josef Klein: Benachteiligung der Frau im generischen Maskulinum – eine feministische Schimäre oder psycholinguistische Realität? In: Norbert Oellers (Hrsg.): Das Selbstverständnis der Germanistik. Aktuelle Diskussionen. Germanistik und Deutschunterricht im Zeitalter der Technologie Band 1. Vorträge des Germanistentages Berlin 1987,
Niemeyer, Tübingen 1988, ISBN 3-484-10593-3, S. 310–319.
Brigitte Scheele, Eva Gauler: Wählen Wissenschaftler ihre Probleme anders aus als WissenschaftlerInnen? Das Genus-Sexus-Problem als paradigmatische Fall der linguistischen Relativitätsthese. In: Sprache & Kognition 12 (2). Zeitschrift für Sprach- und Kognitionspsychologie und ihre Grenzgebiete. Huber, Bern/Göttingen 1993, S. 59–72, ISSN 0253-4533.
Lise Irmen, Astrid Köhncke: Zur Psychologie des «generischen» Maskulinums. In: Sprache & Kognition 15 (3). Zeitschrift für Sprach- und Kognitionspsychologie und ihre Grenzgebiete. Huber, Bern/Göttingen 1996, S. 152–166, ISSN 0253-4533.
Klaus Rothermund: Automatische geschlechtsspezifische Assoziationen beim Lesen von Texten mit geschlechtseindeutigen und generisch maskulinen Text-Subjekten. In: Sprache & Kognition 17 (4). Zeitschrift für Sprach- und Kognitionspsychologie und ihre Grenzgebiete. Huber, Bern/Göttingen 1998, S. 183–198, ISSN 0253-4533.
Elke Heise: Sind Frauen mitgemeint? Eine empirische Untersuchung zum Verständnis des generischen Maskulinums und seiner Alternativen. In: Sprache & Kognition 19 (1/2). Zeitschrift für Sprach- und Kognitionspsychologie und ihre Grenzgebiete. Huber, Bern/Göttingen 2000, S. 3–13, ISSN 0253-4533.
Dagmar Stahlberg, Sabine Sczesny: Effekte des generischen Maskulinums und alternativer Sprachformen auf den gedanklichen Einbezug von Frauen. In: Psychologische Rundschau, Band 52, Nr. 3, Offizielles Organ der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Psychologie (DGPs), zugleich Informationsorgan des Berufsverbandes Deutscher Psychologinnen und Psychologen (BDP). Hogrefe, Göttingen/Bern 2001, S. 131–140, ISSN 0033-3042.
@ Nerd
If you give the co-ordinates, I’ll fly past and rev it.
@ Pharyngufoodies
I am trying to make my first batch of yoghurt evah.
Hold thumbs,rub medalion,stroke rabbits paw,throw pinch of salt over shoulder,pray.http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/02/more_bad_science_in_the_litera.php#c6230159
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/02/why_do_physicists_think_they_a.php#comment-6230132
I haven’t investigated the power or badness of their poetry.
Mormons are Kolobians.
It has been a while since I have been to SB… my word, it seriously slows my laptop down. I do like the Gumby header though – when are we going to get the cycling headers back? I miss some of the old favourites.
@ Lynna
Vogons are only the third worst poets in the Universe. Are Kolobians the worst?
Rachel Maddow presented a segment that updates news related to Benton Harbor, Michigan.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#46436487
Some will remember the issues that emerged last year in conjunction with this mostly African American community. The Governor of Michigan used a souped up version of the Emergency Management Law to effectively remove all of Benton Harbor’s elected officials, to negate contracts with service providers, etc.
The upshot is that a bunch of very rich and very powerful people can now build a golf course and a restricted-to-rich-people community on what used to be Benton Harbor’s public park.
Daze (@685):
Wow! Succint, and razor sharp!
I also liked the comment a few spots down that thread:
I’m listening to “Says You” and one of the daffynitions was “a rogue hair”.
Now I have “Kill Da Wabbit” earwigging me.
Why, yes, yes I am bringing wabbits back into discussion.
evilisgood (@wayuphere):
Sorry ’bout the quotation mixup yesterday; I misread somebody else’s quotation of that passage. That’ll teach me not to go back to the primary source!
internet is up! BUT FOR HOW LONG (dun dun dunnnn….)
—
cicely: sacking out when sick works by easing the metabolic requirements of stress and moving about and such, so more resources can go to infection-fighting methods such as shivering, running high fevers, generating white blood cells and all that. The point being, if resting and bundling up STILL isn’t helping the symptoms of immune system running at maximum (shivering and being cold) then the situation should be taken seriously. Do you at least have ways of checking your temperature and pulse rate? Or somebody within sight or sound range who can tell if you start to look not-right?
—
One would think, but the case of Nurse Pandithurai who harassed a gay military veteran shows it’s not a safe assumption in practice.
Summary on RBB
I also would like to commend Cenk Uygur on calling out the American media on their warmongering regarding Iran…
(sorry don’t have a link because I’m viewing it on iTunes, but it’s at the beginning of the TYT Extended Clip, February 17)
—
theophontes:
While I think your statement’s trivially reasonable, it’s unspecific: “Could humans display similar behavioral changes after 35 generations of similar selection” – probably, sure. That’s a good start.
Compare to “Might purging of dissidents have had a significant effect on heritable conformity?” Now there’s a question. With some ass-pulled numbers – say nonconformity’s 25% genetic, and purging takes out 5% of the population – it’s possible to calculate the theoretical loss of the trait in the surviving population, and whether it was significant. In fact, that might make for an interesting study exercise in population genetics.
…I just had a horrible thought. What if dominant/dogmatic groups started using implicit association tests to determine who’s a true convert/believer? Or even just who’s sufficiently acculturated to be permitted in?
regarding bacon in Spanish salads:
the Japanese Tokugawa shogunate employed a far less subtle means, they used the so-called fumi-e “treading pictures”, i.e. likenesses of Mary and Jesus, on which those who had publicly renounced their Christian faith had to step on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fumi-e
—
Classical Cipher:
Thanks… I’ve seen the entry before, but it’s full of history and dogma-babble that means nothing to me without further study. What are all these big words? It sounds a lot like organic chemistry:
What I’m trying to grasp right now, in my socially-clueless way, is what being raised by these people meant in terms of seeing the world and seeing other people. And not in the “We believe ZYX” way, but the practical assumptions sort of way, if that makes any sense. Like, Libby Anne linked a blog post about something called JOY: “Jesus First, Others second, Yourself last.” I’ve never heard the saying before, but I recognize what the author’s describing in my own head. I’ve yelled “You’re not my slave!” just as described. But the wiki doesn’t say anything about THAT. Or, on Ed’s blog, someone mentioned the quote by Martin Luther about letting women die in childbirth because “that’s what they’re for”. Again, I didn’t know that was a quote with history – but I heard it said, by a teacher to my whole class. THAT isn’t in the wiki either. (I walked out in a fury, I’m proud to say.)
So where should I go to find out who these people are that raised me, and what the frick they thought they were about?
(PZ’s post on Walla Walla College and Loma Linda firing their biology department kiiind of clued me into the young-earth bit. But I’m sort of glad to find out that “my” sect just believes sinners are annihilated forever instead of burned in hell with convenient viewing concourses for the devout.)
If this is the experiment I am thinking of, there was a parallel experiment that selected part of the original population for ferocity. It was an extremely striking result whereby the tame foxes would fall over themselves to be petted by a human, whilst the fierce population would physically damage themselves attacking the wire on their cages when a human passed by.
…So if the Horde starts meeting up in meatspace and breeding, then in 35 generations we’ll be “
Mother HittonPZ’s Littul Kittons”? >_>I would like to take a moment to express my profound dislike for televised funerals. Specifically, for televised funerals that my mother watches with the volume turned up so loud I can’t escape it.
Thank you, I feel better now.
I’m going to go paper-tiger my wallpaper while listening to my iPod at high volume. And eating chocolate. This will make the world a better place.
I thought we did not need to meet in meatspace in order to breed.
Don’t we breed via USB ports?
After the indecent interval of one year, mormons can start necrodunking Whitney Houston.
Tigers. In heaven.
“But then WE wouldn’t be happy.” -Hobbes
Rey Fox: +1 for that reference.
…Ffff, I just realized something else about that Virginia forced-vaginal-sonogram law. Having a sonogram takes an office appointment and costs money, which the patient has to pay for (of course). But I remember, here in Texas, crisis pregnancy centers (religious propaganda centers that lie to clients) have been buying ultrasound equipment and getting trained personnel on staff so they can provide cheap or free sonograms.
…I think the Virginia law is intended to funnel patients who need abortions into crisis pregnancy centers.
I didn’t mean for my last comment to come off as too assholish. I am, of course, sorry that Whitney Houston is dead, and I’m sure there are lots of people who appreciate the public funeral. Personally, I would hate to have my grief displayed to the world, and public displays of strangers’ grief make me very uncomfortable.
*****
Rey Fox: Ten points to you!
Hot damn, I’m up eleven today.
Didn’t come across that way to me… I was sorry to hear the news of her death but I am not keen to see the funeral and would not be happy to have it imposed on me at high volume.
Lynna,
Ideas spread so well via USB, I don’t know as 35 generations will be necessary.
Well, if it helps at all, I’m passing the request on to aforementioned friend. He’s been a lurker here for a short while and I may be able to coax him into talking to you about it directly instead of me playing carrier pigeon :P
So much this. :( And analyzed! So bad.
We just need to declare everyone an atheist and consequently a member of the horde, done. If the mormons get to baptise people, even posthumously, I don’t see why we can’t join in… it is equally meaningless, after all.
Lynna’s idea is sound, though we need to revert to USB 1.0 and avoid USB 3; faster isn’t always better.
Carrier Cipher, er I mean Classical Pigeon: *blush* thank you. For going to all that trouble, too. I appreciate it. I can even lay off the cussing for your friend. <_<
Serendipitydawg,
I hope your #715 was only in jest, we just spent a thread with hundreds of posts why what the Mormons do is NOT meaningless, and indeed offensive…
Wow, that looked weird! Turns out the mobile CSS was somehow server to me.
====
Good, because the more I think about it, the more that first therapist starts to sound like a white male skeptic who has his privilege pointed out to him and denies it.
A good response would be asking why this is a matter of concern to you and then explaining — not merely stating — that they are a trained professional who will try to not let get any biases in the way.
Has anyone seen this mess yet? A wingnut asks, in all seriousness, “What are women for?” The silver lining is that, except for a couple of MRAs in the comments, everybody is pointing and laughing at the OP, who makes Ross DoucheHat sound like a model of intellectual honesty and Hemingwavian clarity.
Here’s his follow-up: “LOL u mad, so I’m right. Also, wimminz haz vaginas, so therefore they’re made for breedin’.” But with a lot more words.
Hehehe. No need, he loves cussing. And it’s no trouble; I’ve been trying to get him to start posting here for a while, so it’s very convenient for me to be able to give him a specific subject on which his expertise would be useful :P
ALSO, my bellydance class for today was cancelled, so now I’m trying to figure out if it’s better for me to go to campus (and thus keep from messing up my routine as much) or to stay at home and pretend it’s a break. I was planning on the former, but to be honest I’m really sleepy and I have enough to do at home that I don’t really need to go do the on-campus stuff today. Hmm.
@pelamun,
Of course it was in jest! Since we lack ritual, there is no way for us to achieve what the mormons do. I suspect that I may have been baptised by them, since they very kindly supplied a nice microfiche copy of the parish records where I was baptised to the parish. One copy of them, anyway. XD
<blockquote.the more I think about it, the more that first therapist starts to sound like a white male skeptic who has his privilege pointed out to him and denies it.
Yeah, I agree. I decided not to even go for an initial visit because it bothers me so much. It sounds a lot like “I may think you’re deluded and wrong but you can trust me not to actually say it” (with a side dish of “even though you would be wiser to consider that you are deluded and wrong” thanks to the comment about my parameters).
I know a couple of people pointed out that it sounds like professional boilerplate, but I can honestly say it’s the only response I’ve had like that, so it struck me as strange; mostly therapists tell me they’re fine with my requirements, with varying degrees of nuance that make me feel more reassured or not so much. There have been a couple truly clued-in replies, and one therapist told me kindly that they didn’t feel I would be a good fit.
My former therapist told me, when I initially inquired, that the limit of her knowledge about BDSM was that people did it, but it was my job to decide what was good for me and her job to help me get there. I liked her a lot, actually, but her school of therapy was woo-laden and after a while I couldn’t take it anymore.
WTF?
Why is it whenever they say they want to find personalities not associated with party strife, they come up with theologians. I want to vomit.
So, among the possible candidates for the German presidency:
– former Lutheran bishop of Berlin, Wolfgang Huber
– former Lutheran bishop of Hanover and head of the German Lutheran church, Margot Kässmann
– Lutheran pastor and former head of the Stasi documentation agency, Joachim Gauck (Rostock)
– current president of the synod of the German Lutheran Church, Katrin Göring-Eckardt. Also current vice-president of parliament, for the Green Party. Would be a theologian too if reunification hadn’t jumpstarted her political career in 1989 (she’s from Thuringia).
OK, so after calming down:
– At least they’re not from the RCC. (There are two “state churches” in Germany, the RCC and the EKD aka Lutheran Church). Especially in the North and the East, the EKD is quite liberal, they bless same-sex civil unions, they were faster than the EKD in the South to ordain women, and have female bishops like Kässmann.
– Some of them are quite interesting personalities. Won’t bore you with the details, but they are all quite progressive (though Gauck might have a neo-liberal streak).
– The grapevine has it that Merkel is against Gauck (no party affiliation) because he was the opposition candidate the last time around, and after some of her other favourites declared they would not stand, the speculations are centering around ex-bishop Huber, who is said to be close the opposition SPD.
I just don’t think, even if the person in question has a great character, electing a bishop or pastor to the highest office in the state sends the wrong signal in a secularised nation. It also shows how much privilege the churches still retain, in a grotesquely disproportionate sense.
offs, I am not going to repost that long comment to fix the blockquote. Obviously, the first paragraph is SQB’s and the rest is mine.
Pelamun,
Good point. I don’t see how it could be pronounced in a distinct way. I’m pretty sure the same people who use it in print have to resort to “étudiants et étudiantes” in spoken form.
I didn’t know about that, but it seems like it would be the inspiration for the French version that I’ve come across. It certainly seems like it’s somewhat more widely used. Looking it up, I even found a link to an application dedicated to removing it from text.
Which seems a little… excessive, to me.
Pepsi! Now with fetus! What was that slogan again? Pepsi,
the coice ofmade from the next generation! Sounds like the perfect atheist drink to me.@KG, no idea, but Revalations 6:6 suggests CAP reform is not on the cards:
“Fragrant Harbor” was a hint today on “Says You”, category: world capital cities.
Not caught up, must run, just…
Perhaps they resort to “étudian-teuh” on occasion, to mock it? :-) I pronounce the Binnen-I with a glottal stop in front, but that’s just a mostly mocking convention within our family.
Ha! We once spent a subthread or three on what we’d all beget with each other! The Seven Saving Vices, the Seven Deadly Virtues, and much more…
Hee. Child #1 is learning the joys of reading.
He’s been working on a novel for a couple of weeks. Finally finished today. Didn’t realize it was a series. Came staggering in with “Nooooo! It’s a series! It’s a cliffhanger!!! Must! Get! Next! Book!”
So I looked it up, and had to say “The library does have it! But it closed 15 minutes ago.”
Child, grabbing head and sinking to the floor:”No! No! Noooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!”
Valentine’s day My Drunk Kitchen. Hilarious.
carlie; ahh, the joys of reading! I deliberately read some books slowly so I can draw them out.
A love of reading is one of the things I’ve tried to encourage in my nieces and nephews. With a book, it doesn’t matter where you are, you can be somewhere else you’d rather be.
The Sailor: I always read too fast.
I waited MONTHS to get ahold of the last three books of the Dark Tower series. Now anyone wanna guess how long it took me to read them?
One thing to be said for reading fast: It increases the ‘re-readability’ a bit, as you discover bits you accidentally skimmed over.
TLC, I used to read too fast. I prided myself on my speed reading skills. I got high scores on comprehension. I’ve learned to slow down to increase my enjoyment. If it’s a book I particularly enjoy I will read journals or magazines in between just to draw them out.
I read fiction books from the library, (Yay librarians!), when I can’t sleep, in the morning over coffee, at every break at work, in bars, before I go to sleep. I am Dorothy Parker’s Constant Reader.
It’s how I relax from reading tech stuff at work all the time. My hands-on work is a small part of reading up on things.
Sometimes I can’t remember whether I read something, dreamed it, saw it on TV. It’s the same pictures in my head.
I think sometimes that people who don’t like to read just never got past that barrier where it stops being words/letters and starts being a direct channel into the brain.
++++++++++++++++++++++++
BTW, TLC, I don’t think your feelings of being estranged from society are odd at all. I think everyone feels that way. Maybe it’s just me, but I see all the people who are trying to fit in, and go to desperate lengths to do so, are just sad.
Sorry man, but you are stuck with being human. It’s the nature of the beast that self-aware folks can even realize we’re animals.
Like I said before, accepting my own humanity becomes much easier when I remember that humans are upright walking, tool using, linguistically advanced relatives of the chimpanzee.
I am very OK with being a ‘damn dirty ape’. Even if I do try to shower daily.
Imma gonna step out for a bit and slake my thirst at a local watering hole.
Repent?
If you’re going music, this cheered me up today: Red Garland – Hey Now.
sqb, a pox on your family for making read something on Natural News.
It’s MRSAlicious!
Just think—a mere handful of days prevents this being the St. Valentine’s Day MRSAcre.
–
Hey, gang; what can anybody tell me about “probiotics”? The doctor I saw today wasn’t our Regularly Scheduled doctor, and she seemed to be at least somewhat into homeopathy, which makes me…uneasy. Oh, she wrote me two scripts for antibiotics, and had a nice young man shoot me in the butt with a massive dose of something (stung like hell), but if antibiotics are against bacteria, surely probiotics should be for them? Can they discriminate and only help out the friendly, helpful colonic bacteria, leaving the evil ones to die a hideous, painfilled death?
–
Yes, I’m in USAia; fortunately, my employer pays for a Family Medical Walk-in Clinic membership for us all, which isn’t like insurance (in that if something big goes down, you are hosed), but has saved us tons of money. A $30 office visit is so much easier to handle than one for $170, which is the price I was quoted for an Uninsured Patient, two years ago. And anything they can do in-office is FREE!, like today’s shot, and lancings-past.
Employer used to have group insurance, but the insurance companies kept jacking up the premiums until it was in no way possible to afford it.
:( :( :(
–
MRSA land is an ugly, ugly place, which I am damned sick (and tired) of visiting.
–
Thanks and *weepy hugs* all ’round for the commiserations. They help, psychologically at least.
–
*mad scrolling*
I refuse to contemplate peas at this time.
*barf*
–
Pteryxx, we’ve determined that I haven’t been fevered. Just cold; though it has to be said that there are sometimes nights, when I have nothing perceptibly wrong, that I just can’t get warm, which is why I didn’t know how seriously to take that Portion of Our Show.
–
I think Imma go lay down again.
–
cicely, good to hear it. (Sometimes I just get cold, but only between 4 and 6 pm. *shrug*)
Re probiotics: there’s been a bit of research, which shows that the harmless bacteria in yogurt and such don’t actually survive in the gut, much less colonize there; however, while they’re there the good bugs apparently help cue the gut to switch to a more healthy-flora-supportive mode, and out of kill-the-bad-invaders mode. Basically, probiotics help with gut recolonization even though the probiotic bugs aren’t colonizing. It’s weird.
Ed Yong has the scoop:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/10/26/what-happens-to-your-gut-bacteria-when-you-eat-a-yoghurt/
Oh, she wrote me two scripts for antibiotics, and had a nice young man shoot me in the butt with a massive dose of something (stung like hell),
Rochephin, at a guess. People tell me that stings.
but if antibiotics are against bacteria, surely probiotics should be for them? Can they discriminate and only help out the friendly, helpful colonic bacteria, leaving the evil ones to die a hideous, painfilled death?
Alas, no. The best we can currently do is take a “kill them all, let god sort them out” approach to your current bacteria and then introduce good bacteria in the hopes that they’ll take over while the bad bacteria are still trying to regroup.
MRSA needs to die horribly. Or at least be out-evolved by a nice, penicillin sensitive, gut friendly bacteria that uses friendliness to humans as its evolutionary advantage.
I am very OK with being a ‘damn dirty ape’.
Me too, but there are days when I’d really, REALLY like to be able to plausibly deny any relationship with humans.
…Currently on wiki, thanks to a speaker at Cranston I’m reading about the Thirty Years War, thanks to Libby Anne and Classical Cipher I’m reading about Premillenialism, per the discussion on sibfoxes I read about Lysenkoism and went on from there to Aktion T4.
Yeah, I’m very very glad there was a premiere of MLP:FiM this morning and an Internet to watch it with.
LOL, yes. Humans suck.
The language stuff is fascinating – there’s something that shapes how you see the cromulence of a new word. Like in English “zthaanr” is not a potential word, but “thand” is – except much more complicated. Yeah, so I’ll be a linguist in my next life. (Hmm, I think I may perceive a flaw in that plan. Don’t tell me…)
Aaaaand…back up. Freezing.
:( :( :( :( :(
–
The name sounds right. At least, the consonants are the ones I thought I heard.
–
Speaking of re-reading, I’m re-watching Young Frankenstein.
Cloris Leachman is brilliant. As is everyone. {ima gonna nod off soon.}
@ Pteryxx 699
The effect becomes stronger when we consider that it works in another way too. It is not just killing off one end of the curve (dissidents) it is also strongly favouring the other side (conformists). (“Directional selection”) Those who find success in a religious and/or oppressive system often have a boosted chance of passing on their genes/memes. For example, strongly religious men having multiple wives (at the cost of those men out of favour with the status quo).
Scientology/Dianetics auditing … E-meters? ;)
@ pelamun 700
[fumi-e]
Crucified (haritsuke) and dumped in volcanoes (I wonder if L.Ron Hubbard knew), those early xtians had a hard time in Japan.
@ Lynna 706
I don’t understand why they don’t just dunk people why they are alive. If they worry that people might complain while they are alive, surely this indicates that they know wht the persons wishes are in this regard.
(They could baptise very old or sick people who do not have the energy to fight. That would really boost their numbers, especially when end times are nigh.)
@ carlie 731
You are a very lucky parent!
(Mamaphontes quote. She is very pro-reading.)
………….
Can teh horde read this?
Of all the internet ads I CAN’T skip… why does it have to be the one with all the annoying jackasses beatboxing poorly on their video phones? Why?
Are you just trying to piss me off now?
ANSWER ME GODDAMNIT.
Theophontes: I could read it.
But why on earth would you want to do that to a cat’s butt?
@ TLC
I think you misread it. It should read: “rabbit’s butt”.
……….
Sapporo have released a video for all you home-brewers out there who want to try making their beer at home. Some assembly required. Linky to instructional video.
Theophontes: I could read it, too, but not until line 3. I wonder if it’d be HARDER to read if random lowercase and normal letters were swapped in, instead of a consistent code?
—
…I wonder about that. I think the value of conformity is highest for the sheep who are at greatest risk of being scrutinized. The powerful usually can bargain their way out of such scrutiny, and the really powerful ones DICTATE THE BELIEFS.
I wondered about that. What boggled me upon reading Altemeyer’s “The Authoritarians”, was that I had always assumed that one could lump all RWA (Right Wing Authoritarians) into one box. I had assumed that a Palin, for example, would be the same as a person who falls for her crap. As it turns out they are different animals (according to Altemeyer).You might say that an authoritarian such as her reaps all the benefits, but being so above the hoi palloi the benefits do not accrue to them.
I don’t know if this is strictly true, as the top dogs where very prolific (some had literally hundreds of kids) and their offspring would trickle (gush?) into the general population. There would be upward mobility too and a relative advantage. Each aspect in turn contributes to a specific evolutionary pressure for genes and memes.
I have an idea why authoritarians, even though they come in two varieties (ruled and rulers), may yet be of like ilk.This may essentially come down to their need for a particular type social order. If I may argue that this is an order based on childishness (we raised this upthread with “intellectual neoteny” in North Korea): The authoritarians will see the social order as a series of parent-child relationships. As the individual is a parent -expecting a particular relationship of duty (by child) and responsibility (parent) wrt their children – there is also a like relationship with the meta-parent or god. The “leader” figure can interpose itself in the same way as an elder sibling (Big Brother) or as an intermediate parent. The obsequiousness shown up the chain will be matched by disciplinarianism down the chain.
Another pressure that can drive this: It is kind of scary being an adult. Believing there is a meta-parent that cares for one and holds one in loving esteem and provides guidance can be a very seductive concept. Being offered such a situation might be very tempting. Once the ball gets rolling it is not surprising that this tendency towards authoritarianism may evolve. The leader figure may simply see herself as a child, but also as an elder sibling with the “need” to act on her “parents” best interests as a type of stand in. All of this could easily occur by hijacking prior social tendencies within (individual) family dynamics.
/wandering-wondering
…
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful” – Seneca Jnr.
(He might have been wrong. Why should the leaders necessarily be cynical? They might simply be thinking hierarchically and truly believe they are doing the right thing.)
@ Pharyngufoodies
Yogurt… SUCCESS!
Wow, it is delicious, creamy and smooth. Omnomnomnom. I have just finished my second bowl, with sliced strawberries, pine nuts, honey.
Recipe:
…
… …
…
OOOOOOOH…. now I get it! How could I have been so mistaken?
Good morning
pelamun
Yes, that was my WTF moment last night, too.
And that in a country where the largest group has no religious affiliation to any church.
I mean, I actually like Käsmann, I have lots of respect for her. As you say, German Lutherans are usually a cool bunch, but this is fucked up. A theologean IS party affiliated, only that the party is called church.
Ah, and to add to that:
Too bad the Sozialdemokraten and the Greens have decided against any currently active politician.
I could imagine Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger as president. I think she’s at least a decent person with some principles left and I’d like her to have a bit of a political presence after the Libertarial boygroup kicked themselves into political oblivion.
I must admit to never having heard of her, but that’s quite a family name she has!
theophontes,
If you’re interested in that, perhaps you should watch the talk about Mormon theology mentioned in the Poll on the bigotry of revealing Mormon theology (winstonsmith helpfully linked to it in the comments).
@ John Morales
Thanks for the linky to the linky. What comes through strongly is how they jerryrigged and cobbled that religion together. Bizzare.
I am still not sure why they cann’t just baptise living people though. They are still on earth in spirit? Reminds me a bit of ancestor worship… the baptism here pays the bond on their spiritual imprisonment in “heaven prison”?
Also we got to hear about the whole “russian doll” concatenation of child-parent-metaparent … wife relates to husband as husband relates to jeebus … spiel.
theophontes,
I’m not privy to their thoughts, but my guess is that dead people don’t talk.
PS Their answer is (as I understand it) that it’s the only way someone can enter the Kingdom of God after they’ve left the realm of Earth and gone to the Spirit World.
With regards making yoghurt, an excellent way of keeping the milk warm enough so the culture can get to work is use a Thermos flask. Just pour the warmed milk and culture in and leave overnight.
Hey, Sailor, coincidence: we just watched that last night. Love Frau Blücher *whinnies*. (YES! YES! HE VAS… MY BOYFRIEND!)
Hi folks, rare poster here. I just read this (long) essay about the Scott expedition to the South Pole and the science/history of scurvy that I found fascinating and thought some here might also:
http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
Take a look. Or not. Heh, I guess it’s two years old now that I see the URL that I pasted. Maybe you’ve already seen it.
I make yogurt one or two times a week in my crock pot:
1. Pour half-gallon of milk into crock pot and set to low for 2.5 hours. (I used to use whole milk, but I’ve been stepping it down. 2% was fine. 1% is cooking right now. I hear non-fat milk may have trouble thickening.)
2. Unplug crock pot and let sit for 2 hours or so.
3. Mix a cup or two of the warm milk with 1/4 cup (or more) of active yogurt in a large measuring cup. Pour that mixture back into the crock pot. (I started one normal serving cup of active yogurt you buy at the store and now just use the last little bit from my previous batch.)
4. Cover with a couple of bath towels and allow to sit for 8 hours or overnight. Longer tends to produce thicker yogurt. (I start mine first thing in the morning so I can stick in the fridge before I go to bed, so I can have chilled yogurt the next morning for breakfast.)
Super simple and super good. I have a bit with granola every morning for breakfast. I don’t bother taking temperatures or anything and the numbers are all approximate and may vary batch-to-batch, but it almost always turns out great.
@ John Morales
You could be on to something there. Check out 11:33 on the video (linky)
Here is a clearer diagram. Linky to The Plan of Salvation ™. It indicates that the mormons in
Schlaraffenlandparadise can tunnel through into the spirit prison and help spring their buddies. They do this by hiding the diggers in a gymnastic horse that they carry into the yard every day. The gym horse is then taken back to storage where the soil that has been removed is smuggled out further in little bags sown into their clothing. It is distributed on the parade grounds under the very eyes of the guards. *The tunnel allows the mormons to smuggle the necessary paperwork to the people in spirit prison. To get the certificates to heaven, the live (ie on earth) mormons do a dunking then give the certificates to very old and wizened TaiTais in Chinatown who burn them. They poof back into existence in paradise (along with big wads of cash).
( (*) There was a movie made about this process. Link: Mormons surreptitiously digging from paradise to hell.
put…the candle…back
in English “zthaanr” is not a potential word
If I ever patent a drug or discover a gene, I think I’ll call it “zthaanr”.
@ Chas
There is a whole rabbit’s warren jeffs of tunnels between paradise and the spirit prison. Indeed, lit by candles. But have no fear for smelly jello fart explosions. They have fireproof underwear. (I kid you not. Linky 0:30)
….
YOGURT:
On to more important matters. Would the Lactobacillus from sourdough yeast be able to make yogurt? Or is it too different? (ie sanfranciscensis instead of acidophilus)
Crock pot … vacuum flask…. My oven can be set to 40 degrees C, so is very easy to use.
Good grief, nettlesgraig is back. I don’t know which is more annoying: them, or the skunk that keeps spraying around our yard.
Back from Wife and I’s short vacation. Visited the Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian and I found it both wonderful and confounding. Wonderful because it tells the story from multiple points of view and pulls no punches (the display with the beautiful gold pre-Columbian artifacts combined with the swords of the conquistadors hit hard). Confounding because there are so few artifacts on display.
We buzzed the amphibians in the Museum of Natural History (those things are both larger and smaller than I thought) and then visited the DOI store and Native American Shop in the MIB.
We spent the night in Winchester (used a hotel coupon book and got a really good rate) and then drove over through Smoke Hole, Seneca Rocks, and up through the Blackwater highlands. And we had dinner at a Red Lobster (I know, but in Altoona there aren’t that many seafood places). Lots of fun.
Thanks.
Well, assuming you mean here in the United States of Christinsanity, it would take forever because I gaurantee that some rich, right wing Christian would finance an operation to stamp “In God We Trust” on every coin they can glom on to, and would issue stamps with the same thing to every church so the sheeple could stamp all over the money.
ROTFL!!! I had forgotten about that one.
Or, “Personhood begins at the first drop of rohypnol.”
Especially served with patotoe.
I-270, where it narrows down to 2 lanes, on a Friday afternoon?
Then why am I at work dealing with another rash of, ‘why didn’t you do this on Friday’ — ‘well, because I am off on Fridays?’?
Borkquoted. Sorry.
Oh. Happy Monday, everyone.
I just listened to Santorum on Face the Nation…
that man get’s more and more ridiculous and scary every time I hear him.
Now he’s against pre-natal screening and care because it leads to abortion. Never mind the benefits it gives.
Well, one of those ‘benefits’ is keeping women healthy, so you can see that this is A Bad Thing. If you put money into helping women stay alive, men end up with the same woman for a long time, and that is A Bad Thing.
So, does anyone out there think that the GOP establishment is doing what they can to keep Santorum’s campaign going so that Romney looks sane?
You mean with the obvious exception when they are either somewhat attached to that woman or aware of the fact that they may be stuck with her but that their political career might take a dent if daddy left the newly-orphaned children in somebody else’s care while he tours the country making sure that more children lose their momma.
Given his personal history he becomes more and more an asshole with every day that goes by.
cicely, feel better soon.
It does, however, sound like the name of a villainous alien emperor in a bad B science fiction movie.
Rev. BDC, “Santorum on the Face of the Nation”, is what I read. Yuch!
We also got to stop at our favourite oriental grocer (in Rockville — Maxims). When I was in high school, it was the closest place to get things like Wood Ears, star anise, dried (or fresh) shiitake, and other delightful, but, to the western palate, odd comestables. We picked up some fermented black beans, some good toasted sesame oil, Chinese mustard powder, and a few other things that we (a) needed and (b) knew what it was. There is some odd stuff in there. But, if I ever need to get a whole dried octopus, I do kow where to go.
Not quite, since diminutives are always “het”, eg het meisje. A lot of Dutch speakers get their relative pronouns wrong in this case and say “het meisje die …” instead of “het meisje dat“.
(prescriptivism vs descriptivism argument follows)
Ogvorbis,[conspiracy theory]to this European it looks more like Obama is manipulating the Republicans-who else stands to win if either candidate is selected after ripping the party apart? [/conspiracy theory]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgh0y9vTgY“>Don’t go back to Rockville.
Like most other college DJ’s in the eighties, I loved REM. Shocking, isn’t it?
It seems that I am not quite awake yet.
@ 1st Approximation
An anagram of that would be: Me, Hare Porn Tzar! (Oh noze, more rabbits… A Rather Zen Romp!)
In case you missed this yesterday, one of the most ridiculous attacks on Richard Dawkins ever. His fortune is based on his family owning slaves.
That should discredit his atheism.
I wonder, should what I believe be discredited because some of my ancestors owned a plantation in Tennessee? And I will toss this out so the atheists here can disown me, I had and ancestor who was a Methodist circuit rider in what became Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky about two centuries ago.
To me, it just seems like Santorum is exploiting the base’s extreme dislike of Romney for his own personal gain. At best, he might get the VP spot from it. At worst, just some name recognition that doesn’t involve fluids coming out an ass.
I wonder, should what I believe be discredited because some of my ancestors owned a plantation in Tennessee?
One of my ancestors walked away from ownership of a plantation in the same region in the early part of the 19th century because they didn’t believe in slave holding. A cynic might point out that he was the younger son and wasn’t going to inherit anyway, but I think it means that you should follow my dictates in everything because I clearly have morally superior genes*.
*The criticism of Dawkins talked about him having “slave holding genes”. Really, I wish creationists would at least try to understand genetics, if not evolution per se.
Michael Davis, best known as the bassist for the MC5, just died.
Kick Out The Jams, Mother Fuckers
Motor City Is Burning
Rocket Reducer #62 (Rama Lama Fa Fa Fa)
Starship
I, too, am disqualified. My something-or-other great grandfather even took his slave, a 3/5 of a man named York, with him on a really long trip out to the west coast a little over 200 years ago, so I, too, cannot be an atheist as I have slave-holding genes.
Eichbaum, no worries – I’ve never seen that scurvy article and it’s frickin’ fascinating. I’d only ever learned the story of scurvy as “Brits discovered limes, no more problem”. But it’s way more complicated, and who would’ve thought an entire cure was so easy to lose?
Well, I’m German
I’m wondering if the anti-fascist grandpa cancels out the Waffen SS grandpa…
You can also just take half of what I say serious and ignore the other half ;)
It is just occurred to me, using this argument, the Southern Baptists can be discredited once and for all. It does not matter that they now disown it, it was founded on the principle that slavery was inherently christian.
Giliell, we will only pay attention to the part of you that comes from your anti-fascist grandfather.
My southern born grandfather (The slave owning side of my family.) fought as a paratrooper against Germany in WWII. Now I am not sure how much he discredits me.
Dunno about slavery, but since I come from a line of SDA missionaries on the one side, and Spanish conquistador on the other, obviously no decent person should let me anywhere near… well, anyone.
So, what do you get when you cross a Seventh-Day Adventist with a conquistador?
Spanish conquistadors had a rather nasty habit of enslaving the surviving native population. You have the slave owning gene, I am sorry to inform you.
Regarding one’s ancestors, I posted this at WEIT:
I know I have a couple of whalers somewhere way up (or down) in the family tree.I’m sure that disqualifies me as a vegetarian.
Oh, I’m part native, so I also have SLAVE genes. Probably rape factored in there, too.
…A missionary who saves the natives from their sinful sinful gold?
Oh noes! I are totes disqualified because somewhere among my great-greats (or great-great-greats) is almost certainly a rabbi
t!Well. I guess I should come clean.
On my mother’s side:
Polish nobility.
An officer in the Czar’s Polish Lancers (at least one, judging from the family, maybe more)
A goldminer in the Black Hills (when they still belonged to the Native Americans)
A banker
and, on Dad’s side:
An explorer and slave holder
Some minor Prussian nobility (though they did drop the ‘von’ when they came to the US after the 1848 revolution fell through)
Three (or more) men of the cloth
Some Interior Department lawyers who helped screw the Native Americans (one legal decision, but the US Supreme Court, held that the US Government (meaning BIA) could abrogate signed treaties with Native American nations if the BIA felt it was in the best interest of the Native Americans to abrogate said treaty)
A whole ‘nother passel of slave holders
A general who helped kick the English out of what is now Indiana and Ohio (so I suppose I have to apologize for all of that stupidity, too)
A US Civil War General who helped keep Lee supplied at Petersburg and may have extended the US Civil War by six months
A mercenary who helped William conquer England
And I am the seventh generation in my family who have worked for the US Government (all but one generation have been with DOI)
Please note that I am not including all the other people who did good things because those do not count.
Add all that up, and I appear to be one evil dude.
Of course, the United States was supposedly founded on the idea that one’s ancestors did not make one important or meager (unless one is a slave), but one’s own accomplishments. We fought a war to eliminate the aristocracy. Don’t believe me? The Daughters of the American Revolution say so (and they are the aristocracy, so we have to believe them).
So I hereby apologize for all the things my ancestors did. And I apologize again at the result of all those genes.
Are these the same sort of people who would deny that blacks lack a privilege due to their ancestors being said slaves?
That’s a wise choice, the other one was an asshole all around.
Funny, I loved him as a kid (although I would have apreciated if he hadn’t made Spießbraten every single fucking time we went there), but then I also didn’t know that the first thing he ever said about me was that I was “only another girl”.
He died before I was old enough to see a misogynist racist asshole* behind the nice old grandpa.
I also must inform you that the rest of my family, as far as I know, is a very non-remarkable bunch of farmers and craftsmen and some religious refugees from France, who also were non-remarkable farmers and craftsmen.
Also miners, of course. Around here you aren’t considered a full citizen if you haven’t got at least one miner or steelworker in your family.
*My second-worst birthday was the day desert storm started. My grandpa said something along the line that the sandniggers deserve to be killed and my mum kicked him out. There are good reasons why I still love her so much.
I have ancestry from both conquistadors and the natives they oppressed. That may explain my self-loathing, :p.
Seriously though, is “your ancestors from the 17th century owned slaves” the best that Lusher got? Hell, there’s stuff Dawkins written on this very blog with the last year that’s better ammunition than that. This guy is too stupid to even run an effective smear campaign.
Every good member of the SS knows that females are only good for breeding more Aryans.
And good for your mom!
I guess 8% of Asian men are guilty of Mongolian war crimes.
Yep, when a year later my male cousin was born, he told my dad to ask his brother how to do this “right”.
Family legend has it that my dad told him that he considered having two planned children with his wife better than knocking up your underage girlfriend (disclaimer: my uncle and my aunt are a great and happy couple, but the point still stands).
BTW, the English “Aryan” always gets changed into Ayran by my brain…
BUt given all your elaborate family histories, I feel a bit like Tiffany Aching :o)
No, wait!
I have some Hungarian gypsies somwhere down the line! Only by the time we come to ancestors whose names I know they have been converted into good, you guess it, farmers and millers.
But that means I probably have some genes for stealing babies, so you shouldn’t trust me with your kids.
I’ve been told once that I had the eyebrows of a Romanian.
Which clearly means I’m part vampire.
Do you keep them in a jar?
Most of my ancestors seem to have been from the labouring classes – lots of farm labourers on my Dad’s side, while my maternal grandfather was a steelworker (but also a Methodist, I’m sorry to say), and his father an ironstone miner. However, my maternal grandmother’s father was a butcher, and I indirectly inherited some of his money, so my current home was, I’m afraid, partly bought with the proceeds of butchery.
I’m wondering if the anti-fascist grandpa cancels out the Waffen SS grandpa…
I can’t help but wonder just how awkward the first meeting of your grandparents was.
Breaking news:
Angela Merkel gives in, agrees to make East German pastor (and GDR dissident) the head of state. Now I have to find out what the guy had said exactly about Sarrazin’s book (the one that says that Muslim immigrants are dumbing Germany down).
If character traits have a genetic basis, the one common character trait that all Americans have, except for those descended from kidnapped Africans, is a willingness to say, “Screw this, I’m outta here!” when things go bad. Maybe that explains why the US makes such strong efforts to propagandize its citizens about how awful the rest of the world is, prevent them from learning about other places (poor teaching of geography, outright banning of teaching of other languages), and pretend that no one ever emigrates. Got to keep people with little inherent place loyalty trapped somehow.
I know that the attributed words of a Virginia law maker cannot be used to represent all anti-choosers but if one follows the logic, once a woman has had sex, rape is something she has consented to.
The last sentence is mine.
Hi, Thread!
I got the bat signal a while back, but it took me a while to get back on here.
Thank you to everyone who offered support a few iterations back. Sometimes there’s a cumulative impact that makes withdrawing more appealing than engaging. Because even though I didn’t have internet at home, I actually have had a 2-hour break 4 days a week in which to goof off on the web. I guess I just wanted a little break from all the misogyny wars. I really appreciate those of you who have kept going. I’ve had my little battles in meatspace and on facebook (must stay sniny for the Tentacled Overlord), but I might be ready to jump back into the Big Kid fray once again.
I’ve got a copyediting project to finish (Sili would be glad to know that I’m instituting the use of the neutral third person pronoun to avoid sexist pronoun usage), which means I’ll pop in a bit to procrastinate. I look forward to catching up with y’all.
dianne
Oh, don’t forget, after the war was over there were no nazis left and if your anti-fascism wasn’t religious you were still worse than shit.
So it’s more or less something that was swept under the rug. The 1968 protests in Germany were partly motivated anout the: the first post-war generation growing up, learning about fascism and asking the question “what did you do back then exactly?”
pelamun
Oh fucking shit.
Why do I have the huge suspicion that there’s a big deal about telling the Left and their voters that they can go and die in a fire in this choice and the whole process?
Jules, it is good to see you.
that reminds me of how my lunch with father figure went.
Mutual truce because of how bad his father and brother are.
After raping the babysitter, divorcing (after getting grandma to give him alibi in said trial) he got to keep the house but pay alimony that was good for the time. Jumped state left her with the house and never gave a cent. Now he’s back being hosted by my uncle who despite living on the block of grandma won’t talk to her at all or help her fix her heat in winter for months. Now that grandma has breast cancer father’s father wants to sell the house out from under her…after telling my father he’d sign it over if father paid for lawyer to draw up the papers (theres 500 bucks wasted)
Ugh out of all the men in that family I lucked out with sperm donor.
Hey Jules, good to see you back!
Can I fill out a form request to change genetics?
Hey, wait, I know a woman who got pregnant without penetration.
Hey Jules, good to see you!
In the US, the FBI was suspicious of any anti-fascist that was active before Hitler declared war on the US. The idea was that this was evidence that the person was a communist.
Funny how it is pretty much the leftists who think that Henry Ford’s antisemitism and friendship with Hitler is actually significant.
Giliell,
the opposition of the Left to Gauck was probably more due to Gauck’s role as head of the Stasi Documentation Agency. I do not have any sympathy for their stance regarding this matter, they need to get their house in order first regarding the history of the GDR.
The entire process was marred by in-fighting anyway, what with the FDP suddenly pushing for Gauck against Merkel, and the SPD signalling to the CDU that they would accept Töpfer or Huber without consulting with the Greens. So, consensus schmonsensus.
Merkel only invited the parties she could imagine having a coalition with, and that’s already one party more than her predecessor, so I think that’s fine.
Thanks, Janine and TLC!
On a scale of 1 to not-getting-it, this sentiment scores KILL IT WITH FIRE.
In the US, the FBI was suspicious of any anti-fascist that was active before Hitler declared war on the US. The idea was that this was evidence that the person was a communist.
I believe the term was “pre-mature anti-fascist.”
The 1968 protests in Germany were partly motivated anout the: the first post-war generation growing up, learning about fascism and asking the question “what did you do back then exactly?”
If I understand correctly, most of the power structure in Germany was left more or less intact and the same people were in power, they just had to make a statement that they weren’t Nazis anymore, no, not at all, really. Thus, the US didn’t really end fascism in Germany, that was done by Germans in the 1960s.
Saying things like that has made me EXTREMELY unpopular in the US at various times. As in, threatened with being beaten up unpopular.
(…and Giliell!)
Yes, dianne, that is the term. For example, Earnest Hemingway. He worked as a spy for England. When he went on his fishing trips in the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf Of Mexico, he was also tracking U-boats. Obviously a potential enemy of the US.
dianne,
that’s not completely true. The SPD came back and did have some real power, even some conservatives like Adenauer, who was at times even “on the run” from the Nazis, came back. Though all parties, incl. the SPD, also had former Nazis amongst their ranks.
I haven’t read any detailed studies on this (but I’m certain they exist as the era of National Socialism is one of the most popular times studied by history majors in Germany), but as far as I know, 1.4% of all de-nazification cases were from the two most problematic categories, so-called “major guilty persons” and “guilty persons”. The first would be the war criminals and the second the party activists/leaders and those who benefited from the Nazi crimes financially. Whoever had been ruled to be in one of those two categories, was excluded from public positions even after de-nazification ended largely in 1951.
Also, in the civil service, most high-ranking civil servants were fired, and in the western zones, politicians and functionaries from the democratic parties of the Weimar republic, were reactivated. The Soviets were much more thorough in this though, but they had a different goal of course.
That said, I agree that de-nazification was ineffective and many were probably wrongly labelled “fellow travellers” (category 4). But to a certain extent, this was necessary. You had an entire nation of fellow travellers, you couldn’t fire them all. I wonder why the US government forgot that lesson in Iraq.
Anybody seen The Secret World Of Arietty? One of my friends left a “zomg DO NOT see this movie with your kids” type message on a shared forum and said it made her “frustrated, horrified and angry” to have to explain it to her daughter but she hasn’t been back since, so now I’m curious. What’s the deal?
Shoot, I’m sorry. In hindsight I might’ve shoulda put a trigger warning for stories of domestic abuse and bullshittery in my last story. Sorry.
I’m glad y’all are here but I’m going to hide under a warm place for a bit.
Here’s one of the songs I had lost:
Howard Jones – What Is Love
A billionaire supporter of Mitt Romney, Frank VanderSloot, has drawn the attention, (and one might say the ire), of Salon.
Here are a few excerpts from the Salon article:
Zuckerman’s partner of five years was fired from his job.
Link to article in Salon:
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/17/billionaire_romney_donor_uses_threats_to_silence_critics/singleton/
dianne
Yep, that more or less describes it. Everywhere, except in the high political fields, authorities stayed in power, especially in the court system and the military, not to mention industry (hey, did you know that the IG Farben took so long to dissolve itself that they finally just admitted they failed at it and carried on?)
pelamun
Yes and no.
Yes, that was most likely their motivation, but I can also in some parts understand them. The whole Stasi-thing has become a witch hunt. Drop the hint and every leftist politician from the former GDR is suddenly Erich Mielke in person.
Secondly, compared with what the conservatives want to be able to do to every one of us, the Stasi was a playground bully
Thirdly, I’d like all the other parties to bring their house in order, too.
They could start with their Nazi-histories.
Then they can go on working on the cold-war injustices.
And then we might want to take a look at the Verfassungsschutz.
And yes, they play dirty, too, yes, they dig into personal histories, too, and yes, they try to spy on people, too.
Only that it is, of course, hypocrisy to say that this needs to be above party-quarrels and about a president who can represent all Germans if by that you mean “party quarrels with parties I like” and “all Germans who I consider worthy of recognition”
Kristinc: Hmmm, I saw that title on one of my movie sites. It appears to be some sort of anime, and the drawing style vaguely reminds me of that weirdass “Nemo’s Adventures in Slumberland” movie that came out when I was a kid (though this is probably just because I have little experience with anime).
Now I’m curious too. Is it just stupid? Or are there some creepy
‘almost child porn’ bits that you sometimes see in Anime?
I don’t actually want to watch the movie to find out at this point. If the mystery deepens though, I will.
one field where de-nazification failed spectacularly was also the foreign service, and some parts of academia.
So in my earlier post, I didn’t want to downplay the role of the 1968 movement. That was a crucial moment in the history of the post-war Germany.
Glenn Greenwald wrote the Salon article detailing some of the tactics employed by Romney’s National Finance Co-Chair, Frank VanderSloot. (see comment #36)
Here’s another excerpt from that article:
I’m betting that Mr. Greenwald is going to need some help.
TLC, that movie is the latest release of the great animation director Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. They are responsible for movies like Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Princess Mononoke, Kiki’s Delivery Service and many others.
With that kind of pedigree, I am willing to watch anything Studio Ghibli releases.
Giliell,
far be it from me to defend the conservatives, but:
– the so-called bourgeois parties were founded as new parties after the war, also in reaction to the failure of similar parties during the Weimar Republic, so there is a discontinuity of sorts. The Left, while it did merge with a different party, is a continuation of the old governing party of the GDR.
– also of course they have “die Gnade der Spätgeborenen”. NSDAP members have largely died off, while SED members (many of whom left the PDS) still live. Margot Honecker still follows German politics via Spiegel Online from Chile.
– I’ll be glad to stand corrected, but I don’t think Gauck himself was part of any witchhunt. The man has a convincing biography as a dissident. What puzzles me right now is that he was also engaged in fighting racism and xenophobia, yet seemed to praise Sarrazin’s book. I hope he will clarify his remarks, and the migrant organisations will ask him to do if he doesn’t.
– Last point: You know how much the CSU hates the Left right? Even if Merkel wanted it, she would have never been able to invite them.
I can’t help it Janine, I’m just not a very big anime fan. I just can’t get too into the drawing style most of the time. And the fandom is a turnoff.
80’s Don Bluth on the other hand…
*sheds a tear for what Bluth used to be*
Lynna: Thanks. Knowing Glenn Greenwald, they’ll have to throw him into solitary confinement without charges in the cell across from Bradley Manning to shut him up.
—
re Miyazaki and parents freaking out: Ordinary ignorant people still think any form of animation = sanitized cartoon pap for the kiddies. I saw Princess Mononoke in theater, and at the first depiction of the villagers being slaughtered and what Ashitaka’s arrows did to the invaders, several parents scooped up their toddlers and stormed out. Really, people, there’s a reason the poster said PG-13.
(also I don’t agree the Stasi was a playground bully. It was no playground bully my grandparents fled. Though certainly, the Nazis were far worse, but I don’t think there’s much point in pitting the victims of two regimes against each other)
Pteryxx: I suppose it could be something as simple as that.
I’d rather imagine it’s something so horribly offensive, the OP couldn’t even bring herself to describe it, myself.
Looks like the discussion of the Salon article linking Frank Vandersloot to Mitt Romney has been deleted from the ex-mormon forum, Recovery from Mormonism. That was fast.
See comments 38 and 42.
In the readers comments below the Salon article, there are some posts from Melaleuca employees. Here’s an example:
also, @TLC: now I have slightly less of an internet-crush on you for not liking anime. ~;>
I suggest you watch Princess Mononoke, seriously. It’s about an all-out bloody war between humans and the animal-gods of nature.
kristinc – whaaa?? It’s based on The Borrowers, one of the most inocuous children’s books ever. The screenplay was written by Miyazaki and directed by Yonebayashi, both who were responsible for Ponyo. I can’t imagine anything more suitable for children coming out of that mix. I’ve been wanting to see it since the first trailer came out.
Well, one is a discuntinuity in name and organisation (well, sure they could have tried to re-found the Zentrum, but they had sullied their nme a bit, too, so the SPD were the only ones who could do so with a clear record), but with lots of continuity in personal, the other ones have less continuity in personal but in organisation.
Well, that means that all that stuff should be forgotten and forgiven? I don’t buy that. Öttinger declaring Filbinger an anti-fascist is like necro-dunking Romney’s father in law, only in the other direction.
Well, he’s a christian pastor, can’t have all those nasty muslims running around having children, can we? So, we’re in for Theocracy light made in Germany.
I very well understand that. I think she could have just said that “the political differences are too big for a joint candidate”, but the very way she did it was a punch in the face of a large group of people as “not really people of this country”
LOL, heute just called him “somebody who enjoys the trust and sympathies of the majority of Germans”. Somehow reminds me of two other infamous German politicians one of them being his immediate predecessor.
Pteryxx: I don’t dislike ALL anime. I just can’t get into it. I’ve tried. And to be fair, every time I tried it always ended up being more entertaining than I expected. But it just doesn’t grab me.
The only exception to my ‘I don’t hate all anime’ thing is the stuff that sexualizes children and toddlers. I make no apology for despising that shit.
Maybe I’ll give Mononoke a shot sometime when I’m in the mood to try something new. I have been a little unfair on anime, mostly due to the fandom.
Rottentomatoes has The Secret World of Arietty at 93% – 86% and it’s rated G. Whatever this parent is freaking out about, I’m inclined to distrust their judgement.
I could only find one slightly negative critic review of it on Rotten Tomatoes, and that just said that there was too much screen time to shrill yelling and not enough to adventurous borrowing. A few others said it was a little slow.
TLC, you are letting your notions about anime cloud your judgement. Like most other terms, anime is almost a meaningless term; it could mean works that contain tentacle porn and children’s shows. Also, there are great works (Though played to death on Adult Swim, Cowboy Bebop is one of the great TV shows; great sharply drawn characters, beautiful animation and a great soundtract.) and run of the mill stuff.
In my humble opinion, the works of Studio Ghibli far outstrips that of Walt Disney. Spirited Away is simply one of the most beautiful movies I have seen.
I too can only find positive and/or glowing reviews of Arrietty.
I can only assume that the parent in the OP understands anime even less than I do. There literally doesn’t appear to be a single child-unfriendly thing in there.
Pteryxx – hee. Joint foray to the fount of all movie ratings, apparently. :)
Well, you also know that people fled the other way?
I’m not denying the crimes, but they weren’t unilateral. The same peolple who were put in Concentration Camps for being communists by the Nazis were put in prison by the same people for being communists in the BRD.
There is still a large group of people who are victims of political (in)justice in Germany who are to this day denied recognition and rehabilitation.
And I said that they were playground bullies in comparison with the full blown attack on our civil rights nowadays
I’m sure the Stasi would have loved to know who called whom when and from where and who sent whom what mail, but they did not have those means.
Glenn Greenwald responded to several commenter at Salon who are concerned for his safety and/or his financial and job security:
Link: http://www.salon.com/user/glenngreenwald-2
TLC: Yeah, as a peripheral part of that fandom (and lots of them are jerks) I think that’s not sufficient reason to dismiss an entire genre. I’d send you my DVD of Princess Mononoke if that’s what it took to get you to watch it.
In fact, I’m going to go watch Princess Mononoke shortly so I can cry and then sleep. The themes fit many of the recent discussions here.
Maybe she’s mad that the boy in the movie has to have heart surgery, so she had to tell her precious munchkin that sometimes children get very sick? I even recently re-read the book (trying to get my kids to read it), and I can’t think of anything in it that’s offensive.
Carlie, just about all Studio Ghibli releases move at a slower pace then just about any other major studio release.
janine – oh, I know. I can’t count how many times we’ve sat through Ponyo. Need to work on getting some of those other releases of there in the mix…
That’s what I was going to say. It’s rated G (even most Pixar stuff gets a PG rating these days), and it’s a great animator with an extremely child-friendly story. I cannot imagine what was so horribly offensive. Not that I’ve actually seen it.
I’m the person with a friend who threw a huge fit over The Frog Princess because it has “black magic” in it. But her kids love The Little Mermaid, which is also full of evil magic. Friend’s response: “Voodoo might be real, but who’s going to believe in a giant octopus? I mean really.” So I can usually get at least something of a grasp of parental freakouts over films. But The Secret World of Arietty? No idea.
Giliell,
I’m really no friend of those parties, but I disagree: The Zentrum had been a Catholic party, and the lesson learnt after Weimar was to become a more broadly conservative party. The liberals were also split up in several competing parties, and the FDP was an attempt at unifying those forces. Also if you start anew you don’t get to inherit any of the real estate and money. The SPD and the Greens were the only parties in the east who had to start fresh (the SPD because of the forced merger with the communists, and the Greens didn’t exist before the 1980s)
I wrote about my disgust about nominating theologians to the highest office earlier, but I don’t think that’s the way he thinks. I found an interview with him regarding his opinion of the book
– he didn’t read the book, and he would criticise pseudo-genetic formulations like “Muslim immigrants are more stupid and are spreading their stupid genes around”, but he felt that the author was courageous in starting a discussion about a topic many politicians choose to ignore. I don’t find that entirely satisfactory, and more a case of white privilege than xenophobia. He probably believes that if the immigrants suffer from bad socio-economic conditions, then it’s up to them to improve their lot (a good Christian Wertkoservativer)
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/interview-mit-joachim-gauck-warum-ueberlassen-wir-den-stolz-den-bekloppten-1.1006716
Some more worrying aspects of Gauck:
– he is a member of the Atlantic Bridge, though conservative Social Democrats can be found there too.
– he is a founding member of the Deutsche Nationalstiftung, some kind of neo-liberal think tank.
– he was ridiculing the Occupy Protests in Germany as ignorant and childish
But then my disgust at the former president’s cheapness and my dislike of Merkel is so high that OVER ALL I’m glad with the result. After all, it’s not the most important office in the state. After March 18, Merkel will go back to ignoring the Grüß-Gauck in Schloss Bellevue.
Spirited Away AND Princess Mononoke are in my top-ten list of “DVDs I must take with me when running for my life” …and, in fact, they were. Not even “Secret of NIMH” merits that.
Jules! *big hugs*
Pteryxx – I had the misfortune of having “Mrs. Frisby and the rats of NIMH” as one of my favorite childhood books, so the secret of movie didn’t stand a chance no matter how good it was.
I dunno if it counts as ‘anime’ but there’s this Japanese kid’s show called Anpanman that I find amusing sometimes. Its one of those things that I can understand even without subtitles or dubbing.
I also enjoyed me some DragonballZ when I was a kid… until it started getting ridiculous (the series should have ended with Frieza getting killed on Namek. I mean, Xie was already ‘the most powerful being in the universe’… at that point any more ‘power level’ and you’d be able to destroy a solar system with a single wet fart. But I digress.)
I find much of the bugeyed ‘cutesiness’ of anime very offputting though. There’s ‘cute and charming’, and then there’s ‘eyes bigger than her body and a constant shrill voice’.
I know, I know, not ALL anime is like that.
Pteryxx has made it kind of clear that I have to watch Mononoke now. But not RIGHT now… I have no attention span ATM. No need to send me your cherished DVD, I’m sure I can find it online.
Jules:
…
……
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Heya, Carlie! *hugs back*
I saw The Secret of NIMH before I ever read the book. I loved the movie as a child. When I read the book, I was ready to punch Don Bluth. There was no reason to make it the OPPOSITE of what it had been. I love a lot of his work, but the original story is superior than what he gave us.
I trusted him.
BTW I loved Disney’s Princess and the Frog… but holy shit did they ever sweep racism under the rug with that one.
It was like the proverbial elephant in the living room, and everyone was under strict orders to not even glance sideways at it.
VERY GOOD WICKERT, former news anchor, amidst a bunch of German Catholic politicans says: Faith and reason are not compatible!! Good man! Jauch, moderating the discussion, is known as religious person. Really good for Wickert not to choose the polite way out.
(Wickert also said that he thinks that Gauck has been a politician since 1990 and shouldn’t primarily seen as a pastor. In that way, he was better than the former bishops, that’s true)
Angela Merkel’s parents. You don’t hear it from her accent, but she was actually born in Hamburg. (NO, they didn’t flee, her father was a Lutheran pastor, but nonetheless one of the very few people to move from the west to the east).
I know it wasn’t the Stasi manning the towers or conducting sham elections, but I wouldn’t just reduce it to the surveillance aspect.
heck TLC, if you find Mononoke and queue it up, I’d watch it along with you so we could chat. It takes very little prodding for me to watch a show that good. (I’m shutting up quite a bit in this discussio so I don’t spoil it for you, heh)
pelanum@41: Most of my knowledge of mid- to late 20th century Germany comes from academia. Many current professors have stories about what their Doktorvater did or didn’t do in the 1960s.
Hi Jules! Welcome back!
Re: Arrietty. I really like Ghibli, and even before I realized it was a Ghibli film I thought it looked pretty damn innocuous, so I was surprised.
Said friend is not inclined to freak out over things like sickness in films nor to think all movies (even all animated movies) should be fit for toddlers. IIRC her daughter is 10, but she does tend to screen what her kid sees quite a bit more than I would be inclined to. She said something about “explaining to her daughter what she was internalizing” so I wondered if there was an issue of sexism, which knowing Disney would not be hard to believe but knowing Ghibli and Miyazaki is … a little unlikely in my experience.
I’ve never seen her say “omg DO NOT SEE” anything before this so I was imagining there must be some fairly obvious issue. This is all very puzzling.
Link to the Mother Jones article detailing Frank Vandersloot’s financial relationship to the Romney PAC, as well as noting, in the form of “updates” and footnotes, corrections made after a visit from Vandersloot’s lawyers: http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mitt-romney-melaleuca-frank-vandersloot
Other comments related to this story: #38, #42, #46, #49, #60
Pteryxx: We’ll have to schedule something. I really can’t concentrate on anything for too long right now. It wouldn’t be conducive to giving it a fair review.
Also don’t worry about spoilers. I’m spoiler-proof. Give me a detailed synopsis with screenshots, and it still won’t affect my enjoyment one way or the other.
kristinc – everything I’ve read does indicate that the female cook is the evil character and the mother is somewhat of a harridan, so is she maybe upset about that as sexism? Or that it’s a boy who helps out a girl, insinuating that she can’t have adventures/survive on her own? I’m reaching here.
Everyone else too, apparently. There was just a study that no matter what people say, their enjoyment isn’t affected by knowing the outcome. In fact, it’s enhanced when they do.
A reader commenting below the Salon article about Mitt Romney’s connection to Frank Vandersloot suggested that, if one is threatened or sued by Vandersloot’s lawyers, one appropriate reaction would be to file a complaint:
*nod* I hear you TLC, I didn’t mean now. I’m not very good company atm, and I’ve watched Mononoke a couple score times, I’d guess – I’ll just watch it again.
Re spoiler-proof: heh, but that’s not the kind of spoilers I mean, not the information-based ones. I would really like to see how you, personally, interpret and react to the theme of animals versus humanity in this story, without me biasing your responses. I don’t know how deeply things like movies affect you (and the mere fact that it’s anime may block your mind) but I get very, very emotional watching Princess Mononoke. It’s cathartic; and that feels very different when forewarned what to expect.
I have to admit, much of my first exposure to the anime fandom was the creepy shit you read about on ED. It did kind of cloud my judgement.
I REALLY REALLY REALLY fucking loathe when perverts defend the child porn anime with ‘It’s just drawings!’. It’s still sexualising children, and ‘normalizing’ the concept of sexualising children.
Please, please, no need to explain to me how narrowminded I was being or how stupid it is to blame an entire style or fandom for a few pedos.
I’m just saying, it did unfairly cloud my judgement for a long time.
I did enjoy ‘Fist of the North Star’, in a ‘this is so fucking stupid it’s hilarious’ sort of way.
It sounds like a plan, Pteryxx. I seem to recall you saying you don’t do facebook?
Well, talking about immigration, the interview you linked to contains this gem:
For those of you who might still be following our German quabble:
“Immigrants have to do their share, too. That’s an impertinence we have to ask from certain milieus in the rural areas of East Anatolia. But we can’t just feed them up with wellfare, that perpetuates dependency [is anybody else reminded of foodstamps…?]. Democracy is meant to be participatory [wait, what does one have to do with the other?]. Contrary to leftist propaganda we have to make clear that we don’t want to harm people if we stimulate their participation and demand it. That’s why I’m in favour of activating social politics [?]. You can cause harm even with the best intentions. If a father or mother shows their love only in giving their children everything and allow them everything, they raise their children to be egoists”
Now, that’s our new president, folks.
Pondering on the idea that immigrants are lazy wellfare recipients who need to be forced into participation (what fucking participation does he even mean? Political? Cool asking people who are not allowed to vote to participate politically. Do they need to go to the Oktoberfest more and eat pork and drink beer? Or should they just fucking stop being so damn foreign?).
They are also like children who need to be educated. You can’t just give and allow them everything. And we all know what we need to do instead…
Here’s a link to some nice slamtoons that are mormon flavored:
http://www.salamandersociety.com/slamtoons/celestial/2012/
The first offering addresses the fact that mormons necrodunked Hitler.
The Little Mermaid is such a conflicted piece for me. On one hand there’s all the typical things wrong with it (giving up everything and mutilating your body for a man etc) but on the other hand I really think it was the villain that opened my eyes to sexism in the culture. They did a really good job IMO having her blatantly playing on gender conformity and insecurity to manipulate. The message is kind of confused because of how it works out (I have to think in Miyazaki or others would be tempted to end it on a bitter sweet with Arial having to return to the sea and all that) but it was still influential on me.
@TLC
I second that from what I pick up on you you’d really like Mononoke, it has feral humans in it after all. And the closest thing in it to a real villain is a monk :-p
I dunno, I think they did stealth-fully open it up with the clear class distinctions shown in the movie. White people in the movie instantly get just about everything they want, black people need to work their entire lives and still may not get it. And it’s not even from sheer malevolence necessarily, just the momentum of how things are. I think that can be a very good starting point for talking about those issues with kids.
From what I recall the creator mostly agrees with you.
That said I’m enjoying the abridged version of that show FAR more than I did the original one…even in terms of story telling
@Jules
Have you see the sequel?
Second on your assessment.
You should be aware of some cultural differences between Japan and America. Totoro for example from the same creator will show children bathing who are well below age of consent but it isn’t an attempt to sexualize. Not that there isn’t obviously sexualization there (lolicon work) due to the differences in sexual censorship and culture there. That said, I sadly have to say I’d rather they make that sort of stuff to satisfy a market than real kiddy porn. Or probably rather there’s that made than real porn due to ethical issues involved.
Heck no, I’m too triggery over stalking to use Facebook. TET and YIM and IRC are all I do. I’m staying here with my DVD player and dial-up internet for the next week or two, probably.
Aber wir dürfen die Menschen nicht ruhigstellen durch Versorgung. Das perpetuiert Abhängigkeit.
Was fuer ein stuck Scheiss. Er klingt wie ein Amerikaner. Ein Republikaner. Ich wette er hat nie ins Leben gearbeitet. Alte Geld, oder?
WTF? Why do the German media even bring up this topic
“now we have two East German Lutherans at the top of the state, the chancellor is a pastor’s daughter, the future president is a pastor himself. What do you say as a Catholic?”
And what about the atheists and the majority who give a flying fuck about religion? Argh… Sorry
Ah Dragonball, the key manga of my youth, and also teaching me to how to “speak Japanese like a man”
(in Japanese, there are clearly marked differences between male and female speech, and my speech was too feminine because I was mostly exposed to women’s speech. That’s fine as long as you’re 6-10 years old, but not as a teenager, or older, or if you’re only speaking to strangers, as polite language is almost gender-neutral. Sometimes that’s a problem with my Chinese too, but in the case of Chinese, the problem is only with final particles mostly, while in Japanese it covers pronoun choice, verb form contractions, and final particles).
On the sexualizing children issue: Possible trigger warning, though trying to be clinical
I’m so conflicted on this. I’m not saying your narrow minded but I have a concern that rather than preventing normalizing of sexualizing children we go overboard with demonizing people who I frankly would very much like be in contact with therapists/councilors. I’ve heard there are concerns with psychologists that the way the laws stand and all such people would find it hard to be able to get any treatment or therapy without being reported as a risk. I know I snapped at Walton for similar possibly undue or at least questionable empathy but I worry about driving people who according to research may be hardwired that way underground away from management support and treatment. I also am not sure if portrayals like that, due to being so niche, actually do normalize. Is scat and WS ‘normalized’ because of the porn there…it clearly creates a safe space for fetishists like that but I don’t think it actually promotes that fetishizing. I’m not sure that sexualizing children is something that can be normalized if pedophilia is a orientation issue…but then again I clearly see the creepy way we seem to sexualize children elsewhere…but on the other hand so many people seem to just find that creepy.
On the other hand, what you said and I obviously really don’t like child molesters and have such a strong revulsion to pedophiles. Previously when this came up someone on the thread claiming to be one of the non-offending pedophiles thanked me and I admit I did feel a bit of “ewwww…it approves of me”. I don’t know if I can trust my own gut due to how strong the emotional impact of the issue is…but I also don’t know if I then go too far the other way trying to compensate.
Hi Jules, good to see you! *waves*
====
Love Studio Ghibli. I think Spirited Away is the best movie I’ve ever seen (though that might say something about which movies I have and have not seen). I have to watch it again with my sons soon. They’ve seen it once and were suitably frightened but enchanted as well. They love The Cat Returns. They don’t know Howl’s Moving Castle is still waiting for them, but I’ll screen that one first. I know movies have ratings for a reason — I don’t always agree with them, though. I mean, Cars 2 was rated as “ages 6 and over over here (NL)”. WTF? You see the badly mangled corpse of one of the cars in one shot while another one is tortured to death.
dianne,
sein Vater war Kapitän, und kam als Dissident ins Gefängnis. Er war dann Pastor, wenn Du das Arbeit nennen kannst, aber er war auch ein anerkannter Dissident (and that’s why in the reunified Germany, he was asked to head the agency tasked with sifting through the Stasi dossiers, which was named Gauck-Behörde after him).
Er ist Mitglieder der Atlantic Bridge und einer neoliberalen (=right at home with the Republican Party) Stiftung. Also kein Wunder, dass er solche Ansichten hat.
The original Little Mermaid was one of my favorite fairy tales as a kid. The Disney film came out when I was 8 or so, and I remembered dreading the awful moment when her sisters sell their hair and give her the dagger to plunge into the Prince’s heart, only to have sacrificed in vain as Ariel cannot take his life to spare her own.
And then none of that happened.
I’m not entirely sure if it’s a positive message overall, but I think the idea that she made a mistake and that she can’t make someone else pay for it is powerful.
But magic boats with the Prince Hero Captain saving the day are cool, too, I guess.
Mitglied, not Mitglieder. Erm.
Seriously. Cars 2 is kinda hardcore. I was shocked. I had a really hard time watching when Mater realizes that everyone thinks he’s stupid. It was so sad.
I like the movie, but I definitely think it deals with some very heavy subjects for children.
It’s rated PG here.
And hai, SQB!
@SQB
What Measure is A Non Human
Ratings and Censorship give more leeway with cruelty and death to nonhuman and especially non-organic characters
The hierarchy from worst to show violence to to most acceptable seems to be…
Infants
Children Humans
Human Adults female
Human Adults Male
Companion Animals
Humanoid Alien
Semi-Humanoid Alien
Animate humanoid objects (like dolls or androids or humanoid plant people)
Sentient android
Predatory animals real
Non humanoid alien sentient
predatory animals fake
Non humanoid alien non sentient
non sentient machines
For any character go up one for female gendered and down one for minority
Anyone else see the Land Before Time?
Disney has parents die…first one I can remember to show the parent die, onscreen….both the trauma that caused the injuries and the actual dying.
SQB,
Chihiro to Sen no Kamikakushi*)
is the best anime feature I’ve ever seen. But then, I haven’t seen many either. Mononokehime was good too, but not as much. If you haven’t seen it, give it a try, it has a strong pro-environment message.
I never got around to seeing Gedo Senki (apparently based on Tales from Earthsea),
a. is it worth seeing?
b. should one have read the novels first?
*) I always wondered, how would they solve this in the English version, the girl called Chihiro 千尋 “loses” her last character and is known as Sen 千 after being spirited away. Do they explain it at all?
dianne
Well, he grew up in the GDR where they had this nasty idea that people should get a decent education for free. Then he became a pastor, I don’t know if you consider that work. And afterwards he became a politician. I wouldn’t say he never had to work, but he never found himself in a position of being underprivileged, undereducated and depending on wellfare.
Well, who is supposed to care about us? We don’t even have a soul…
Yes, I’m having my cynic evening…
Oh, talking about movie ratings, I just had a strange encounter with Sankta Burocracia.
I ordered some of the William Hartnell Dr. Who DVDs lately. Since they were never shown on German TV, they have no German rating, only a BBC rating. Therefore, Amazon Germany has to treat them like hardcore porn and I have to pay 5€ extra so the mailman can look sternly at me and my ID before handing over DVDs that are rated 12yo because of “1 use of strong language”.
But, I can order them in the UK directly, for about 40% of the Amazon price, and because it’s absolutely legal for the UK seller to ship them without ID proof, I don’t have to pay an extra handling fee *headdesk*
warning: more discussion of porn and sex crimes
for what it’s worth, there’s not much research, but there doesn’t seem to be much if any correlation between certain kinds of porn and subsequent criminal behavior. Mostly I’m thinking of John Douglas’s work with serial sadistic rapists… basically, when they don’t have porn they invent their own torments, or learn them in jail from other rapists. When they DO have sadism porn, they get ideas from it and may act out their favorite scenes; but the porn doesn’t turn them into sadists if they weren’t already inclined enough to like it when they saw it.
Sick as it sounds, y’know, knowing that “only” 6% of so of men are self-reported rapists (“Meet the Predators”) is rather encouraging considering our entire culture says men always want sex and hunt down passive trophy women. That means the vast, vast majority of men get all the same messages, see pretty much the same porn, buy into the excuses, AND STILL DON’T RAPE.
As far as sexualization of children (meaning, young girls) in the US, I think it has far more to do with objectifying femaleness, neotenizing women, and consent-phobia/sex-phobia in general than actually making pedophiles out of regular non-rapey men. I’m sure it provides cover but I doubt it creates de novo pedophiles.
In order to land a leading role in anime, one must be a teenager living on one’s own.
Having a superpower also helps.
Yes.
IIRC the dub has subtitles showing the name change when it’s magiced away.
Maybe I’m just a total wimp, but we took my stepdaughters to see The Lion King Broadway production. They’d both seen the movie and loved it. But when Mufasa died in the theatrical production, I was holding the 3-year-old on my lap (that scene is very intense and scary in person), and she looked up at me with tears streaming down her face and said, “I don’t want Simba’s daddy to die.”
I left. She wanted to stay, and I let her. But I made her grandmother take over. She was the kind of heartless asshole who could take that shit in stride.
They also add some extra dialogue (near) seamlessly to fill in cultural gaps.
Example Chihiro/Sen sees Yobaba’s bathhouse for the first time and her actress comments “A Bath house?”. It’s done during the reveal show when the camera’s off her to solve lip synch problems.
Acc to the Pfft:
– Gauck’s parents were both Nazi members, the mother joined in 1932, the father in 1934. Also Mecklenburg was a very fervently pro-Nazi region.
– The Soviets expropriated his grandmother’s house, and later even though it was returned, the authorities made her rent it out to a communal enterprise at a very low rent.
– His father was arrested by the Soviets in 1951 for “espionage” and “anti-Soviet propaganda”, using some printed materials from the west as evidence. He was sent to Siberia. When Adenauer was negotiating about the return of all remaining German POWs in 1955, Gauck’s father was released too.
– He was never imprisoned as a pastor, but he was under constant Stasi surveillance. His dossier is full with critical remarks about the regime.
his father was sentenced to 25 years, and sent to Siberia.
I hear Siberia is beautiful this time of year.
Maybe because the message has that you are to “win” women. the idea being that MASCULINE MANLY MEN woo and seduce and attract women, where rape is just force. It’s still a power thing, but is like how Lex Luthor bullshits by being personally above petty crime.
Yup, if I heard that sort of trash-talking from a British politician, I’d have no hesitation at all labelling them a racist scumbag.
Ing,
to a Japanese person, that the same character could be read Chi and Sen depending on context, is clear, but I wonder how they’d do that in the dubbing? Would they maybe say “We give you a new name?”
I mean, to an English speaker, “shortening” Chihiro to Sen doesn’t really make sense now, does it?
Hi Jules, welcome back!
@pelamun
IIRC they had subtitles under the Japanese signature showing how the word started as Chihiro, then when Yobaba grabs the last character it shows it became Sen. Either way it was clear what happened when I saw it.
Yobaba also has lines I don’t know if she had originally
Paraphrasing from the top of my head
Yobaba “Chihiro eh? What a pretty name. Well now it belongs to me! From now on you’ll be Sen”
Other characters explain that owning the name is how she enslaves people, and that because she remembers it she’ll be able to remember her old life and remember her parents.
KG,
I’d still give him the benefit of the doubt and say he was speaking from ignorance and white privilege. He was engaged in some organisation against racism and xenophobia, so it’s clear that at least in his self-image he is not only not racist, but also committed to fighting it.
I just hope that the migrant orgs will meet with him and discuss these issues.
They just took it in stride. We see the other character float off the paper, leaving just the T-shaped one, and “Now your name is Sen.”
Yeah we probably just presumed the symbol meant Sen so it was like shortening Paul Zachary to PZ
The dub as far as I could tell did a decent job at filling in context for Westerners. I don’t remember being confused at anything (not even the black slug). For example I do remember it conveying that the Bath House workers were supposed to be like Frogmen or something.
Ing,
the line in English sounds like she gets a new name, in Japanese it’s clear from the character that it’s the same name, just shortened.
Once I was watching a Japanese detective series which had a plot point revolve around the fact that a character they had found scribbled in the victim’s note book could either mean “sky” or “empty”.
Things like these make translators despair…
(more rape stuff)
“Meet the Predators” showed these men will self-report their rapes as long as the word “rape” isn’t used. So while the message is as you say, still, most men don’t actually rape – even though the cultural messages basically tell them they can.
Ah yes, the magic of the characters. That sounds quite ingenuous how the translators solved that in the anime.
I hope I’m not repeating an urban legend here, but that reminds me that even Leibniz romanticised Chinese characters, he thought that it was logical script which was independent of any specific language. Which was nonsense and one of the reason the ill-fitting term “ideographic script” is still floating around.
Speaking of Japanese names. Partner and I have found Sgt Frog dub on netflix and are loving it because we’re lame and giant children.
If anyone who knows any Japanese could fill us in on name puns of characters? we know Keroro is from the Japanese for ‘ribbit’ so it makes sense, and that Tamama is from the word for tadpole and that Kululu is from either spiral or kuru disease but couldn’t track down if there was a pun in Giroro or Dororo
To everyone else, sorry for bugging you.
Yeah. Good translators have to be poets as much as linguists. ((I have an awesome copy of Dante that is actually done in rhyme))
Like I said before we’re watching Sgt Frog dub and it’s very clear that the adaptation/translation team just rewrote new jokes for western context to replace Japanese pop-culture.
Land Before Time gave me a few WEIRD dreams as a little kid, and that scene is… I dunno. I wanna say ‘hard to watch’ but in a good way.
It’s intense. It makes me feel things. Excitement, sorrow, etc. 80s Don Bluth never shied away from this shit. He never talked down to the kids, but sometimes he was pretty goddamned brutal about it.
Of course my favorite Don Bluth movie is still All Dogs Go to Heaven. We had a german shepherd when I was a little kid and that movie came out, so instant connection.
Charlie B. Barkin was also my first exposure to the idea that a ‘good guy’ didn’t have to be all squeaky clean and good, that he could be a good guy with bad habits, or start as a bit of a bad guy but then have a change of heart. Powerful stuff for my 5 year old mind.
I thought that meant the opposite? the 6% will use weasel words to remove themselves from guilt but the others recognize those situations as not conforming to the narrative (or they’re good people…either way)
(more rape stuff)
Well, the others by and large DON’T hold women down, threaten them with violence, or drug them or get them drunk so they can’t resist… so whether they’re good people in their hearts or not, they aren’t doing much raping.
Pressuring and harassing women for sex isn’t good either, but it’s not rape… and aren’t the majority of guys fairly reasonable about that, too, outside of atheist conventions and MENSA? Nobody’s teaching them NOT to be assholes while dating, by and large. They’re simply willing and capable of figuring it out on their own.
TLC:
EX-ACTLY. Exactly this. When I was a little kid, I didn’t WANT sanitized pap where everything was safe and poofy and perfect. I wanted real frickin’ emotions from my stories. I wanted to FEEL THINGS. To this day, I still do. (Maybe not quite as much emotion as the PTSD is giving me, but still.)
I vividly remember the chimney sweep song (the first iteration) in Mary Poppins, about being lonely and lucky, sad and happy at the same time. That was when I first realized THIS was what I wanted – the real stuff, the good stuff, that you could trust.
Ing,
first of all, it seems that they all have an
ABB pattern.
So if you’re looking for etymologies, you have to look for the AB part only.
For instance,
kerokero is the sound frogs make, and gerogero is the sound toads make.
And Tamama comes from otamajakushi
Kururu (NO “l” in Japanese) could be from kurukuru which would mean “go around in circles”. But Japanese has such simple phonotactics that any combination of a consonant and vowel usually means something.
Likewise, doro means “mud”, and reduplicated it would be dorodoro “full with mud”. giro could refer to some kind of stare you give a person, and girogiro means something like “make your eyes light up”, but without knowing the series and the characters involved, I couldn’t say.
Though Dragon Ball is a great example of thematic naming. Saiyajin (the name itself an inversion of yasai “vegetable”) were named after English names for vegetables: Kakarotto, Radittsu, Vegeta…
This sounds like a discussion I could actually follow … I should look in to that … tomorrow …
I need to step in and defend Disney here. *spits*
The bastardisation of the H. C. Andersen oeuvre was done by the Victorians who could not accept his social criticism, nor imagine ‘fairytales’ to be anything but cutesy. So the happy endings to several stories are far older than Disney.
/PSA
Ah that makes sense
I guessed from context Giroro had something to do with toads, but staring makes sense too, to give a context for the character he has the same English voice actor as Vegeta so… Crypto Fascist Proud Warrior Guy.
Dororo is a ninja who is distant from the others because he is earnestly kind and a friend to all nature and people…also they forgot he existed and Keroro was the worst friend ever.
I’s approve no matter what you did, but thanks for making the world a little bit better.
Not least by being back here.
Interesting diplomatic tidbit:
Joachim Gauck separated from his wife in 1991, and without getting a divorce has been living together with a journalist, the national politics editor for the Nuremberg News. She will take a leave of absence, to avoid a conflict of interest, and to conform to the traditional stereotypes this office still has.
I foresee diplomatic repercussions here. Sarkozy once took Carla Bruni on a state visit to Egypt when they weren’t married yet, and the Egyptians were not amused.
Though this is one of the few areas where I agree with the German foreign minister, who said that he would take his same-sex civil union partner anywhere he pleases, the other countries would just have to accept it.
Two hour Downton Abbey tonight! Then we USAians are caught up with the rest of the world.
Welcome back, mental acuity! Oh, how I have missed you!
*mentally dancing*
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Young Frankenstein is possibly the second (or third) finest film ever made.
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And they don’t fight well, either. But, come the Zombie Apocalypse….
.
.
(Of course, we’re talking about the modern, fast-moving zombies, here, and the advantage of numbers.)
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Hekuni Cat, I do feel better, thank you. Of course, I still have this hugely-swollen place just south of my abdomen, but at least I’m not queasy any more, the headache has died back to a distant static, and I’m not frickin’ freezing to death; all this, and my brainz seem to be working, too!
It doesn’t count as a WIN, but it at least has to be a bitter disappointment to the enemy team.
I’m good with that. :)
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I have little notion of what is lurking in the branches of my family tree. Mostly British, I think, with a touch of Native American.
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Jules! Awesomeness!
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Brains! Braaaains! *cheers*
Modern, fast-moving braaaains!
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Pelamun,
Citation please. Not that I disbelieve you, it’s just that I’d really like to know more.
NEW THREAD!