This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.
Status: UNMODERATED; Previous thread
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.
Status: UNMODERATED; Previous thread
It is snowing in Morris.
That’s not snow.
That’s dandruff of the gods.
****
EL quoting me @192:
I’ve re-read Grewgills’ comment, and while I think I can see where you might think that xir comment is an example, I don’t think it is. Make your case.
Also, you “think” CD did the same? How about you don’t throw out the accusation without making sure you can back it up with something?
Tony! #238 (previous thread)
There is now a poll!
P.S.
I like how on your blog the category of “The Fabulous Art of” is followed immediately by “Tony Tales”.
P.P.S.
I can’t see your pets’ pictures. It’s probably better instead of imbedding to link to an external site (like Flickr), since WordPress greatly restricts the space available to free accounts and your theme uses a lot of space by placing a main picture in every post.
The Cafe Cambria.
AlexanderZ @3:
Yikes. I didn’t know the pics were unviewable. Heck, *I* can’t even view them. Thanks for the heads up on that.
I voted on the poll.
I don’t think I’m going to be in the majority, but the way that I see “assholery” is not so much the “state of being an asshole”.
I see “assholery” as “the behaviors that give clear and convincing evidence that you are an asshole”.
In other words, your asshole-ish behavior is your assholery, while your state of being is your assholitude.
Although…
…I sure hope this doesn’t start a 1k fight over the definitions…
“a 1k comment fight” that should be.
I can’t believe we’ve hit 10 day/1k.
Something prompted the memory, and now TOO MANY COOKS!
Sorry about the snow. The unseasonably warm winter here in Salt Lake City had a brief cold snap again, and now it’s an unseasonably warm spring. I’m really hoping we don’t break the March temperature record like we did for February (since the March one is 80 degrees F).
That snowman picture is from Gloom on Deviantart, who has a few neat pictures. Though often of the creepy or disturbing variety.
Tony! @2
It could be a huge flock of pigeons with diarrhea flying overhead.
brianpansky:
What the fuck is this bullshit?
Enlightenment Liberal made sure to address multiple different arguments and different posts.
The post that people objected to was made by EL at 135. People objecting to the example:
Me at 140.
rq at 141.
Seven of Mine at 147.
Implicit: Beatrice at 148.
Giliell at 152.
EL comes in at 192, addressing comments: 168, 187, 139, 186, 165, 145, 150, 152, 172.
The only one that EL addresses that is the same list as those taking issue with EL’s horrid little domestic abuse hypothetical was 152, which he brushes off by just saying it is a quotemine.
The rest must have been read, because all the other comments around them were read.
And they were dismissed.
“As for everyone else, I don’t see anyone worth replying to. They cannot read, or have not read, or have a problem with reading comprehension…..
I think this is a wasted exercise because of the clear lack of good-faith honest engagement from almost everyone here. Just from the last day or two, there’s a half a dozen bald-faced quote minings and other posts who seem to don’t have third grade level English reading skills.”
How is this NOT a dismissal of people’s concerns regarding ABUSE victims? (Giliell’s comment and rq’s explanation of it explicitly is about both rape and abuse victims, and their concerns, and feelings surrounding such things.)
EL was as explicit as they could be that they don’t care about their insensitive little hypothetical. They doubled down on that insensitivity by doing so. And it is frustrating to have to explain this.
AlexanderZ:
I forgot to mention, thanks for reminding me that I need to upgrade my WordPress account. Now that I’m making more money at work, I can afford to do so.
On another note, I just wrote about some assholery.
@rq
Sorry. Accident. I’ll do better.
…
@Daz
The definition of “violence” given by the W.H.O. has a list of harmful forceful acts. The exact list was something like “assault, rape, and murder”. I said incarceration belongs in that list. I compared incarceration to a punch in the face, which is an example of assault (colloquial assault, legal battery). At no point did I say incarceration is comparable in harm, horridness, etc., to rape or murder. Please try again. I again welcome you to provide a direct quotation of me where I said that incarceration is specifically comparable in harm, horridness, etc. specifically to rape. I never said that.
And didn’t read the rest of your post.
…
@Crip Dyke
Ok. So we agree that historically speaking, tax enforcement has always involved some level of violence. Good. We’re making progress. What next step do you find disagreeable then?
1- In the real world, for large populations of real humans, with current levels of technology and foreseeable levels of technology, all (non-trivial) instances of governments will require taxation and tax collection enforcement.
2- In the real world, for large populations of real humans, with current levels of technology and foreseeable levels of technology, all effective taxation and tax collection enforcement will involve at least some minor degree of violence.
Thus:
3- In the real world, for large populations of real humans, with current levels of technology and foreseeable levels of technology, all (non-trivial) instances of government will employ at least some minor degree of violence.
Which then nicely leads into my opening statement:
I still feel comfortable with that description, just like I would say that law enforcement e.g. police action is almost by definition violence.
Again, there’s a fundamental difference between ignoring their particular interpretations of their definition, and ignoring their definition. Just because they put together the words that constitute that definition does not mean that they are the only and final authority in determining the meaning of that string of English words.
And skipped the rest.
…
@Grewgills in 202 (previous page)
Ok. I originally made the assertion that vaccination campaigns do kill people who would not have died otherwise. I also noted that several people disagreed with this position. Tony called bullshit on that assertion, and asked for an example. I assumed Tony called bullshit on my actual assertion, and not a strawman of my position, and so I gave you as an example. Now, perhaps Tony actually did say “no one here says that vaccination campaigns kill no one … full stop”, but that is a strawman of my position, and I assumed Tony wasn’t strawmanning me.
Perhaps I was insufficiently clear at some point. My apologies for that.
As to the factual matter, I think your position is completely and utterly ridiculous that we cannot safely conclude that someone has died from a vaccination who would not have died otherwise. I do not plan to address this matter further.
As for the comparison to school lunches – the comparison is invalid on multiple counts. 1- People who don’t eat will die. Assuming that people are provided by food, whether they will choke to death on school lunches or choke to death on other lunches or die from starvation – you cannot say that the program leads to people who would not have died otherwise. Unless the food is a significant choking hazard compared to the alternative. 2- Providing school lunches is not compelling them to eat or choke. It’s their choice to eat the food or not. Whereas the vaccination campaigns I was referring to are compelled by the state – especially in those two (IIRC) states with no religious exemptions or other exemptions for vaccination for school children.
…
@anteprepro in 203 (previous page)
That is correct. This is me not caring about some people tone trolling me and calling me insensitive in the Thunderdome of all places. I don’t even know why I’m bothering to reply to this post.
…
@Al Dente in 208 (previous page)
I also have a similarly strong case of duty calls. I am not trolling. I am just a strong advocate of Marxist critiques of society as the proper understanding of the employment of violence which is inherent in nearly all interpersonal interactions.
…
@rq in 220 (previous page)
I don’t understand how you can be so bad at English or following context. I was setting up a reductio ad absurdum. I was showing how the application of the purported standard of intent which was used against me regarding vaccines is completely and utterly ridiculous. I state in no uncertain terms that the abusive husband does have intent in the context of violence and moral and legal responsibility, and it’s ridiculous to say otherwise.
…
@brianpansky in 239 (previous page)
Thanks.
I wrote in “Republican” in the poll. Is that a state of being?
I see EL is still being a dishonest pissant.
We know you’ve said that. But what you haven’t done is provide a reason for anyone to think the WHO report would consider incarceration to be an example of violence. You just continue to assert it. Over and over again. As I’ve mentioned several fucking times, there must be some reason the WHO report doesn’t mention a fucking thing about incarceration being an example of violence. You’re trying to add to their definition by using your bizarre and still unknown definition of the word violence*. Stop fucking asserting your point and actually argue it.
Or hell, continue doing what you’re doing, you’ve written a lot of mockery-worthy material and I’m sure you’ll write more.
Just bc you *can* be an insensitive asshole in here doesn’t mean you *have* to be one. Especially when the subject is sexual assault or rape. Fucking asshat.
*Even though you agreed to use the WHO definition, somehow I doubt their definition is what you had in mind when you made the assertion that led to 10 day/1k. Remember that assertion? Here, I’ll help you out:
government is almost, by definition, violence.
Enlightenment Liberal uses the completely unnecessary hypothetical of a man beating his wife to get a sandwich to add to his inventory of asinine arguments.
People call this out.
Enlightenment Liberal calls that tone trolling.
Enlightenment Liberal, FUCK. OFF.
Fucking disgusting piece of shit.
And Enlightenment Liberal dares to fucking dismiss that as tone trolling when they have also been explicitly saying that they are going to start ignoring people….because of tone!
I just can’t fucking even.
By the same fucking token, people pointing out misogyny, rape apologia, or racism are also tone trolls.
Enlightenment LIberal knows better than that. Enlightenment Liberal knows Pharyngula better than that.
But they just don’t fucking care.
PS: Citations please.
I said I would ignore people who were dishonest, who had poor reading comprehension skills, or for whom I thought further conversation would likely be unproductive. I don’t see how you got “tone” out of that.
You said you were ignoring Crip Dyke because they were mocking you.
And seriously, that’s the thing you choose to address?
Again, fuck off.
EL @19:
So you’re ignoring yourself then…hows that working out for you?
Tony!:
That could explain so much.
EL @13:
I know you’re comfortable making that assertion, but how about you try backing it up?
This time, try to understand the difference between a government using violence and a government being [almost by definition] violence. Using something and being something are not the same goddamn things, you fuckwit.
@EL
You said that the people who instituted vaccine programs knew for a near certainty (100%) that people that would otherwise live would die if the program were instituted. You have not and cannot show that those people know this to be true and so by your own (absurd) standard have intent to kill. You have not and cannot show a single example of a single child anywhere in the world that has died due to a vaccine and prove that without the vaccination program that person would have died. You cannot do it. If you can’t do so you cannot show that the people that instituted the program intended to kill anyone.
Likewise with the vaccination program some significant number of the children will die without the program in place. Maybe the person would have skipped the meal that killed them and lived another day to eat another meal that didn’t kill them. Regardless, by your standard, people running the soup kitchen know that there will be choking if they serve the food, and yet they serve the food anyway. They know the harm will happen, intent by your standard, and they commit to the action regardless of the known harm. There is no way that you can consistently use your argument and not conclude that soup kitchens are violence. Equivocate all you want, but you will have to apply some ad hoc reasoning to get yourself out of it.
The way the state ‘compels’ vaccinations is by requiring them to attend free public schools. Giving free food to children that otherwise wouldn’t have food is compelling in the same way. If the choice is made not to get the vaccine, the child doesn’t get a free education. If the choice is made not to accept the free lunch, the child doesn’t get a free lunch and might not get to eat that day. Food in an otherwise empty belly is at least as compelling as choosing to go to public school rather than home school. Again though, that doesn’t much matter using your standard of knowledge of eventual harm equals intent. By providing food to hungry children they know that choking and other harms will occur with some small minority of the children. They (rightly) judge that the minor harm is vastly overwhelmed by the good of the program. Again, you cannot argue consistently and dismiss school lunches as violence while characterizing vaccines as violence. You can equivocate and throw in ad hoc qualifiers that you don’t allow for vaccines, but you cannot argue it consistently.
And there is the seed of all of this disagreement. When you define virtually all interpersonal interactions as violence you so totally strip the word violence of meaning as to make it useless. If giving someone candy and throwing them down a flight of stairs are only different in degree, then something is wrong with your model. If you can’t see that, then you are fucking blind.
@me #24
should have read
EL is (almost?) a bad argument.
Which means he uses them …
… potentially … or almost potentially.
Same thing. Whatever. Some shit like that.
quoting more of EL’s inanity:
(bolding mine)
Which interpersonal interactions do not have this inherent ?
Adults having consensual sex?
Parents cooking with their children?
Friends jogging in the park together?
Teaching children how to read?
Buying a cappucino from Starbucks?
Guests ordering and paying for a drink at my bar(oh dear, there are taxes they have to pay along with the cost of the drink…this probably is yet another example of the inherent employment of violence in interpersonal interactions)?I’m holding my breath in anticipation of your answer.
Also, gotta laugh at the idea that the definition of violence that exists in EL’s head is anything like the WHO definition. Especially given the quoted material above.
Following myself up:
…or the definition most people have in mind when discussing violence.
Why am I even getting into this -______-
@EL
Except that “terror of violence” is the defining feature of what the beater intends as a means, it is not an accidental aspect of the means. I think this makes it a different category than the intent of vaccination. And I think my previous writing about intent is validated here.
I wasn’t talking about individual doctors either. It does apply. Just like 2 grains of sand are 100% guaranteed to be 2 grains of sand (yet not be a heap of sand) so too is such a plan (at large enough scales) guaranteed to kill people and yet is still not violence.
Though now after the clarification I just wrote here about the beating example, I think maybe the difference of category in some cases is clear enough that no sorities paradox even needs to be considered.
If you’re hung up on the word “intent”, then just pretend it isn’t there, or replace it. Substitute what I actually said, and you’ll see it isn’t anything like the “acting with intent” legal definition. And then you’ll see my point about the word “violence”. Instead of missing my point. Maybe.
Though yes my description of intent focused on a “goal”, whereas now, in post 29 here, I’m saying it has to do with the “intended means”. But in my post (a few words before mentioning a “goal”) I did say:
So the side effect isn’t itself the plan/the intended means.
§´ ̯´§
I’m trying to make a Miss Sweetie Poo emoticon.
I can’t find the eyes.
§* ̯*§
§○ ̯○§
You assume I have not followed the conversation before commenting, or that I did not read back before commenting. You also laughably invoke ‘groupthink’ to explain away why no one agrees with your inane definition of violence. And in doing so, you do not address my actual argument re. intentional reduction of harm. If only there was a word for being guilty of your own criticism of someone else…
I stand by my low opinion of people with smarmy names.
Holms @33:
VIOLENCE!
Here is some background on the WHO report on violence
All those experts…all that peer-reviewing…yet the report mentions nothing about incarceration, taxes, government, or vaccination being almost, by definition, violence. Nor does it mention anything about incarceration, taxes, government, or vaccination being examples of violence.
scary̐̐
scary̐͒
scary͒͒
scary͒̐
….̐.̐
….̐.͒
….͒.͒
….͒.̐
I give up.
@Holms:
EnlightenmentLiberal had evidence you hadn’t read the thread:
You didn’t agree with EnlightenmentLiberal.
See? Perfect sense.
…go …faster …turn …lefter!
@chigau: §ఠ ̯ఠ§ ?
*
Owlmirror #38
yeah
like that
Sadly, the iPad doesn’t do acronym or whatever that other one is.
so the underliney things are just a waste
also
Owlmirror
when I Previewed my #36
those weird characters showed outside the preview screen
which was scary
because of stuff that happened awhile ago
maybe at the old site
It’s just overhead. No worries.
Huh. I have no idea why.
======
scary̐̐
scary̐͒
scary͒͒
scary͒̐
….̐.̐
….̐.͒
….͒.͒
….͒.̐
======
Nope, doesn’t happen when I do it.
*whistles innocently*
I’m sure that I have no idea about any HTML shenanigans whatsoever . . . !!
Hows about everyone deliberately misrepresents EL? Then he will ignore everyone and just possibly, stop posting. I’ll start the ball rolling: hey, EL, why did you advocate burning kittens alive in the last Thunderdome?
Nick, it’s my understanding that EL was merely proposing that kittens should practice self-immolation, of their own free will. That’s different.
CR@43,
But surely that’s still kitten-burning, since he must know that, given a large enough population of kittens, some of them will be gullible enough to follow his advice.
Then you are lacking an undertanding of “tone”. You don’t control the debate, and in attempting to do say, and say you respond to those polite to you, you are tone trolling. QED.
What a stupid pissant pseudointellectual you are.
EL @ Whatthefuckever
Tone trolling? Tone trolling? You want to call a request for some basic fucking decency “tone trolling”? Fuck off.
It wasn’t just kittens. Puppies, too. And puppies consent to be kicked, since given a large enough population of puppies, chances are 100% that at least one of them will get kicked at some point in their lives. Hey, EL, why do you advocate puppy-kicking?
A question to people with experience of TD:
What are threads change rates? Do they usually last as long as this one?
Okidemia:
PZ does things on his own mysterious schedule and could change things on a whim at any moment, so it’s fairly unpredictable for us.
However, generally, new threads for the Lounge and Thunderdome (and previous incarnations of Endless™ threaditude) are created when the old ones are “full.” For a while, being full meant the thread had more than 500 comments, and that was rounded up to approximately 666 (this was before some issues with pagination were fixed). That’s done because it takes significantly longer to load the page when thread have many, many comments. These days, the first page goes to 500 and automatically starts a second page after that, which eventually fills to a roughly equivalent number of comments. Then, somewhere around that time, PZ may or may not feel like punishing us with a new thread. There are invariably still people who are wrong on the internet at such times, so our burden is to rant about it in the new thread.
So, that depends on how often people comment. When there are in-depth arguments involving lots of people writing lots of comments, then of course the rate of new threads is faster.
Have only read this thread here, but EL seems to be talking typical libertarian bollocks:
@EnlightenmentLiberal #13
Surely then, any society would be almost by definition “violent” (goverments/societies can’t be “violence” as Tony pointed out, that doesn’t make grammatical sense, that’s like government being “truth” or “beauty”), in so far as it enforces its social contract. Even a fully anarcho-communal society, where justice/crime prevention/contracts are all enforced by vigilante mob rule and consensus of present individuals, will be “violent”, towards anyone who breaks that social contract or the social contract of a specific moment. You can’t make use of that definition to say “more government means more violence” or “government is more inherantly violent than a lack of government”.
In fact if we consider:
4) A country with well organised commerce, taxation, education, military, social services and foreign policy will tend to be populated with happy, intelligent and safe people who, due to their investment in society will be less prone to breaking the social contract they all benefit from and therefore in less need of “violence” from their particular form of government.
Then:
5) Governmental violence is in adverse proportion to the success of that government in so far as it benefits society as a whole. Better government => less violence. Less/smaller government => may often lead to more violence.
The violence you’re describing is an inherant property of enforcing the social contract, not of government per se.
And furthermore with the attempt to strain every last drop of violence out here, one could just as similarly say that all of commerce was violent, since in the real world, for large populations of real humans, with current levels of technology and foreseeable levels of technology, all (non-trivial) instances of contract enforcement/property rights/employee management/[insert here] will employ at least some minor degree of violence.
As I can see, this is another instance of a Nobody Scores debate.
So Thunderdome these days is all about EnlightenmentLiberal? But he’s so boring, and evasive, and long-winded, and did I say boring? Really boring.
@Nerd
I searched for the word “polite” being used, and it hasn’t been.
Brianpansky #52
Doesn’t mean the implication isn’t there. It’s obvious EL wants “polite” debate, where their fallacious presuppositions and irrationality aren’t pointed out, then pointed at and ridiculed. Too bad for them this is Pharyngula Thunderdome.
It’s hard to pretend you are the authority and in charge of and leading the debate when nobody accepts that you are/have that authority.
Ah, just found my way back to the original post… and my response still stands. Adding to that of course that taxation is therefore not inherantly more violent than any other part of the social contract that is enforced (enforcing rules of the road => may require violence). One may expect that a more restrictive social contract would need more enforcing and therefore lead to more social violence, but there is no way to directly correlate that with taxation. Is 30% taxation more restrictive than 15% if it means your poor family gets education and healthcare above your means? Definitely not. Is 30% taxation more restrictive than 15% for a millionaire? Not in any significant way, the millionaire still has all the life-options they previously had. One could even imagine systems where 100% taxation were nonrestricting, or money-less societies (ones with unlimited or near-unlimited resources and barter exclusively based on value to the individual).
PZ
When you say “boring” you are being violent.
PZ Myers @51:
Well, yeah. But xe makes up for it by being boring.
Miss Sweetie Poo
@Nick and CR
I think what he actually proposed was a system whereby kittens, puppies and any small, cute furry would be given a lighter and a liter of gas.
@Nerd
Sure, Nerd.
Also kitties.
Soon, recipes.
Oops, I forgot to bring the cat to the vet for the vaccination round, for real.
TD is also all about violence – it appears that many of us are violently headdesking out of massive boredom and sheer frustration.
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2015/03/19/if-i-were-a-terribly-cruel-man/
Very rough draft:
Oh Poetry, poor Poetry,
The horrors people throw at thee;
The crimes committed in thy name,
When trying to marry thee with Game.
There’s nothing there which seems aesthetic.
The metre’s sprung, the rhymes pathetic,
Crude imag’ry in brutish theme.
Oh Poetry don’t it make you scream?
Daz,
are we mean to sing that to the tune of Lydia, The Tattooed Lady?
Oh nooooo nooo noo no! Please don’t start me clicking through clips of the muppets! That’s more of a time-hole than TV Tropes.
Still an’ all, Stand By Me.
mean = meant. Whoops. Happy to be of service!
@65 yazikus
I did the same thing ! Then I read your comment and about bust something laughing.
pHred, hah! I’m glad I wasn’t the only one. It does work rather well.
It works scarily well. Maybe I’ve released my inner Kermit.
It’s a known fact that everything’s better with Muppets.
BTW, meanwhile “assholery” has the absolute majority with 57% of the vote (though “assholstery” makes me laugh every time. Also Republicans. LOL). Which makes it my word of the day.
________________
Tony! #12
I’m glad your financial situation has improved, but I was only offering a workaround, not hinting that should throw money at WordPress.
________________
chigau #57
Miss Sweaty Poo (what’s up with “poo”?) is taking bribes! I saw her grab that dollar bill!
Or your inner Groucho Marx.
Is he the one who said religions are odium with Masses?
On another note, There is no republican middle.
It’s not a real Thunderdrome for me without Thunderf00t.
It isn’t hard to read between the lines. You just need to remember dog whistles, and that people lie to themselves, and don’t realize it. Also, if the phrasing is overly consistent and sounds overly rehearsed, they know they are being deceptive.
I may not be the best at reading between the lines, but the word “unevidenced” is coming to mind.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls #76:
Huh? I may have a bone or two, or maybe an entire ribcage and a bag o’ miscellaneous small bits that probably belong in a foot somewhere, to pick with EL, but this seems neither fair nor right. You would seem to be saying that (a) consistency and care to express oneself clearly are bad things and (b) EL has been consistent and careful to express themselves clearly. Both of which claims I would dispute.
anteprepro, you seem to have the talent though:
Actually, anteprepro, your statement:
is clearly true if you change it to be about your own post 140, rather than Giliell’s and rq’s comments.
*and Seven of Mine in post 147.
The evidence is there. Never, ever, take a proven liar and bullshitter at their words. I find it better to ignore the words per se, and argue the ideas behind the words, up to and including the presuppositions behind the ideas.
No, not necessarily consistency of ideas, but consistency of expression of those ideas. The recently banhammered LM used the same sentences over and over. Verbatim. Copypasta. Same for misogynists trying to hide their misogyny. They take care not to be overtly offensive. In doing so, it is a tell as to their real agenda.
The old Sherlock Holmes clue for an event.
SH “The strange thing the dog in the night.”
Watson “The dog did nothing.”
SH “Exactly my dear Watson….”
It seems kitty recipes are ***exactly*** the kind of thing that people want kept out of the lounge. If you’re going to wok your kitty, some folk in the lounge may not want to hear about it.
Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden
That’s weird. There are numerous places where pets are for cooking, and not merely convenience cooking. I’ve eaten many pet species and some are actually quite good. (There’s one exception though, I let you guess which one).
The So much buzz for the FRFF! thread has spawned a discussion about why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. Here’s my take on the question.
Most of Japan’s military leaders realized that they could not win a long war against the US. Since the 1920s the Japanese government had become increasingly dominated by army officers. The army leadership had got Japan involved in an aggressive war in China. The Western countries, primarily Britain and the US, had reacted with an oil embargo in August 1941. This put the generals on the spot. They could not politically afford to abandon their war in China as that was their primary justification for running the government. But they could not ignore the embargo either as the Western countries controlled the world’s oil and without oil the Japanese military would be crippled in 12 to 18 months.
For the military it was a case of use it or lose it. The generals convinced themselves that after sinking the US Pacific Fleet the Roosevelt administration would negotiate from a state of weakness. One of the strongest advocates of this idea was General Shinichi Tanaka, the head of the General Staff’s Operations Section. Tanaka was a student of the American Civil War. Why someone who knew about the Battle of Fredericksburg and Pickett’s Charge thought Americans had no fighting spirit is a puzzlement.
The generals thought some chance of military victory was preferable to guaranteed impotence from a lack of oil. The generals saw the embargo as an offensive action and their response as a defensive reaction. Many Japanese today still see it that way.
While the Japanese admirals did not exercise anything like as much control over the government, they went along with the generals. Japan was a maritime nation, it depended on control of the seas. The generals recognized this and the navy’s budget remained large during the 1920s and 1930s. But the generals were in firm control of the government and the admirals followed the generals’ lead.
The basic plan for the Pacific war was to destroy the Allied forces, seize Allied colonies (remember that the Philippines were an American colony) and possessions, and then sue for peace on favorable terms. It was felt (although not all Japanese military and civilian leaders believed it) that the Allies, particularly the Americans, would prefer some kind of settlement rather than fight a long, expensive war. It was a desperate gamble that at first seemed to work.
The Japanese had a high opinion of their military prowess. This attitude certainly helped, since the numbers didn’t look so favorable. Most of the Japanese army was involved in China. Only about 250,000 Japanese ground troops could be scraped together for the Pacific offensive. Japan’s target list was impressive: The Philippines, sundry Central Pacific islands, , the Netherlands East Indies (modern Indonesia, the only large oil producing area in the Pacific), New Guinea and nearby islands, Indochina, Malaya, Thailand, Burma and parts of India. In these areas there were over half a million Allied troops. But it was more than numbers which counted. Many of the Allied troops were poorly trained, inexperienced, or both, and many were local recruits who were not necessarily happy with the rule of the “mother country.”
The biggest asset for the Japanese army was the Japanese Navy. The Pacific war began with the Allies and Japan having rough parity in naval forces (albeit the Japanese had a superiority in aircraft carriers) and the Japanese having larger and more capable air forces. The major Japanese deficiency was in their merchant marine. They did not have enough freighters to support widely spread military and naval units.
On December 7, 1941 the Japanese attacked the US Pacific Fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor. With quite minimal losses the Japanese destroyed the American battleships. In the next six months the Japanese seized many of their objectives, having attacked targets from the Hawaiian islands to Sri Lanka, literally halfway around the world from each other. But the Allies didn’t negotiate like the generals hoped they would. It took almost four years but the Japanese generals lost the war they had started due to arrogance and wishful thinking.
Okidemia @84:
Roaches?
Cover your ears!
5cm and counting.
How is the equator doing with this climate change crap?
@ Al Dente # 85
An interesting prelude to your interesting comment… the invasion of China by the Japanese navy in 1894. Their triumph was rather predictable:
The more things change, the more things stay the same.
…
Source: Bloomberg
Hi, theophontes.
Nice to see you.
How’s things?
Are you and yours safe?
Got any functioning helicopters?
Ah, but that shows a clear intent that furry cuteness should sizzle and smoke!
Tony! The Queer Shoop #86
Nope. I can’t say about roaches (yet), but insects are usually tasting fine (tried on crickets, grasshoppers, caterpillars, grubs, and termites –which are the closest relatives to roaches and probably taste close) (the edible brands that are tasting “neutral” do fine with hot pepper sauce). I am thinking a much less exotic pet (or a more ancient domesticated pet breed), that would also really be challenging to eat to most people (insects are just _disturbing_ , but many people would it them more easily than they think).
chigau (違う) #88
The change is either unnoticeable in lucky seasons (from 90% rainy time to 95%) or dramatic decrease in rains (“good” for people but strongly altering ecological communities in sensitive areas, say in dry forest Amazon). That’s the _erratic_ part that’s driving insane.
In other places in the tropics, it’s rather messy too. We’re supposed to be dry in “Lent season” but I haven’t been able to cut the grasses at home since two months. I lose sight of kids whenever they hide, and it’s also benefiting fire ants whose nests are growing way too big. Try cut banana bunches before rats and birds do, in wet grasses with spiny seeds and angry fire ants!
“but many people would eat them”
I guess when you begin to make this kind of typo, that means you’re improving in language skills…
I think I’m going to file this article away to link to every time I encounter someone complaining about their tax money being used to support those lazy, good-for-nothing poor people.
From the article:
Play as John Boehner* as he tries to do whatever.
*My auto correct wants to change his name to “Boner”.
@seven of mine, #94:
Nice catch.
Not sure why this amused me so much, but: heard through my window, just now, from out on the street…
‘Stand up!’
*unintelligible child voice*
‘No, you’re not a doggy.’
@Daz, #97:
Hmph.
I am having difficulty, without access to tone of voice, to interpret that, Daz.
Was a child questioning a dog trainer whether the child should stand up as well? Or was the child being asked to stand and resisting on the basis of, “I’m a doggy right now”?
One is a bit funny, I guess. The other isn’t. I suppose which one is which depends on whether or not you live with kids 2-12 years old that you have to parent.
Do you believe that this movie has this cast?
Mira Sorvino, Sean Austin, Ted McGinley, Brian Bosworth, Cybill Shepard, and Lee Majors.
Where’s Nicolas Cage?
@Janine
From the plot summary:
Oh, sure, only God could orchestrate it. But most of us believe in freewill anyway and find God forcing us to make choices a symptom of an evil god.
From the sound of the voice twas a child pretending to be a dog, while mum—not snappy, just kinda with a resigned sigh—just wanted to get home at something approaching walking speed. It just seemed, I dunno, ‘timeless’ I suppose. One of those little moments that could have been 2015 CE or 2015 BCE.
An interesting point about English, and connections I haven’t made yet.
English as Globish, and potential remedies to its disadvantages.
Janine #99
Outside, scraping at the door.
Daz, #101,
I have an image of the little lad having stopped for a pee against a tree!
(This is from experience. I have young grandsons and a dog: It is inevitable that a certain amount of copying takes place).
Okidemia:
What’s your first language? That sometimes helps me decide which words I should use, if it’s a fairly close relative or we’ve borrowed a lot from it.
Just for fun:
This is more properly expressed as “connections I hadn’t made before.”
You hadn’t (=had not) done that, in the past. But now you do.
If you haven’t made them yet, then right now you still have not made them. However, that is (probably) not what you mean to say, since you did already make them. That may be what you would have said before reading the article, but it isn’t something you would mean after the fact.
…
I disagree with the notion that all international communication should be in English. Let me just say that first.
But, as a matter of fact, that is of course how things are going in many cases, so we do have to work on that somehow. English is terribly complicated in a lot of ways, but I don’t think that is always bad. The world is a complicated and messy place too. Yes? The criticism about the large vocabulary seems especially misguided. That is not a problem. Technical writings (in academics, law, etc.) do often require many shades of meaning, so cutting out parts of the language for those would not be helpful. Also, we do already complain about imprecise/ambiguous/informal uses of English (the thread above about “violence,” etc., is a good example), so that we do whatever we can to more accurately represent the ideas that we have. That is not a problem with English itself. The problem is that English speakers (and speakers of any language) are sloppy at communicating and thinking, because they’re humans. Even when they aren’t being very sloppy, there can still be a shared understanding of the context (e.g, whether we’re talking about “writers” or “riders,” “irons” or “ions,” etc.) to guide us in the right direction. I don’t think picking any other language (or set of languages) or building a new language from scratch will remove the need to do things like that.
Ahem.
Political liberals display greater happiness, study shows
Well, duh. The less I have to hear from those appalling, walking-violations-of-journalistic-integrity folks at fox news, the happier I am.
CD:
Happiness is overrated and all that, but I was “happy” to see it wasn’t one of those bullshit self-report studies. Those were apparently even criticized in it. That’s a bonus. They say conservatives are more prone to a “self-enhancing style of self-report,” but there are other problems. You can imagine: “it was cloudy today when you called to conduct this questionnaire, therefore my entire life sucks.” People obviously aren’t consciously thinking that sort of thing, but it affects their responses. Taking that garbage out of the equation would at least help a little bit.
I haven’t read it (behind a paywall) so I don’t know what else to think. How much happier are liberals, etc.?
Huh.
I would think taking the garbage out would just be another confound.*
=====================================================
*and this is another example of the acquitted taste of my humor.
Crip Dyke #106
Maybe in the US…
Maybe you have been trying, but you are very, very guilty.
cr @107: You can read it here (PDF).
But never mind Duchenne smiles, etc. It seems reasonable to me that not denying reality would generally make life more bearable, if not all happy happy joy joy.
@CR:
Thus the importance of the procedural defense. Where, precisely, are you going to find someone my peer to sit the jury, eh?
Well, if you can import your defense, it’s only fair that juries can come from somewhere. To find your peers, I suppose that simply means we need to find people who are very, very guilty (and violent). But convicted criminals aren’t allowed to serve as jurors, are they? So we can’t get them from prisons….. Yep, I’m totally stumped. You’re innocent.
Dunno if this has been posted before… but WTF honestly.
http://phys.org/news/2015-03-men-body-evolutionary-roots.html
By asking a grand total of 300 men, they’ve “conclusively” determined optimally attractive angle for spine curvature. The drawings of the various angles 2/3 of the way down the article are hilarious and 3/5 deserve to be on eschergirls as being snake-women or centaurs.
consciousness razor #105
French. That helps to a degree where it is actually often deceiving and even deceptive. That’s the part that resonnated most when I first read the text. I feel often grammatically correct but meaning weirdo, and I also spot it regularly when I read colleagues as a mock reviewer.
Also, I liked the suggestion that we may collectively aim for a simple form of English so as to ease standard com for scientists worldwide. This is a fair argument. Having been assistant editor at a scientific journal, there are too many authors that are unfortunately outed from the “greater” sci com pool.
Also, it is quite frequent for French scientists to have reviewers pointing out poor writing quality. I find it striking that part of the answer might be, as the text suggests, prescient language connections (here between French and English) that I hadn’t suspected until today. Worth exploring.
You’re right about my wording. Thanks for the note. I can still rationalise a posteriori that I am actually still making the connections, but that would still be rationalising… :-)
What’s more, changing the standard with creation of an entirely new language (or pick one of those that have been already proposed to that purpose) would at least place everybody on the same level. Not sure that it is something I would push up, but it is interesting to look at critically. Whatever. We are not changing things today… :-) More interesting to me is the argument for collective appropriation (sorry, can’t help) of what International English should be. That would certainly allow people worldwide to embrace their diversity directly upon transformative action. It is certainly already happening, and this is not a call to enforce it, more simply the realisation that we are allowed to do that.
I disagree (softly) with you about the vocabulary richness as an issue. Typically, for French authors, it could be really helpful to stick to lower word diversity, so that they would not be tempted to frenglicise their writings (which results in grammatically correct sentences that are barely understandable to actual English natives).
I learned a new word today murmuration.
chigau (違う) #116:
I was lucky enough to see what I was told later was a particularly large murmuration, on a visit to Norfolk. Quite entrancing.
Never got this close though. That must have been really amazing.
daz @117:
I’d have thought you’d be more into lemuration.
@118, leerudolph
Now this place is just full of people monkeying around.
Oh god, I thought we’d gibbon up on the puns.
Oh man, d’rill-y think so?
Aye I thought so.
We need the ‘aped crusader….
Goodbye, math and history: Finland wants to abandon teaching subjects at school:
AlexanderZ,
Sounds interesting. There is also something bothering me about the idea, but I can’t put it into words quite yet, maybe better leave criticism for after I’ve read more about the proposed program.
@Beatrice:
I’d like to think that they’re not making so great a break with the past without some research to show this works better on average.
My only worry, since they appear to really be intending to teach all the subjects, just not as “Subjects, capital S,” is how this will work when collaborative learning is taking place (as apparently will be common). This methodology + collaborative learning certainly allows for kids to avoid certain subjects in favor of others, but that might also be called “finding what you’re good at and making your best contribution that way”.
Again, it’s a worry founded on ignorance. It may well be that the system is better, or has problems but not ones I’m noticing, but it’s just different enough that unease is as natural a reaction for some of us as excitement might be for others.
Crip Dyke #126
The current system already allows the student to choose their educational path in higher classes.
________________________
Beatrice #125
I know what you mean. The click-bait title has really put me off at first and the aftertaste remained even when I finished the piece. Regardless, they do seem to be very careful about it, slowly implementing it here and there. I’m too curious about the gritty details. If you find a good translation/summary in English, please let me know. Strangely, I can’t find any mention of this reform on the Finnish National Broad of Education site or on Eurypedia.
Then again, in the Finnish system the government mostly restricts itself to setting targets and the actual teaching programs are left to the schools.
This happened, Richard Dawkins linked to an article on Breitbart.
Janine #128
he also wrote this.
So it doesn’t look like he’s throwing his support for Breitbart. He’s Just Asking Questions. Very vigorously and for all to see.
Also, he really needs to change his background. It’s old and it looks like he’s about to crush the bug and drink it, a la Rabbar from Dune.
*Rabban
Yes, that is part of the new narrative of GG and TERFs, that being placed on a blocklist is libel because the reason for the block is just a difference of opinion. And the terms you use for people on a blocklist are slurs.
Richard Dawkins explains why he sent a link to Breitbart.
The responses that follow is funny in a very twisted way. One person keeps insisting that Breitbart is the only publication that calls out SJWs.
Pure gold.
This person might want to rethink his life choices.
Janine #134
That’s not all! Another responder, Mduduzi Dlamini, describes himself as a Liberal Humanist and his latest tweet reads:
Dawkins’ followers are quite an interesting bunch.
P.S.
The “Preview” button no longer works for me. Does anyone else has this problem?
He is so proud of that statement, he pinned it.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
This just happened with Dawkins.
@Janine
Sad to see that he doesn’t notice that creationist logic is silly when it isn’t coming from creationist talking about science. When a feminist says something wrong, he must think it just works differently than when a biologist says something wrong. And perhaps he thinks it isn’t silly to say something true (like a deepity) when the fallacious argument is left implicit, rather than explicit (though still very obvious).
He should have had a talk with some of the other Thought Leaders before tweeting those things. Surely one of them could have helped?
I am now being told that I am picking an argument with someone much smarter then me.
Dawkins gets all the best dudebros.
Wow. Dawkins fanboys are saying that calling someone a “moron” is dehumanizing, and Dawkins himself is making a big damn spectacle about calling out how RUDE and WRONG it is to be so INSULTING.
Seriously, wut? I really can’t believe I am seeing Dawkins of all people whining about tone and politeness. I suppose it is consistent with his whining about “LIBELS! LIES!” however. I guess there is a Just Right amount of Civility where Dawkins can both take offense to being called sexist and yet also see no issue with issuing rape apologetics, attempting to justify certain subsets of child molestation, and just otherwise being an utter dismissive asshole to women and feminists. A Goldilocks Zone, if you will, where it is bad to call someone moron, but when you call religious people everywhere delusional, that is somehow not “rude”, no matter what.
I really don’t have faith in Dawkins’ ability to Logick, anymore.
Janine:
I would imagine good skeptics would want to have evidence for such a claim. And people with a good logical and scientific mind would understand that intelligence in general doesn’t translate to intelligence in regards to a specific subject. I very much doubt anyone willl get much quality evidence of Dawkins being much smarter on this specific subject.
It’s almost like there is a blind spot at work here.
brianpansky @139
Certainly Michael Shermer could have made some good suggestions.
The time is now 18:33 MDT.
19:05
Which means Pharyngula has switched time-zones.
never mind
Okay this is really precious.
First the hairsplitting:
So one Twit on Twitter made a post about how “Feminists” called Newton’s “Prinicipia Mathematica” a “rape manual”.
One critic calls said Twit a “moron” because Newton did write “Principia Mathematica”.
Good Sir Dawkins gallops in to express his gravest offense at the word “moron”, of course, and says that Newton did in fact write a book with “Principia Mathematica” in the title: “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica”, which according to Wikipedia is often referred to simply as The Principia.
The book that, you know, was ONLY known as “Principia Mathematica” by Whitehead and Russel, was in fact named after Newton’s book. Dawkins points this out to call out the critic, but really….it seems like the original poster is just right on a technicality. Or wrong on a technicality. Either way.
But the real meat is of course avoided: That feminists called that book a “rape manual”.
Well googling has shown that a lot of people have been grasping onto this one statement by Sandra Harding in the last few years. She made the comment in 1986.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0801493633/qid=1126945492/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-6180632-7236007?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
That is the book. I found the source and the quote from this 2005 post from Gene Expression, a blog that prefaces the statement by talking about how he was searching for some “post modern feminist gibberish” to criticize.
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2005/09/know-thy-enemy-newtons-rape-manual.php
I do note that the passage conveniently ends with the sentence where “rape manual” comes up.
Which is crucial, because Harding has been criticized A LOT for this passage, and claims that it was taken out of context and that her feminist critique is not anti-science.
Here, from an article about feminist criticism of science: http://www.dhushara.com/book/renewal/voices2/femsci.htm
Also notable: Dawkins himself has been a part of making a mountain out of this molehill.
http://www.freethought-forum.com/forum/showpost.php?p=160361&postcount=1
And let’s also quote from this book about the anti-feminist idiots taking this out of context:
https://books.google.com/books?id=id75vu3IRCIC&pg=PA195&lpg=PA195&dq=Newton%27s+rape+manual+context&source=bl&ots=iww9NBSVnb&sig=K9u5yXTOqJxB8ql6vl64oaWWNgg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Z2IPVeTKD8WjNo-pg9AC&ved=0CFEQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=Newton's%20rape%20manual%20context&f=false
And Dawkins joined in all the anti-feminist bandwagon of pseudoscholars, laughing at the dumb things a feminist supposedly said when really they are just quote mining her. Surprise surprise.
Final note:
The first three hits for “Newton rape manual context” are:
Wikipedia entry for Sandra Harding.
An article by Dawkins. From 1998.
Fucking Freerepublic.
The writing has been on the wall for a long, long time.
The words “willful ignorance” and “special pleading” come to mind:
https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/579800276695126016
Regarding his incredible opposition to calling people morons: I have not found Dawkins using “moron” as an insult. I have seen him calling people or things “stupid” though. So he isn’t opposed to the insults in general. And I very much Dawkins would object to the term on the basis of ableism: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/aug/21/richard-dawkins-immoral-not-to-abort-a-downs-syndrome-foetus
Dawkins really is a fascinating disaster.
No need for him to defend GG when he’s uncritically signal-boosting Sargon of Akkad, Mark Kern and Milo Yiannopoulos.
If it were warmer out there and less snowy, I’d go out for a smoko.
but
fukit
I’m goin to bed
Heh!
anteprepro #147
Good work! I bookmarked it for future reference.
@ chigau
Bisy Backson
Things have quietened down on the streets. This does not make things any less disquieting though. I am sure that at some stage things will be brought to a head again.
I have one little racing quad working (though through no small effort on my part to destroy it.) Also two tricopters nearly ready to fly…
Thank you so much for that, anteprepro. I finally get what it is that’s been so massively misrepresented.
I’ve just seen a newspaper story about the Pope being mobbed by a group of adulating nuns, and I’ve had a flash of insight so powerful that it can only have come from the Lord himself.
So hear ye, O Sinners:
I prophesy that Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, known as Pope Francis, will have at least one miracle attributed to him in the next few decades, and that this will be proven as absolutely true by no less an authority than the Vatican itself.
Such power of prophesy on my part (remember we’re talking miracles here) is clearly a sign that I too should be beatified, ‘coz it’s pretty impressive on my part – I am clearly righteous unto the Lord or something like that.
Anyway, if any of you poor misguided sinners want any more of my amazing insights into God’s great plan, just send me 500$, and you will receive a 100% genuine, five-star, bona fide no-frills prophesy, guaranteed by Sainthood (pending). It will be the best 500 bucks you have ever spent.
[Testing]
(Been having some problems leaving comments; let’s see if logging out then logging in again has fixed it!)
Lookit what someone did:
http://www.tedcruz.com
http://www.tedcruzforamerica.com
I can’t find the thread to which I’m referring. The Bibble opening of, “He created them, man and woman. Man and woman he created them. Adam the first man…”, Is all from the King James translation, which was royally required to be an artistic translation of the original Greek (?) writing of the Bibble.
I am trying to ask (clumsily) what the original Hebrew Torah had written, as the first few lines of Genesis, and if they are radically different than the KJV. Did KJ mistranslate the original, deliberately, or were they working with a mistranslation to begin with?
Even if the translation is accurate and precisely correct, does the phrasing “He created them…”, imply that Adam and Eve were not the solitary residents of the Earth? That A&E were just two of the many that Gawd selected, and plopped into the Garden, until they disobeyed and were kicked out, to the land of more people, where Cain & Able could go forth and find themselves girls to bear their children?
@ twas brillig (stevem)
Correct! Look up the story of Lilith.
(There was a long and detailed discussion of Genesis, Lilith, Mrs Snake, The Garden, Gawd ™ , etc only a few years ago, on this very thread.)
twas brillig #157
The relevant part is from Genesis 1:27 – “וַיִּבְרָא אֱלֹהִים אֶת-הָאָדָם בְּצַלְמוֹ בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים בָּרָא אֹתוֹ זָכָר וּנְקֵבָה בָּרָא אֹתָם”
It literally translates to “God created the man in his image in god’s image he created him male and female [he] created them”
Not by this point. Genesis 1 is the first genesis story (the Torah has several versions of it) and is fairly straightforward. Later it (in Genesis 6) it is revealed that “god’s children” and the giants (nephilim) lived along side the first humans, though the creation order of those is never specified. It is mentioned (Genesis 6:4) that the children of god intermingled with Adam’s daughters/human women (the two phrases are the same in Hebrew).
______________________
theophontes #158
Lilith is an external myth (from the Babylonian Talmud) that tries to explain the inconsistencies of Genesis 6, not those of Genesis 1.
So Gawd is male AND female? And Xians are so opposed to trans* as “abominations”, me thinks they need to read the Bable more literally.
theophontes
Good, then.
twas brillig #161
According to Ḥazal onward, yes (the female aspect is called Schechinah).
Though there is little hint for this in the text, in the previous verse (Genesis 1:26) which talks about the intention of making a man and his/their role amidst the animals, god refers to itself in plural (…we will/let us make man in our image our likeness…). There is no royal “we” in Hebrew, but the word for god that’s used in Genesis (elohim) is the plural of the word deity (eloha).
@brianpansky
Good intentions make it not violence, and good purposes make it not violence. Is that a good summation of your argument? This reminds me of a phrase about good intentions and roads to hell.
Bullshit. Try that in a court, and see how far you get. Imagine what it would look like if it was a private citizen doing it, and not the government:
Your honor, I took it upon myself without consulting others to use this alien device to forcefully vaccination everyone in the country against measles. (The machine uses teleportation to teleport the intravenous vaccine directly into the body of every person on the planet.) Yes, I know that the alien device reports that 3 people were killed (allergies, contaminations, etc.), and independent autopsies confirmed this fact – but I didn’t intend for those people to die. It was an accident. Yes, I also know that the alien device confirmed the well known medical literature that this course of action would kill a small number of people, but it’s still an accident. I’m not guilty of murder. I had the best intentions. Look at how many other lives I saved.
We would charge you with murder – or at least negligent homicide. IIRC, that’s the charge for when someone fires their gun into the air and the bullets falls and kills someone, right? If any one person had the power to do it on their own, and did it on their own without consulting anyone else, and without obtaining the informed consent of a majority of the population through a government, then it would be homicide at the very least – actual, prosecutable homicide. Good intentions be damned – such a person would have killed someone, and it would be homicide.
It’s ridiculous to say that criminal homicide is not violence, which is the end result of your position.
Related:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull
I stumbled on an online video on vk.com (like youtube) that seems to be evidence of an unconscious woman being raped. I don’t know where it was taken or when or any of the people and the few comments are in Cyrillic. How do I bring this to the attention of the appropriate law enforcement and get the evidence preserved before it gets deleted?
No…how could that be a good summation of my argument? What a joke.
Which is a vague phrase. [I’ve written about it before ^^]
And now you’ve taken to a court example when I specifically said I was not using any legal definition of “intent”. I’m not even going to respond to that.
UGUUGUUHUGHHUUHGUGU.
Look. Having a different definition of a word doesn’t mean that I think I can equivocate it with any other definitions. I’m capable of both: 1) having a different definition and 2) not trying to equivocate it with legal jargon.
I said I wasn’t using the court definition. That shouldn’t imply that I think my definition can be used in court.
@getkind
I don’t know who you would contact about that (doesn’t that website have a report feature for criminal content like youtube does?), but to preserve the video you could try FreeMake Video Downloader or Firefox video downloader.
@brianpansky
Thanks from mentioning Firefox Video Downloader. I seem to have successfully used to save a copy of the evidence, so I am no longer feeling the need to get someone involved right this very minute in order to preserve evidence.
I think reporting it to the host would more likely just get it deleted quickly instead of having it preserved, so I don’t want to be the one to take that step.
The nice person at the other end of online chat at RAINN.org both suggested the FBI Tip Line and promised to try and follow up at their end. I provided the link to RAINN.org and FBI Tip Line and several contacts at my local newspaper, so maybe one of those will pan out.
Tony! The Queer Shoop #86
My guess is that you don’t give a try for a second guess because you fear that it would be right? (If that’s it, I just want to tell you: you’re certainly right about the second guess! ;) )
AlexanderZ
It will be left as an exercise, for astute readers, to untangle the syncretistic mangle of disparate fairytales in Genesis.
;p
Slow night.
Must be the snow.
Dawkins displaying his usual arrogance.
Goodness gracious me, there’s a difference between time and tense and it’s time he studied some linguistics.*
But since it’S Dawkins just being ignorant and arrogant on linguistics is probably progress as opposed to him being ignorant and arrogant on rape.
*Would you believe that I can use the simple past to indicate a recommendation or order for the future?
Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- #173
Calling that progress may even be a bit optimistic, it’s merely progessive panoramics.
It is confusing when historians refer to historical events using the historical present tense? How? It’s history: It is essentially in the past by definition. How the fuck can you get confused and think that the Gettysberg Address is happening right now, because someone is describing it as if they were there?
I sometimes get the impression that Dawkins thinks that any field that isn’t his own is fundamentally flawed and not worth knowing about.
I sometimes get the impression that Dawkins thinks that any person that isn’t him is fundamentally flawed and not worth knowing about. Unless they bend over and give his ass a huge smooch.
That too.
Yep. He’s showing his ignorant ass off. Oh, excuse me, he showed his ignorant ass off.
If you
limited were going to limitlimit the use of the tenses to the time they roughly corrensond to, you’ll run into trouble.Giliell, is Dawkins afraid that is a historian is using the present tense in a work of history, that the reader might get confused and no longer think it is a work of history?
If it walks like and asshole and quacks like an asshole, it’s an asshole.
Trigger warning for fantasies of rape, torture and murder.
Also, fuck A&E.
Janine: Jesus fucking Christ.
I’m just gonna leave this here for those didn’t know or didn’t remember: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/feb/17/phil-robertson-duck-dynasty-star-to-receive-cpac-f/
Republican Brand Freeze Peach on display. The very finest.
Remember, black people were happier under Jim Crow and they were more “religious” and not contaminated by outside agitators according to that fine upstanding chritian.
Does Dawkins also get confused when reading memoirs if parts are written in present tense?
Life must be heard for him.
hard
getkind #169
I hope so – it’s the only available option. If you were certain that the video was shot in Russia or by Russians then you/we could also have sent a message to the FSB, but they don’t pay much attention to crimes witnessed online, nor will they accept reports from foreigners.
Hopefully the FBI would get in contact with the their counterparts in the relevant country or the Interpol (though that’s usually works only for child porn, not for videos of adult rape victims).
Janine
I have no fucking clue. To me it seems like he’s trying to say something terribly clever, failing to even conside that he might not be qualified* to talk about this. Really, it’s the equivalent of “why are there still apes???”
*How can I do that? Used a past participle as an adjective!
Wait. Scratch that. You said vk.com? That’s V Kontakte – a Russian version of Facebook. It’s mostly owned by Putin’s confidante. It should be reported to the FSB.
Dawkins must be a fucking riot at comedy gigs.
“A priest and a rabbi walk into a bar…”
Dawkins: “Don’t you mean walked? Surely you’re not reporting ongoing events? Where is this bar, and how do you know what’s happening there? Damnit, you’re confusing me!’
Daz #188
He reminds me of the Ankh-Morporkian attitude towards poetic similes:
–The Light Fantastic
@brianpansky
Again, I believe my position w.r.t. your position remains the same. As I said before: If a private citizen tried to use the same amount of force as some states of the United States sometimes use to enforce a vaccination campaign over a big enough population, we would call that negligent homicide. Now, your choices appear clear to me: 1- Admit that justification or cost-benefit analysis is part of the definition of violence. 2- Continue to hold a position which entails that some instances of actual, prosecutable, criminal negligent homicide are not violence, which is a completely ridiculous position to hold.
a song
Enlightenment Liberal:
No, we would call that medical care.
EnlightenmentLiberal,
Injury or death due to unpredictable vaccine adverse effects is not criminal negligence. Negligence would be if the healthcare provider didn’t bother to check if the child has an allergy to a component of a vaccine.
*peeks into Thunderdome*
*sees EnlightenmentLiberal still doesn’t know what words mean*
*concludes all is right with the world*
EL, government is not violence. But your reaction to government borders on violence with your inane and hostile rhetoric.
Now, out of a million children, how many will die from the measles if none are vaccinated?
How many will die if all are vaccinated from vaccine reactions?
(Answers will be shown later)
Which is the solid PUBLIC HEALTH position based upon EVIDENCE, not emotion.
Seven of Mine,
Yeah, I don’t know why I got sucked back into it.
SIWOTI and EL don’t mix.
A violent crime or crime of violence is a crime in which an offender uses or threatens force upon a victim. This entails both crimes in which the violent act is the objective, such as murder, as well as crimes in which violence is the means to an end, such as robbery.
Well, wikipedia is not by any means always right.
The term “crime of violence” means—
(a) an offense that has as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against the person or property of another, or
(b) any other offense that is a felony and that, by its nature, involves a substantial risk that physical force against the person or property of another may be used in the course of committing the offense.
…and Cornell Univeristy Law School could be misquoting the U.S. Code.
In the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, violent crime is composed of four offenses: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Violent crimes are defined in the UCR Program as those offenses which involve force or threat of force.
…and as for the FBI, what do they know about violence?
But EL, the important point is that you still haven’t explained why you advocate burning kittens alive. Inquiring minds want to know!!
Interestingly, EL’s latest strays further from the debate of the definition of violence into a debate about the term “negligent homicide”, specifically about whether something with a very remote risk of fatality but is still very very VERY likely to be a net positive counts as either negligence and/or murder on the very rare occasions that it results in death. Essentially this brings EL’s argument against all of medical care, and possibly against any action at all. I imagine you could use EL’s “logic” to argue against driving, due to the high risk of traffic accidents. I imagine driving is negligent homicide by definition the second you wind up in an accident. You are automatically at fault, by definition, due to your choice to drive whilst knowing the risks of driving.
I wonder if obligations that require driving or incentives to drive count as VIOLENCE? I imagine it must be. Though EL never confirmed nor denied that the Economy is Violence, it is clear from the “logic” that it must be.
There was a study a few years back.
Random sampling of written internet content available through various channels (like “all wordpress”, etc) or on various big sites (CNN, whatever). Even corporate and government websites.
They scored them according to type, then noted how often that type of website was, on average, updated. Finally, with the random sample of content, they counted how many easily disprovable errors of fact were plainly made, excluding reasonably possible instances of metaphor, etc.
Noting the sector from which the content came, and multiplying by frequency of updates, it appears the major portions of the English language internet are responsible for > 95,000 easily identifiable errors of fact per second!
What I didn’t realize at the time when I originally read that, was just how many of these are attributable solely to EnlightmentLiberal!
CD
Did I tell you recently that I love you?
+++
Well, a Germanwings plane just crashed in the Alps. On board a German Spanish class and their teachers on their way back from a student exchange. I conclude that taking students on an exchange is attempted homicide or something like that.
Lordy, the letters to the editer are a hoot this week:
I’d like to hear the name of your supposed ‘reputable christian biologist’.
Judging by the name, Ken Ham can be considered an “amalgamation of man and beast”.
@Seven of Mine: Shrieking Feminist Harpy, Thunderdome #58, page one, comment #427.
Sorry I have not responded in a while. But I wanted to thank you for your response. I’ve been very socially complicated lately. As my other community nears a merge between the sites that resulted from an old schism the conflicts have increased (I think the more combative people are sizing one another up). It’s hard to maintain a behavioral code for two internet environments and I often fear some sort of breakdown. I did not want you to think that I did not read your comment.
In the world that exists inside EL’s fuckwitted noggin, violence equals taxation equals incarceration equals vaccination equals kidnapping equals government equals rape equals domestic abuse equals child abuse equals gun violence equals…sheesh! In EnlightenmentLiberals’ world, it’s probably easier to list the things that aren’t violence (or examples of violence; xe still hasn’t clarified which one xe means) than to list those that are.
Thankfully, here in the real world incarceration, kidnapping, vaccination, taxation, and government are not violence (or examples of violence).
Okidemia @170:
D’oh!
I didn’t have a second guess until I looked at your gravatar…
Tony
Enlightenment Liberal is a true egalitarian. In their world, all words are equal. To each other.
Wow. Superherohype ran an article about the addition of Chyler Leigh and David Harewood to the cast of CBS’ upcoming Supergirl tv series. Harewood, who is black, has been cast as the character Hank Henshaw. In the comic books, Henshaw is a white man. In the comments, one person wrote:
To which I responded:
I just received a lovely response:
That first line…
How can anyone be so disconnected from reality to think that’s true. A cursory look at the history of tv and cinema shows that white, heterosexual, cisgender men have and continue to dominate the big and small screens.
Tony! #207
If you continue the conversation, don’t forget throw in some UPPER CASE.
Tony, that sounds like a person who thinks that there is a white genocide going on.
Sometimes, my interests (cosplay geek culture and feminism) collide in very powerful (and interesting) ways. Trigger warning: descriptions of rape and abuse. But very much worth reading.
http://nerdyandnaked.blogspot.com/2015/03/holy-trigger-warnings-batgirl.html
Janine @209:
Most definitely!
****
chigau @208:
I did respond to the guy who claimed Hollywood has never been overwhelmingly white. I doubt he’ll click it, but I left a link to the 2014 Hollywood Diversity Report, which shows that Hollywood is still doing a poor job on the diversity front, but doing a great job employing white, cisgender, heterosexual men. I doubt I’ll respond any further. When I comment on sites other than FtB, I usually comment only once.
President Obama talks about his childhood love of comics.
Given how much the GOP despises the President, I’m morbidly curious to see their reaction to this.
****
Gal Gadot talks about playing Wonder Woman:
I haz smile on face.
Crimson Clupeidae @210:
Thanks for linking to that piece. It was indeed powerful.
Trigger Warning: GOP official talking about Rape
GOP state lawmaker ‘if witnesses of college rape exist it was a really great party’.
Anteprepro:
He’s always been whiny about tone and politeness. During Egate, he said he’d consider how his Dear Muslima was wrong, as long as it was explained politely, with no naughty words.
Finally came to the realization that Richard Dawkins’ fans treat him in the same veneration as fans of Ronald Reagan treat Reagan.
Janine
As I recently remarked, those people just swept Dawkins in for Jesus.
Tony! The Queer Shoop #205
But… But… These are pets! How dare you even think about eating them! :)
Brony @ 203
I assume you mean the question you asked about Ponychan and my response about the Conflict Tactic Scale? At any rate, don’t worry about it. I just figured life got in the way. Of course you should take care of yourself first. :)
I have to acknowledge I’ve had longways found Dawkins interesting. Probably even until Twitter was invented.
Okay, I admit I swept back to Jesus. At least Jesus loves you.
Hahem.
It is as if VD cannot wait to show off just what a horrid little specimen of humanity he is.
Funny how in the minds of too many men, women are somehow sluts and too picky about the men they have sex with. What a wretched little world they insist all of us must live in.
Just saw that PZ has a post about the subject of my last message.
So, never mind.
Okidemia
So, how’s the taste? Anything you’d recommend?
@Caine, #215
Oh, I remember that.
So… fondly.
Trigger Warning: Rape
A group of young men in Nairobi intervened and prevented a man from raping a young girl because they were taught
about bystander intervention and that ‘no means no’:
Team Harpy, the two women who accused a librarian of sexual harassment last May, have now offered a retraction.
Jacob Schmidt #226
I hoped it wouldn’t end like that, but I guess they’re doing what their lawyer/s think is best.
The worst part is that now rape apologists will bring this as an example of “false complaints” and “misandry” and what not.
_____________________
In other news:
Russia threatens to aim nuclear missiles at Denmark ships if it joins NATO shield:
AlexanderZ #223
You mean for grubs? Needs seasonning! A bit bitter, so I’d rather say to give a try to crickets or termites. Definitely better.
I’d recommand anything that’s prepared traditionnally, because it’s gone through a long experience of cooking experiments and experiences. Else there’s nothing better than experimental chefs with regard to modern insect cooking.
But the worst tasting pet* is definitely not an insect, it’s a vertebrate.
*in my experience.
Lakota woman angry at racist t-shirts and headdresses being sold at New Mexico gift shop:
If you click the link, you can watch the video she took on her cell phone.
Okidemia #228
Thanks, I was curious. Provided grasshoppers taste as good as crickets, I might get a taste in the next locust season.
AlexanderZ #230
Where are you located? Pending, make sure there isn’t already a species documented as non-edible.
Locusts might be more abundant than grasshoppers.
Avoid species with spitting defense behaviour, since spit substances is usually what makes them bitter.
Also, make sure to have them feast one day before you prepare them, so that they are “empty” (also better for taste).
If you’re into insect diet in a temperate place (where breeding is easy), you can go with mealworms (I think temperate species are better tasting but this is only based on opinion), they are easy to keep.
If you’re based outside USA/Canada, you can also go for stick insects (plus if you’re in Europe, the common entomo enthusiasts’ breeds feeding on bramble without aposematic ware are often edible). (Beware the food plant if you pick them in the wild, avoid those species eating known toxic plants, and unfortunately species in the USA are not edible).
Okidemia #231
Currently, Israel.
I’m not adventurous enough to try to collect/prepare the insects on my own. I know that local Yemeni Jews have a tradition of eating grasshoppers and some still do it, but I’ve never seen some on sale (and I don’t know a single one who still holds that tradition). I’ll go looking down south, there are more tradition oriented towns there so I might get some insects prepared in by an experienced cook.
This post and some of the comments following it reminded me why I don’t read Ophelia any more.
Does she even give two shits about trans people?
AlexanderZ #232
If you learn more, please share!
Tony
Oh my goodness.
Also, that discussion about the origin of skirts is plain silly.
Tony!, Giliell
I’ve replied and my comment is awaiting moderation. Is that normal?
Not only that but I found Ophelia Benson’s claim that “There is one reason women are expected to wear skirts, and that’s ease of access” to be very problematic in the way it plays into the hands of rape apologists. After all, a rapist would argue that if skirts exist to provide ease of access, then a woman that chooses to wear a mini skirt must want to provide maximal access, and therefore has nobody to blame for being raped.
Obviously that’s not what Ophelia Benson wanted to convey but, once again, she needs to rethink both her position and her wording.
A bazillion geese, the sun low, their wings *sparkle*!!!
Where the fuck is my camera?
Tony!
Thanks for the reminder of why B&W is no longer one of my regular stops.
Chigau
Is it under the passenger seat of your car? I find the damnedest things there.
an experiment 1
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kmmPFrkuPq0
HappyNat
Nope. In my purse.
My ‘purse’ is big enough to hold a wallet and house-keys.
How I lost my camera in there…
under the passenger seat of my car is a whole nother story
@236, AlexanderZ
No it isn’t playing into the hands of rapists or their apologists. It’s possibly false and poorly reasoned, but it isn’t that.
Your hypopthetical rapist is using an extra dose of fallacious reasoning that isn’t part of what OB said. For instance: ease of access does not mean permission of access.
What if it were true that skirts did exist to provide easier sexual access, and (just to tease out your fail here) suppose that some women wanted to wear them for exactly that reason? What then….? Honestly, the fuck?
AlexanderZ @236:
If you haven’t commented over there before, your comment will be sent into moderation automatically until it’s approved.
Meet ‘Yawunik kootenayi’: researchers unearth 508 million year-old sea creatures’ fossil in Canada
I wonder if it’s possible to actually “spell” ‘Kootenai’ in the English alphabet.
I doubt it.
brianpansky #241
Of course not, but that isn’t the point. The rape argument goes like this:
Neither part is true and there is no logical connection between the two. But for rapists and their supporters it doesn’t matter. What I’m saying is that OB’s statement can be used by rape apologists to argue in support of the first part of their dogma.
Then it’s an argument that deserves more than a couple of lines. Because considering how popular skirts of all sizes are, it means inhuman levels of sexualisation.
____________________________________
My comment wasn’t approved by OB. Here is a copy of it:
P.S.
I find it really odd that she screencapped Tony’s comment here. It’s not like PZ is going to delete it or anything.
P.P.S.
My entire spine hurts more than usual. From the neck down to the lower back and shooting into my legs, chest, arms and numbing my fingertips. It’s either the changing weather or I overexerted myself swimming yesterday.
It has nothing to do with anything, I just feel like complaining. Sorry.
AlexanderZ @ 245
What you’re actually asking of Ophelia is that she not make a claim of fact that she believes to be accurate because her interlocutor will respond fallaciously. If she’s factually incorrect, she should care about that and stop making that claim because it’s incorrect; not because her interlocutor can’t argue competently.
@Chigau, #244:
No.
Almost by definition.
@AlexanderZ:
Ophelia Benson seems an odd duck to me. At one point when I was critical of her wording (she was claiming certain people, IIRC, “think of themselves” as allies to islamists and/or “think of islamists” as allies to themselves – either way, the wording doesn’t admit of people who think of non-violent muslims as allies but happen to have bad tactics such that they do things to benefit islamists, which was my point), she brought up a months-old statement from me over here to the effect that I’d stopped reading her.
I never said she was crap. I didn’t insult her. I said I stopped reading her. Which was true. Reading habits can change back, of course, and I had been poking around a little in the couple weeks before this disagreement, but I am Groot! she seemed to think this was some kind of rebuttal. I don’t know what the point of that was supposed to be, but she clearly was lurking over here and remembered this bit that I’d said, and then was apparently prepared to use it “against me” or “against my argument” or whatever. It was surreal.
My best guess is that she’s had so many people bash her in bad faith that it may be harder for her now than before the online harassment to hear honest disagreement. If her point was that I couldn’t possibly be critiquing her argument in good faith since I had once said I’d stopped reading B&W (or stopped reading it regularly, or something – it was a mild statement, as I recall, wish I could find it), well, that would be wrong, but it would at least make some sort of sense based on the harassment campaign.
I could hardly care less about Bindel. She sounds a bad job, but I don’t know. I don’t read her work. And I’m not that interested in seeking out years-old work that supposedly bashes me. I mean, ugh. Countering current misinformation is a good enough reason to read anti-trans* trash, but there’s too much out there from the past to bother with, y’know? I have a life, after all.
Well, sort of a life.
Okay, I have an occasional day.
@AlexanderZ
Well if “for rapists and their supporters it doesn’t matter” whether things are true or have any logical connection, then there is literally nothing you can say which is safe from them using it. So judgement is absurd.
I don’t think you have a point.
Seven #246
No, I’m asking her to be mindful of a very common attack tactic. She’s not writing to her drawer – she’s a prominent blogger with a platform. This means she has responsibility to address common misconceptions, misunderstandings or even expected misuse of her words.
Here’s an example: How often does PZ say that Darwin was wrong? Fairly often, almost in every post discussing Darwin. But PZ never leaves that point hanging. He always explains that while Darwin was wrong on some issues due to his lack of knowledge of genetics, he was still right when it comes to the basics of evolution. Furthermore, PZ often states or explains how modern evolution theory combines both Darwin’s insights and modern genetics to get a better understanding of the world.
PZ does it again and again, and why? Because he knows that any potential ambiguity will be exploited by creationists and IDiots, who are no different from rape apologists when it comes to fallacious arguments.
Does that mean that OB (or any other writer) must triple-check every word they write? No, but they do have to be careful when they’re supporting a very controversial position in a very sensitive matter.
___________________________
brianpansky #249
Human beings aren’t robots driven by deterministic logic. They are varying degrees of support and even strong support may be strengthened or eroded through arguments. Take for example a different case: Slymepitters hate FtB and OB in particular, but they’re happy to quote her when her position on Islam or Muslims coincides with theirs.
Given that she knows her words are turned against her, I would have expected her to be more careful/clear when talking about sensitive topics.
___________________________
Crip Dyke #248
It is surreal! It also proves that Tony was right about her – if she can find the time read the Thunderdome, she can certainly find the time to research the positions of the person central to her post.
It makes some sense, but if she had been reading you for at least half a year she should have understood that you are in no way a harasser, and learned enough of your positions to know that you argue in good faith.
I hope you have a great day :)
___________________________
I find OB’s attitude particularly strange because I used to read her a lot in 2007-8, during the Obama campaign. She was on a blog with several other writers, all reporting about liberal issues and the Democratic Party’s campaign. It was one of two US blogs I read at the time – the other being Andrew Sullivan’s (who, eventually, was the one responsible for me coming to Pharyngula).
She impressed me then as a very reasonable person, but I’ve stopped reading that blog when Obama was elected. I rediscovered her here on FtB when I started reading PZ some time ago. I don’t know whether I’ve changed over the years or she did, but my attitude is no longer that receptive.
Wrong. I never wrote for any group blog reporting on Democratic Party issues. I can think of few things that would bore me more.
Ophelia Benson #251
I’m terribly sorry. I was sure it was you. I even remember the name “Butterflies & Wheels” there. I have very bad memory, but this is just horrible. I’m off to find that blog.
Again, sorry.
AlexanderZ @ 250
Which, in practice, would amount to her not stating what she presumably believes to be a fact because some hypothetical interlocutor might argue fallaciously from it. The statement you’re objecting to is a simple claim of fact, not some complex moral argument. It’s true or it’s not. She states it or she doesn’t. There is no interpreting exactly what she means by it. She makes quite clear from the rest of that passage that she objects to the idea that wearing a skirt is implicit permission for random strangers to do what they like to your body. Even if she didn’t, a fairly cursory examination of her blog should reveal to any honest person what her position is. The people who would quote mine her would do that regardless of any additional explanation she provided. Because that’s what they do. Because they’re dishonest, horrible people.
If there is a problem there, it’s that she’s either altogether incorrect or her understanding is incomplete. The problem is not ambiguity.
WiFi works!
@AlexanderZ:
I’m more-or-less with Seven of Mine here, but I’ll had a clarification.
I think that you’re talking about steps one should take for the practical purpose of being effective in one’s advocacy.
I think that Seven of Mine is understanding you to be making an ethical statement – that Ophelia (or anyone else) has an **ethical duty** to avoid misuse of one’s blog posts.
Fuck the rape apologists: they are solely responsible for their misuse of our words, ethically.
As a practical matter it might be good tactics
but there is not duty to use good tactics.
That makes your phrasing somewhat confusing. I’m interpreting you as talking about practical tactics, and taking Seven of Mine’s side because I think it’s much more important to get the ethics right than the tactics right. (there’s room for quite a lot of different folks with lots of notions of best tactics)
However, if you were actually making the argument that Ophelia Benson (or anyone) has an ethical duty to avoid misuse, I’d have to say that you’re wrong. Almost by definition.
Crip Dyke @ 255
More or less. I’m fully on board with taking care with one’s words. It’s on the speaker/writer to communicate their position accurately and clearly and to argue it correctly. I just don’t think the example AlexanderZ gave fails to do either. If AlexanderZ is talking about good tactics, I’m not sure what xe expects Ophelia to have done differently there, apart from verify that she’s factually correct which is worth doing for its own sake.
brianpansky, Seven, Crip Dyke
CD is correct. It’s my fault, I was so much engrossed with this specific issue that I didn’t think about the general, ethical implications. Ethics weren’t on my mind at all which is why I gave an example of a factual issue (i.e. Darwin’s understanding of biology) rather than a moral one.
I was so shocked by OB’s statement that I thought it deserved a full explanation, but you right – this is only because I strongly question its veracity to the point of taking my criticism too far.
_____________________
Ophelia Benson
I was unfair to you in this regard and I apologize.
However, I still think your statement was factually wrong and I still share the criticism of half of your commentariat regarding your post.
I wonder if the former atheist, blaisep, is going to share the support for their position.
Violent prison.
What is it with special higher intellect christians and being so damn weird in conversation? My guess is that their position selects for individuals who are slippery.
Priest in Melbourne Australia:
Murdered woman would be alive if more ‘faith filled’.
Red Dwarf is wonderful.
Just discovered it, did you, chigau?
I had the pleasure years ago. It is indeed a thing of …ahem… beauty.
CD
a re-discovery.
Watched it back then but not since.
It is a Joy.
@ chigau
Mine hit the picket fence on the edge of my roof yesterday, and plummeted two stories onto my neighbours slab below. At this stage it became detached from the *copter and skidded along the concrete. I retrieved it by putting double-sided tape onto the bottom of a jar of honey, attaching this to some gardening twine, and fishing it back.
It is still working.
I need to watch Red Dwarf again. It’s been quite a few years…
Workers were supposed to come six hours ago so I took a day off.
They came just now.
Oh, you know that “assholstery” answer to @AlexanderZ’s poll? That was me. Oddly that occured to me before having read this: #TwitterFail: Twitter’s Refusal to Handle Online Stalkers, Abusers, and Haters
Yes, there’s a twitter user who goes by “Assholster” (when not a sockpuppet) who perfectly exemplifies “the state of being an asshole” – as in a serial harasser who creates thousands of twitter accounts to continually harass his victims and anyone around them with racist and sexist slurs, threats of violence, incitement to self-harm. Assholstery is why we can’t have nice things (including silly ways of saying assholery).
Why the trolley dilemma doesn’t work: BoingBoing on measuring utilitarianism versus just plain psychopathy.
ScienceDirect link
The Trolley and the Psychopath at Last Word On Nothing
theophontes #265
jeez
I hope you took a video of that…
oh, wait
=8)-DX #268
Twitter likes assholes. Assholes are good for business. Just image how much ad revenue one harasser who daily creates dozens of accounts and sends hundreds of twits can bring. Twitter needs people like that to inflate its user number and activity, and since all of those fake accounts technically count as white, American males they are prime targets for clueless advertisers.
Pteryxx: (I am probably not saying anything you don’t already know, this is just my half-serious reaction to the articles you linked to)
I call shenanigans on those articles. It was talking about the Trolley Problem in general, but the Boing Boing and Last Word on Nothing articles are specifically talking about pushing a fat man into the way of a trolley. That’s an alternate version of the trolley problem, isn’t it? The other version (which I thought was generally considered the basic and traditional version) is where you choose between letting the trolley hit five people, or pulling a lever, changing its track so it hits one person on another track.
The fat man example supposedly uses the same utilitarian logic that the original trolley problem uses but it leads people who agreed the first time to NOT agree this time. Sort of like an “argumentum ad absurdum”, a test of how far you can push someone when they use utilitarian thinking. Per wikipedia:
The way that the articles frame this, I was thinking that even the people who responded to the initial trolley problem with a “yes” were considered to be lacking in empathy. Which was baffling. The fact that the people who responded to “yes” to the fat man problem is far less surprising. The entire point of that example is that it introduces a conflict between cold rationality calculating the greatest good against the visceral response to actively killing an innocent bystander and essentially using their corpse to stop a locomotive. As someone who would say yes to the traditional Trolley problem, and finds the “fat man” variant abhorrent, this makes a lot more sense to me. And I dislike that these articles do not clarify which Trolley problem they are specifically looking at.
Grrr…
This Marketwatch op-ed tries to argue that all the criticism of Indianas religious freedom law are misplaced. The writer makes the claim that the Indy law is similar to other laws in the country. He is wrong.
How about: labeling this action moral fosters a sociopathic morality that will end up causing so much more harm than a single death that even assigning a small percentage of that harm to the category of relevant consequences of labeling this action moral (because such a thing would only contribute a small percentage to an eventual sociopathic morality) outweighs that single death?
Would anyone be willing to look at my first draft posts on my nascent blog? It’s a little weird because these are all posts that organize the blog rather than legitimate blog posts (so they will be in the top menu bar). I put it here instead of the lounge because I thought the subject matter could get a little harsh, it automatically comes along with the nature of the material.
There are four posts, but really it’s only three that matter when it comes to wanting some opinions (but I will take opinions on anything really). They are:
*A page explaining the blog’s purpose, “The purpose of this blog.”
*A page explaining why the name of the blog is “A Demon Speaks”, “About the author: “A Demon Speaks”, why the name? My experience of Tourette’s Syndrome.”
*A “Warnings and notes.” page that seeks to explain the mature content, my writers voice, Wikipedia warnings (because I will use it a lot and it has risks), and how the linking to the vocabulary, concepts and resources page works.
The second one may be a little long and I’m thinking of ways of shortening it, but since these are defining pieces of writing I’m thinking of just leaving them as long and being more aware of length on future posts. I am still playing with formatting to make it easier to while maintaining the style and substance. And I am in the process of figuring out how to add visuals to replace text and make everything easier.
The last post, the “Vocabulary, Concepts, and resources” page, is very long and will probably stay that way because I will be constantly adding to it and probably reinventing it over time (lots of figures at the least). So I’m not really expecting anyone to go through that unless they want to. These are not standard definitions in some cases because to be honest, I have to brutalize our language and concepts to get across things that I see and feel in the material. I’m trying to make it obvious what it me and what is standard though.
@Seven of Mine: Shrieking Feminist Harpy 219
Yes, it was the contact scale question. But I have not needed to use the information yet because to be honest most of the anti-feminism around there has been of a nature that has not really needed research to deal with. In my experience most anti-feminism on imageboards is organized around conflict rules and I have almost never had anyone get into details with me. They try to make it look like it’s about details but that usually involves trying to shift the burden of proof. This has been a very revealing exercise. I’m still puzzling over the contrasts that I see when I’m in both places at the same time.
I’m a lot more stable though. It’s the damnedest thing feeling your group codes of conduct bleed into one another. Hyper-focus can drag me into mistaken places in a way that’s still fascinating even when it’s embarrassing.
Tony: Just check out Brett Arends twitter to get an idea of what kind of person he is.
Scrolling down I see:
Whining about George and Laura Bush being cropped out of NY Times photo (and retweeting someone who complained that Al Sharpton did not get similarly cropped out).
An article entitled “How to Invest like Mr. Spock” after Nimoy’s death.
Whining about the government being mean to Americans who want to remain American while living overseas.
Whining about a Jezelbel article about “stupid white people” being racist: https://twitter.com/BrettArends/status/567067254907367424
Brief whine about the following tweet “ruining someone’s life”, calling it a “cyber lynching”.
Citing Ann Coulter and mocking Rolling Stone because they were wrong regarding a campus rape story.
The words “privileged asshat” come to mind.
Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden:
I like that. Honestly, my personal stance is that the problems are quite different because the former implies that one person is dying only as an accident of saving the five, while the latter problem, you are purposefully using someone against their will to save other people. In a way that I can’t honestly imagine not defying physics and, even if it did, requires god-like levels of foreknowledge to know that it is necessary and that it will be effective. Which I guess is exactly the problem: the people who think that they could and should shove a fat man off into the way of a trolley with the guarantee that this will save lives and with no feeling of guilt in doing so are essentially imagining themselves as gods, able to perfectly predict the future and able to perfectly say what is Best for humanity at large, and who is expendable at any given moment. Which I would imagine is where the antisocial elements come in.
@ chigau #270
But of course …
.
Speaking of videos: I really admire Amos Yee for speaking truth to power in Singapore. I hope he doesn’t get the crap beaten out of him.
theophontes
Awesome!
I opened my birthday card early and spent some of the money on AdFree FtB.
Holy shit.
Thanks Chigau, your #280 reminded me I needed to update my Paypal account.
I’m getting some ads again.
What does this mean?
Bilbo seems to be kinda racist … speciesist … um …
Sign out, then sign back in again. The ads should disappear. And make sure you accept cookies from FtB.
Thanks, Nerd.
So far, so good.
Theophontes – definitely awesome.
So, I recently got so cranky on my Facebook feed that I wrote this. Could people look it over and make sure I’m not TOO far gone in irritation that it still makes sense?
@287 this is, btw, in response to someone posting “The government doesn’t have the right, nor should it, to tell me who I can or cannot service, for any reason, including if they’re a n***** or k***.”
Xaivius, aside from trouble understanding the second sentence at first (it was obvious once I read it a second time), it is coherent and sounds like a good argument, with an obvious amount of righteous anger behind it. If the person you were replying to used those racial slurs, you did a damn good job restraining yourself too. I’m not sure if I could reply with much than a screen full of “fuck” ‘s.
twas brillig (stevem) at 161.
Of course El/Yaweh is both male and female (on account of being a colony organism. Like that Portugise whatsit)
Watching The Desolation of Smaug.
Boy oh boy, those Mirkwood Elves are kinda…
not much like Rivendell or Lothlórien
Smaug
.
.
.
wow
Precious….
@Xaivius:
I’m with anteprepro: perfectly good comment. Second sentence could have been broken up for clarity.
@brian pansky:
Sorry about your comment stuck in the spam trap. It seems that
a) it was counting your links twice because you included each in 2 different formats – so your 3 unique links added up to practical links 6 when anything over 5 triggers the spam trap.
and
b) I wasn’t aware that I need to be the one who performs those actions on the threads I initiate. So I could have approved it a while ago, but didn’t realize I had the power (no one has ever gotten spam-trapped on one of my threads before – thanks for teaching me a lesson).
c) did I mention power? Unlimited power!!!
We just started watching this on Sunday. It is the first ‘movie’ movie we are watching with the little dude. He is six. Up till now it has been David Attenborough & educational kids shows, but he really expressed interest in this. We are watching it bit by bit. It is really interesting trying to explain to a very literal and skeptical young person what is going on in the movie. My own response was more like, “Ah, yes, the extended running scenes, I remember those! Ah, yes, the extended fighting scenes, I rememb… Oh SHIT THAT IS A GIANT SPIDER, AND THERE ARE MORE!!!!!!!’. I’m not sure whose heart was pounding faster. Okay, it was mine. Little dude didn’t even flinch at the spider scenes, he was more curious about what kind of spiders they were and if we have any like that around here for him to hunt. So there is that.
Xaivius, if I remember correctly, the issue is happening right now in your locale, correct? I keep reading the TCHerald, hoping for some good Letters To The Editor, and am daily disappointed. I have a dear friend who was a long time customer of the florist in question who stopped shopping there after this all went down. I talked to my state rep. when a bill was on the floor to do the same thing Indiana is doing, and though republican, she assured me that it would never leave the floor and that she would fight tooth and nail against discrimination. That gave me hope. She also told me that her party ‘had jumped shark’ and she didn’t know what the hell they were thinking.
chigau:
Indeed not. The Elves of Rivendell are Noldorin. The Elves of Lothlórien are mostly Sindarin, but their leader (Galadriel) is Noldor (well, mostly – she has some Vanyar ancestry) and their culture is heavily influenced by Noldorin custom.
The Elves of Mirkwood are mostly Silvan, but their leader (Thranduil) is Sindar. Thranduil is also – as the film depicts – an asshole of the first order. The rule of Thranduil – and that of Oropher before him – has been predicated on the idea that the Silvan will be made to give up their inferior/barbaric customs follow Sindarin rules and keep Sindarin customs (the Silvan are not terribly pleased about this). What’s-her-face, the Elf woman that Kili gets the hots for? She’s Silvan, and one of the reasons Thranduil is such an ass to her over the idea that she and his son Legolas might get together is (1) Thranduil is an ass (2) Thranduil is a racist ass who is content to rule Silvans, but cannot handle the idea that his son might actually like one. Legolas kindasorta having the hots for a Silvan woman suggests that if and when (the fact that Elves are immortal makes the “if” highly relevant) Legolas becomes King of Mirkwood the policies of the Sindarin ruling elite might change vis-á-vis the Silvan majority, and this really pisses Thranduil off.
TL;DR: Elven politics are as mucky and racist as human politics, and Elves are as varied – culturally and ethnically -as humans are. The varying depictions of the Elves in the films is thus Jackson showing his work.
Esteleth
Interesting.
Actually, they all seem to be assholes.
and
poor Smaug
:,(
Who would win?
Smaug or Godzilla
Orcs or Klingons
-The Dwarves are the only ones who pay attention to grooming.
(srsly, the rest of you. comb yer fucken hair)
-Azok was packing a bat’leth.
For sheer loyalty to the awesome and splendor (and smexyness) that is Smaug, I will have to say that he will win. Because he is Smaug and he is perfect… my preciousssss
One of the best designed dragons ever. Amazing.
Rowan
Agreed!
Can Pern be far away?
(as long as there is a Script®)
Red Dwarf remains awesome.
Parallel Universe
Series 2 Episode 6
Holy did this really happen this quickly Batman?
The owners of Indiana’s Memories Pizza have temporarily closed their doors in the wake of the outrage over their homophobia.
This happened fucking FAST. It was *this* morning when I read that owners Crystal and Kevin O’Connor said they would not cater a gay wedding.
Ugh. A GoFundMe campaign has raised nearly $40K for the pizzeria owners.
I’m dismayed that more than 1,000 people (in 5 hours) have raised money to aid bigots. Not surprised mind you. After seeing Darren motherfucking Wilson get nearly $500K in donations, I’m not sure if I could be surprised at the support that bigots receive. Dismayed, yes. Surprised, no.
Tony!
Well.
I think I’ll go back to Middle Earth.
Orcs are nicer.
chigau Red Dwarf was one of my favourite programmes when it came out. I can still quote various chunks of it. It dropped off in later series, but I still have fond memories…..
I always wondered if the Holly Hop space drive was an intentional reference.
I’m not sure Daz . It could be….or it could be just a coincidence.
So will Muslim men be able to marry four women in Indiana?
Prohibiting that seems far more of a personal attack on one’s religion than having to sell cake to two men.
I read somewhere (Daily Kos perhaps?) that someone registered a church which listed smoking pot as among its religious practices. Apparently there are lawyers who actually think it’s not outside the realm of possibility that it could successfully be used as a legal defense under the new law.
Daz:
Happy belated birthday!
****
I’m sure there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the NRA once they learn of this Harvard study debunking their favorite talking points
@Seven of Mine:
Ed Brayton is of the opinion that it’s nonsense. Me? I think that ignores Smith v Oregon – the case that started the RFRA thing.
In that case, 2 workers were saying that the peyote they smoked shouldn’t have led to their firing, because it was only as part of a sacrament of their indigenous religion. The Supremes ruled that the burden to indigenous religion wasn’t a discriminatory and unconstitutional burden in a country that bans peyote but manufactures, exports, and imports red wine. For the Supremes it was an incidental burden of a neutral statute and these were entirely constitutional.
The federal (and original) RFRA was passed **specifically** in response to this case. The language didn’t specifically overturn the holding – so it doesn’t actually say, “yes, smoke peyote” – but it does overturn the test applied to determine the holding. The court would have to pass a much more stringent test if it wanted to maintain a ban on peyote smoking in religious rites. In other words, given the legislative history and the new test, it would be entirely reasonable to believe that the federal RFRA protects smoking peyote as part of a religious rite. Wouldn’t necessarily win in court, but the position is reasonable and has a chance to win.
Nonetheless, Ed was discussing someone who had just filed paperwork for a new church that articulates marijuana smoking as part of its sacraments. It’s possible that the court wouldn’t take the opportunistic creation of the church seriously. However, for Rastas and others who have established a religious tradition of smoking marijuana, it’s not outside the realm of possibility at all.
BUT that is at least ostensibly true in other states that have RFRAs as well. The language unique to Indiana wouldn’t affect the case for religious pot smoking. That means we should have seen that test of the law’s reach by now. And maybe we have, but I haven’t read the case. I think it would be hard to distinguish pot smoking from peyote smoking, but maybe the courts (especially a motivated court) could distinguish between the two or find that the language of the RFRA requiring a new test doesn’t go so far as to make religious peyote smoking legal (and thus find the two don’t need to be distinguished in order to ban religious reefer).
Is that helpful?
Tony, #305
It’s at $142,000 now. That’s in 18 hours.
Shame on GoFundMe. Just like Twitter has a moral obligation to ban certain content, so does GoFundMe. So how does this work exactly? Memories will actually be receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars just like that?
Tony #312:
Thank you very much. And no worries; better later than never!
Sorry. Any excuse. I’ve been on a real slap-bass kick since I wrote that post. (And that vid reminds me; I was somewhere in the crowd at their reunion concert. Happy days, indeed.)
$186,941 in 20 hours.
Stunning.
This time on “Dawkins is an asshole on Twitter”
https://twitter.com/benlangfeld/status/583596952371257344
Dawkins does the “we are all African” line.
Someone on Twitter notes how this can be problematic: an appropriation of African culture, being careful to note that it might not be done intentionally.
Dawkins and fanboys get incredulous.
One fanboy says the following that, on accident, perfectly encapsulates why there is an argument to begin with:
This distinction is not made clear at all by, you know, a fucking T-shirt that just says “We are all African”. The African even has the standard Dawkins Scarlet letter atheist A attached to it. But that doesn’t stop the scoffing. Oh the endless scoffing.
This was the fanboy response Dawkins retweeted:
As compared to actively trying to fault in a message of concern about sloppily claiming membership in a group you obviously do not belong to and patronizingly referring to such an action as an attempt to help Africa somehow, in process of associating yourself with it. Amazing.
anteprepro #317
I don’t care if you are black or white or purple, we are all African!
yup
That works.
chigau, #316
$81,880,158 in a year.
Actually more. They’ll probably be more giving around Christ’s Mass.
Because dog forbid we’d show solidarity by NOT rhetorically erasing the fucking problem. Jesus fuck.
Re: the Indiana pizzeria
The money they’ll receive from the GoFundMe campaign will be enough to keep the restaurant afloat for a while, but they don’t just need money. They need customers. I wonder how business will be for them if/when they reopen. And what business will be like months down the line.
Tony!:
They could go Full Chick-Fil-A and just run with the two prong approach of “We are good Christians being persecuted for our innocent beliefs” and “Hey, come visit us if you too hate the filthy, evil gays!”. I imagine their business will look very similar to a Baptist church or to the speakers’ line-up at CPAC.
“Bcs dg frbd w’d shw sldrty by NT rhtrclly rsng th fckng prblm. Jss fck.”
T b hnst, Dwkns ws gng bynd hs blgtn t vn rcgns tht wrtchd hv f scm nd vllny. Fr tht y shld b thnkfl. s hrsh s t snds, frc rlly sn’t th pstr chld y wnt fr mvmnt tht prds tslf n scntfc dvncmnt nd scl prgrssn. W r tlkng bt cntnnt stll n th drk gs n gd mjrty f plcs (sv, f crs, th plcs whr th vl wht mn hs sprd hs nflnc, nmly strng dctnl nstttns, pblc hlth nfrstrctr nd stbl cnms bsd n rsrc dvlpmnt rthr thn sllng slghtrd mnkys nd lmrs).
Lt’s b frnk – why nyn wld wnt t b vlntrly ssctd wth frc n ny wy, shp r frm s bt bfflng t m. prmtv ppl wth prmtv blfs (rgrdlss f th myrd vrtns f ncmprhnsbl lnggs, trd wrppd n tlt ppr s stll trd) dsn’t xctly ffr nsprtn fr th ftr f hmnty. W r tlkng bt ppl wh cldn’t rgns fck n brthl – bl shld hv bn stmpd t nd cntnd thrgh snsbl, rgnsd pblc hlth nttv bfr t gt t ths lvl, bt t lv nythng cmplx t th ntvs n Wst frc sms t b skng fr trbl. f crs, w cld hv pssd n th rspnsblty t th lrgst nd mst cnmclly dvlpd stt n tht rgn, bt Ngr sms t b strgglng wth thr ndmc crrptn n th Sth, r pr-Mdvl slmc nsrgnts n th Nrth. Lvly, h?
Brng bck th clns. Th dd blck my d, bt th nnmrbl dvncs cnmclly nd mdclly tht ntrlly cm wth th gdng hnd f cvlsd wstrn ppl s wrth t.
That’s a lot of racist shit. Get the fuck out of here, schoolofbrock.
I know it’s the Thunderdome but I sent an Alert.
Their GoFu
ckndMe is up to $300k. My only consolation is that most of it will be taxed. And they’re eventually going to lose. It’s simply a windfall for an undeserving bigoted family. Still angry that there are enough people out there to contribute that much… Fucking fuck.coolofbrocken #324
Let’s be frank –to be as remotely associated to anything from you as possible seems already a sufficient reason to.
Second, why would anybody let you know what makes Africa worthwide if you have so much shit in your eyes?
And I’m not a physician, so I assumed the issue was with the eyes, not the brain.
Fnny, sn’t t? Nn f y (t my knwldg) r frly pstng ths frm hrdln Mslm twn n Mzmbq? r wr-rvgd slmc ffdm n Nrthrn Ngr? r n DS-plgd sttlmnt n Swzlnd? r rp-fctry n th DRC?
t’s sy t rmntcz cntnnt frm th lxry f sf, scr md-Wstrn cff shp r st cst cnd. t’s sy t ppnt yrslf s th mrl rbtrs fr th dfnc f ppl wh y’v nvr mt, smply t stt yr hngr fr yr dprssng mnrty-ftsh. Th hrsh trth – frc s by nd lrg dngrs, pr-mdvl bskt cs fll f th wrst xmpls f hmnknd. Th nly sm-cvlsd plcs r ths nhbtd by whts, r fndd, dctd, mntnd nd spprtd by whts.
Stp rmntczng sch dplrbl cntnnt. Th snr th ntvs thr kll ch thr ff r r r-clnsd th mr th rst f th wrld wll bnft.
schoolofbrock
Before you go, how do feel about Ireland?
You’re the luxury shopper, I’ve spent a lot of time both in West Africa and South Africa, from the most modern cities to remote villages and life in the bush.
Maybe I’m romanticizing, sure, but indeed, the whole continent is a wild philosophical romance and despite your apparent complete lack of experience (if you really experienced Africa anyhow, I’ve certainly seen you behind your fences and your security quarters full of civilised looters and professional plot commanders, or maybe you’re a civilised mercenary?).
Maybe I’m romanticizing, but you’re idealizing both African people and the colons in ways that are telling long about your own unsecure cultural setting.
Did you spot my gravatar? Should have told you that Africa is not something I fantasize about but a real thing to me.
It’s easy for you to romanticize the shooting next door to my house just days ago, a robbery days before that, lots of diseased and ignorant people, lots of zealous fucking religious people at the church around the corner…. That’s just my tiny neighborhood, but it’s all over for that matter, and it’s in a mostly white town in the US. As if that fucking mattered.
Fuck off. Try to cure your hateful fucking ignorance some day, but for now just fucking leave.
The most blatant fucking racism I’ve seen a while. That’s saying something.
Moreover, RDC is not called that way since over a decade. Now it’s C-K.
I know this is Thunderdome, but even here we have some limits, and fucking racists are never going to be tolerated anywhere on this site. schoolofbrock is banned.
Late as always.
Africa has fifty four fucking countries in it. It’s land mass is bigger than the US, Europe, India and China put together. Anyone making any kind of broad brush claims about “Africa” or “Africans” is an ignorant idiot.
Hi, FossilFishy.
I hope you and your are well.
you and yours
Over half a million.
I need to figure out a fundme.
Trigger warnings for the deliberate production of rape videos starring video game characters.
I thought this should be passed along to people that might want to say something about this.
The People Who Make Brutal Video Game Porn
It will be $1,000,000 shortly.
Is it really this easy to make a lot of money? I don’t need a million. I wonder how much I can get for the common cold.
$842,592
the most recent donation was 12 hours ago
Maybe they’re done.
Just watched 6 minutes of totality of the lunar eclipse. Nice and orange with a bright edge that set it off nicely. Off to bed now so I will hopefully sleep through any world ending event in some fundies bent mind.
Donations are closed.
I think we should invite Malcolm Kirkpatrick over and ask if he thinks taxes equal violence. *runs away*
Death toll in the Kenyan massacre : 148
… since we’re counting.
A good day to hate the world.
Rats, the world is still here. I suppose I’d better get into the easter eggs then.
Pulp Fiction was a documentary.
Roald Dahl wrote the screenplay for You Only Live Twice.
With tomorrow being the anniversary of the fictional Lichification that spawned this space, I offer this image to the former members of the TZT Politburo: Tardigrades Shall Rule!
A. R
bugger
To what Event are you referring?
My date-book says August.
Lovely pic, that.
Hey chigau. The family’s fine. I’m… well, we’ll go with tired. You?
Happy Zombie Day, one and all.
The Redhead requires lamb for Zombie day. Fortunately, takeout from a local restaurant is good enough.
FossilFishy
I’m OK. It’s good enough.
…
There’s 5cm of snow here, the smeggin’ Bunny didn’t make it.
Snow? What’s that?
The Small Fry benefited from your inclement weather: She had two egg hunts, one at her Nana’s and another when she came home. I wonder if the bunny got overtime… Mind you, she still has a chocolate rabbit left from last year’s haul. I sometimes wonder if she really is my kid.
FossilFishy
Someone needs to eat that old rabbit.
It’s the right thing to do.
chigau
Heh, I offered to put it out of its misery earlier tonight. The SF’s response was to grab it back, give it a cuddle and a kiss before putting it tenderly away. I’m afraid foul play in the dead of night is now the only answer…
Speaking of the dead of night, time for bed. Night.
Sounds like a story for Broadway, or Opera. What a day. Wonder if he has come down yet.
I just found out that Jim McCann of The Dubliners died last month. This seems appropriate.
I’m watching Iron Man III.
I can feel my brain cells dying…
nice explosions though
57 minutes to go.
I won’t make it without another beer.
Ben Kingsley is awesome
“Not the face!”
“I Am An Ac-tor!”
I was just informed,
“Your brain is not big enough to contain all the inconsistencies.”
ayup
chigau,
I watched Iron Man III last night too. Heh.
Agreed on Ben Kingsley. Agreed on the explosions.
Was that no AC/DC in an Iron Man movie? WTF?!
Pepper Potts getting powers was awesome. Iron Man just sort of casually “fixing her” in the end. WTF?!
Pepper had extremis and rocked that Iron Man glove. I hope the “fixing” bit was just stabilizing her powers, even though it sounded like getting rid of them.
Other than Pepper being awesome (when she wasn’t the damseled), yeah, pretty crappy.
Beatrice
Yeah. Belief not so much suspended as sent on a nice vacation far away from the movie.
disbelief
anteprepro #317:
Richard Dawkins has spread some insane horsesh!t on Twitter in the last couple of years, but this does seem like a fairly straightforward (if useless) show of human solidarity.
There may be some issue with Dawkins being part of the colonial elite in Kenya, but he was born there and spent his formative years there too.
polishsalami: I don’t disagree that that is the intent. But I do think it is open to interpretation and Dawkins and his fanboys dismissing that interpretation out of hand, and not caring how it is interpretting, outright scoffing at people who might think it is taking about culture instead of just evolutionary ancestral origin on the relevant continent, is just par for the fucking course for them.
anteprepro #371:
There are heaps of folks who will defend Dawkins no matter how badly he fucks up — it’s cult-like. But any day he doesn’t do any Rape Ranking is sort of a good day by his standards.
polishsalami: Disturbingly true. That should be added to his wikipedia page and/or to his biography.
I fully agree that the “we are all African” thing refers specifically to evolutionary ancestry. And it’s also completely vacuous as a show of solidarity because anyone with a few spare brain cells and a couple seconds to think about it understands that anti-black sentiment (and racism in general) has fuck all to do with Africa. “We are all African” is a platitude for making white people feel better about the status quo without having to engage with any of the actual issues.
Does this logic I used over here make sense? (fourth paragraph from the bottom).
It has to do with the way I see SJW get used and the natural consequences of it and I’ve been wanting to develop this idea more. Let me set this up.
SJW = Social. Justice. Warrior.
Supposedly this means a person supporting social justice in an extreme way, and/or supporting an illegitimate example of social justice.
The three words and the literal message of their combination is simply a person that “fights” for social justice in a metaphorical sense. A metaphor used all over our political culture. Everyone is fighting for something related to justice at a social level. At face value this term can cover anyone. A person hearing and seeing it used for the first time only has the literal meaning for a first impression.
Some SJW characteristics used by randzoid(1) and my paraphrasing of my own experience with the term:
*Hyper-reactionary
*Emotionally unstable
*Over-analytical
*Absurd
*Cannot bear criticism Ideas
*Sensitive to reality being inconsistent with arguments and thus uses mechanisms to protect beliefs
The SJW argument/belief characteristics.
*Trivial
*Irrational
*Illogical
Notice something? This is how political opponents often describe one another. Creationists often look like this and thought we were being unjust. You get descriptions like these by passionately politically active people all of the time. Including on the side that does not reflect reality. When it comes to pure political behavior and rhetoric independent of reality the sides are identical in the form of the emotional rules and presentation.
But like in the fight with creationists and Fox News’s “fair and balanced”, the sides are rarely equal when you get past the political behavior and emotional language. Often one side is simply a detriment to society as it takes actions based on beliefs.
This stuff is steeped in subjectivity, perspective and perception. There are people that are genuinely being honest and still utterly utterly wrong. So what would happen if both sides used this word as it is intended? All social justice becomes illegitimate and the status quo is maintained. The term SJW is poison to society and it must be dealt with. The easiest way for me is to refuse to care about it and be proud of it while trying to drag examples out of the people using it.
But that might not work for everyone. Thoughts?
(1) I get the impression that randzoid is legitimately confused by our reaction to them. I realize that this does not matter when it comes to activism, but it does have important implications if true. Like the fact that I’m going to take his characteristics as impersonal and that they believe the term has real objective use until I dishonest behavior.
I think you’re spot on Brony. The literal meaning of the term is completely beside the point. It’s understood to refer to a reactionary who defends people against purely imaginary slights. Much like any slur, its intent is to silence and shame, not to actually convey any meaning which tracks with reality.
@Seven of Mine 376
Interesting. You are correct overall about the literal meaning, but I added it because it’s actually relevant to me because of my non-literal language issues. I’m not actually bothered by it personally because I know what I’m doing with it, but I thought it would be worth mentioning.
The neutral meaning is what always sticks out at me loudest. That at least implies that different people with different exposure and ability in non-literal language may be somewhat impressionable by the the literal meaning. Things like how bills can get named things that sound innocent but contain awful things. But I guess that it’s not something that most people would pay attention to.
Sesame Street
sesame street
Sesame street
sesame Street
I made a whiny comment and I’ll hate it forever.
So I’ll sit on this corner sipping my grog while muttering Katie Cruel, because I suppose this is the mature thing to do.
Or maybe sleep. Sleep sounds tempting.
It’s late
Brony @ 377
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be dismissive of the importance of the literal meaning to you. It certainly is worth mentioning how the way the term is used works to poison the entire concept of fighting for social justice.
re: ranzoid,
He has a long history here of being more or less completely incoherent. I wouldn’t file him under the heading of your garden variety MRA but he’s still full of all kinds of FUBAR ideas about pretty much everything he attempts to opine on.
@Seven of Mine 382
It’s funny but this ended up being one of those things where I am different, and I’m honestly not offended. But I mentioned it out of a sense of obligation. The balance is that you are pragmatically correct and so your modification of what I wrote is appropriate. A person’s tendency to be literal or interpret literally is probably a factor, but not one that the average person would be worrying about.*
I’m often very aware of the difference between the analytical and the intuitive because of the range of things I have to pay attention to. It’s like I had the analytical signal pop up and it said “I think this is one of those things that someone else called “ablism””. One part of my intuitive side said “I don’t care, I don’t want to argue about it and it’s strategically sound to not worry about it”. Then another part of my intuitive side said “You need to at least mention it, it matters in a larger context”. Then every one grumbled and went back to work.
That’s all interesting all by itself because it suggests that I have some privilege with respect to others with mental illness and maybe even tourette syndrome. Social OCDs are sort of like annoying advisers in my head.
*I still believe that a first impression with the literal meaning of an unfamiliar three word term might actually be relevant in terms of cognitive bias issues, but that’s an analysis for the future. It has to do with how the words are mostly used in a political context, and how that relates to fitting those meanings into one’s experience of “social justice” and warrior when one encounters the term “social justice warrior”.
Yet more police shenanigans…
I am similarly and continually appalled by the blatant racist crimes committed by America’s law enforcement, but I have nothing to add that has not already been said. Here is something else to present to the Horde, if you please:
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2015/04/06/science-denial-is-not-just-conservative-or-liberal-its-bipartisan?int=998208
“There are important lessons in this. Science is not a collection of facts to be memorized but a rational process for drawing conclusions about the empirical world. In this way, it is different from – but can co-exist with – religion, which relies on faith. ”
Any responses to that self-contradictory clap-trap? Thanks for your time.
Sometimes it is hard to remember the 3-post rule. Especially when someone like lorn engages in apologetics for the Ferguson PD.
Tony!
I
thinkfeel it’s more of a guideline than a rule.and it’s really meant for new commenters.
lorn ain’t new
I have completed my sixth decade.
What should I do now?
I know.
I’ll do the dishes and then go to bed.
@ Tony!
That is FAR from lorn’s first post at Pharyngula. The rule isn’t 3 posts per thread is it?
Last year, a Connecticut philosophy professor made some pretty nasty comments on the people of Gaza (‘rabid dogs’ who need to be kept in a cage). Some students discovered it a few weeks ago, and now the professor has taken medical leave. This has upset Jerry Coyne:
Yeah, just like NYT: these people are rabid dogs, those people need to be caged like wild animals etc.
Luckily, reader “muffy” has worked out who the real professorial villain is:
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/04/08/connecticut-professor-hounded-after-pro-israel-facebook-post-forced-to-take-medical-leave-while-his-university-frantically-engages-in-soothing-hurt-feelings/#comment-1172509
happy decade completion, chigau
@ chigau
London Bridge is Falling Down.
@ dõki
Welcome back to the fold.
@ polishsalami
Apartheid Bantustan in the Middle East. Another stain on humanity.
polishsalami, #391
That’s interesting. I like how he calls the professor’s comments “pro-Israel” and not horribly demeaning racism against an oppressed people like they truly were.
It’s like saying “pro-life” when you mean “anti-choice”.
dõki
Thank you.
theophontes
Your technique is improving!
@ chigau
I smashed the thing to pieces!
(On the other hand,as you suggest, the pieces are getting larger.)
From polishsalami’s link, this is a fascinating exchange:
colnago sez:
And then in response to another comment, sez:
And person he is talking to sez:
Apparently it is okay to badmouth Dawkins when they do it (?)
Also: From polishsalami’s link, this is a fascinating exchange:
colnago sez:
And then in response to another comment, sez:
And person he is talking to sez:
Apparently it is okay to badmouth Dawkins when they do it (?)
Also: https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/?s=Dawkins
Last posts about Dawkins were in September and November.
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/?s=Harris
Last post about Harris was October.
Also also: colnago80 in action on Pharyngula
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2014/07/20/no-more-us-support-for-israel/
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2014/11/20/do-the-right-thing-temple/
Believe colnago was also considered a persistent troll over at Mano Singham’s.
Well that was a weird type of double post.
@ anteprepro
Indeed.
FUCK THAT NOISE!
(I hope I have stated that with a complete and utter lack of nuance. Thank you.)
@ anteprepro
That’s not badmouthing Dawkins, though. It’s basically blaming Twitter and casting Dawkins as the venerable old man about whom the worst that can be said is that he’s a little out of touch with internet culture.
Seven of Mine: That’s what it attempts to do, deflect the blame. What it actually does is cast Dawkins as feeble and incompetent old man, lacking stamina to debate, lacking self-awareness and adaptability, unable to learn how to use new technology and mediums. Oh, they obviously don’t mean to do so. They diminish the importance of communicating on the internet, and dismiss the importance of the debates that he steps into. They want to blame everything but Dawkins. But they way they frame it, they are accidentally insulting Dawkins by implication. Their apologetics for him accidentally portray him in a new and yet not necessarily more positive light. As apologetics often do.
Daz @ 384 Jesus Grasshopping Christ, that’s horrific.
Seven of Mine @390:
As chigau pointed out it’s probably not a rule so much as a helpful suggestion (though I initially thought it was a rule-should have checked the commenting policy first). One that I think is reasonable to keep in mind. Not sure about if it is per thread though.
Michael Nugent’s word choice shows us whose support he’s gunning for. Quoting from Friendly Atheist’s reproduction of his arguments, “We would like people to endorse the importance of ethical standards of reporting when blogging.”
Ethical Standards of Reporting.
Sound familiar?
Over in the Sad Puppies thread, Brony said this:
I found myself having the same knee-jerk reaction that I often do when learning that someone likes something that I don’t: “Yuck! How could you like that. It’s so gross.”
But I’ve been slowly training myself to stop and recognize that I’m doing this and remind myself that my response is predicated on the false idea that others share my tastes. My knee-jerk reaction is self-centered, without regard for the preferences of others.
Tony
To be honest, if you’d said summat like ‘Eww, tripe! How can you eat that?’ (very much my own reaction—my grandad used to eat the ‘orrible stuff fried *shudder*) I’d have assumed you meant it as banter, rather than as seriously judgmental.
Awww, It looks like AvFM could be in the middle of a meltdown.
@toiger, #405:
That is telling.
Of course, I never read MN (actually I did once, when linked, just to review the supposed-evidence of his supposed-jerkiness; it wasn’t the jerkiest thing he’s said to have written, but it was enough for me to credit future reports without bothering to click through). So I wouldn’t have caught it without you, and it’s not particularly important to me who reads or doesn’t read the blog of some guy I don’t know who lives in Ireland.
Still and all, it’s a good catch. It’s the kind of thing that lends a lot of credence to the idea that he’s got a tendency towards obsessive denigration of particular favorite targets, given that an occasional gamergater (the audience he’s clearly courting with that rhetoric) has also demonstrated that tendency.
My teeth are …fragile…
but
I will try anything
if you grind it
and provide the hot sauce
Right wing watch.
Chigau,
Happy decade completion. Hope there was rum.
Oops! Missed that.
Belated happies to you, Chigau!
Belated thank yous.
Crip Dyke, thanks for your offer from the I-haven’t-had-this-much-fun thread to bring it to the T-dome, but the info provided over there was enough to jog my memory. I don’t have any further questions/comments (but would still be interested in reading a post from you if you’re working on one). Thanks.
@LicoriceAllsort:
My laptop battery doesn’t work, so when my my mac mag-power chord gets jiggled, my computer instantly shuts down.
That happened and cost me the long comment I had going. Since I’d prefer not to recreate it anyway, I’ll let it go now that you remember.
Thanks for the note.
DAREDEVIL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
From what I hear, he’s the man without fear.
from what I see 5 minutes in, he’s kicking sex-trafficker ass!
Do i need to live-blog this?
CD:
You do know that all 13 episodes are available, right? Are you prepared to live-blog for that long?
Crip Dyke,
Uuuugh, that’s the worst. I appreciate the effort, anyhow.
Does a Koch shit on the poor?
CD:
I was eating food when I read that response. You very nearly made me spit out my hot dog…
leave it alone people…
By all means, I’d love to read your live-blogging. I can’t watch the show bc I deactivated my Netflix account and haven’t yet reactivated it (I planned to this week, but rent ate up all my extra $$).
tony!, check your e-mail
The local Symphony Orchestra is doing a concert of the music of Led Zeppelin.
Think I should go?
Crip Dyke,
Hah. That’s great!
Anybody want to chew on some slymetrolls? Ashley M has an infestation tonight…
Testing…
Must be one o’ them there strange glitches then; I’m in moderation on another thread. Ho-hum.
Cecil Adams says:
I snorted.
Daz
Well, you could make a conspiracy theory out of this…
Giliell @431:
We could even call it ‘Wilfording’.
I’ve been Wilfordimated
And so this song-trail entered my head…
Cradle Of Filth
The Coasters
The Toy Dolls
Sid King & The Five Strings
And there I seem to have reached a dead-end.
Oh bugger, I meant to put Nat King Cole between the Coasters and the Toy Dolls.
I made the following comment on the WEIT post polishsalami linked to@391. Very likely my last there!
NIc Gotts
Did your comment there go into moderation? It’s not showing on the page as of now.
Oops. ‘Nick.’ My apologies.
I stumbled across this video about something that Lionhead Studios got into hotwater over, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfs-Nx1Ngl0
Is she right? is she wrong? Is it a double standard for the internet media to single out only one of the two pictures and scream about sexism in a very tongue-in-cheek advertisement that uses silly puns?
Ranzoid
A warning.
When PZ says that you should not comment in any other thread, it means he will ban you if you do.
—
Your linked video is 45 minutes long.
I ain’t watching it.
Ranzoid, it’s transparent that you are fishing for people to troll.
In the unlikely case that you seriously want information, maybe the following link will be useful to you:
https://proxy.freethought.online/carrier/archives/3128
It will probably take you in the ballpark of 45 minutes to read it, and the material it links to. I’ll also leave it up to you to judge whether this link is relevant to your inquiry: your post is unclear, so I’m only guessing here, and I’m not going to bother checking your video.
Is your time so valuable on a Sunday afternoon that you can’t watch even part of it? Why even bother responding?
The lack of self-awareness, it’s amazing. Having the tortoise as an avatar on Twitter is kind of funny, since people make all kinds of assumptions.
What was I thinking? I must be obsessed in my ceaseless quest to drag Dawkins & Harris down! No wonder Atheist Ireland can’t get anything done.
To let you know you are likely a troll who is to be ignored and/or laughed at. DUH.
It may be not so much that your quest is ceaseless as that the sting of your harsh words has a very, very long half-life (as stings go).
How is it trolling to ask questions that i preserve to be legitimate? how is it trolling to be the contrarian if only to step back and look at the movement to find anything that may be wrong with it? What makes Liana Kenzer wrong? I only just started reading Richard Carrier article so if the answer is in there let me find it.
Ranzoid, who objected to the first tweet? What did they say about it? Was there actually any screaming? Can you honestly say what the fuck you’re on about and why anyone here should care?
Because you have stupid concerns and opinions. Who gives a shit about your questions, if they are nothing but JAQing off? You past behavior suggest strongly that is the case.
If some actual real people have said something wrong, then point out what they said wrong, and why it’s wrong.
Using some obscure media incident that no one has heard about to evaluate an abstract unspecified “the movement” is backwards. It looks like an intentional attempt to make a chaotic dispute directed at people here that has nothing to do with anyone here.
It doesn’t make any sense. It sticks out like a sore thumb.
whoops, blockqoute fail.
If you would of bother to watch the first ten minutes of the video and read the Gamespot post you would know that Lionhead deleted the tweet, along with all comment with it, as far as i can tell it isn’t in a cache anywhere. As to what the fuck I’m going on about, it’s this. the industry that is my, and my others, primary form of entertainment is being torn apart. Companies are walking on egg shells so they’re content won’t offended anyone. Well guess what, you don’t have a right not to be offended! I’m also seeing a movement that is being run by absolutist and group thinkers, where any kind decent, any of deviation from the narrative is not at all welcome, there is no absolutely no room for any other kind of conclusion. When you are rigid you beliefs you became fragile, one good hard smack and you will shatter like cheap glass. Sex-Positive Feminist like Liana Kerzner is trying to find the middle ground that both sides can agree on, and what does she get? she gets doxt, she gets harassed, she gets threaten. all because she is a centralist
and of course i use the wrong “there/they’re/their”
I did already figure out that they deleted two tweets. The first one, which drew some kind of criticism from somebody, followed by another (who knows how much later) that was presumably meant to be their dumbass response to that. According to you, there was “screaming” of some sort, but unfortunately any evidence you might have had of that is gone. Probably, you’re just making that up though, since you also don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.
I think the gaming industry is doing just fine and isn’t being torn apart, because there is no evidence of anything remotely like that. Perhaps you are offended by the fact that some people in the industry have some sense of decency, but like me, you also don’t have a right not to be offended. Since nobody here has anything to do with any of this shit, I don’t know what the point is of whining at us about it.
Did you salt that question? Dehydrate it?
Oh, I know, it was something you smoked.
Ranzoid, #452
Elaborate on both of those statements.
Razoid, since you are proven liar and bullshitter, CITATION NEEDED. No citation, claim dismissed as fuckwittery.
I find it sad that at the same time that Ranzoid is banging on about tone and that Nugent and his affiliated organizations are going after PZ for (ostensibly) his tone, George R. R. Martin is Not-a-Blogging his support for tone arguments in connection with the Sad Puppy fiasco; see http://grrm.livejournal.com/417600.html. I would like to like George, but if he’s going to come down on the side of pearl-clutching and fainting couches on issues related to social justice, he’s lost some of my respect.
Testing.
What happens when the unstoppable idiocy of the Chinese patriarchy collides with global feminism?
We may well find out soon enough: http://chinachange.org/2015/04/12/detention-of-five-chinese-feminist-activists-at-the-juncture-of-beijing20-an-interview-with-professor-wang-zheng/
.
On twitter: #FreeBeijing20Five #FreeTheFive
.
(Methinks the repressive CCP juggernaut is about to hit a really big rock.)
It did; I hadn’t noticed before. So, very unlikely it will ever appear.
I’m starting to wonder about melanie’s “neocon” posts in response to every topic.
Saad, me too. As if everything bad must be tied to one cause. Makes a change from the ‘blame everything on religion’ thing, I suppose, but it’s the same mindset.
Nick Gotts #461:
Here’s how that comment should have been worded —-
“While I too am saddened that this courageous defender of Israel has been hounded by the politically correct Thought Police, most of whom are no doubt inspired by anti-Semitism, I can’t agree entirely with this post.
Even though much of what you’ve said is true, I do have a minor quibble however with the wording of that Facebook post, in that Pressin, no doubt absent-mindedly and with no intent of malice on his part, wrote “Gaza” when he should have typed “Hamas”. I just hope that this fine individual can recover from this savaging from these sociopathic SJW types.”
Those ‘skimwords’ adverts, where commenters’ words are being turned automatically into links for amazon, ebay and the like…
If you have the Stylish add-on for Firefox, or similar, this will differentiate them from intentional links made by the commenter:
@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);@-moz-document url-prefix(https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/) {
a.skimwords-link {
color:green !important
}
}
Saad:
I called her out on that on some thread a day or so ago, I can’t remember which one. I was pretty mild, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I got a “you neocon!” response. Definitely one note, well, no, two. There’s the white supremacist thing also, but it’s behind the ever present neocon.
Caine
Here
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2015/04/10/secular-coalition-for-america-global-secular-council-secular-policy-institute/comment-page-1/#comment-931734
melanie never returned
Thanks, Chigau.
Is it just me, or does the over-use of “neocon” in melanie’s posts make it stop even sounding like a word?
An amazing discount!
Daz, #470
Just my two cents.
Is two cents like common cents?
Google results for site:freethoughtblogs.com “melanie says” neocon
7 threads matching so far:
Pharyngula:
• April 3, Fatwah envy, again;
• April 6, We don’t need another hero;
• April 9, We can only bear it because we don’t see it;
• April 10, Secular Coalition for America → Global Secular Council → Secular Policy Institute;
• April 11, Blockbot argle bargle waaaah waaaah waaaaaaaah
Butterfly and Wheels:
• Sometimes one swears
• The words spoken
I also believe she may have tried to post on Ashley Miller’s blog, judging how Ashley described her on Twitter as possibly being a Poe. Whoever Melanie is, she needs a few new words in her vocabulary.
Hmm. I just noticed the bizarre necromancing of the Bill Maher, nevermore thread. It looks very odd:
• Back in February when the post was fresh, there was a prolix motormouth calling himself Michael Kimmitt spamming the thread.
• Now since early April, there’s a different prolix motormouth calling himself Christopher Jones, also spamming the thread.
Are these commenters one and the same? It looks like one has simply picked up whether the other had finished two months earlier.
Saad et al. – yes, I banned melanie a few days ago when her third comment sounded too suspiciously rote and…deliberately provocative. I think it’s a sock and I think I know which one.
Add to the list of threads, There go my plans for creating an atheist thinky-tank, just now. That suspiciously looks like they’re trying to seed Pharyngula with a very particular meme, that certain New Atheists are being impugned by PZ Myers’ commentariat as being ‘New White Supremacist Atheists’, and I can’t imagine why they’d want to do that… oh, wait, it’s only too easy to imagine a reason why someone might want to do that.
(Oh, and sorry for mangling the name of your blog Ophelia!)
She’s also suspiciously good at covering her tracks: she’s using a throw-away hotmail account and an anonymizer. She’s banned now, because as suggested above, I suspect someone is trying to game google here.
Kinda fun:
Stephen Hawking does Monty Python’s Galaxy Song.
Daz #478
*snorffle*
*wiping a tear*
re: melanie
What happens if I look in a mirror and say:
neocon
neocon
neocon
?
better yet
http://m.xkcd.com/555/
[China]
Well, after all that, it looks like Xi’s hoods have released all five women – at the last minute. Very much thanks to the international outcry. I have little doubt that if a lot of noise had not been made, they would still be arbitrarily (and illegally) detained.
There is a lot of fuss being made about rule of law here , but it is going to go nowhere while some animals consider themselves to be more equal than other animals.
theophontes
That about The Five is good.
too bad everything else sucks
PZ, that accusation by “melanie” over at Greta’s almost certainly looks like dirty pool, either for unfavourably gaming search engines, or to facilitate defamatory quote mining, so I have no objection to any of my comments being redacted as you see fit. (I’m particularly thinking of the capitalised words N_ W_ S_ A_ in 476.)
China Needs a Strong Leader Like Xi — but the Rule of Law Like Singapore
I am flabbergasted that the writer has managed to fit so much bullshit into a single article. How such a navel-gazing RWA shill became a professor is incredible.
(eg: The so-called “Eco-city” has been built on land trucked in from the mountains and dumped onto a wetland. i have seen the endless stream of belching behemoths myself. If ever there was an assault on the environment, it is this project. Reality simply does not enter this person’s narrative at any point.)
[China]
Despite Release, Feminists’ Case Shows China’s Hostility Toward Civic Action
“Sadly the five’s release does not indicate a change of view by the government towards civil society activists: It still treats them as criminals, rather than as partners in solving pressing social problems.”
“As long as nongovernmental organizations’ activism for advocating and implementing laws relating to gender equality or any other issue is defined as criminal, there will be no safe zone for feminists as well as activists working in other realms for social justice.”
Elton John and Michael Stipe, at the Grauniad, on the mistreatment of trans people in US prisons.
Well it looks like Cracked did the inevitable and published a pro-douchebag article: http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-reasons-being-offended-doesnt-matter-anymore/
The good will streak in terms of support of the social justice side of things had to come to an end eventually. Though it isn’t overt, the gamergater and other assorted asshats are certainly reveling in it. And I despise this fucking bullshit narrative of framing all criticism related to social justice issues as “offense”, painting it as emotional and irrational in order to dismiss it out of hand. Oh, sure, there might be emotion involved, but isn’t mere “offense” to object to this shit. I can’t speak for everyone, but I am rarely ever personally offended by the shit I criticize. The shit I criticize is offensive often, sure, but that is part of why I criticize and what I criticize about it. Dismissing that anyway is just saying that you have the right to be a douchebag immune to any resistance or rebuke. Which is ridiculous or outright evil.
And that’s to say nothing of the fact that the real offense and outrage is coming from people who are just pissed off about the GALL of those people actually criticizing them. The strongest and most outraged offense are those who are whining and shrieking about their free speech being impugned by people daring to say that they are being fucking jerks.
Seriously, what the fuck?
Cracked goes back and forth a bit on SJ related stuff, but most of it is forth rather than back, lately. I wouldn’t right Cracked off entirely.
Jacob Schmidt: Oh, I haven’t written them off and I know that they have quite a slew of writers, all with their own opinions, and some of them are naive and write something without really thinking the shit through. Nevertheless, it is disappointing. And I really really do hate the labeling shit as “taking offense” (and also the myopic overtones of “kids these days” doesn’t help either).
I purposefully avoided reading that “being offended” article because I could guess by the title I’d hate it. JF Sargent isn’t the worst writer there*, but he’s definitely not one of the better ones.
*I’m fairly certain that’d be Seanbaby.
Fair enough. I was pretty charitable on my reading of the piece, as Sargent is sort of the un-official Cracked SJW,* so I doubt he’s taking a swing at SJ to score political points (or maybe he is and my estimation of his political integrity is wrong).
I think some parts of it were good in principle, e.g. “We all need to call out shitty jokes, and then give the comedian room to recover and try something new, because we’re not Roman emperors dishing out sentences here.”
I like that strategy: call people out as needed, and let them recover. Pharyngula seems to mostly operate on that principle (isn’t that an actual commenting rule? We’re not supposed to bring up stuff from other threads so that people don’t always feel defensive?).
Then he veers into crap like this:
I mean, ok, sure. Offence is something felt, and feelings aren’t invalid. Except he’s clearly not talking about feelings. Previously, he was talking about calling people out, which is an action with consequences on others. It can be justified or unjustified. It’s a copout. It’s a fuzzy, bland statement that is virtually meaningless except to give credibility to the “offense is just feelings” narrative.
*On that note, it’s amusing watching the commentators on his threads. For a while there was a bemoaning of “Oh, no, not another Sargent social justice piece. I bet he even reads Jezebel!”
Am I correct in thinking that chocolate-covered almonds and rum are covering some of the Basic Food Groups?
A few days ago I noticed a commenter called “melanie” was banned from this site for repetitively using the word ‘neocon’, amongst others, presumably as an attempt at Google bombing.
Lo and behold, a certain person from Ireland published this yesterday:
http://www.michaelnugent.com/2015/04/14/reliably-leftist-neocon/
Coincidence?
chigau
chocolate comes from coacoa beans. Bean are vegetable. Also sugar, which can be made from a variety of plants like , cane, beets, corn. Again, vegetables.
Almonds are nuts, rum, again, sugar cane.
Maybe you should add some cheese.
+++
Wow, fuck, I didn’t know that Madonna was disturbingly sexually predatory.
I’m currently reading a cultural studies text that deals with her (very interesting reading a late 1980’s analysis some 25 years later) for the methodology and concepts, but there’s this very disturbing quote from her (and the author doesn’t even notice):
She was in her late 20’s by then. That’s fucking creepy and predatory.
Vinho Verde , makes for an excellent salad.
.
@ polishsalami
What on earth, pray tell, is a “leftist neocon”?
(No, I don’t want to click on the linky.)
Much like a pointy circle, or a empty cupfull?
theophontes: That’s just how the title got truncated in the link.
The real title is “Is Atheist Ireland reliably leftist, or neocon, or neither?”
Thanks anteprepro.
(All really big words for something that boils down to a personal hobby. As answer, I’m going with “mu”.)
Coming from the person who thinks kidnapping, taxation, and imprisonment are violence (or forms of violence), this comment is rich!
I don’t see the connection Tony!.