Rob Beschizza explains where following the Persian tradition of tarof can end up.
Tarof is the Persian etiquette of deference, wherein one must both yield to others (you first!) and decline the offer (no, you!). One may not insist or accept until the end of the line–at least in this hilarious parody by Simon Garshasebi–so what happens when a circle forms?
Via Pharyngula I came across this article by Michael Harriot that looked at how oblivious people like Pete Buttigieg are when it comes to understanding the issues that black people face in this country.
“Kids need to see evidence that education is going to work for them,” Buttigieg explained whitely, when he was running for mayor in 2011. You’re motivated because you believe that at the end of your education, there is a reward; there’s a stable life; there’s a job. And there are a lot of kids—especially [in] the lower-income, minority neighborhoods, who literally just haven’t seen it work. There isn’t someone who they know personally who testifies to the value of education.”
…I want to be clear: Pete Buttigieg is a lying motherfucker.
This is not a misunderstanding. This is not a misstatement. Pete Buttigieg went to the best educational institutions America has to offer and he—more than anyone on the goddamned planet—knows that everything he just said is a baldfaced lie.
…Mayor Pete’s bullshittery is not just wrong, it is proof.
It proves men like him are more willing to perpetuate the fantastic narrative of negro neighborhoods needing more role models and briefcase-carriers than make the people in power stare into the sun and see the blinding light of racism. Get-along moderates would rather make shit up out of whole cloth than wade into the waters of reality. Pete Buttigieg doesn’t want to change anything. He just wants to be something.
Pyrex glass dishes have a reputation for being able to withstand extreme temperatures from the very hot to the very cold. Hence I was surprised when someone I know did something that many of us have done without incident. He took a hot Pyrex baking dish from the oven and laid it on top of the rods that surround the burners you find on gas top stoves that keep the pots slightly above the gas outlets for the flame. But this time, the dish shattered into fragments, sending shards in every direction. He was lucky that he did not suffer any cuts from the high-speed bits of glass.
It turns out that this can happen on occasion and this video shows what can happen when a drop of cold water is placed in a hot Pyrex container.
Computer generated graphics now enable some pretty amazing visual effects in films. In particular, it has been able to make animations look extremely lifelike. But interestingly, when it comes to depicting humans, there turns out to be a problematic element. As the animation gets more and more lifelike, audiences respond positively, getting more empathetic and engaged, but once it gets pretty close but is still not perfect, audience approval drops sharply and people tend to see the humans as creepy until the animation reaches close to 100% of being lifelike, as shown in this graph. The dip is known as the ‘uncanny valley’.
Putting people in solitary confinement for extended periods is recognized to be a form of torture. So what does it say about us that in the state of Illinois, school districts have been using this form of punishment as disciplinary measures for decades, even with very young children, though giving them benign-sounding euphemisms. ProPublica investigated these practices and issued a damning report.
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Neoconservative warmonger Bill Kristol is wrong about pretty much everything and this tweet from him should give the rest of us a good idea of whom NOT to support in the Democratic primary.
I very much prefer Biden or Buttigieg or Bloomberg or Klobuchar to Warren. But the idea that one term of Warren would pose anything like the threat of a second term for Trump to the basic norms and institutions of our liberal democracy, including to free markets, is laughable.
— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) November 25, 2019
So that rules out Biden, Buttigieg, Bloomber, and Klobuchar. The fact that he gives a lukewarm endorsement of Elizabeth Warren should make her pause to try and understand where she is going wrong.
I think it is safe to say that, by omission, Kristol hates Bernie Sanders and that should be taken as a very good sign for Bernie.
Tom Tomorrow has some thoughts on this.
These two Pearls Before Swine cartoon strips caught my attention because they were slightly more extreme representations of me.
I too do not find large parties very congenial and sometimes end up wishing I could find a good book instead.
While I am not as bad as Rat, it is the case that I can find social interactions, even with people I really like, exhausting. The difference is that after a couple of hours, I tend to fade out somewhat and seek to leave, rather than becoming hostile.
The internet is under siege, its initial promise of providing free global access to everyone on a level playing field under attack from governments, big businesses, and secretive, anti-democratic forces. Tim Berners-Lee, one of the key creators of the World Wide Web, has been involved in a consortium that has come up with proposed measures to save the internet in a document titled Contract for the Web.
He discusses the plan in an interview.
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I saw this film yesterday that is based on real events and found it to be very gripping. It stars Adam Driver as Daniel Jones, a member of Senator Diane Feinstein’s staff, who was assigned by her to investigate reports of torture by the CIA. Despite the fact that the CIA refused to cooperate with him, over five years he and a small team painstakingly built up a dossier of all the illegal and immoral actions and war crimes that were committed under the justification of ‘keeping us safe’. They produced a comprehensive torture report that the CIA and the White House of Bush and Obama tried to avoid releasing.
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James Baillie, a professor of philosophy, looks at why people struggle so much to accept the fact of death even though they know it is inevitable. He starts by looking at a passage from The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) by Leo Tolstoy.
The syllogism he had learned from Kiesewetter’s logic – ‘Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal’ – had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but by no means to himself. That man Caius represented man in the abstract, and so the reasoning was perfectly sound; but he was not Caius, not an abstract man; he had always been a creature quite, quite distinct from all the others.
Baillie says this cognitive split described by Tolstoy arises because we see the world from both an ‘outside view’ and an ‘inside view’.
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