Saying something nasty and following it with “I’m just joking” is a form of verbal abuse that’s passive-aggressive. I.e: it’s semi-concealed aggression, intended to give the target pause as to whether or not they can successfully counter-attack.
Is this the right room for an argument?
It’s a technique that can be employed in a strategy of verbal abuse but succeeds if it’s fairly consistent, and only then against unsophisticated targets.
August 13 is International Left Handers’ Day and Rhiannon poked a corner of the Hive Mind and asked if it’d consider taking a look at handedness as a social justice issue. They’re doing a series of postings on the topic, which you should check out.
I lived for 13 years with a left handed person, and I recall it occasionally was a problem, but I admit I never thought about it much. I remember mostly complaints about 
finding decent scissors – stuff like that, so I replied to Rhiannon: “I’ve mostly worked in the software industry and I’d always thought that computing wasn’t so bad…”
This episode of “Ask the Strategic Genius” is about logistics and the 2nd Amendment: two things you typically will not find connected in public discourse. Time to cure that!
“Amateurs talk about tactics, professionals study logistics” – Napoleon Bonaparte*
I hate the olympics because of the corruption in the surrounding fol-de-rol, the pointless displays of silly excess, and the nationalism.
If you’re like most of us, you buy a variety of surfactant products: for your dishes, for your body, for your clothes – some of them are quite expensive. Most of them are made of the cheapest possible stuff. It’s not really hard to do better than the manufacturers do. It’s also fun to learn how to read the ingredients of soaps in hotels and stores – yeah, that “vegan” soap bar with the “sodium tallowate” in it? That’s beef fat.
If you want to cut to the chase and just read this article over at Jacobin, I encourage you to do so.
There are emoji-maker apps. Of course there are.
Back in the early 20th century, a remarkable woman got interested in crime. Though she was never a member of the police* she significantly improved police responses to crime-scenes.
Richard Feynman famously said that marketing was an inherently immoral job, because it consisted of selling something as being better than the marketer knows it to be. I tried that argument on our VP of Marketing, back in the day, and she said that “MarCom” – Marketing Communications – was OK. Well, that still leaves the rest of marketing on the hook.
As we discussed in my piece on butter packaging, marketing claims often do amount to lies – excuse me – “deliberate excursions from the truth.”
