And make sure that you state that some female you know is offended. Because you wouldn't want to imply that you're some kind of pervert who gets offended when women are insulted.
This is cute—the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) thinks Donald Trump might cause their candidates problems with female voters if he wins the GOP nomination. Here’s part of a leaked memo from NRSC executive director Ward Baker:
“Donald Trump has said some wacky things about women,” Baker wrote in the Sept. 22 memo, first reported by the Washington Post and independently obtained by Bloomberg Politics (read the full memo here). “Candidates shouldn’t go near this ground other than to say that your wife or daughter is offended by what Trump said. We do not want to reengage the 'war on women' fight so isolate Trump on this issue by offering a quick condemnation of it.”
Yeah, just “isolate” Trump and all his "wacky" comments. But go ahead and press on with that sustained GOP-led smear campaign against Planned Parenthood and all those Congressional investigations and stuff. Take that defunding vote, for sure. That’s totally a winner with the ladies.
No, Mx. Bond, I expect you to... well, actually, I don't know what I expected you to do.
Designers Vedat Ulgen and Deger Ceniz have juxtaposed the concept of modernity with nature, the sleek with the rough, and transparent with opaque in their novel lucite chair that houses a large, prickly barrel cactus sitting directly under the seat portion.
The cast acrylic planes make the chair completely transparent. The geometric shape gives the chair its rigid structure. The initial fear of sitting on top of the cactus will keep them on the edge of their seat. Comes with 10 inch Barrel Cactus.
This week, two important publications set the standard for embracing gender-neutral language in the media.
First, the New York Times used the gender-neutral honorific “Mx.” to refer to an interviewee in a story, a big deal particularly because the Times said as recently as June that it wouldn’t be using Mx. anytime soon. Next, the Washington Post announced that writers can use the singular “they” when needed.
From the Washington Post memo:
It is usually possible, and preferable, to recast sentences as plural to avoid both the sexist and antiquated universal default to male pronouns and the awkward use of he or she, him or her and the like: All students must complete their homework, not Each student must complete his or her homework.
When such a rewrite is impossible or hopelessly awkward, however, what is known as “the singular they” is permissible: Everyone has their own opinion about the traditional grammar rule. The singular they is also useful in references to people who identify as neither male nor female.
Millions of people read these publications every day, and they’re considered leaders in the industry. This is a really big deal.
Restating this, because it’s awesome and can apply to much more than games: As a woman who games, you can never let the opinions of insecure men dictate your hobbies.
I'm gonna be honest. Super ButtButt's little bouncing balcony adventure scared me enough that I've actually purchased orange collars for both the girls, in the hope that this concept takes off. Not that the boyfriend's cat EVER wants to have ANYTHING to do with outside EVER again.
Matthew Inman from The Oatmeal has started the Kitty Convict Project, which aims to get all indoor cats to wear orange. His reasoning is that by wearing ‘convict’ orange, the public will know the cat is lost and needs help getting home. Check out his entertaining graphics for more info.
leverage season 1: let’s help a hardworking, honest young patriotic veteran w/ a disability who just wants to get back to the workforce
leverage season 3: let’s steal a federal witness and set him up for murder, fuck the courts. let’s steal the department of defense it’s not treason as long as we give it back probably.
leverage finale: lets fucking find out every company who got a government bailout they didn’t earn after the crash and DESTROY THEM. destroy the us banking system destroy the companies let’s take on interpol to do it goddammit
leverage if they’d gotten another season, presumably: lets travel back in time and kidnap george washington and then steal the declaration of independence and erase all eagles from existence by stealing the first ever eagle
leverage the movie: Donald Trump is president. Let’s go steal America.
RIGHT. Like anything keeps cats away from something they want.
If your pets tend to drink from places other than their water bowl, then you need to do a little extra work when setting up your Christmas tree. Chemicals from the fertilizers used on the tree can transfer to the water in the stand, and you don’t want your pets drinking that.
I know Tumblr will probably hate me for saying this, but not reading books written by male authors purely because they’re male is sexist as fuck.
I never take this into account. I do read a lot of books by white male authors, but that’s not planned or anything; I just read the books that sound good to me. The author’s gender or ethnicity doesn’t really factor into my wanting of reading the book.
Exactly. I judge a book purely by its content.
No, you don’t. You operate within the same system as the rest of us, which is the one that packs the shelves with books by men, codes those books as being better when written by men, skews best books list to favor male writers, and disproportionately gives top writing awards and commercial success to white male writers. Female writers’ success is often restricted to YA or romance, both genres considered to be inferior to literary fiction, where male writers dominate. Female and minority writers are told their experience is not universal and will only be appreciated by other women and minorities, while men are considered the default experience and told everyone can appreciate their writing. All of that means you don’t judge a book solely by its content. You judge it through the same prism as the rest of us, and it’s a prism that happens to bring men into focus and blur out women and minorities.
Upholding a system that puts men above women is sexist. Choosing to opt out of that system is not.
I think something that some folks miss about Jessica Jones is that Kilgrave’s casting is quite deliberate.
We’re all: “Oh no, Kilgrave’s horrible, but David Tennant is cute - I feel conflicted!”
Well, that’s the point.
Kilgrave’s power is basically white male privilege dialed up to eleven.
What more perfect face to put on it than a dapper, upper-middle-class nerd?
You don’t always get obvious warning signs. It’d be convenient if every entitled misogynist sported an ill-fitting fedora and a scraggly neckbeard - but sometimes, the guys that popular media tells us are the nice, safe ones are exactly the ones you need to watch out for.
“[A]lthough there are sex/gender differences in brain structure, brains do not fall into two classes, one typical of males and the other typical of females, nor are they aligned along a ‘male brain–female brain’ continuum.”
As we join in mourning the shooting victims in Colorado Springs, we are more determined than ever to ensure that our doors stay open, no matter what. If you believe in lifesaving health care for all, support your local Planned Parenthood this Giving Tuesday>>
For years—despite what she wrote in her autobiography—the refusal of Rosa Parks to follow the orders of a driver on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus and change seats to accommodate a white passenger was mischaracterized as a spontaneous protest undertaken because she was tired. When she died 10 years ago, at age 92, that myth got debunked in a few places. Today, on the 60th anniversary of her protest, Justin Taylor at The Washington Postadded a bit to that debunkery, taking on five myths related to the civil rights icon:
4. Rosa Parks refused to stand up because she was tired.
Parks sought to set the record straight: “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I was at the end of a working day. . . . No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” She later said she couldn’t have lived with herself if she had given in and stood up.
To attribute her action to fatigue would have pointed to weakness rather than to the source of her strength. She insisted that the power to love her enemies came from God: “God has always given me the strength to say what is right.”
In other words, she was not just a black woman who had had an extra bad day. She was a black woman fed up with Jim Crow laws forcing blacks to sit in the back of the bus, to use separate drinking fountains, restaurants, hotels, and to enter those establishments where they were allowed through the back door. And she was willing to take the risks that went with making public objections to segregation in one of the darker recesses of Dixie. People got killed for doing that. Because she was fed up, by the time she refused to move to another bus seat in late autumn, 1955, she had for years been part of a civil rights movement that was determined to break down racist barriers that made a mockery of the post-Civil War Amendments to the Constitution. As Aldon Morris wrote in his 1986 book Origins of the Civil Rights Movements:
[I]n the 1940s Mrs. Parks had refused several times to comply with segregation rules on the buses. In the early 1940s Mrs. Parks was ejected from a bus for failing to comply. The very same bus driver who ejected her that time was the one who had her arrested on December 1, 1955 … She began serving as secretary for the local NAACP in 1943 and still held that post when arrested in 1955 … In the early 1940s Mrs. Parks organized the local NAACP Youth Council … During the 1950s the youth in this organization attempted to borrow books from a white library. They also took rides and sat in the front seats of segregated buses, then returned to the Youth Council to discuss their acts of defiance with Mrs. Parks.
I’ve always admired people who can successfully navigate what I refer to as “Kafka’s Castle,” a term of dread for the many government and corporate agencies that have an inordinate amount of power over our permanent records, and that seem as inscrutable and chillingly absurd as the labyrinth the character K navigates in Kafka’s last allegorical novel. Even if you haven’t read The Castle, if you work for such an entity—or like all of us have regular dealings with the IRS, the healthcare and banking system, etc.—you’re well aware of the devilish incompetence that masquerades as due diligence and ties us all in knots. Why do multi-million and billion dollar agencies seem unable, or unwilling, to accomplish the simplest of tasks? Why do so many of us spend our lives in the real-life bureaucratic nightmares satirized in the The Office and Office Space?
One answer comes via Laurence J. Peter’s 1969 satire The Peter Principle—which offers the theory that managers and executives get promoted to the level of their incompetence—then, David Brent-like, go on to ruin their respective departments. The Harvard Business Review summed up disturbing recent research confirming and supplementing Peter’s insights into the narcissism, overconfidence, or actual sociopathy of many a government and business leader. But in addition to human failings, there’s another possible reason for bureaucratic disorder; the conspiracy-minded among us may be forgiven for assuming that in many cases, institutional incompetence is the result of deliberate sabotage from both above and below. The ridiculous inner workings of most organizations certainly make a lot more sense when viewed in the light of one set of instructions for “purposeful stupidity,” namely the once top-secret Simple Sabotage Field Manual, written in 1944 by the CIA’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
Now declassified and freely available on the CIA’s website, the manual the agency describes as “surprisingly relevant” was once distributed to OSS officers abroad to assist them in training “citizen-saboteurs” in occupied countries like Norway and France. Such people, writes Rebecca Onion at Slate, “might already be sabotaging materials, machinery, or operations of their own initiative,” but may have lacked the devious talent for sowing chaos that only an intelligence agency can properly master. Genuine laziness, arrogance, and mindlessness may surely be endemic. But the Field Manual asserts that “purposeful stupidity is contrary to human nature” and requires a particular set of skills. The citizen-saboteur “frequently needs pressure, stimulation or assurance, and information and suggestions regarding feasible methods of simple sabotage.”
You can read and download the full document here. To get a sense of just how “timeless”—according to the CIA itself—such instructions remain, see the abridged list below, courtesy of Business Insider. You will laugh ruefully, then maybe shudder a little as you recognize how much your own workplace, and many others, resemble the kind of dysfunctional mess the OSS meticulously planned during World War II.
Organizations and Conferences
Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.
When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committee as large as possible — never less than five.
Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
Managers
In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers.
Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw.
To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions.
Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.
Employees
Work slowly.
Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can.
Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment. Complain that these things are preventing you from doing your job right.
Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker.
