Luke.stirling

How those who argue that GONE GIRL is sexist are totally missing the point.

Post bath.

Drumroll please!

QVC lady: Isn't the moon a star?

Isaac Mizrahi: No, the moon is a planet, darling.

A recent email hoped that Muslims will 'behead you one day' so that 'we will never have to read your trash again.' Read the rest

I've written many times about Kim Stanley Robinson's 1990 novel Pacific Edge, a utopian story about a world where corporate growth has been checked and people have found a way to live together wihtout the need for extreme haves and have-nots, and without the imperative to destroy the world to enrich the few. Now it's available as a DRM-free audiobook (download, MP3 CD). Read the rest

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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by uaiHebert

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Excerpts from a thought-provoking TomDispatch essay by Ann Jones reposted at Salon:

Americans who live abroad... often face hard questions about our country from people we live among. Europeans, Asians, and Africans ask us to explain everything that baffles them about the increasingly odd and troubling conduct of the United States.  Polite people, normally reluctant to risk offending a guest, complain that America’s trigger-happiness, cutthroat free-marketeering, and “exceptionality” have gone on for too long to be considered just an adolescent phase...

Then recently, I traveled back to the “homeland.”  It struck me there that most Americans have no idea just how strange we now seem to much of the world...

At the absolute top of the list: “Why would anyone oppose national health care?” European and other industrialized countries have had some form of national health care since the 1930s or 1940s, Germany since 1880.  Some versions, as in France and Great Britain, have devolved into two-tier public and private systems.  Yet even the privileged who pay for a faster track would not begrudge their fellow citizens government-funded comprehensive health care...

In Norway, where I live, all citizens also have an equal right to education (state subsidized preschool from age one, and free schools from age six through specialty training or university education and beyond), unemployment benefits, job-placement and paid retraining services, paid parental leave, old age pensions, and more.  These benefits are not merely an emergency “safety net”; that is, charitable payments grudgingly bestowed upon the needy.  They are universal: equally available to all citizens as human rights...

In all the Nordic countries, there is broad general agreement across the political spectrum that only when people’s basic needs are met — when they can cease to worry about their jobs, their incomes, their housing, their transportation, their health care, their kids’ education, and their aging parents — only then can they be free to do as they like...

Other things I’ve had to answer for include:

• Why can’t you Americans stop interfering with women’s health care?
• Why can’t you understand science?
• How can you still be so blind to the reality of climate change?
• How can you speak of the rule of law when your presidents break international laws to make war whenever they want?
• How can you hand over the power to blow up the planet to one lone, ordinary man?
• How can you throw away the Geneva Conventions and your principles to advocate torture?
• Why do you Americans like guns so much?  Why do you kill each other at such a rate?

They’ve watched the United States unravel its flimsy safety net, fail to replace its decaying infrastructure, disempower most of its organized labor, diminish its schools, bring its national legislature to a standstill, and create the greatest degree of economic and social inequality in almost a century. They understand why Americans, who have ever less personal security and next to no social welfare system, are becoming more anxious and fearful...

What baffles so many of them, though, is how ordinary Americans in startling numbers have been persuaded to dislike “big government” and yet support its new representatives, bought and paid for by the rich.

There's more at the link.

Posted for my expat cousin Karl in Barcelona, who undoubtedly has to answer the same questions.

Now lets go down the pub and spook the barmaid.

Why not become a Patron of the Blasphemous Arts? Book shop here

"Since that glorious 'free speech' march, France has reportedly opened 54 criminal cases for “condoning terrorism,” writes Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept.

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A Florida county planned to allow religious groups to hand out Bibles in public schools. Atheists planned to take advantage of the required religious freedom to hand out secular material as well, and the school board was unfazed — yeah, go ahead, you can send out your tepid separation of church and state pamphlet while we give ‘em a whole book of lurid sex and violence and gay stonings and babies smashed against walls.

But then the satanists offered to send out Satanic Children’s Big Book of Activities, a little coloring book, and…

The school board folded. Bam. Down for the count. They canceled all the distributions of religious texts.

Satanism. It’s atheism’s secret weapon.

Hodor from Game of Thrones manifests a condition called Broca's aphasia. Here's a real-life example of a man who communicates only using the word "tono." Read the rest

My sister gave me the BoostPlus Near Field Audio speaker for Christmas. I was happy for the kind thought, but since I already have three or four Bluetooth speakers, I wasn't overly excited about getting another one.

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You already knew this, but now you know it even harder.

TYWKIWDBI will not be dwelling on the Charlie Hebdo tragedy, which is extensively covered elsewhere.  But I thought it worthwhile to excerpt a couple comments, first by Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept:

One defends the right to express repellent ideas while being able to condemn the idea itself. There is no remote contradiction in that: the ACLU vigorously defends the right of neo-Nazis to march through a community filled with Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Illinois, but does not join the march; they instead vocally condemn the targeted ideas as grotesque while defending the right to express them.

But this week’s defense of free speech rights was so spirited that it gave rise to a brand new principle: to defend free speech, one not only defends the right to disseminate the speech, but embraces the content of the speech itself...

Some of the cartoons published by Charlie Hebdo were not just offensive but bigoted, such as the one mocking the African sex slaves of Boko Haram as welfare queens. Others went far beyond maligning violence by extremists acting in the name of Islam, or even merely depicting Mohammed with degrading imagery, and instead contained a stream of mockery toward Muslims generally, who in France are not remotely powerful but are largely a marginalized and targeted immigrant population. ..

So it’s the opposite of surprising to see large numbers of westerners celebrating anti-Muslim cartoons - not on free speech grounds but due to approval of the content... Indeed, it is self-evident that if a writer who specialized in overtly anti-black or anti-Semitic screeds had been murdered for their ideas, there would be no widespread calls to republish their trash in “solidarity” with their free speech rights...

When we originally discussed publishing this article to make these points, our intention was to commission two or three cartoonists to create cartoons that mock Judaism and malign sacred figures to Jews the way Charlie Hebdo did to Muslims. But that idea was thwarted by the fact that no mainstream western cartoonist would dare put their name on an anti-Jewish cartoon, even if done for satire purposes, because doing so would instantly and permanently destroy their career, at least...

To see how true that is, consider the fact that Charlie Hebdo – the “equal opportunity” offenders and defenders of all types of offensive speech - fired one of their writers in 2009 for writing a sentence some said was anti-Semitic (the writer was then charged with a hate crime offense, and won a judgment against the magazine for unfair termination). Does that sound like “equal opportunity” offending?

Similar thoughts were echoed at The Dish (citing other sources):

Put simply, in France, racist and anti-Semitic speech, as well as historical revisionism regarding the Holocaust, is illegal, as is all speech that can be considered an incitement to hate. That is something that very few Americans understand—or approve of...

The last lawsuit to be filed against Charlie Hebdo in 2014 was declared ineligible only because Islam doesn’t qualify for the special legal regime that criminalizes blasphemy against Christianity and Judaism in the Alsace region. And the British Muslims in 1989 wanted authorities to invoke British blaspehemy laws, not the shar’ia, to sanction Salman Rushdie’s novel – but there too Islam did not qualify for protection...

It wasn’t that long ago that entertainers like the Dixie Chicks were being roundly denounced and taken off the air for having the temerity to question our country’s wars.

The counterargument is that this is comparing apples to oranges:

This is a completely false equivalency, and really gets to the heart of the cultural gap at play. To secularists like the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo, Mohammed is a man like any other, he is no prophet, he is aggrandized by a religion, and is therefore a legitimate target of satire, just like the the Pope, or Jesus, or even the Dalai Lama if one is so inclined. The Holocaust was systematic genocide based on religion/ethnicity.

I'll close the comments here, because there's so much discussion elsewhere (everywhere), but I'd suggest that those who expect to address the Charlie Hebdo event at cocktail parties or around office water-coolers should ponder the above in order to be prepared for the discussions.

Metal Cats is Alexandra Crockett's collection of brutal dudes and their cute fluffy cats. As we learned watching Metalocalypse, metal musicians love their cats.

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Being a TSA officer is a dream job for sadistic sociopaths, but for people who are able to sympathize, it's a nightmare. "I hated it from the beginning," writes former TSA officer Jason Edward Harrington, in an essay published in Politico Magazine. He recounts the daily shame of having to confiscate nail clippers from pilots (to prevent the pilots from using them to "hijack the very planes they were flying"), jars of homemade apple butter ("on the pretense that they could pose threats to national security") and a bottle of champagne from some Marines returning home from Afghanistan who wanted to share it with a young soldier who'd lost his legs to an I.E.D. Read the rest

carryonmy-assbutt:

theshadyslut:

owlcitymordred:

stagdoeandfawn:

catully:

brigwife:

latitudeoctopus:

brigwife:

wait you mean you don’t use the word ‘fortnight’ in america???

Wait what? Then what do they use?

they don’t have a word

what do you mean they don’t have a word what kind of uncivilised people are they??

the fuck is a fortnight

It’s a word for ‘two weeks’

We say “two weeks”

*thousands of cups of tea smash to the ground in shock*

majiinboo:

janemba:

zirbanchalib:

antfucker98:

myonteru:

just because you dont like being around black people doesnt makes you racist jfc

yeah it

yeah it really does

LMFAOOOOOOo

What do white people think racism is I need answers

calling them crackers 

fellow white people: feeling uncomfortable around black people is literally what racism is. really, you should walk into a waiting room, see a black person sitting there already, and want to chit chat with them (if you’re the kind of person who likes to make conversation — sometimes I am, I know, we’re weird). If you feel some other feelings — that’d be those years of learned racist bullshit kicking up. You can unlearn it! But first you’ve gotta admit it’s there.

Smooth. (comic by Lunarbaboon)

“On the internet, evidence doesn’t always matter — and now there’s evidence for that. A study published this week shows that men on the internet find it difficult to believe that sexism is a problem in scientific fields, even when its existence is demonstrated in studies.
 
“22 percent of the comments justified sexism in scientific fields”
 
To reach this conclusion, researchers looked at how internet commenters reacted to news of studies describing gender-based harassment and discrimination against women in science, reports The Washington Post. Their investigation, published in Psychology of Women Quarterly, helped confirm what most women on the internet already know: male commenters don’t like to confront their male privilege. For some men it’s easier to either deny its existence, claim that sexism is actually directed toward men, or justify sexism with biological explanations.”

- Evidence of sexism in science isn’t enough to convince men on the internet that there’s a problem, study says | The Verge

gunterthetiel:

Things I can put on Gunter’s head pt. 9

“We have shifted from biological racism to cultural racism. Sixty years ago most people in America believed that Blacks were biologically inferior, made-by-God inferior. Today there is a cultural racism that says that Black parents are not giving their children the right values, and it’s often offered as the reason for why Blacks are not doing as well as other groups. It associates ‘Black’ with a range of negative assumptions that are so deeply embedded in American culture that people who hold them are not bad people. They’re just ‘good Americans,’ because it’s what American society has taught them. Researchers put together a database of ten million words from books, newspapers, magazine articles, various documents. They found that when the word ‘Black’ occurs, what tends to co-occur is not only ‘poor’ and ‘violent’ and ‘religious’ but also ‘lazy’ and ‘cheerful’ and ‘dangerous.’ Being violent, lazy and dangerous, other research shows, are widely held stereotypes about Blacks. All racial ethnic minority groups are stereotyped more negatively than Whites, with Blacks viewed the worst, followed by Latinos, who were viewed twice as negatively as Asians. Southern Whites are viewed more negatively than Whites in general. There is a hierarchy.”

- Dr. David Williams, “No, You’re Not Imagining It,” from the September 2013 issue of Essence (via digital-femme)

pangeachasmata:

unexplained-events:

Cat

Cougar breaks into man’s house and….destroys his blinds.

all cats is the same

the-unstoppable-juggernaut:

rnusicality:

fun statistics for adults!
“when I was a kid, I had no help with college tuition, I was hardworking and paid it all myself”
-Annual tuition for Yale, 1970: $2,550
-Annual tuition for Yale, 2014: $45,800
-Minimum Wage, 1970: $1.45
-Minimum Wage, 2014: $7.25
-Daily hours at minimum wage needed to pay for tuition in 1970: 4.8
-Daily hours at minimum wage needed to pay for tuition in 2014: 17.3