Luke.stirling

Clearly, for grooming.

Thank you, Ronald Reagan, for promoting the voodoo of trickle-down economics.

Sam Harris does it again, opening his yap and exposing his biases.

Liberals have really failed on the topic of theocracy. They’ll criticize white theocracy, they’ll criticize Christians. They’ll still get agitated over the abortion clinic bombing that happened in 1984. But when you want to talk about the treatment of women and homosexuals and free thinkers and public intellectuals in the Muslim world, I would argue that liberals have failed us.

Hell yes, I’m still agitated over any abortion clinic bombing. Shouldn’t we all be? I’m also agitated over female genital mutilation and shooting girls who want an education in Pakistan. I can be frustrated by all the onslaughts against modernity everywhere; I don’t treat it as a failure of liberalism that American women are fighting for their rights at home as a priority; I’m sure that almost all of them feel a sense of solidarity with women around the world, but in most cases they are far more limited in what they can do about Somalia than they are about taking action in their own back yard.

Libby Anne really rips into him for that stupid remark.

Violence against abortion clinics and abortion providers dates back to at least the 1980s and continues in the present. Eight doctors or clinic providers have been murdered, the last one only five years ago. In fact, the clinic that was bombed in the 1984 incident Harris mentions was bombed again in 2012—and completely gutted as a result. I hear of arson and death threats, and it shakes me. I’ve served as an escort at my local Planned Parenthood clinic. It can be very scary—for all involved. Women often have their license plate numbers recorded by anti-abortion protesters calling them “murderers,” and in some areas of the country doctors who perform abortions have to wear masks when entering clinics to protect their identities. Just recently a writer for the high-profile National Review called for hanging women who have had abortions.

Americans are facing a wave of oppression of women’s reproductive rights: there have been 230 restrictions enacted since 2011. The majority of abortion clinics in Texas have been shut down by entirely legal means, and Sam Harris wants to blame liberals for not doing enough to protect freethinkers in the Muslim world? The only way liberals have failed is in not being as obsessed with Islam as Harris…but since Harris isn’t a particularly good example of an individual with liberal ideals, you’ll have to forgive me if I say “so fucking what?”

I say we must fight the fights we can. It’s important to stand up for women’s freedom world-wide, but it’s futile and hypocritical if we can’t even do the same for women at home.

I think Libby Anne is right. Harris is using Islamic oppression as a pretext for dismissing serious concerns right here in the United States.

goose no like drone

First some tweets, and then some commentary.

There’s something both telling and sad about the sort of dude who literally thinks that a) impugning my masculinity is the worst possible thing they can say about me, b) that it’ll somehow lessen me if they do. On the former, meh. Given the ridiculous ideas that they have regarding masculinity, I’m happy not to meet their definition. On the latter, whatever. They’re idiots. I’m not inclined to care, outside of the opportunities it provides for pointing and laughing.

But I do think it’s useful to publicly mock their stupidity on such subjects, for the amusement and edification of others. I also think it’s particularly useful to mock their definition of masculinity and gender, and their baseline assertion that being male is the apotheosis of the human condition. It’s not; it’s merely one way to be. I’m okay with gender being more than binary; I’m okay with people having a gender other than mine; I’m okay with people shifting their idea of what their gender is over time. Because I don’t think one’s essential value is rooted in gender, and someone else’s gender is nearly always not my business anyway. I am for people being who they are, not who anyone else wants them to be, or demands them to be for their own selfish reasons. I’m for letting the world know that I think such a position is the most correct one to have. I’m for calling out people who try to make difficult for those who don’t conform to their own, usually bigoted, expectations.

Want to declare that because I don’t meet your pointless and stupid definition of “masculinity,” I should identify as another gender entirely? Awesome. I get to create a gender that doesn’t have your jackassedness riddling it front to back. The folks in my gender won’t be focused on being a “real man” or a “real woman” but on being “really me.” My gender will have all the best parties because we can do what we want, free of gender expectations! Because there are no gender expectations! My gender gets to love whoever they want! My gender gets to be whoever they want! My gender doesn’t care what you think my gender should be! My gender rocks. And it doesn’t need you, or care what you think of it.

If only it were as easy for people of every gender to be as free in theirs as I am in mine. Because of course that’s the thing: Even when these idiots declare me “not a real man,” it doesn’t change that I am always seen to be a “real man,” and that I get all the benefits that accrue to me for being biologically male, identifying as a man, and conforming to social standards for what both of those mean. The worst these dudes can do is be mean to me on the Internet. It doesn’t change anything about what I get from the world. And while I can mock them for it and proclaim the new Scalzi Gender in all its awesomeness, let’s just say that I know that it’s easy for me to do so, because in the end society has my back. Not everyone else gets to say the same. We need to be working on that.

sekahyyh:

cardsofclow:

decencybedamned:

HELLO FANFIC AUTHORS IT’S TIME FOR A VOCAB LESSON

• wanton: sexually immodest or promiscuous
• wonton: a type of dumpling commonly found in Chinese cuisines

YOUR CHARACTERS SHOULD NOT BE MOANING LIKE A CHINESE DUMPLING OKAY THANK YOU AND GOOD NIGHT

either way, things are sure gonna get

steamy

GET OUT

[@kevinfarzad]

Alex writes, "It features censorship, hangings, dissent and criticism, a whole bunch of state and church control, angry queens, sad Stationers, and, of course, our terrible culprit: the printing press." Read the rest

By John Atkinson of webcomic Wrong Hands.

The researchers suggest that autism may be rooted in an impaired ability to predict events and other people’s actions. From the perspective of the autistic child, the world appears to be a “magical” rather than an orderly place, because events seem to occur randomly and unpredictably. In this view, autism symptoms such as repetitive behavior, and an insistence on a highly structured environment, are coping strategies to help deal with this unpredictable world...

“At the moment, the treatments that have been developed are driven by the end symptoms. We’re suggesting that the deeper problem is a predictive impairment problem, so we should directly address that ability,” says Pawan Sinha, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and the lead author of a paper describing the hypothesis in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week...

This hypothesized deficit could produce several of the most common autism symptoms. For example, repetitive behaviors and insistence on rigid structure have been shown to soothe anxiety produced by unpredictability, even in individuals without autism. “These may be proactive attempts on the part of the person to try to impose some structure on an environment that otherwise seems chaotic,” Sinha says.

Impaired prediction skills would also help to explain why autistic children are often hypersensitive to sensory stimuli...

For the New York Times magazine’s fall Food issue, the publication treated six second graders from P.S. 295 in Brooklyn to dinner at Daniel, a fancy spot where a seven-course tasting menu goes for $220 a person. (more…)

Wendys is a popular restaurant chain that serves inexpensive ground beef sandwiches. Reportedly, all the employees know the catchy song in the official employee training video by heart and are known to sing it spontaneously as they go about their work. [via]

This bad.

Wallpaper Download

fanoffandom:

I actually applauded this post

rosannapansino:

Borg Cube Cake - Video [ LINK ]

Alan writes, "Why privacy matters' is Glenn Greenwald's talk to TED in which he makes the argument that we are not obligated to make ourselves harmless; rather, we need to be able to express ourselves unwatched."

I want one so bad my head hurts. Deep space rugs by Schönstaub. Read the rest

boyishdivision:

goddessofmusic:

elaran:

livelikedolphins:

unapolagetically:

a guide to some common and/or popular australian birbs by your friendly neighborhood australian 

emus always seemed more psychotic than stupid to me

DO NOT ENGAGE THIS BIRD

Anything from Australia will onyl be nice to you only if you have food

except the cassowary, you stay the fuck away from those demons

The pizza cake started off as a thought-experiment, entered into a competition -- but now it is a reality that you can prepare at home (but probably shouldn't).

(via Neatorama)

Let's Bike It/VK

In Latvia, as part of International Car Free Day, some cyclists went to a lot of trouble to tangibly demonstrate one huge difference between bikes and cars: the amount of space they take up on the road.

Let's Bike It/VK

These photos, which the European cycling group Let's Bike It posted to the social network Vk.com, show a group of bikers in Riga that strapped rickety car-sized constructions to their bikes to show how much space they'd take up if they were actually driving one.

Let's Bike It/VK

The implication here is pretty obvious: if those cyclists actually were in cars, they'd dramatically increase traffic congestion. On the other hand, getting people out of cars and onto bikes is one way of cutting it.

Let's Bike It/VK

The photos also call to mind a particularly well-known demonstration of the road space people in cars take up, in comparison to both bikes and buses.

In 1991, the German city of Münster commissioned a poster showing the amount of street space taken up by 72 people sharing a bus, riding bikes, or driving alone in cars. It's since been recreated several different times — most recently, in Canberra, Australia, by the Cycling Promotion Fund:

(Cycling Promotion Fund)