Zephyr Dear

ablogorsomething:

an-excess-of-tennant:

tinydragongina:

senecasbearddontgiveafuck:

fuck-yeah-band-nerds:

titlethisaparadox:

COULD THIS BE ANY MORE ACCURATE

THIS IS THE MOST WONDERFULLY ACCURATE THING I’VE EVER LAID MY EYES ON

This is the most accurate thing I have ever seen. 

and then reading it again years later

sourcedumal:

Michael K. Williams talks about an emotional moment on the set of ‘12 Years a Slave’, moving Arsenio Hall to tears.

The emotional and spiritual toll that this film must have taken on every single Black cast member…..

Lord….

There’s an excellent Australian film called Rabbit Proof Fence, about the Stolen Generation - Aboriginal children who were forcibly removed from their families by the white authorities to be raised in government-run schools, and trained essentially to be servants. The film is based on a true story about two sisters and a cousin who, as children, escaped the government school and travelled back, alone and on foot, to their family lands - and it’s an inditement on Australian racism that the Stolen Generation is a recent enough historical event that the actual women whose stories are being portrayed appear at the end of the movie to effectively give the epilogue, about how Molly, the main character, was later taken away again, along with her own children, and escaped again with them. It’s an amazing, harrowing film, is what I’m saying.

But just as happened to Michael K. Williams here, the filming took an incredible emotional toll on the Aboriginal actors. In a documentary about the filming, after they shoot the scene where the children are taken from their mothers, all the Aboriginal women and girls are holding each other, sobbing and shaking and crying, and I just - 

This is why we need to tell these stories: because in every way that matters, they are still happening.

Are you tired of recognizing and enjoying your background jams? Do you strive to have a sonically obscure yet socially sharable music collection? This weekend give a listen to songs literally no one has tried out on Spotify. Forgotify is dedicated to bringing songs with zero plays to an audience of at least one.

The offerings are understandably wide-ranging—apparently there are a lot of stray songs in the world, 4 million if you ask the guys at Forgotify! You'll find off-brand covers of yesteryear pop hits, symphonic arrangements of classical classics, and truly difficult to explain foreign soundtracks. Something is bound to strike your fancy, or at least raise an eyebrow.

(more...)

In response to Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s “Same Love,” the soundtrack to the cringe-worthy Grammy wedding, Brandon Ambrosino asks whether we can support equality without imagining sexuality as biologically predetermined:

One of the reasons I think our activism is so insistent on sexual rigidity is because, in our push to make gay rights the new black rights, we’ve conflated the two issues. The result is that we’ve decided that skin color is the same thing as sexual behavior. I don’t think this is true. When we conflate race and sexuality, we overlook how fluid we are learning our sexualities truly are. To say it rather crassly: I’ve convinced a few men to try out my sexuality, but I’ve never managed to get them to try on my skin color. …

Arguing that gayness is as genetically fixed as race might have bolstered our rhetoric a few years ago, but is it necessary to argue that way now? I understand that the genetic argument for homosexuality is a direct response to the tired “You weren’t born that way” rhetoric of religious people. But in my opinion, we could strip that religious argument of much of its power if we responded like this: “Maybe I wasn’t born this way. Now tell me why you think that matters.” I imagine many religious people haven’t really thought through the implications of their own rhetoric. (What, for instance, does a socially-constructed word like “natural” even mean?)

Sigh. The salient fact for a vast majority of gays is that we experience our sexual orientation exactly as straights do. We experience it as a given – and even the old-school reparative therapists believed it was fixed by the age of three. The pomo left doesn’t want this to be true, just as the Christianist right doesn’t either. But it is. John Aravosis makes the obvious point:

I’d love to see the Great Ambrosino in action, willing an attraction to a gender where, only moments ago, there was none.  It’s never happened in the history of the world.

Ambrosino is likely not formulating his thoughts terribly well (which happens when magazines hire people who can’t write).  He’s not describing gay people actually choosing their sexual orientation. He’s talking about either bisexuals (or people who are predominantly of one orientation, but still have enough attraction the other way that if the right person came along they could act on it), or he’s describing people who legitimately have seen their orientation morph over the years, through no causation of their own.  But all three of those categories are not people who “chose” to change their sexual orientation.  They are simply people who chose to act on the already-appealling meal placed before them.  Ambrosino didn’t choose to find men sexually attractive any more than I choose to love chocolate.  I can choose whether to partake in chocolate, but I can’t choose to turn on and off the underlying desire for the sweet.

Savage, meanwhile takes the gay outrage machine to task for bitching about Same Love:

The queers complaining about Macklemore & Ryan Lewis now remind me of the queers who used to bitch and bitch and bitch about how big beer companies didn’t advertise in queer publications or sponsor pride parades. (“Queer people drink a lot of beer! They want us to support them and buy their beer but they don’t want to support us and our community!”) But when big beer companies began advertising in queer publications and sponsoring pride parades… the exact same queers who had been complaining about how big beer companies weren’t advertising in queer publications or sponsoring pride parades immediately started bitching about how the beer companies were trying to profit off our sexuality. (“The pride parade is not for sale! We are a community, not a commodity!”) Blah blah bitchy blah.

I kinda hoped this lefty whininess and escape from reality would dissipate at some point. But no! At least at this point they aren’t actively sabotaging the case for gay equality and integration, as they did in the 1990s. But you’d think these fantasies about fluid male sexual orientation and the social construction of everything all the way down would have faded away by now.

When teams try to take control of their technical debt and improve the maintainability of their codebase over time, one problem that can crop up is a lack of refactoring experience. Teams are often composed of developers with a mix of experience levels (both overall and within the application domain) and stylistic preferences, making it difficult for well-intentioned contributors to effect positive change.

There are a variety of techniques to help in these cases, but one I’ve had success with is “Mob Refactoring”. It’s a variant of Mob Programming, which is like pair programming with more than two people (though still with one computer). This sounds crazy at first, and I certainly don’t recommend working like this all the time, but it can be very effective for leveling up the refactoring abilities of the team and establishing shared conventions for style and structure of code.

Here’s how it works:

1. Assemble the team for an hour around a computer and a projector. It’s a great opportunity to order food and eat lunch together, of course.
2. Bring an area of the codebase that is in need of refactoring. Have one person drive the computer, while the rest of the team navigates.
3. Attempt to refactor the code as much as possible within the hour.
4. Don’t expect to produce production-ready code during these sessions. When you’re done, throw out the changes. Do not try to finish the refactoring after the session – it’s an easy way to get lost in the weeds.

The idea is that the value of the exercise is in the conversations that will take place, not the resulting commits. Mob Refactoring sessions provide the opportunity for less experienced members of the team to ask questions like, “Why do we do this like that?”, or for more senior programmers to describe different implementation approaches that have been tried, and how they’ve worked out in the past. The discussions will help close the experience gap and often lead to a new consensus about the preferred way of doing things.

Do this a few times, and rotate the area of focus and the lead each week. Start with a controller, then work on a model, or perhaps a troublesome view. Give each member of the team a chance to select the code to be refactored and drive the session. Even the least experienced member of your team can pick a good project – and they’ll probably learn more while by working on a problem that is on the top of their mind.

If you have a team that wants to get better at refactoring, but experience and differing style patterns are a challenge, give Mob Refactoring a try. It requires little preparation, and only an hour of investment (although I would recommend trying it three times before judging the effect). If you give it a go, let me know how it went for you in the comments.

respectthenightowl:

so this is erika linder, a dfab model working as a female, androgynous and male model

and this here is andrej pejic, a dmab model that works as a male, androgynous and female model

both are famous for their opposite sex and androgynous work

and they’re fucking dating.

hottest couple ever

The Wall Street Journal says the brouhaha over the Perkins letter to the editor shows that he has a point about the coming progressive Holocaust about the 1%.

Let me just say this, he’s not my cup of tea music-wise, but Macklemore would make an excellent pope

Escher, “Relativity”

Salt of the earth.

City set on a hill.

A peculiar people.

In the world, but not of it.

Called out.

Separated.

~~~~~~~~~~

I wrote a post for Convergent yesterday talking about why I think legalism exists, and part of what I was thinking about the entire time was a concept that’s consistently bothered me over the last year. In an e-mail I received a long time ago, someone asked me why I had such a big problem with “the biblical doctrine of separation.” My initial response was that they’d missed the point, that it wasn’t separation at all that I was talking about– that I had a problem with Christian fundamentalism. Except, to this person, “fundamentalism,” which they proudly claimed, and “separation,” go hand in hand. To this person, and to a lot of the people I know, they’re really the same thing.

As I wrote about the “why” of legalism, I realized that there was an audience I was likely not going to be able to reach: fundamentalists. Because fundamentalists have an essentially ironclad reason for their legalism, and it comes down to the very definition of church: ἐκκλησία comes from καλέω and ἐκ, and means, literally, “called out.” Fundamentalist Christians take this incredibly seriously: if we’re the Church, we’re “called out.”

I have a book sitting on my shelf: Biblical Separation: The Struggle for a Pure Church by Ernest Pickering. It’s a textbook for one of the Bible classes at my old fundamentalist college, and it lays out an argument for the necessity of separation. We must be separate, because if we’re not, we risk apostasy and corruption. We must keep our theology and our ideology pure, untainted by “wordliness” or “godless philosophies.” It’s the reason why Christian fundamentalism began, when the early leaders wrote and compiled The Fundamentals. They were worried about attacks on doctrine, about new and disturbing theologies that accommodated early post-modernism and higher criticism.

They would even go on to make the same exact argument I did yesterday: that God’s holiness demands his followers to have the same abhorrence to sin. That we must hate sin, and do whatever it takes to remove it.

Which is where legalism enters.

Every time, growing up, I heard a messaged preached on “sin,” it always, always included this reasoning. God hates sin, so we must hate sin. Except . . . I’ve never been able to really understand what “sin” is, not even when I was a fundamentalist doing my utmost to avoid it. I had this nebulous understanding that sin was “doing something God told us not to do”; but then “drinking alcohol” was a sin, and when the Bible includes “drink wine for your stomach’s sake,” that shit gets confusing.

And as I got older, and the pastor and the people in our church fell deeper into “separation,” more and more things became sin. Things that were obviously not in the Bible, and therefore could not be something God told us not to do– things like going to the movie theater or doing yoga.

Which is where “biblical principles” come in. The Bible might not explicitly condemn movie-theater-going, but we are supposed to “avoid the appearance of evil,” and some movies have all sorts of things in them that are clearly evil– how could anyone tell we were going to see Finding Nemo and not Saw? Better just to avoid the whole thing all together. Or what about dancing? The Bible has lots and lots and lots of dancing, but that wasn’t modern dancing. Modern dancing is always sexual, and doing sexual things in public is clearly not “avoiding the appearance of evil,” but embracing it. Or rock music– rock music comes from demon-summoning-African-tribal-music, and listening to it means that we’re not avoiding listening to the same “beats” that witches use to summon Satan from the depths of hell, therefore it’s sin.

If it wasn’t avoiding the appearance of evil, it was “becoming a stumbling block.” Don’t celebrate Christmas– it reminds some people of their secular/pagan days, before they were good and holy. Don’t listen to rock music– it could remind someone of when they used to do drugs. Don’t discuss philosophy– it could remind someone of when they were an atheist.

There’s no end to it. When you get into this mindset, there’s no place to stop, no place to draw a line, no way to have a healthy conversation about individual responsibility. And once you start thinking like this, it’s incredibly difficult not to get sucked deeper and deeper, and there’s no bottom. There’s always something else that can be avoided, another step you can take to become more holy, more consecrated, more set apart.

I think it’s because Christian fundamentalists have deeply misunderstood the meaning of holy. They’ve lost what it means for something to be sacred, and they’ve cheapened these glorious, beautiful things into a list.

fancybidet:

thebigblackwolfe:

sourcedumal:

ouyangdan:

brothasoul:

fyeahlilbit3point0:

tyndalecode:

Amanda Palmer and I saw completely different movies.

And for context she was using this as a discussion point about why black people should stop being mean to Macklemore. 

what the fuck

Amanda Palmer is a horrible person.

Trusting white folks almost got Solomon killed on 3 separate fucking occasions, but okay….

It’s Amanda Palmer, aka the ableist piece of shit that thought it’d be a good idea to fake a suicide attempt so her drug addicted boyfriend would understand how she felt.

She’s trash, she’s always been trash, and she always will be trash.

She is an awful human being.

wow this is the most clueless tweet ive read in awhile

So far today in a renewed GOP push to appeal to female voters, 1) Hannity has proposed an "adopt-a-woman" program to help alleviate any issue with affordable access to birth control; 2) Republicans - including Bristol Palin of all people - have attacked Wendy Davis as a bad mother; 3) Rand Paul has managed to hog a lot of media space with an on-going discussion of whether Hilary Clinton needs to be held to account for her husband cheating on her with a White House intern.

Meanwhile production is underway for Mike Huckabee's neo-blaxploitation action flik Uncle Suga.

Russian opposition member Alexei Navalny created a website to document the rampant corruption at the Sochi Olympics. The site is a map with clickable regions showing how illegal dumping, graft, inside dealing, and general sleaze caused billions of dollars to disappear into the pockets of Russian political elites and their mafiyeh buddies. The site was translated to English by the Interpreter, which notes:

As Navalny describes on his blog, the Fund designed the site because they were “sick of looking at how the numbers of Olympic construction projects were being juggled” by Russian officials. In particular, he referred to a statement by Vice Premier Dmitry Kozak that a total of 214 billion rubles was spent on the Olympics.

The main page of “Encyclopedia of Expenses” shows the calculation by which the overall expenditures on the Olympic Games came to 1.5 trillion rubles. This figure was obtained by combining the expenditures fro the federal budget on the sports facilities and infrastructure (822 billion rubles), the expenditures of state companies (343 billions), the loans provided by Vneshekonombank (249 billion), private investments (53 billion), and the budget expenditures of Krasnodar Territory (33 billion rubles).

The authors of the research further included in the total sum all the loans from Vneshekonombank (VEB), which the Olympic investors received, expecting that they would not be returned. This contradicts the statements of the bank itself that there are only loans totaling 190 billion rubles that possibly have to be restructured.

Navalny Presents Sochi Corruption Map

Don’t forget! It’s good low-pressure comics fun. I usually pre-make some panels so I don’t have to think too hard. Mine from 2013 are up here as well as on the forum.

Like John Campbell said, you don’t have to draw a lot to enjoy making these. It’s a fun journaling exercise, and even really simple doodled figures can be a nice little snapshot of your day.

(On a separate note, I set physical goods & digital download stores up over the weekend! Official announcement later, but open to tumblrites now :) )

- from the campaign of Paul Broun, candidate for the US Senate in Georgia. The AR-15 offer came up in a debate last night.

[Content Note: Cissexism]

Dear Joss Whedon,

Some women have a penis and testicles. Implying otherwise, even as a joke, is cissexism. Encouraging people who educate you about that to "unfollow [you]" is defensive assholery.

A hypothetical someone in your position saying "whoops, I'm sorry, that was a stupid joke that I didn't think through because of course trans* people (and intersex people and other women with penis/balls) exist and I just forgot that because of my cis privilege, thank you all for the awareness raising" is basically the lowest bar there is for ally work and you've still managed to miss it. That's a problem.

I understand the urge to be defensive over your privilege. I understand the desire to lash out when it feels like the internet is yelling at you. I also understand that a basic foundation of my feminism is being willing to say "I'm sorry, I screwed up" when I screw up and hurt people.

To be honest, I have grave doubts that you are engaging with feminism and feminists in good faith. I would be lying if I said I don't sometimes feel like you do the bare minimum of ally work and then coast on the ocean of cookies flung your way because the rest of (cis male) Hollywood people are that dreadfully awful such that the slightest amount of effort looks like the second coming of feminist-Jesus.

But I am trying to engage with you in good faith and assume that you do have good motives and do want to undermine kyriarchal systems and be an ally to marginalized people. And so I urge you to drop the flippancy over this issue and make a statement affirming that the "joke" was a bad one and that trans* women (and other women with penis and testicles) exist and that (a) they shouldn't be invisibled, even jokingly, and (b) they deserve their stories told just as much as cis women do.

Because there are a lot of transphobic people out there who wrongfully believe that genitals equal gender, and you have a tremendous amount of power to shape the social narratives they engage with. For you, a famous cis man who famously writes Strong Female Characters, to affirm that women who happen to possess penis and/or balls are still women, that would be a real piece of awareness-raising ally-work you could do. That would be leveraging your privilege to help people more marginalized than you.

Therefore I urge you in all good faith to reconsider how you are responding to this issue.

-- Ana

[Hat-tip to Liss. Also: Awesome Venn Diagram by Kate.]

Kshama Sawant to Take Home $40,000 in Pay out of her $117,000 City Council Salary:

During her successful campaign for Seattle City Council, Socialist Alternative candidate Kshama Sawant repeatedly promised to take accept no more salary than the average Seattle worker. Today, in a press release, she announced what that specifically means—$40,000 a year after taxes—and what she plans to do with the remainder of her $117,000-plus salary:

“The people of Seattle elected me as a socialist on the platform of a $15/hour minimum wage, for affordable housing, and to tax the rich to pay for public transit and education. In addition, I strongly support all efforts to increase wages. Data shows Seattle median wages for men at $60,000 while only $51,000 for women; and people of color earn only 45% of the median income of white workers. I will fight to close the gender pay gap and to overcome the structural racism in working and living conditions.

“Seattle City Councilmembers receive over $117,000 a year – the second highest of any city council in the country. Inevitably, such a salary removes Councilmembers from the realities of life for working people. I will only take home $40,000 per year. This amount is roughly the full-time take-home pay of a Seattleite.

“After paying taxes, the remainder of my salary will go to a Solidarity Fund to help build social justice movements. Throughout the year I will be making donations from this Solidarity Fund to causes such as workers’ strike funds, and environmental, civil rights, and women’s rights campaigns.

Sawant promises “regular and transparent accounting” of her Solidarity Fund, and has already pledged two donations: $500 to Puget Sound SAGE and $15,000 to15Now.org.

So there you go, Sawant-hating comment trolls: Promise made, promise kept.

The new GOP alternative to Obamacare shows why Republicans have refrained from offering a concrete plan for so long: health care policy is complex and requires hard choices that result in uneasy compromises. But even still, is targeting employer-based insurance for disruption really what Republicans want to do?

Christopher Harding explores it:

People from all sorts of Churches — and none — come together to practise: meditation builds its own ‘community of faith’, Freeman says — faith, in this sense, being ‘our capacity for relationship, for enduring, transcending the instinct to run away and have an easier time somewhere else’.

This is ‘faith’, then, not as some watered-down alternative to propositional belief, but a commitment made and remade even while its object comes into view only gradually and uncertainly (‘through a glass, darkly’, as St Paul put it). It’s a commitment, too, to facing whatever silence throws at you. Boredom and busy schedules are familiar obstacles in any meditation practice, Christian or otherwise, but tougher still are those times when practitioners find themselves frightened or unwilling to follow where the silence seems to be leading them. Questions of theology and Church teaching will come up, of course, but Freeman insists that we must allow them to emerge in the midst of all the other doubts — about ourselves and the world — that arise as we practise. As he puts it, meditation ‘opens Pandora’s box… everything starts to look different’.

My partner is INTJ and we often find ourselves discussing theoretical matters, which I enjoy. Although I usually agree with her, I usually find myself explaining opposing perspectives to her, which leads her to think that we’re arguing.

"Oil pulling is a technique to clean your teeth and mouth. You put a spoonful of oil in your mouth, then swish it around for 20 minutes (yes, 20 minutes!!). Then you spit it out (into the trash can/compost bin, not the sink, so it won’t clog your plumbing)."

I just tried oil-pulling but after 6 minutes my mouth was so full of spit I couldn't stand it.

Oil Pulling

There has been plenty of well-deserved derision directed at the billionaire fretting in the Wall Street Journal that the super-duper-rich like him are headed for concentration camps. Paul Krugman fires an AK47 into the world’s smallest barrel here; while Josh Marshall has a must-read. Josh is actually trying to understand rather than simply excoriate the completely bizarre idea that the Obama administration is a populist, socialist threat to a capitalist system it all but saved from itself:

It is that mix of insecurity, a sense of the brittleness of one’s hold on wealth, power, privileges, combined with the reality of great wealth and power, that breeds a mix of aggressiveness and perceived embattlement.

I’ve been a little taken aback too by the attitude of the Wall Street class, after they royally fucked up the entire global economy, were bailed out by the rest of us, still get Dimon-style compensation, and have enjoyed one of the sharpest booms in stock prices since 2009. At some point, you have to ask: WTF? But here’s the empirical data on how hard the one percent have had it over the last few decades:

Well, yes, they have returned to pre-Reagan levels of taxation. But the tax take is still roughly where it was in the mid-1990s and I don’t recall Clinton being perceived as a socialist or howls of protest from the wealthy as the economy boomed in the tech boom bubble. Josh notes, for example:

It’s worth remembering that Bill Clinton pushed through a reasonably substantial tax hike on upper income earners in 1993. President Obama meanwhile largely maintained the tax policies of George W. Bush, the guy who had in essence repealed Clinton’s tax increase. These are all facts that are hard to ignore.

So whence the anger and the panic? Josh thinks, as my shrink would say, that it is multi-determined. Is it adjusting to a president who, though he is a pragmatist in his record, is nonetheless more progressive in outlook than any president since the conservative revolution of the late 1970s (of which Carter, in some ways, was a part)? Is it classic in-group isolation that fosters ideological extremism? Yes and yes. But I’d add a couple of factors to the mix.

The first is the triumph of victimology in political discourse. It began on the hard left, of course, in the 1990s, as every member of a minority group was designated a victim, and all were allegedly on the verge of being targeted or discriminated against. Godwin’s Law had to be constantly invoked back then as well. But today, what began on the left is ubiquitous on the right: those denying marriage rights to gays are in fact the real victims of lefty intolerance; whites, not blacks, are the real victims of our racial politics; and men are now the real victims of the feminized, big government left (see Hume; Brit, et al.). If you want to free-base on far right victimology, just track down the rhetoric of Sarah Palin. According to her, Christians now live in constant fear of legions of Obama’s jack-booted thugs, i.e. Wal-Mart greeters wishing them “Happy Holidays.”

The second factor, I’d argue, is actually self-awareness. This is entirely speculative, but many of these extremist plutocrats must surely know, somewhere in their psyches, that they collectively failed – and failed terribly – in self-regulating and thereby protecting the very capitalist system they depend on for so much.

These masters of the universe had to go cap in hand to the federal government to bail out their sorry, incompetent asses. They were revealed not as brilliant engineers of our collective wealth, but as enablers of the debt-mania, tech-hubris and bubble-creating that destroyed so much from 2007 onwards. They were exposed as something much worse than greedy; they were revealed as incompetents whose mistakes and over-reach created untold misery and hardship for countless millions. Their own self-image – again, somewhere deep down – must have shattered a little.

People respond to revelations of their own incompetence in different ways. But the proudest – and this group of people are not exactly renowned for humility – can sometimes respond by internalizing an ever more extreme version of their own previous mindset. They cannot compute the fact that they failed, and so they have to construct a version of reality that insists it was all someone else’s fault, and then build on that an ideology of their own unrelenting heroism, which is now, on their minds, unfairly impugned.

And the only target of blame that can plausibly fill the gap is the federal government. Anything lesser would actually diminish the one-percent’s self-perception as masters of the universe, and require some adjustment in an ideology that has been cast as eternal truth since 1980. Hence the early 2008 myth that the government alone created the economic crisis through too-cushy mortgages – when the vast majority of shady mortgages were in the private sector. And because the one percenters’ collective humiliation has been so great and so public – even the Pope won’t absolve Larry Kudlow of his heresies any longer! – you get the kind of anguished psychology behind Tom Perkins’ absurd paranoia (which makes the neocons’ habitual resort to the anti-Semite card look relatively mild).

You know who they remind me of? Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld after 9/11. Both were responsible for the collapse in national security that enabled 9/11 to take place. Both were sold to the public as safe hands behind a jejune young president. And both were anything but safe hands – in fact, they acted like reckless, panicked, and blinkered chickens with their heads cut off. Both simply could not internalize the obvious fact of their own failures – because both had long regarded themselves as national security “masters of the universe.” Their self-understanding could not adjust; it was too fixed by then.

But they are both very intelligent men and knew, deep down, the extent of their incompetence. Their reaction was to up the ante, not unlike Tom Perkins’ crazy. So they did not rationally reflect on the reasons for the failure to protect Americans from 9/11, they assuaged their buried guilt by turning the fight into an even greater battle between good and evil, by putting their previous belief in an unfettered presidency on steroids, authorizing torture on a massive scale, and embracing policies, like the war in Iraq, that could both erase memories of their own incompetence and yet also project that incompetence onto an even larger stage, with even worse results in terms of human life and economic and security costs.

When cornered, the sequestered, guilt-ridden, but psychologically rigid mindset does not reflect. It cannot see the broader picture. It cannot even publicly acknowledge what it must internally understand somewhere: that it played a part in the catastrophe that has now led to public shaming. And they worry deeply that this buried truth, if embraced by the politically influential, could come back to bite them yet. That worry is as rational as their response to it is irrational. If only they could know it, Obama is the best friend they could have in times like these. He wants to defend the capitalist system from its fatal, unregulated flaws. And it’s only by doing that can the one percenters’ wealth-creating dreams have a chance of being realized. If only they could see that. And if only they could adjust.

(Photos: scenes from the crash of 2008 and from Twitter’s IPO from Getty Images.)

What happens when the average red-blooded man comes in contact with an obviously able, intellectual, and competent woman, manifestly independent of any help a man can give, and capable of meeting him or defeating him on his own ground? He simply doesn’t feel like a man any longer. In the presence of such strength and ability in a mere woman he feels like a futile, ineffectual imitation of a man. It is one of the most uncomfortable and humiliating sensations a man can experience, so that the woman who arouses it becomes repugnant to him.

When a man is in the presence of a tender, trustful, dependent woman, he immediately feels a sublime expansion of his power to protect and shelter this frail and delicate creature. In the presence of such weakness, he feels stronger, more competent, bigger, manlier than ever. This feeling of strength and power is one of the most enjoyable he can experience. The apparent need of the woman for care and protection, instead of arousing contempt for her lack of ability, appeals to the very noblest feelings within him.

I don’t usually quote this much from the book (mostly because that would get boring pretty fast, but also because I can only legally reproduce so much of it for a critical review), but I thought it was important for all of you to see this, in the full, horrible, stark reality of Helen’s world. In this world, the most important thing that must be maintained at all costs is that men feel powerful. And not only must they feel powerful, they must be powerful, except that is only possible when a woman is incompetent.

I wish I could say it doesn’t get any worse.

The next section of the chapter is one of Helen’s lists– all the “characteristics” of a feminine nature:

• weakness– physically weak, incapable of solving physical problems.
• submissiveness– defined earlier in the book as “never having needs.”
• dependence– “because her whole purpose in life is home-oriented.”
• tenderness– “crying [over books, dead animals], were it ever so stupid.”
• fearfulness– “men will, in fact, sometimes take women into danger, just to see how fearful women are.”

The last one– fearfulness– pisses me off. My abuser would do this over and over again– deliberately put me into a situation that made me feel incredibly unsafe, or do something that was life-threatening and ridiculously stupid (like doing donuts in an iced-over parking lot, or nearly breaking my neck on a jet ski), and then get an incredible kick out of my reaction. He thought my legitimate fear was hysterical, and it made him feel big and bad by comparison. According to Helen, however, men– all men, not just abusers– do this. “He does it because you are so afraid, and he is so unafraid.”

Helen goes on to tell us how to “awaken” our feminine natures, and it’s as easy as 1-2-3. First, we get rid of any “strength, ability, competence, or fearlessness.” Then we stop doing anything around the house that could possibly fall inside a “masculine” job– and if we have to do it, we must do it incredibly badly (“do it in a feminine manner” and feminine = incompetent) or our husbands will “never come to our rescue.”

Then there’s this:

Don’t compete with men for advancement on a job, higher pay, or greater honors. Don’t compete with them for scholastic honors in men’s subjects. It may be all right to win over a man in English or social studies, but you’re in trouble if you compete with men in math, chemistry, or science. Don’t appear to know more than a man does in world events, the space program, science, or industry.

I just . . . can’t even handle this chapter.

Partly because I know more than my husband about the space program. It’s what happens when you’re obsessed with something like space exploration since your earliest memory, like me. Except, in Helen’s world, the fact that I have been a Trekkie and a NASA geek since I was four is wrong. Something that is so deeply a part of me– my love of space, and the stars, and of space launches and Mars missions– must be removed, because it threatens men.

I know this sounds crazy. I know this sounds like something from the 50s. Except it is exactly what I grew up with, and it is entrenched so deeply in our culture that when you remind a woman that she’s a woman she does worse in math and science evaluations. And it’s because women like Helen Andelin, and Debbie Pearl, and Mary Pride, and Phyllis Schlafly, and Mary Kassian, and Nancy Leigh DeMoss, and Grace Driscoll, and Danah Gresh have all been screaming about this since the 60s. Being strong, and capable, and competent, is anti-feminine and anti-God.

Two white doves released by children standing by Pope Francis as a symbol of peace were immediately attacked by a renegade seagull and large black crow.

Tom Perkins, the venture capitalist who said critiques of the 1% could lead to a Holocaust against wealthy people is doubling down in new comments to Bloomberg. "In the Nazi era it was racial demonization, now it is class demonization," says Perkins.

In case you missed it, here's my take on where this kind of insanity is coming from.

Most Authors Make Less Than $1,000 a Year:

The research revealed that only 10 percent of traditionally published authors made more than $20,000 a year and 5 percent of self-published authors made more than $20,000 a year.

Guards May Be Responsible for Half of Prison Sexual Assaults

Announced earlier this week, the Steam version of Resident Evil 4 is atonement for the god-awful Windows port released in 2007. Capcom's released some comparison shots showing off how much better the game looks when the textures don't look like they were painted with mud.

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More Manly Action, Less Manly in Fact:

A few years ago, a team of researchers led by a professor from UC Berkeley set out to test what they called the masculine overcompensation thesis, the theory that when men sense threats to their manhood, they respond by exaggerating their gender traits.

The researchers used several approaches, from laboratory experiments to large-scale cross-sectional surveys, but they all confirmed that when men faced the implication that they were somehow not men, they tended to increase their support of war, homophobia, male dominance, “purchasing an SUV,” and other stereotypical male bullshit.

careydraws:

Written in the Bones. New comic, written by Christopher M. Jones & illustrated by Carey Pietsch.

I’m hoping to have printed copies of this at MOCCA, ABPCC, and TCAF this spring, and SPX in the fall! More info to come.