These are BuzzFeed headlines that I saw listed together:
This Is What Baby Sloths Sound Like, And It Will Destroy You
Are Slow Lorises The New Sloths?
We can probably thank/blame Kristen Bell for popularizing both sloths and mild emotional instability. I wouldn’t mind at all if slow lorises had their day, but I hope it doesn’t take away from the sloths. See, I was into sloths before they were cool. I am a sloth hipster. So there.
Decide for yourself who is cuter:
The internet and social media have enabled people of differing viewpoints to talk past one another more now than at any other point in human history. As I have embarked on rants, arguments, and tête-à-têtes of various degrees of interestingness via Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and various blogs, I have learned far more than I ever wanted about the sorts of logical gymnastics that people, myself included, will undertake to reach or support their desired conclusion.
Now, someone has created a poster detailing the most egregious logical fallacies out there (h/t three Facebook friends):
My personal favorites, which I seem to encounter quite often, and of some of which I have no doubt been guilty myself, are:
Scotsman A: You know, laddie, no Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge.
Scotsman B: Is that so? I seem to recall my cousin Angus (who is from Scotland) puts sugar in his porridge.
Scotsman A: Aye… but no true Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge.
See, e.g., Bill O’Reilly’s stubborn refusal to accept that mass-murdering Norweigian Christian extremist Anders Breivik is a “true Christian.”
We now have an excellent set of real-world examples of some of these fallacies in action, relating to the news of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul’s endorsement of Mitt Romney for president, courtesy of the Libertarian Party (h/t Zandar):
When Dr. Rand Paul ran for U.S. Senate in Kentucky, many of his fund-raising appeals were sent to the donors and supporters of his father, Congressman Ron Paul. They were designed to convince Ron’s supporters that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. That Rand was, like his legendary father, a steadfast champion of liberty.
But no true libertarian, no true friend of liberty, and no true blue Tea Partier could possibly even consider, much less actually endorse or approve of, the Father of Obamacare, Big Government tax and spender, Republican Mitt Romney.
Especially the son of Ron Paul, who has no excuse.
Especially a medical doctor, who has even fewer excuses.
See if you can spot them all!
Here endeth the lesson. Now learn how to argue a point and stop wasting my time.
!['NGC_6745' by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center NASA-GSFC (The Goddard Library) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NGC_6745.jpg "'NGC_6745' by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center NASA-GSFC (The Goddard Library) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons")
Could this be the end result of self-referential blogging? History will decide.
My main goal here, however, is to write a blog post about a blog post that discusses bloggers who write about blog posts. That ought to be enough of an infinite feedback loop.
Photo credit: ‘NGC_6745’ By NASA Goddard Space Flight Center NASA-GSFC (The Goddard Library) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
Via Oliver Griswold:
Sooo, the conservative heroes of Spring 2012 are the guy who killed an unarmed black kid and the guy who cut off a gay kid’s hair?
!['Pinterest User Pie Chart' [Fair use], via G4](http://cache.g4tv.com/ImageDb3/291165_S/pinterest-user-pie-chart.jpg "'Pinterest User Pie Chart' [Fair use], via G4")
I don’t get Pinterest. I think I have made that pretty abudantly clear in recent months. I have a few “boards,” to which I will “pin” things from time to time (my board entitled “Food porn“) is far more popular than it probably deserves to be, considering the level of inattention give to it. I never, however, browse through other people’s pins the way I might scroll through my Facebook news feed or my Tumblr dashboard. It’s just not my thing.
Don’t get me wrong; I think Pinterest is a brilliant idea, and it has been wildly successful. It just doesn’t necessarily appeal to my particular sensibilities. Maybe it’s because I’m a dude, although I doubt it is as sociologically significant as that (for me, anyway.) Whether or not by design, Pinterest primarily appeals to women, possibly a first for the internet. Of course, this being the world in which we live, someone has to ask how to make a service like Pinterest more appealing to the sausage-bearing crowd. And because it is the internet, it eventually comes back to the question of how many X’s we can post. Perhaps not surprisingly, these two questions overlap.
To review the state of what I will artfully call Smut in Social Media:
(Please note that I use the word “smut” in a purely descriptive sense.) Continue reading
!['SMirC-cry' by chris 論 (own design) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SMirC-cry.svg "'SMirC-cry' by chris 論 (own design) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons")
People are mean on Twitter. That’s pretty much a fact of life at this point. It goes all ways (I’m not so daft as to think there are really only two sides to any given issue, however much we are meant to think that.) It is usually quite amusing to watch the parade of tu quoque responses whenever someone tries to call someone else out on hateful or violent rhetoric on Twitter. Sometimes, though, it gets downright hilarious. Like when a Breitbartian gets dinged on Twitter regulations and whines about it.
From Rick Moran at the inaptly-named American Thinker:
There’s a budding war in the Twitterverse as liberals are evidently carrying out organized attacks on conservative Twitter users by reporting their tweets as “spam,” thus triggering an automated block on their accounts.
Apparently, a threshold has to be crossed as far as the number of tweets for the system to kick in, as well as the number of spam reports in order to ban the user so not all conservative Twitter activists are vulnerable. But several high profile conservatives have had their accounts blocked and trying to get them reinstated is proving to be a difficult matter.
***
A tidal wave of Tweets from conservative activists are trying to keep pace with the organized attack on free speech from the left
[Emphasis added]. I bolded “evidently” because he didn’t cite any evidence. I bolded the bit about “free speech” because once again that term is being abused. Is the government trying to shut down these Tweeters? If not, shut up about free speech until you learn what that actually means. (Here’s a hint: my telling you to “shut up” does not infringe your free speech rights at all. If you don’t understand why, then I am amazed you don’t injure yourself with your spoon every morning at breakfast.)
Golly, an organized campaign of liberals to prevent people from Tweeting? I’m surprised he didn’t link it directly to the White House, since our incompetent, do-nothing Executive Branch is full of evil genius masterminds. Speculate much? Continue reading
I promise I will never, ever wear these again.
Not a picture of Chief, but intended to elicit an emotional response
The story of Chief, an American Pit Bull Terrier in the Philippines who sacrificed himself to save his human family from a cobra, showed up on my Tumblr dashboard a little while ago. It is a beautiful but tragic story, evoking all of the emotions that dog stories like that tend to do. It also set off some skepticism warning bells for me, since the internet has a way of embellishing and propagating stories well beyond the original facts. Chief’s story needs to be told, but in order to be told it also needs to be true, and supported by news sources.
WARNING: Some of the links below include a picture that might be Chief but is definitely triggering.
Hopeful Veterinarian posted a link on Tumblr on March 19 that leads to a post on the blog Cool Story, Dog! dated March 13, 2012. That post contains no external links, which is what caused my initial skepticism.
A Google search led to a post on pets.ohio.com dated October 27, 2009. The cited source is a March 1, 2007 DogsInTheNews.com post. This post leads to what appears to be the actual source material:
The incident evidently occurred on Monday, February 12, 2007, in Cagayan de Oro City, Philippines, a city of just over 500,000 people on the island of Mindanao. The article has some journalistic problems (secondhand quotes and such), but it lays out the entire story rather well. From the Cagayan de Oro Journal post:
A pit bull terrier proved beyond doubt that a dog can become a man’s best friend when it saved and gave its life for its master’s wife and her grandmother in Barangay Lapasan here.
The dog named “Chief,” saved 87-year-old Liberata la Victoria and her granddaughter Maria Victoria Fronteras from a cobra that snaked through an opening in the family’s kitchen shortly around 8 a.m. Monday.
On two occasions, the snake was about to attack the women when the dog dashed from a corner and used itself as a shield.
Marlone Fronteras, an employee of Nestle Philippines who owned the terrier, said Chief seized the venomous snake in the neck with its teeth and repeatedly slammed it on the floor until it died.
The dog was bitten too by the cobra; it died a few minutes later after giving its master a farewell gaze, according to the dog owner’s friends Mare Sabelita and Derf Ian dela Rama.
***
“The snake was in front of us., maneuvering a deadly attack,” Sabelita quoted Maria Victoria as saying. “I screamed out loud to ask for help.”
Hearing this, the four-year old pit bull terrier dashed from its sleeping area to fight off the deadly snake, said Sabelita quoting Maria Victoria.
The cobra fought back and bit Chief at the lower left portion of the jaw. The dog then repeatedly slammed the cobra after it succeeded in immobilizing the snake with its sharp teeth, she said.
Dela Rama said la Victoria was watching television when she panicked and alerted her granddaughter. The old lady said the cobra was about to attack her and the dog came to her rescue.
Maria Victoria said she saw the cobra expand its neck as soon as she turned the lights on. She said the cobra looked like it was spitting as its inched closer, about a meter away, toward her.
De la Rama said the terrier, “out of nowhere,” jumped on the cobra , bit it the neck, and then shook it till it died.
Moments later, the dog slouched flat and fainted, spreading its arms and feet on the floor, after killing the killer snake.
De la Rama said the dog went wobbly and lost control of its organs some 30 minutes after being bitten by the cobra; it started to urinate and defecate uncontrollably as it grasped for air and panted heavily.
The Fronterases sought the help of veterinarian but they were reportedly told that it was too late because the snake bite was near the dog’s brain and the venom had already spread.
Sabilita said Marlone rushed home when his wife called him up to tell him of what had happened and the dog’s master was stunned.
The Fronteras children, who treated Chief like a member of the family and who called the dog “Kuya Chief,” were deeply affected, according to Sabelita.
The last thing Chief did was waggle its tail and gaze at Marlone who had just come from work, said Sabelita.
“Chief gave his two deep breaths and died. (It) was fighting and saving (its) last ounces of breath to see a glimpse of (its) master for the last two seconds of (its) life,” added dela Rama.
Sabelita said he hoped people would change how they look at pit bull terriers, a breed strongly discouraged in many countries and banned because of their “cruel looks.”
We never get the change [sic] to know them more,” said Sabelita.
I don’t know what caused this story to start showing up online again five years after the fact, but I am glad it did.
Photo credit: ‘Baby puppy pit bull, Bach’ by Beverly & Pack on Flickr.
I was trying to import a few posts from the old platform, and I ended up with more than 100 duplicate posts, all of which then automatically went to Twitter. I regret any inconvenience this may have cause, but I assure you (CK) that I did not break Twitter. All is well once again…
In honor of everything being well once again, here is a GIF of Megan Fox fixing her hair.
After several clumsy attempts to import posts from the old platform, followed by the process of making sure there wasn’t anything too incriminating that I didn’t remember writing back in 2007, I can now say that the blog is up and running once again.
Except for internal links. Those won’t work. Too bad,’ because I’m not re-editing anything else.
In honor of the blog finding new life, here’s a GIF of Kate Upton dancing in a bikini:
