We’ve begun to take some pretty extreme measures to keep the dogs in line. Our latest innovation involves using the dining room chairs to block their access to the living room sofa when we’re not around.
I really don’t give May enough credit for her problem-solving skills, though. A sideways ottoman and a set of chairs isn’t an obstacle for May. It’s a challenge.
Conservatives Smear Slain ISIS Hostage Kayla Mueller Because She Cared About Palestinians Too, Zaid Jilani, AlterNet, February 11, 2015
26 year-old Kayla Mueller accomplished much before her death while in ISIS custody. She traveled the world, working for various international nonprofits. By all accounts, she was a big-hearted humanitarian and represented the best of America’s values abroad.
But all of that is unimportant to a group of Islamophobic conservatives who took issue with Mueller’s advocacy for the Palestinian cause – which included joining protests against the Israeli occupation.
SF/F Saturday: The Years of Rice and Salt, Adam Lee, Daylight Atheism, November 15, 2014 Continue reading
New Study on Gender and Hot Sauce Has Exceptional Conclusion, Maggie Lange, New York Magazine, February 3, 2015
Just as you hoped, a new study from Penn State researchers titled “Gender differences in the influence of personality traits on spicy food liking and intake” has important information about the ways in which men and women are entirely different sorts of creatures, and how one group might be genuinely badass taste adventurers and one group might not be.
In the study, the researchers conclude that women are more likely to seek sensation from spicy food, while men are more likely to see other extrinsic rewards like praise and admiration.
To put it another way, no one eats Guatemalan insanity peppers because they taste good.
Stop what you’re doing, and GO READ THE BUZZFEED EXPOSE OF A VOICE FOR MEN’S PAUL ELAM. (SPOILER: He’s even worse than you think), David Futrelle, We Hunted the Manmoth, February 6, 2015 Continue reading
The Tragedy of the American Military, James Fallows, The Atlantic, January/February 2015
This has become the way we assume the American military will be discussed by politicians and in the press: Overblown, limitless praise, absent the caveats or public skepticism we would apply to other American institutions, especially ones that run on taxpayer money. A somber moment to reflect on sacrifice. Then everyone except the few people in uniform getting on with their workaday concerns.
***
This reverent but disengaged attitude toward the military—we love the troops, but we’d rather not think about them—has become so familiar that we assume it is the American norm. But it is not. When Dwight D. Eisenhower, as a five-star general and the supreme commander, led what may have in fact been the finest fighting force in the history of the world, he did not describe it in that puffed-up way. On the eve of the D-Day invasion, he warned his troops, “Your task will not be an easy one,” because “your enemy is well-trained, well-equipped, and battle-hardened.” As president, Eisenhower’s most famous statement about the military was his warning in his farewell address of what could happen if its political influence grew unchecked.
At the end of World War II, nearly 10 percent of the entire U.S. population was on active military duty—which meant most able-bodied men of a certain age (plus the small number of women allowed to serve). Through the decade after World War II, when so many American families had at least one member in uniform, political and journalistic references were admiring but not awestruck. Most Americans were familiar enough with the military to respect it while being sharply aware of its shortcomings, as they were with the school system, their religion, and other important and fallible institutions.
Now the American military is exotic territory to most of the American public. As a comparison: A handful of Americans live on farms, but there are many more of them than serve in all branches of the military. (Well over 4 million people live on the country’s 2.1 million farms. The U.S. military has about 1.4 million people on active duty and another 850,000 in the reserves.) The other 310 million–plus Americans “honor” their stalwart farmers, but generally don’t know them. So too with the military. Many more young Americans will study abroad this year than will enlist in the military—nearly 300,000 students overseas, versus well under 200,000 new recruits. As a country, America has been at war nonstop for the past 13 years. As a public, it has not. A total of about 2.5 million Americans, roughly three-quarters of 1 percent, served in Iraq or Afghanistan at any point in the post-9/11 years, many of them more than once.
The Surprising Thing People Who Resist Authority Have in Common, Krystnell Storr, Science.Mic, January 14, 2015 Continue reading
This is critically important:
Free speech is the right to speak your mind without government censorship and without fear of extralegal retaliation like harassment or violence. That’s all!
Free speech doesn’t include the right to speak your mind on any forum anywhere. The government may not prevent you from speaking, but private parties, like blog owners or corporations, aren’t required to let you use their property as your platform.
Free speech doesn’t include the right to be believed or to be taken seriously. People may mock, ridicule or laugh at what you say, or they may reject it outright.
Free speech doesn’t include the right to be listened to. People who don’t desire to hear your opinion can hang up on you, block you on social media, change the channel, close the browser tab. Free speech doesn’t give you the right to bombard people with harassing messages or otherwise force them to pay attention to you against their will.
And free speech doesn’t include the right to suffer no consequences whatsoever for your expressed opinions. As Facebook found out, if you say things that other people find abhorrent, they may boycott you, disinvite you or choose not to associate with you.
– Adam Lee
The hot dog is perhaps the greatest instrument mankind has ever devised for delivering ridiculous amounts of deliciousness in unspeakably deadly packages. The kogo, a Korean invention that takes the quintessentially-American corn dog and swaddles it with the world-beloved French fry, is the latest in a proud line of tasty, greasy harbingers of an early death (h/t Paul).
The Last Appetite / Via Rocket News 24
Here’s the real test, though: Is the kogo as tasty as Urban Cookery’s self-evidently delicious deep fried bacon wrapped hot dogs? Continue reading
That is 20 minutes of my life I’ll never get back arguing that vaccines don’t cause autism with Deuce Bigalow, male gigolo.
– California Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego), on a recent political kerfuffle (h/t Todd W.)
The Angry Black Dude Post No. 1, The Difference Between Cockroaches and Butterflies, January 27, 2015
I don’t like being the Angry Black Dude. I really don’t. There are enough of them (and with good reason). Being an ABD is social suicide: Anyone (white or non-white) with rudimentary knowledge of past and present and a conscience knows you have the right to be angry, yet your indignation still annoys them. Then there are the folks who either do or do not know (more like refuse to acknowledge) the history of race relations and have no conscience whatsoever, and your righteous anger undoubtedly pisses them off. ABDs, like feminists, cannot win. It’s a lose-lose situation, socially speaking.
I remember once I was outside of a bar in the Lower East Side around the time of the Ferguson protests. I became drunkenly acquainted with a group of people (Millennial non-whites) who started talking about what was going on in Missouri, and one of them said something like, “But c’mon, dude, not all cops are bad.” Which instinctively roused the ABD within me from dormancy. I was tactful, though: I implied (calmly) that the protesting — or rioting, depending on your viewpoint — was in response to a larger, endemic malady. These are the rhetorical hoops an ABD must go through so that he can be listened to and not simply heard.
My significant other has been asked lately (by Millennial non-whites), “Why a black guy? You’re such a pretty girl so why him?” Which of course makes me feel like shit. I’m reminded of Iago’s warning to Brabanito: “Even now, now, very now, an old black ram is tupping your white ewe.”
What Does Feminist Porn Look Like? Russell O’Connor, Everyday Feminism, September 7, 2013
Most porn has a predominantly male perspective. The directors are usually men, and most porn is made for men. As a result, the camera often embodies the “male gaze“: It looks where a man (a stereotypical straight man, that is) would look.
As a result, women are presented exclusively as objects of desire and never as subjects of pleasure.
This is why men are so strangely absent from much straight porn, except as disembodied penises.
This can easily appear, as J. Bryan Lowder once said on Slate, as a strange form of reverse objectification.
But, as Lowder notes, there’s a simple reason for this: Most porn made for men is shot in such a way as to allow the male viewer to project himself into the scene. The woman is thus presented as available to any man who wishes to use her.
A penis needs to be present, but the man to whom it is attached had better not be too present, lest he threaten to become the focus and the male viewer be threatened with homo-eroticism.
Only the woman is to be seen, and she is there for the pleasure of the male viewer. [Emphasis in original.]
I have gotten very far behind on this particular blog series, so here is a quick roundup of what I meant to post over the past few months (part 3 of 3).
– Austerity goes too far: I know kids’ birthday parties can be hella expensive, and it’s awfully rude to say your kid will be there and then just not show up. That said, I’m pretty sure it still violates some clause of the social contract to invoice the kid for the cost of his share of the party. Seriously, they didn’t send a bill to the parents—they gave it directly to a five-year-old.
– Suck it, Goonies: I once found a pipe that was part of an old gas line buried in my backyard. I never found buried pirate treasure or anything. These kids in California found a buried Ferrari.
© Michael Haering, via Sliptalk / Jalopnik
This happened in 1978, but it’s still both newsworthy and WTF today. Continue reading
Believing that life is fair might make you a terrible person, Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian, February 3, 2015
If you’ve been following the news recently, you know that human beings are terrible and everything is appalling. Yet the sheer range of ways we find to sabotage our efforts to make the world a better place continues to astonish. Did you know, for example, that last week’s commemorations of the liberation of Auschwitz may have marginally increased the prevalence of antisemitism in the modern world, despite being partly intended as a warning against its consequences? Or that reading about the eye-popping state of economic inequality could make you less likely to support politicians who want to do something about it?
These are among numerous unsettling implications of the “just-world hypothesis”, a psychological bias explored in a new essay by Nicholas Hune-Brown at Hazlitt. The world, obviously, is a manifestly unjust place: people are always meeting fates they didn’t deserve, or not receiving rewards they did deserve for hard work or virtuous behaviour. Yet several decades of research have established that our need to believe otherwise runs deep. Faced with evidence of injustice, we’ll certainly try to alleviate it if we can – but, if we feel powerless to make things right, we’ll do the next best thing, psychologically speaking: we’ll convince ourselves that the world isn’t so unjust after all.
Hence the finding, in a 2009 study, that Holocaust memorials can increase antisemitism. Confronted with an atrocity they otherwise can’t explain, people become slightly more likely, on average, to believe that the victims must have brought it on themselves.
Lunging towards lunacy. What has happened to conservatism? Rudolph Bush, Dallas Morning News, February 3, 2015 Continue reading
