They are not like us

My new Freethinker column is posted. It’s stuff I’ve been saying here, but it’s chafing my mind rather, so I wanted to say it there too. It’s about police fascism in the US, and the way our mephitic heritage of genocide and slavery (notice how both are rooted in racism? funny coincidence, isn’t it?) has produced a stratified society which means police work can be a tough job. It’s a vicious circle, and to break out of that vicious circle we’d need to do things that are not part of the Church of the Free Market, so we don’t do them. We’d rather spend billions on locking people up than on ways out of the trap.

The one comment is from a UKanian talking about a one and only visit to the US.

Racism, in the affluent area I was living in, was blatant in the comments made. And I had the distressing experience of watching a Mexican, picked up in some queue, working furiously in hot sun in the garden while we enjoyed drinks. I caused surprise and resentment at deciding to take him a drink. My hosts wife said, “They are not like us. They don’t expect to have to be given a drink.” The worker seemed scared of me. I discovered he was an illegal immigrant. At the end of the day money was handed to the man who had brought him; not to the worker.

Alas, I recognize the picture.

Anxious nerds v alluring aliens

Laurie Penny has some thoughts on nerd entitlement. She has them in response to an impassioned comment by Scott Aronson on his own blog about what it’s like to be a nerdy anxious teenage boy and why that makes it impossible for him to recognize any “privilege” attributed to him by feminists. Here’s some of what Penny has to say:

Women generally don’t get to think of men as less than human, not because we’re inherently better people, not because our magical feminine energy makes us more empathetic, but because patriarchy doesn’t let us. We’re really not allowed to just not consider men’s feelings, or to suppose for an instant that a man’s main or only relevance to us might be his prospects as a sexual partner. That’s just not the way this culture expects us to think about men. Men get to be whole people at all times. Women get to be objects, or symbols, or alluring aliens whose responses you have to game to “get” what you want. [Read more…]

Whooping cough could be edging back

Whooping cough may be evolving to resist vaccinations. That would be bad.

Analysis of strains from 2012 shows the parts of the pertussis bacterium that the vaccine primes the immune system to recognise are changing.

It may have “serious consequences” in future outbreaks, UK researchers state in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.

But experts stressed the vaccine remains highly effective in protecting the most vulnerable young babies. [Read more…]

We command no worship, do we?

From a story about Chicago courts dismissing most tickets issued to cab drivers in 2011…

Most tickets for the 28 cabdrivers were heard in the Daley Center, in one of seven white-walled courtrooms decorated only by the words “In God We Trust” on one side.

Um…why? Why do courtrooms have the words “In God We Trust” on their walls? I don’t trust in god, and if I don’t think judges or lawyers should be trusting god either, any more than pilots or surgeons or engineers should.

Oh yeah? So why aren’t we doing it that way then?

Ben Jonson would have ratted him out so fast

Oh yay, Amanda Marcotte has a poke in the eye for the people who think Shakespeare was just the front guy for the Earl of Oxford or some other more aristocratic type because how could a nobody from the provinces possibly be Shakespeare?

Newsweek has a surprisingly sympathetic piece about Shakespeare truthers, republished here at Raw Story, and I just have to take some time to point out that, like with other conspiracy theories and denialist obsessions, there’s more going on here than some kind of legitimate dispute over the facts. For those who are unaware, Shakespeare truthers are people who believe that William Shakespeare was just a half-literate actor who was the cover story for some no doubt wealthy nobleman who secretly wrote the plays and didn’t want credit because, as we all know from our fairy tales, wealthy noblemen are noble, honorable creatures who have small egos and little desire for respect and adulation.* [Read more…]

And matching plaid bras

And another such chain of girls-showing-tits drinking and dining establishments, courtesy of Orac commenting on the last one. This one is called, winsomely, Tilted Kilt. I thought it must be the flipped version, with male servers in kilts and nothing else. How silly can you be? Of course it’s not.

While the Tilted Kilt concept has its roots deep in the rousing tradition of Scottish, Irish and English Pubs, it actually first came to life in America’s own sin city, Las Vegas. The brainchild of successful restaurateur Mark DiMartino, Tilted Kilt was conceived to be a contemporary, Celtic-themed sports Pub staffed with beautiful servers in sexy plaid kilts and matching plaid bras.

[Read more…]

Life suddenly made sense to him

So this is something I didn’t know about – a chain of “sports bars” called Bikinis Sports Bar & Grill. “Bikinis” isn’t the name of the owner but what the servers – all women, of course – wear.

How “America’s Only Breastaurant®” got started…

It all started back in the winter of 2001. Weary of the technology world, and discouraged by the “dot-com” implosion that was happening all around him, Doug Guller packed his bags and headed to Australia for a much needed vacation.

While sitting at a bar on the Australian coast, watching some rugby on a small TV nearby, an attractive server approached and asked, “Wanna beer, mate?” [Read more…]