Sometimes a few words are worth a thousand images. In this case the words that tickled my fancy came to me through a company that placed them on a T-shirt. I would think Iris in particular might like them, but even I found them delightful. Can’t wait to hear exactly what I’m talking about? The build up beginning to feel excessive? Well, okay. Here you go:
Alex Jones is now the subject of two related EEOC complaints that allege he sexually and racially harassed his staffers.
Though the Daily Mail is a terrible paper, they seem to have broken the story.
One wonders why folk consider this news.
So many of us have said for so long that Trump is authoritarian. Some of us even said Fascist, though that definition is up for debate and if it means anything, shouldn’t be merely a synonym of authoritarian.
Nonetheless, our warnings fell on 62,984,825 deaf ears. It seems that a heck of a lot of people thought that Trump might be hostile to some persons’ rights, but not their own rights.
The Baton Rouge advocate reported yesterday that the mother of a baby killed in a car crash has been charged with negligent homicide.
I’m not one to say that the loss of a child is by definition punishment enough when a parent or parents are responsible for fatal injuries to a child. I’m perfectly fine with charging parents who refuse to get medical care in the face of an obvious health crisis. I’m fine doing that whether they did so because of some issue that ultimately has a reasonable basis (:cough: Tuskeegee :cough:) or whether they did so because of some issue that has nothing rational even at some distant core (:cough: faith healing :cough:). The charges, however, need to be proportionate. In this case, they clearly are not. But you’ll have to stay with me to get more on that later. [Read more…]
From Agence France-Presse via RawStory:
Thousands of poor women in India’s Tamil Nadu state have been offered free cosmetic breast surgery, including implants, its health minister said Friday, because “poor people also have a right to look beautiful”.
Fuck sexism right out of the universe.
When I say sexism kills, I’m not being metaphorical. I’ve argued (as have others) that feminisms save men’s lives. The easiest mechanism to trace is the reduction in women killing men who are intimate partners as anti-violence shelters become available in an area. This study estimates shelter/hotline availability to correlate with a 2/3rds reduction of murders of men by women in intimate relationships with those men. The correlated reduction was 87% in the case of such murders of Black men. Causation is trickier to prove, but there are a number of good reasons to believe that feminist actions generally and the availability of shelters and hotlines specifically did cause at least a significant portion of this decline.
While theoretically it’s possible to provide shelters and subsidized breast modification surgeries, you know that’s not how this works. Tamil Nadu is now using its medical service to bolster sexism … which, I’m sure, will ultimately cost lives.
As I said: fuck sexism right out of the universe.
Imagine a male African American baby born in the US in 2012. According to the CDC and the NVSS, that baby would have a life expectancy of 72.3 years. Now imagine that baby ends up living more than 3600 years. Trans folk and other persons, I bring you the Opportunity Rover.
Expected to have a life of 90 Martian days (90 rotations of Mars or about 92 days and 8 hours on earth), the Opportunity Rover has now been performing tasks of exploration and discovery for 5000 Sols – over 14 years and 18 days on Earth (5128.5 days).
Public Relations is the art of using mass communication to change how people feel about politicians, celebrities, products, and especially entire corporations. One Spanish woman, Carla Forcada, felt she had the capacity to do this work quite well. The company where she applied to work, Impulsa Comunicación, had other thoughts on the matter. Ever mindful of the benefits of Public Relations, Forcada screen cap’d their message to her and aided them in making it reach further than they ever imagined:
Thirdmill – who is not an idiot, but is wrong in this instance – has repeated a bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, fucked and wrong trope over on Pharyngula. This trope is repeated by idiots so much that eventually some reasonable people start to think that maybe they have a point, which is why the trope needs to get stomped on hard, though please don’t stomp on Thirdmill as a person, should you choose to comment.
The trope is this: when considering discrimination, we need to consider the genuinely held beliefs and permit room for people to adhere to their consciences when doing so does not directly harm another. This was in the context of a Pharyngula post about how in the 99 years after the civil war and before the federal government started butting in, the invisible hand of the free market had totally taken care of private sector segregation just fine, and that Title 7 thing was completely unnecessary and Heart of Atlanta is a load of crap. Because of course it was, this is Sam Harris’ opinion, remember?
So. Much has been made over the last couple weeks on certain blogs about the pity-the-Trump-voter-who-can’t-get-a-blowjob articles that have been cropping up. I even intended, though never succeed) to write a post about the wonderful humanitarian work done by OK Cupid when they publicly posted a bit about users tendencies in 2017.
Many of you will remember the It Gets Better movement and its apotheosis: Rebecca Drysdale’s song and video.
Well, it turns out that Drysdale has a new project. The Ave Maria Bamford videos are consistently co-written by Maria Bamford and Drysdale. I’m not sure of the exact working relationship here as Maria Bamford is clearly the “star” of this youtube series, but it’s clear that Drysdale is integral to the writing. Drysdale even takes on an acting role in the latest video Ave Maria Bamford 112: The End of the World:
If you like dry, sometimes uncomfortable humor, and you don’t mind when someone pokes fun at religion, you’ll probably like the Ave Maria Bamford series. Enjoy!