The NCSE has opened a new front in their war on bad science!
Episode CCXCI: Maybe the Puritans weren’t all bad.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
The NCSE has opened a new front in their war on bad science!
Episode CCXCI: Maybe the Puritans weren’t all bad.
Er… I’m not going to snipe back, but I will point out, at this juncture, that I abhor hate speech as much as you do. Indeed – given that I’m planning a career in immigration, asylum and refugee law, and given that I believe very strongly in open borders and in equality for immigrants, a point which I have argued here at considerable length – I will be the first to say that the lies and hatred spewed by the likes of the Daily Mail and the Sun are incredibly toxic and are causing considerable harm. Likewise, it makes me sick when Andrew Green (I refuse to acknowledge his undeserved knighthood) of “MigrationWatch” appears on BBC news programmes to spew lies about immigrants with an air of pseudo-academic authority. It’s certainly tempting to want to shut them down, or at least to prevent them from spreading out-and-out racist lies (“asylum-seekers in million-pound house” and the like). For this reason I entirely understand the imperatives behind laws against incitement to racial hatred. Believe me. Our society could do with a great deal less racial hatred, and if I believed that hate speech laws would actually end hate speech without having catastrophic consequences, I would be in favour of them.
But I am also very conscious of the fact that prohibitive laws of any sort tend to be a terrible way of solving social problems. The criminal justice system is a blunt instrument; it is not, in general, a good way of engineering social change. There is a reason why most attempts to stamp out undesired practices through brute force – from anti-drug laws to the French ban on the burqa – have ended in making problems worse, not better.
With laws prohibiting hate speech, it is my contention that the moderate laws which exist in many European countries have been largely ineffective. Prohibiting Holocaust denial, express incitement to racial hatred, and Nazi symbolism doesn’t stop far-right and fascist groups from operating; it simply causes them to adopt different symbols and veiled language (hatred of Islam and Muslims being the rhetorical cover du jour). On the occasions when far-right leaders have been prosecuted and convicted (as Le Pen has been, for instance), it hasn’t shut them up; if anything, it’s given them more attention and the opportunity to paint themselves as martyrs.
Of course this doesn’t mean that no hate speech laws could be effective, as I’m sure LM is about to point out. But to make them effective, you’d have to take a much more bluntly coercive stance, jailing racist and far-right leaders, banning their political parties outright, and shutting down their media organs. Which would quite literally mean the end of liberal democracy. Where would we stop? After all, it isn’t the likes of the BNP that are the biggest threat to racial equality in Britain; it’s the more mainstream xenophobic right, and the likes of UKIP and the right-wing tabloid press (the Sun, the Mail, the Express and so on). Are we going to shut down the entire Murdoch and Rothermere media empires for hate speech? How about UKIP? MigrationWatch? The Conservative Monday Club? It isn’t practical or feasible, unless you want to end up banning political dissent entirely.
Because you said…
…which I took to be a reference to the torts of libel and slander, since the purpose of those torts is to safeguard individuals’ reputation against falsehoods.
Go NCSE!
So you’re opposed to the outlawing of discrimination on the grounds of race, sex and sexual orientation in housing and employment? Because I’d say those laws have done a great deal of good, both directly, and in making clear that racism, sexism and homophobia are unacceptable.
Note to self, then: Walton’s claims that prosecution actually made the BNP more popular are based on complete speculation.
Looks like “motivated reasoning” to me.
First, I apologise for calling you a sanctimonious arsehole. That was uncalled for.
However, I specifically did not mention the UK libel laws because I do not support them. I am in favour of the changes proposed by Libel Reform Campaign, which recommends a change to the law so that in order to successfully sue for libel you must show that either the defendant make the statement knowing it to be false, or showed a reckless disregard for checking if it was true.
If you have been following Levinson you will know that last week the odious Kelvin McKenzie (former editor of The Sun) admitted to publishing stories without bothering to check if they were true or not, and not caring if they were true or not. I would imagine that the level of checking considered appropriate will depend on the seriousness of what is being said.
@ walton
For the record I am anti-burqua not pro-repression. (Fairly obvious … the alternative would be self-contradicory.)
I just hope that the NCSE is careful to distinguish between anti-AGW and anti-evolution claptrap.
Because the uncertainties in AGW are rather greater than any uncertainty that life evolved. Not that AGW is seriously in question, it’s just that present warming a single occurrence, which by itself makes it quite different.
Why do creationists oppose it, btw? It’s not “historical science” (although it uses that). Was I there? Well, yes, idiot, not that such a fact makes it any more certain.
Glen Davidson
I think it’s a good thing that they’re taking this on. I do worry, though, that they’ll take the same tack with this that they have with evolution, and join with environmentally active religious groups while criticizing those who challenge their beliefs. I would not support that.
Walton,
I would also suggest you make use of iPlayer, or download the mp3, to listen to “The Long View” that was broadcast on Radio 4 this morning. It looked at the vicious murder of a young black man in the 1959 that led to the first law prohibiting incitement to racial hatred being introduced in the mid 60s. Especially telling was how hard it was to get such legislation passed, and who it was who made it so hard. Hint: Not the left-wing of the Labour party!
One advantage of this new NCSE campaign is that it might keep Rosenau too busy to make stupid comments about new atheists.
Captain Courageous
Up to a point; it’s important, of course, not to confuse correlation with causation, and we don’t have the counterfactual (we don’t know what would have happened without prosecution). But prosecution certainly hasn’t wiped out the BNP or caused its support base to disappear; and as I pointed out, Nick Griffin became leader of the BNP in 1999, a year after he was convicted of a public order offence. Clearly it didn’t end his political career.
That’s why I said “tend to” and “in general”. I think you’re right that such laws have done, on balance, considerable good. But they do come at a cost: for example, there have been very difficult debates about how broadly to permit exceptions of conscience. (On the one hand, few of us would argue that the Catholic Church, say, should be forced by law to ordain women and gay people to the priesthood. On the other hand, we do, rightly, require religious charities providing publicly-funded services, such as adoption, to do so without any form of discrimination; and we also require secular businesses owned by religious people, such as hotels, to refrain from discrimination. Where do we draw the line? I agree that anti-discrimination laws are worthwhile and necessary, but I wouldn’t pretend that they’re easy.)
I think these are best couched not as prohibitive laws, but as conditions for working in certain industries or providing certain services. Such conditions apply to speech, too. For example, members of many professions (teachers, police, prison officers and so forth) are, rightly, barred from being involved in racist groups like the BNP, or from expressing bigoted views in the workplace; psychologists, social workers and other health care professionals have to provide services to people of all races, sexual orientations and gender identities without discrimination; and so on. And I think that’s right. But there’s a line between prohibiting racial discrimination for people working in professions or providing services, and making it a crime for a private citizen, outside the workplace, to express views which are racist, homophobic or otherwise bigoted.
I think it’s also worth noting that most of the remedies under the Race Relations Act 1976 and its various successor statutes (including the omnibus Equality Act 2010) for discrimination of this kind are civil actions, rather than criminal prosecutions, and thus less intrusive on liberty. This doesn’t, of course, mean that they aren’t restraints on speech (libel and slander are civil actions too), but this is a consideration that has to be weighed in the balance.
True – I should have recalled from our previous discussion that your view is more nuanced than I originally understood. And I apologize for strawmanning you.
===
(Referring specifically, here, to discrimination in employment and in the provision of services. The 1976 Act, which covers a number of issues, does also create certain criminal offences, including that of “incitement to ethnic or racial hatred”. Just to be clear.)
I think the issue where hate speech isn’t or shouldn’t be censorship is the distinction between saying words and causing an effect.
Saying the words “let’s kill all the Jews” can easily nto be hate speech
a) If said in a neutral tone clearly not inciting and just giving an example of hate speech
b) In fiction or play with a character
c) Sarcasm, etc etc
It shouldn’t be the speech that is punished, it should be the effect. Yelling ‘Fire” in a theater shouldn’t be illegal, it’s the intent to cause harm by starting a panic. If someone said “Everyone, there is no emergency but please ignore the following example of nuances in free speech” and then yells fire that’s far different.
Inciting people to do violent crimes, should be seen as an attempt at conspiracy for crime even if the other contributes are anonymous.
the problem is people fear that
a) The state will take any claim of descent or dissatisfaction as incitement for treason
b) The state will ignore context
c) The state will selectively enforce.
d) People will force it based on hurting feelings
e) People will be blamed for others misinterpreting their intention
Just what I think is the American POV on why free speech is seen as an absolute.
Mention of The Long View reminds me to ask: what podcasts do people listen to that you like? I’m always looking for new ones.
Currently my list is:
Buzz Out Loud
A History of the World in 100 Objects (no new episodes)
Infinite Monkey Cage
Judge John Hodgman
Living After Faith
Pop Culture Happy Hour (from NPR Monkey See)
Bullseye with Jesse Thorn
The Sporkful
StarTalk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson
Stuff you missed in history class
Radiolab
I never imagined that it might.
So you think it made him more popular among people who were already white supremacists. Could be. This is irrelevant to what I’m wondering about: whether a successful prosecution of a party leader for hate speech affects the party’s popularity among the general population.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_National_Party#Electoral_performance
Well, again, correlation does not imply causation, but in 2006 – the same year as Nick Griffin’s second trial, and two years after he was arrested and charged – the BNP made enormous gains in local elections, doubling their number of councillors. They also gained two seats in the European Parliament for the first time in the 2009 elections.
Hm. I’m pretty sure I already said I don’t expect an unsuccessful prosecution to have a negative effect on their popularity.
(Of course, 19 doesn’t directly address your point because Griffin was acquitted. But, to take another example, Jean-Marie Le Pen was convicted of Holocaust denial in 1999, and suspended from the European Parliament in 2000 for a physical assault on another MEP; and yet went on to achieve his strongest-ever result in the 2002 presidential elections, polling second after Chirac in the first round. Being treated as a criminal doesn’t seem to affect the popularity of white nationalist leaders. Indeed, these examples are consistent with the view that it may, in some cases, help them by giving them extra media attention, although I will acknowledge that there isn’t enough evidence to claim that this is so in all cases.)
That would be pretty hard to separate from the effects of the 2005 bombings.
I don’t often listen to the podcast because I tend to catch it when it is broadcast, but “In Our Time” on Radio 4 is excellent. The presenter Melvyn Bragg is mainly an arts broadcaster and novelist but he has a love of science with a good understanding of the subject.
Each program looks at some aspect in history, art, science, philosophy etc. The subject range is diverse. You can have the iconography of faeries being discussed one week, The relationship between early Islam and Judaism the next and Dark Matter the week after.
Each show has the same format, with Bragg talking to three academics who are knowledgeable about the field. Bragg takes the role of an intelligent layperson, asking intelligent questions.
You can find the website here. New programs are still being made, and there are several hundred editions to download free.
I was just watching the video above, and one moment in particular caught my attention – quoth the talking head; “there is no making deals with these vampires… I am not trying to demonise them” (or words to that affect).
No, he is not trying to liken them to demons; just mythological blood drinking undead monsters, so that is totally fine, naturally…
Of course, what he is also doing is likening them to Esward Cullen of the justly reviled and thoroughly awful Twilight franchise and, contrary to PZ’s thread elsewhere on the blog, that is the ultimate insult.
I’m not comfortable, in any case, with going down the road of debating solely whether hate speech laws are an effective way of combating the far right, as though this were the only relevant consideration. One can obviously envision circumstances in which they could be. If the state’s response to the far right were to jail its leaders for decades at a time, ban their political parties and close down their media organs, I am fairly sure that this would reduce the power of the far right. I don’t doubt, for instance, that the influence of the 75-year-old racist neo-Nazi Horst Mahler, whatever influence he may have had, has been lessened by the fact that he is serving a 12-year prison sentence.
But while such tactics might very well be effective, they would clearly be morally wrong. In fighting authoritarianism, we should not descend to the tactics of authoritarians: I am not willing to countenance the use of violence to silence others’ opinions, even pernicious and bigoted opinions.
Because if we sink to that level, we implicitly admit that might makes right. We accept that the people in power are entitled to use force to silence views they oppose. What right would we have, then, to complain if the tables were turned and if we ourselves were put in prison for expressing liberal, socialist or progressive viewpoints – which has, indeed, been the practice under a great many régimes? How can we possibly hope to build a free society if we do so by jailing the opponents of freedom, and imitating the very tactics that they advocate? Freedom of speech, if it is to mean anything at all, must apply not just to mainstream, moderate or acceptable opinions, but to those opinions which threaten the very foundations of the state and the fundamental values of a society. The real test of our commitment to liberal values is how we respond to the people who oppose those values.
I thought, well shit! that’s not good! But it turns out he went from 15.00% in 1997 to 16.86% in 2002. Not such a big deal.
Given the evidence, I’ll have to agree with that much.
+++++
And now I must bow out.
If you get bored, consider trying to get theophontes to explain just what on Earth he’s talking about and why he thinks it constitutes a workable model for, well, anything:
Change in topic: Apparently the current Republican-led push for tougher “voter ID laws” is disenfranchising people.
So much for your plan, guys.
Oh, one more. Because it is delicious bait.
No, we’d be saying that because they presence of racist organizations is actually detrimental to society, we’re justified in stopping them. That’s “right makes right”.
But someone else will surely feel compelled to argue that in more detail. I am here for the dessert:
Who gives a shit about having a moral right to complain?
Not me! Justice as Fairness is for liberals!
Walton:
Why the scare-quotes? What’s the difference between the first “dangerous” and the second “dangerous”? The state decides the first and you decide the second?
Since you claim that in many cases speech is toxic and causes harm, the state could justifiably determine that it is in fact dangerous.
No one should expect any law (or any instance of a law being enforced) to “end hate speech.” Given a more practical and less totalitarian goal (thus not requiring such restrictive laws to be effective), do you think it’s possible for a hate speech law to not have such catastrophic consequences as you imagine?
So they could be more effective. That doesn’t mean we have to go as far as “banning political dissent entirely.” You see all that space in between those two extremes? You find none of it worth even considering?
Very difficult debates don’t cost very much. Were you going to tell us about these “costs”?
Sounds good, but doesn’t actually make the case. “In fighting the violent, we should not decend to violence.” Unless you’re a complete pacifist, to the extent of refusing to resort to violence even in immediate self-defence or defence of others, you don’t accept this, so why should we accept your parallel claim?
Color me shocked.
It’s a long standing tactic of the Good ole’ boys here in the south. They of course make claims (i hear then daily here in SC) such as:
“What’s so wrong with having to show who you are”
“I have a drivers license, they can get one too”
“VOTER FRAUD!!!” [which is very rare, but try and tell them that]
“Why don’t they want to show an ID, they must be up to something”
and my favorite
“If they get IDs and try to vote, then we can grab the ones with warrants”
An excellent idea!
whoops hit submit too soon
And here is the obvious reason why they want it.
Well in the case of Murdoch we could just declare him an unfit person to own a newspaper, and force him to sell. Given either his complicity in criminal activity at his papers, or his wilful ignorance of that activity, he would have a hard job showing he was a fit and proper person to clean a toilet.
With regards voting, why not keep a register of those in each area eligible to vote ? That is what we do here in the UK. It is revised every 12 months, although you can notify changes of address in between that revision. Seems to work pretty well.
Yes, there is some speech that is dangerous. I have never denied this. But I do not trust the state to make that determination.
It comes at a cost – not necessarily a financial cost, but a cost to individual freedom. Limiting people’s freedom of association and conscience in certain contexts – as we must do, if we are to enforce anti-discrimination laws consistently and effectively – is in itself a harm. I believe that harm is outweighed in many contexts by the urgent need to fight entrenched discrimination against marginalized groups, which is why I am in favour of anti-discrimination laws in employment, housing and certain other contexts. But this does not mean that the cost can be ignored, or that the debate over where to draw the line is an easy one.
But you know it’s not. While it might be a tempting prospect for those of us who deplore the hatemonger tabloid press, I don’t believe that you genuinely want the state to silence them by force.
Matt, 36:
That’s exactly how it’s always been done here in the states. That’s the system the disenfranchisors want to replace. They don’t want it to be simple, they want it to be difficult and unreasonable.
If by force you mean enforce/make laws against criminal actions, hateful incitement, and deceit in broadcasting; I think you’ll find that that’s exactly what people want.
Billo can tell Ice Cube and Ice-T apart. He is not the whitest guy you know.
And if history is any teacher, we know they’ll couple this with a campaign of distortion to scare those having to get new IDs into thinking that mistakes on their end could result in fines and/or jail time.
Walton the above with the voting disenfranchisement is another example of speech that should not be allowed because it itself is a crime.
Another example: Should UN or other forces stop Vatican and Missionaries from going into Africa if they spread misinformation about HIV and undermine important life saving disease control programs?
Gag. The guy who wrote St. Elmo’s Fire has rewritten it for Tim Tebow. It is not done ironically.
Here (from Shakesville)
Hello everyone. Speaking of junk science…. I need some help. Anyone know anything about naturopathy? Its seems to have different meanings everywhere and there are all kinds of naturopathic medicine colleges and courses and degrees etc etc. The Wikipedia entry (yeah, I know, about as reliable as a match in a hurricane) indicates that naturopathy is full of woo (which I assumed already) but also indicates that there are some aspects of it that are sound or which are utilised in or alongside mainstream medicine.
Is naturopathy just a blanket term for nature-based approaches which covers both good stuff and utter nonsense? Like herbal treatments (some good) and homeopathy (all shite) and recreation-based stress management (mostly very good) and learning to control your vital energy (b-o-l-l-o-c-k-s)…
NMD stands for Not a Medical Degree
It’s a blanket term for bullshit that isn’t medicine.
That song was terrible to begin with. You are better off listening to Brian Eno’s song with the same title. Love that solo.
What? I don’t even understand what you mean. Are you arguing that Republicans who propose bills imposing voter ID requirements should be arrested and prosecuted? :-/
The UN has no such legal power, and I don’t know what “other forces” you’re talking about. States can exclude foreign missionaries from their territory, and some do (particularly Middle Eastern Islamic states which ban Christian proselytizing), but I doubt that’s what you’re thinking of.
testing
Podcasts:
Reasonable Doubts
The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
Brain Science Podcast
The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe
–+–+–
Walton:
I don’t trust you to determine what’s best for society either. Who has to determine that sort of thing? Society does. Given that none of us are in anarchist utopias (or any other utopias), our governments are responsible for representing society’s interests with the laws it enacts and enforces. Deal with it.
You are basically saying that you accept tangible harm that really is occurring right now, because you just don’t like the kind of nightmares that gives you about where that might possibly lead someday if the slippery slope to totalitarianism is anything like you imagine it to be. That’s not acceptable to me.
You merely define it as a kind of harm for obvious ideological reasons. The kind of harm a racist suffers by being forced not to discriminate is generally not a kind of harm at all.
Damn, I think a comment with a measly four links is being put into moderation. Annoying.
Podcasts:
Reasonable Doubts
History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
Brain Science Podcast
Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe
–+–+–
Walton:
I don’t trust you to determine what’s best for society either. Who has to determine that sort of thing? Society does. Given that none of us are in anarchist utopias (or any other utopias), our governments are responsible for representing society’s interests with the laws it enacts and enforces.
You are basically saying that you accept tangible harm that really is occurring right now, because you just don’t like the kind of nightmares that gives you about where that might possibly lead someday if the slippery slope to totalitarianism is anything like you imagine it to be. That’s not acceptable to me.
You merely define it as a kind of harm for obvious ideological reasons. The kind of harm a racist suffers by being forced not to discriminate is generally not a kind of harm at all.
@Rev. BigDumbChimp
Yeah, they almost got me with that one too. We’re all considered non-citizens in states with these Jim Crow voter ID laws until we can show our birth certificates. When I was asked for mine, I almost panicked thinking that I might not have it (luckily I did). But what if you don’t have it at home and have no car to go zooming around to local/regional hospitals trying to find your birth certificate (and on top of that, how are you going to get to the remotely located building to get your ID even if you do have your birth certificate)? What if you were born in a far-off place across the USA and have no easy way to get your birth certificate? These voter ID laws are plainly illegal and make a mockery of us all.
People lie to minorities and elderly and women to try to dissuade them from voting. Do you want to allow this or stop it?
Way to dodge the question. Is it ethical to you to prevent people from spreading disinformation regarding a health crisis or undermining ongoing health and disease control programs?
Walton I think your ideals and values on this are from a privileged position. Those in society who are more vulnerable I think are very much more concerned with their own protections than curtailing the absolute FOS of those who pray upon them.
Prey* but pun is probably appreciated.
FFS, the comment doesn’t post three times in a row, then when I take out the links, it worked anyway. Seriously, I’m not crazy.
Oh, obviously that should be illegal. Sorry I misunderstood what you meant.
Freedom of expression protects vulnerable minorities. Indeed, that’s its primary purpose. The point is that the majority do not get to silence the minority through force – and that’s very valuable, in general, because it protects ethnic, political and religious minority groups from being silenced. (Without the First Amendment, what do you think would happen in the more hyper-conservative US states to the freedom of expression of, say, Muslims? Or non-theists? Do you really want to trust legislatures or the voting public to decide which forms of expression should be allowed and which should not?)
The problem, as you observe, is that absolute freedom of expression also allows racists and other bigots to promote bigotry. But this is the price we pay for protecting the free speech rights of everyone, including vulnerable minorities.
Darwin/Hooker slides!:
http://www.bgs.ac.uk/discoveringGeology/geologyOfBritain/archives/jdhooker/home.html
NYT piece about increasing oppression of women in Israel, linked by Digby:
I agree with this whole heartily. In order to protect unpopular speech you agree with you have to be willing to protect speech you do not. Does it have uncomfortable and hurtful consequences? I sure can. But so can the opposite if you happen to find yourself on the other side of the equation.
SC– :)
Previous Thread:
Confusion, and plausible deniability. The victim sits in front of a line-up, and the officer says, “Sir or Madam, can you identify the kitteh that assaulted you?”…but all the kittehs look alike. Or, kitteh says, “It wasn’t me officer, it was my Evil Twin!”, and the police are left to figure out which one.
–
But Benjamin, wouldn’t it be more fun to use a catapult?
:)
–
Actually, I kinda like that one. I’ll have to remember it for later. :)
–
Josh, you did remember about the f minor thingy, yes?
–
More than just suspicion, on the video.
–
Gringrinch comes with a shitload of baggage.
–
–
My age has once again hit me.
I’m preparing a lecture on phylogenetics, and looking over the brand new cool textbook chapter. Then I went back and got my Compleat Cladist to get an example problem, and realized the juxtaposition of how it’s all so set and just taken for granted now, while when I was in school it was still being argued for as the best technique.
Good grief.
Whoever’s running Colbert’s campaing is a political and comedic genius.
Cain for president of South Carolina!
SC – NEED PICTURES!
*whimper*
Is there a list of tags besides those above the reply box that work on this site? I want to avoid another fuck up.
Somewhere a minion of the Discovery Institute is going to quotemine the shit out of that comment. At long last! Proof that evolution is a lie! Darwin had sex outside of marriage!
See the second link!
***
Hee. I thought of that, too.
The country music they play on stations around these parts is equal parts love, loss, and propaganda for a lifestyle that never existed. I hates it.
___
Giliell,
How hard is this concept really? There are other people around and kids who are behaving poorly are not learning any good things about social situations with strangers. Time to move on.
___
Former Mullah,
That seratonin link to moral judgements is fascinating. I don’t know as I understand fully, but maybe with another read.
___
Walton,
I find myself curious how this would play out if border controls were eliminated. Where would more people end up? More to the point, would the nations that had the best overall treatment of their citizens be the ones that had the least impositions on their citizens, whether in general or when tied specifically to speech.
I think I understand the point you are trying to make, but I find myself unable to accept it. I do think that hate speech should be opposed at a large scale level. Maybe better media would help in this, it sure isn’t great right now, but exposure of lies, half truths, and hidden motivations go a long way to undermining much of the credibility that public figures have. Would it make more sense for governments to speak out rather than prosecute?
___
Carlie,
John Parr, urk.
Wasn’t the choice at that summit between Santorum and Gingrich ?
Gringrinch comes with a shitload of baggage.
There’s a dirty joke in there somewhere about Gingrich having a shitload of baggage and Santorum having a santorumload of baggage, but I don’t quite have it yet…
BWAHAHAHAHAA!!! Satirical Twitter feed based on this aforementioned question:
And Tiffany jewelry.
Randall Terry’s Superbowl forced-birther ads: “Nothing says ‘pass the dip’ like a bloody fetus.”
@73: From your link: “So he’s launching a non-serious campaign for president (running as a Democratic challenger to President Obama) in order to exploit a loophole in Federal Communications Commission rules that requires station to run campaign ads in the weeks ahead of a primary election—no matter how grisly they might be.”
My first thought about this law is that it could be exploited in a lot of interesting ways. PZ could run for president and we could demand that an ad promoting atheism, possibly complete with lesbian bible sex, be shown. Porn stars could run for president and put out “previews” without censorship. Al Qaeda and the NRA could run “how to assassinate people most efficiently” spots. Just make a claim that you’re running for president and the (TV) world is yours, apparently.
I wonder if campaign ads get a discount compared with other ads. Maybe McDonald’s should run for president (hey, corporations are people too-why shouldn’t they run for president) and stretch its advertising budget a bit…Of course PETA would probably run as well and who knows what they’d come up with.
I’m not sure if promoting the use of this loophole would be a good thing or a bad one. Maybe just a chaotic idea.
Crommunist post! I don’t want to spoiler it, just take a deep breath and go look:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/crommunist/2012/01/17/mencall-kathryn-marshall-things
I just made the ex really mad at me. A discussion involving people in poor areas having lots of children. Strong opinions were exchanged.
I can’t stop snickering with glee whenever I intentionally make someone rage at me…
But by accident with someone I care about? I won’t feel remotely right until I’ve ‘fixed it’. And it appears the only way to ‘fix it’ for now is to leave her the fuck alone for a few hours.
I fucking hate this. Can’t really think about much else.
bye bye SOPA… for now
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johngaudiosi/2012/01/16/obama-says-so-long-sopa-killing-controversial-internet-piracy-legislation/
Well, that’s a relief.
“St. Elmo’s Fire”: Why is the first thing I heard in my head “die in a fire”, to the tune of the Title Drop? (TVTropes link; you have been warned)
####
Couldn’t find my keys this morning either, so I grabbed my spare set (after looking for them for 10 minutes). Ended up late to class.
Got home, sat down, looked down at where I set the bag-o-parts for my shoulder rig, and saw my keys. Somehow they ended up in my tool bag.
####
Speaking of the shoulder rig, I’m building a variant on the one Ryan built in this episode of Film Riot. The difference is I’m using pipe connectors instead of a heat gun. I’ve pretty much got it built, but I need to glue the PVC together and attach the mounting plate. (And I’ll probably shorten the body of the rig first; it’s a bit too long for comfort.)
Another difference: I’m going to use a ballhead instead of mounting the camera directly to the mounting plate.
Ooh. *Bad* NCSE. They didn’t give credit to Peter Sinclair for that excerpt they showed from one of his Climate Denial Crock of the Week episodes.
Hope everyone’s seen this.
We’re thinking of making “noone cares about your big paragraph” into a meme. Do pass it on :)
This is a strawman. I’m not proposing an “anarchist utopia”. I’m proposing strong judicial protection for freedom of expression, limiting the ability of the legislature and the voters they represent to suppress dissenting viewpoints, much as exists in the US.
This can be said to be a collective decision of society on a more abstract level, insofar as there is a social consensus about the legitimacy of the constitution and the authority of the courts to interpret it. Without this consensus, the right to freedom of expression, however broad on paper, would be unenforceable and meaningless. (Which is why Newt Gingrich’s idea of attacking the independence of federal judges really, really terrifies me.) But on a more concrete and individual level, it’s fine that some decisions of the courts do not reflect the general opinion of society as a whole; because the whole point is to protect the freedoms of minorities from suppression by the majority. And if we demand and expect such protection for ourselves, we have to accept it for everyone else too, including bigots and idiots.
Freedom of expression should not be taken for granted. It hasn’t existed in most societies in history, nor is it permanently secure in any of our own societies, even the most stable and democratic. It can always be eroded. The only way we can prevent that is by setting clear outer limits, enforced by an independent judiciary, on the ability of the government to suppress speech. And those limits, if they are to be substantial and meaningful, have to allow for the protection of speech we dislike, as well as speech we like.
I’m not talking about hypothetical harm or imaginary dangers. Suppression of speech by the government is a real problem, occurring right now in real societies. And it is very dangerous.
Romney also has the support of the Show Us Your Papers guy.
SC: Yes, I did get your comment about the paper, by the way. Thanks.
####
I realized something today. Microkernels and exokernels can be thought of as the libertarianism and anarchism, respectively, of operating systems. Microkernels try to offload as much as they can into user space (‘the market’) while still maintaining a minimal abstraction layer. Exokernels don’t even maintain an abstraction layer, serving only to prevent one process from stepping on another process’s resources; the abstractions are found in the “library operating system” components.
Walton the issue is what to do when speech itself imposes upon the rights of others or endangers the lives of others.
Someone spreading misinformation in a disaster or quarantine zone for example can kill a lot of people, with just words.
Suppression of LIFE and safety is a real problem right now for many. This isn’t a question of security theater and giving up liberties for an illusion of safety; this is a question of whether you try to curb bullying speech or hate inducing speech that is inflicting a queer casualty.
With the religious exceptions and oppositions to anti-bullying laws and that it sure as hell seems to me that the message is “The majority’s right to shout at you trumps your right to live in peace”
Walton,
Your employment of the American vernacular is noted, as is your assignment of guilt by association.
That’s true. And there’s another example which you could have used: the role of Radio Milles Collines in inciting and organizing the Rwandan genocide (as a result of which some of the station’s staff were later indicted by the ICTR). That’s a clear example of speech leading directly to a very large number of people being killed.
Those are difficult issues. But they’re exceptional cases which are very different from the situations we’re talking about, where far-right activists in European countries have been fined or jailed for expressing views that the majority (rightly) finds to be abhorrent and bigoted.
Firstly, we aren’t talking about laws against bullying, harassment or intimidation. I think it would be very hard for a rational person to argue that all anti-harassment laws should be abolished, and no one in this discussion is making such an argument. Threatening people with violence is a crime in most places; sending people persistent unwanted and offensive letters or emails, or following them around shouting abuse at them, is a crime and/or grounds for a civil injunction in most places; harassment in the workplace is a crime, and/or grounds for a civil action, in many places; and so forth. And rightly so. Even in the US, it has long been established by the federal courts that there can be legitimate limits on the “time, place and manner” of expressing one’s views, with regard to constitutionally-protected speech.
Rather, the question is whether people should be penalized for the content of their opinions, as opposed to the circumstances in which they express them. If a racist, X, stands outside the homes of ethnic-minority people yelling racist abuse at them, he will be arrested, and rightly so; and they will probably get a civil injunction to stop him harassing them.
But if X circulates, to his own group of fellow racists, a set of leaflets expressing his view that ethnic-minority people are a threat to X’s culture and should all be rounded up and deported, should this be a criminal offence? I would say not. Because if the legislature has the power to criminalize X’s leaflets on the grounds that they pose a threat to social order and the values of society, what’s to stop it also criminalizing the promotion of other forms of speech that it also deems to pose such a threat, like advocacy of communism, anarchism or anti-war sentiments? This isn’t an imaginary fear. There have been plenty of efforts in the US to silence “subversive” political speech, and I, for one, am very glad that the federal courts have (albeit inconsistently and often half-heartedly) pushed back.
Secondly, be careful with the word “majority”. If the majority, in society as a whole, were the ones doing the bullying, then the laws for which you argue wouldn’t exist, because the majority would have voted against them. If, for instance, the majority of people in society were
I find this video flippin’ hilarious! POTUS demands to see Betty White’s long form birth certificate (seen at Towleroad).
Ok, I forgot to finish my paragraph. Post continues:
Secondly, be careful with the word “majority”. If the majority, in society as a whole, were the ones doing the bullying, then the laws for which you argue wouldn’t exist, because the majority would have voted against them. The opinions criminalized by hate speech laws are not generally majority opinions, but the opinions of fringe right-wing groups.
Don’t get me wrong. The majority of people in most societies are bigoted (if not always consciously so); internalized sexism, racism and homophobia are pervasive and pernicious, all around us. But hate speech laws don’t address this kind of internalized, unstated bigotry. They address the open bigotry of noisy figures like Nick Griffin or Jean-Marie Le Pen, not the more tacit and subtle bigotry that is much more widespread.
Britain, for instance, is an extremely (depressingly) racist society in many respects; our government’s treatment of immigrants and asylum-seekers reflects that. But that racism is fostered and encouraged not primarily by far-right parties like the BNP (although they play a role), but by the more “moderate” xenophobic right: the Daily Mail and other tabloid newspapers, UKIP, groups like MigrationWatch, and so on. Hate speech laws don’t address those groups; they don’t criminalize those who hide their racism behind statements like “we need to get control of our borders” or “our culture is in danger of being swamped”. That’s the much more dangerous and pernicious form of racism; and there is no way for hate speech laws to address it, except by suppressing political dissent entirely, something I hope none of us would advocate.
Aaaaand, right on cue, apparently Newt Gingrich wants to fire federal employees who are “too far to the left”. Illegally, of course, but he doesn’t seem to care about that. So, right after implementing his Chavez-esque plan to destroy the independence of the federal judiciary, he’s also going to fire everyone from government (including, presumably, DoJ lawyers) who might disagree with him on any issue. I’m not sure how this could get worse; at this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised if he proposed appointing John Yoo as Attorney General.
I’m worried about this not because I think he’s going to win the presidency – clearly he isn’t – but because I’m worried about the place that he and his scary ideas might have in a future Republican administration. Especially since so many conservative voters seem to be eating this shit up with a spoon.
Dhorvath,
It’s worth keeping in mind that this might not have any implications in normal life outside the laboratory. While our Ichthyic is fond of saying that everything’s a trolley problem, it doesn’t follow that the brain naturally treats anything as such. It’s possible that this study amounts to merely an irrelevant curiosity.
The authors give one reason for suspecting that it does have some wider implications. As they note, a deontological justification for flipping the switch in the standard trolley problem is likely to involve the principle of double effect. This is a simple enough concept that it evidently emerged several times in the history of philosophy, even though it was not classified until Aquinas.
Since there were no genetic differences in the endorsement of intentional harm, but only in endorsement of unintentional harm, it appears that carriers of the S allele were more likely to employ thinking which approximates the PDE. And cases where the PDE could be employed are extremely numerous, common in everyday life.
Not so much.
Condell is guilty by his own actions. He actively became a spokesperson for UKIP.
KG documented this a couple years ago. Even rorschach finally noticed. What’s your malfunction, John?
[rant]
Dang, coldest night of the year coming up and the heat to my lab/office has crapped out as usual.
[/rant]
SC: Thanks for that. I hadn’t come across that story.
To be clear, there are immense problems with the American judicial system, both at the federal and the state levels – particularly with criminal procedure, something I wrote about a while back. And of course there is a long, long, long, ugly history of activists being framed for crimes as a means of suppressing dissent, going back to Sacco and Vanzetti, Joe Hill, and so forth. When I defend the independent federal judiciary for their better moments, I am certainly not intending to downplay the number of times the judiciary has stood aside and allowed appalling power-abuses to take place.
Which is exactly my point; this is why free speech rights are in constant peril, as much today as they have ever been, and why I am very scared of anything that expands the legislature’s power to suppress political speech of any kind. The same laws that can be used to suppress activists we oppose can also be used to suppress activists we support. (As we’ve seen in Britain; police powers designed to suppress far-right BNP and EDL rallies have, in the last couple of years, been used against students’ and workers’ protests.)
LM,
I would not go so far as to suggest lending different credence to different people based on their genetic background, but it is interesting to see a reasonably solid link between neurochemistry and decision making.
Sidenote: I tend to the position that there is no correct response to the trolley problem (although I think I would tend to act in whichever way saved the most people from harm) because there are actually three sets of victims.
It would be a fairly unreliable guide, in any case. Those with the LL genotype may be prone to answer correctly but without understanding or explaining why. At best, we might note that having an SL or better yet an LL genotype might lower the barrier — though which barrier is this, exactly? anxiety? — to learning the correct answer, which is obviously to flip the switch.
Typical SL talk! ;)
I am who I am.
Damned good article on Mormonism’s Lethal Culture of Sexual Dysfunction
Excerpt:
Of course, the mormon online missionaries, and general defenders of the faith, are all out in force. There’s a flood of pro-mormon comments that follow the article.
The True Believing Mormon commenters are generally not objecting at all to untrained clergy interviewing teenagers about their sex life. No, heaven forbid that they would actually address the subject. But the TBM commenters are saying things along the lines of, “The LDS Church has high standards, and what’s wrong with that,” or “What about the sexual dysfunction is Islam,” or “This author obviously got over the trauma of being interviewed by a mormon bishop because here he is talking about things in public that should remain private,” or “All mormon bishops are kind and wise, and they never tell anyone what goes on in private interviews.”
No one should be obligated to disclose private details about their life to anyone that those details can’t directly affect, that an organization is tolerated which exacts such an awful price from it’s children appalls.
I didn’t say you were. You were saying that governments cannot determine threats to society, even those you yourself deem to be threats. First, that’s just nonsensical. Second, I was claiming that they can legitimately determine what is and is not a threat, given the fact that we are not in a situation in which governmental authority itself can reasonably be put into question (despite the fact that you seem to have a slight distaste for it in most cases).
I agree with everything you said after that in that comment. Sorry, that still doesn’t make me a free speech absolutist. In fact, it’s almost entirely the absolutist bullshit that I don’t like.
…
Not if it’s just rhetoric, but actually making plans (recorded verbally or in writing) to kidnap people and “deport” them should be illegal.
@Zeno, if you are there
I just read that blog post of yours with that calculus graph problem where all three problems in the question can be solved by coincidence using the incorrect formulation (integral)x*dx. That was just about the most hilarious math story I ever read. Another funny part, you mentioned that two of your students did the same thing.
Overall, I was seriously flabbergasted. I was also giggling like a child. ^_^
@100
Quite true.
You will not be surprised to find that mormons are busy saying that it’s not really mormonism that is pushing up the suicide statistics. And furthermore, it is not really mormons that are accessing porn online.
This is from the reader’s comments section:
Those familiar with mormon apologetics will recognize the hand of LDS leaders in that weak rebuttal of the research that indicates at least a correlation between mormonism and an increase in suicide rates, and in online porn use.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the some of the claims in the apologetic text are wrong, twisted, or taken out of context. That would also be the mormon way. Start with the assumption that mormonism is all good all the time, and then adjust the facts to fit.
@Lynna
That story makes me wonder why they would want to even hear a masturbation confession. I mean, that is kind of disturbing. Do they get a kick out of it?
ibyea,
Control.
ibyea: really, how could you think such a thing? They’re just doing their duty, as unpleasant as it is. I bet those poor bishops have to hear those confessions again and again and again just to make absolutely sure they know what sins they’re fighting against.
I’m sure there will always be a few nut cases who take advantage of the position of Mormon Bishop to get their jollies by delving into the sex lives of their flock. However, most of them think they are doing God’s work. They seriously believe they are helping the flock to stay on the path to the Celestial Kingdom when they counsel them to avoid all forms of sexuality not sanctioned by holy matrimony.
Here’s a comment from a mormon in Mesa, Arizona:
And here’s another one:
Moments of Mormon Madness rule #1: It’s always worse than you thought it was.
All right, regarding the last thread:
How the fuck did you lot manage to pull this off? After all those posts about horrible country music and the worst of the worst, I’m actually listening to Willie Nelson’s cover of “Graceland.” I haven’t bothered with that song in years! And while I’m no longer a huge fan of country (this happened well before the schlock of today ever hit the airwaves), it still makes me a bit warm and fuzzy on the inside to listen. Nostalgia.
Now to catch up with the new thread.
Just for fun, here’s some Mormon Cosmological Moments of Madness. The source is the April 1971 issue of “New Era,” the LDS Church’s official magazine for teenagers and young adults:
Ing @ 64, dammit, you promised hooker slides! Those aren’t anything like hooker slides! Now what am I gonna do for my 55th birthday? ***grumbles*** ***walks away with head down kicking non-existent can***
***mutters under breath*** I never get to have any fun! ***kicks can farther down the road.***
Dammit, mine @ 110 was for SC @ 58. Sorry Ing.
I think reading mormon literature has damaged my brain. In my last comment I posted, “Here’s some Mormon Cosmological Moments of Madness.”
Please, dear Pharyngulites, make that “Here are some…”
Thank you.
Carlie (@16):
I’m thread bankrupt, but I figure I can answer your question about podcasts without having to be 100% caught up. My list:
The Rachel Maddow Show
On Point with Tom Ashbrook (WBUR Boston)
Fresh Air with Terry Gross (WHYY Philadelphia)
The Colin McEnroe Show (WNPR Hartford)
To the Best of Our Knowledge (PRI)
In Bed With Susie Bright (audible.com; paid subscription)
Savage Lovecast (Dan Savage)
Skeptics Guide to the Universe
For Good Reason
Philosophy Bites
Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me (NPR)
Car Talk (NPR)
NPR Sunday Puzzle
Michael Feldman’s What Do You Know (PRI)
This American Life (NPR)
Only a Game (NPR Sports)
It’s a lot… but I listen throughout the day while I’m working.
Fair enough: I think my use of the word “absolutist” created a degree of confusion, since you (and some others) seem to have construed the term more literally than I intended it. I’ll settle, therefore, for saying that I agree completely with the ACLU’s position on freedom of expression.
Well, obviously. To the best of my knowledge, that would be an offence of conspiracy, in most common-law jurisdictions. I don’t know of anyone who argues that it shouldn’t be.
Rather, I was referring to whether that kind of political rhetoric, without any direct plan to put it into effect, should be a criminal offence – as it can be, in some European countries (Britain included; see Norwood v United Kingdom in the European Court of Human Rights, for instance).
Puscifer – Dozo
That is eery Weed Monkey. I just referenced them on another thread.
Ah, I think I see now. I knew not the track’s title, but a little listening…
Reason #2,487 why knowing how to cook improves your overall quality of life: someday you may be stuck eating soft food for days, and it will keep you from being miserable during that time.
Mmmmmmm, cream of broccoli and cheddar soup. Some other sucker can choke down the instant cups of mac and cheese my well-meaning MIL brought over.
Instant? That is just wrong.
Dhorvath, it’s not so eerie actually: i was reading the thread and that song popped into my mind immediately. I didn’t feel it was appropriate to post it there, so here it is. No mind reading involved. Enjoy. :)
Your restraint exceeds mine.
Kristinc: cooking question for the benefit of my mother: Is there a way to cook cauliflower, broccoli, and especially brussel’s sprouts, without making the entire house smell like a sasquatch’s ass?
Cook it less.
Been there, when I had a tooth abscess and the infection caused me to be unable to open my mouth properly. The real bummer was not being allowed to drink on the antibiotics.
Try cooking them in water for a couple of minutes, and then drain and stir fry them.
When I said less, I meant for less duration. Stir fry, quickly steamed, or other fast, low scent generation cooking techniques should help. Don’t boil for ten minutes, it makes it icky anyways.
Speaking about Puscifer: Vagina mine
TLC, I have never actually noticed a smell from cooking broccoli or cauliflower. Well, they smell … vegetably. but not sulfuraceous or like ass in any way. (I actually *looks around nervously* don’t care for brussels sprouts. Not even very fresh ones. So those, I don’t know anything about.)
I cook broccoli et al quickly and briefly in either a minimum of boiling salted water or a steamer basket over a minimum of boiling salted water. 2 or 3 minutes max. And I try to start with fairly fresh veggies — old rubbery broc/cauli doesn’t taste good, let alone smell good.
“I refuse to accept any state’s right to take that liberty away from me on any ground. ”
Ohhh, Walton. Who else will enforce it? Society agrees on these things in a democracy/republic. The state, ideally, is us. You just can’t say anything and expect society not to take you word for it.
“I will kill you and all your family.”
Yep, I want to call the state and have them arrest and try that person. Maybe that person is harmless and crazy. Maybe they want to murder me and all of my family. Otherwise I would have to kill that person myself because I can’t take the chance on my family’s lives.
I would be a lot slower to kill someone who only threatened me, but when 3rd parties are involved I will hesitate less.
Dhorvath and Matt: Thanks. All responses I get are getting copied and pasted into a little list.
I support my mother’s decision to eat healthy food. But I can’t ignore the stink. I’ll even try cooking the shit FOR her if that’s what it takes… everyone kind of aknowledges I’m the best cook in the house anyways.
TLC –
Step1: throw them in the garbage.
Step 2: pretend you never saw them in the kitchen in the first place.
Thanks Kristinc too. Most helpful. I think it might be mostly the brussel’s sprouts that reek. They seriously stink.
Once, I dunno what went wrong, but some local farmers allowed an entire unharvested field of brussel’s sprouts to rot over the winter. I get it now, why people in the dark ages thought bad smells brought disease. The illusion is a good one.
Any advice for cheese and broccoli soup?
Eat the cheese, eat the broccoli, skip the unfood.
Sure, but a direct threat of violence, addressed to a specific person, is illegal pretty much everywhere, the US included. In most jurisdictions, there are criminal laws against threats, harassment and intimidation (and it is also often possible to take out civil injunctions or restraining orders).
That’s a different issue from laws against “hate speech” – which criminalize the expression of certain opinions, regardless of the manner or context of delivery. That’s what we were originally discussing. (But I realize that I used some terminology which has confused the issue – see my reply to consciousness razor above – and for that I apologize.)
I have to admit that no method of cooking sprouts has ever made them palatable to me, not even stir-frying them with bacon and chestnuts. Just ruined the bacon and chestnuts as far as I was concerned.
As for broccoli and cheese soup, here is how I would do it.
Finely chop some leeks, carrot and celery and cook in a little oil or butter for about 5 mins. Chuck in the broccoli and cook for a couple more minutes. Add stock, chicken or vegetable, and simmer until the broccoli is tender. Add some Stilton, or other blue cheese and stir in. Blitz using either a hand blender or goblet blender. Serve with some of the blue cheese crumbled on top. You could add a little garlic to the leeks, carrots and celery if you want.
So today was an exciting day. Girl slipped on the ice and we thought she broke her ankle so I came home from work, took her to the Quick Care center and we discovered no such luck. High ankle sprain. A break would have heeled faster.
She has also decided that she does not want to be a teacher. She is changing to a psychology and history double-major (or maybe a history minor). Which means she has to drop two classes this semester and get into one or two others.
And I made a really good beef stew (I used a bottle of Rock Art smoked porter to deglaze the pan in which I browned the beef). ANd it was good.
Do decisions shape preference? Evidence from blind choice
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3196841/
Never had any that came pre-made, so no advice there.
Sautee some onion, add broth, boil broccoli in broth till tender but still bright green, blend the crap out of the whole thing with your choice of tool, adjust consistency with liquid, salt/pepper/dill to taste, heat back up, add shredded cheese, stir till melted.
Don’t know if it freezes well. Refrigerates fine.
Caught up till comment 342 of the previous subthread.
Snow! A whole centimeter of it! It snowed for most of the day, and it was cold enough for the snow to stay on most of the ground and on every branch, every twig. *bliss* Alas, the heat is scheduled to return tomorrow. :-(
Sister 2’s pharmacology professor: “Where is [whatever] localized? – It’s where pharmacology should be localized in you: in the spinal cord.” :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D
Chocolate for glazing: add coconut fat. :-) Margarine will do, but it’s not as good.
ROTFLMAO!!! I must clog the tubes of the Internet with this!!!
I no r expurrt =^_^=
:-S
:-S :-S
*hug*
My mom must be like that.
Not news. The government has started to backpedal to avoid being sued for violating EU treaties.
Interesting.
Remember “omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent – pick two”? heddle has picked two. That’s actually a surprise. I suppose the is somewhat smart after all.
Alas, I don’t think he’s one of those people who have a better sense of morals than their own god.
*clenched-tentacle salute*
+ 1
“May well have”? The pasage is completely unambiguous. It goes on to fucking list the languages! And on that list, there’s fucking Elamite!
It’s all bullshit anyway. Nikita is a male name, as in Khrushchov. From Greek Niketas.
LOL! And I thought I had problems when one of the Mattir family kittehz walked around on my lap, stepping between and into various thigh muscles!
And so, to bed. :-)
Interesting, kristinc.
Premade? you mean like packaged stuff? PAH!
Cheese and broccoli soup sounds like one of those foods that can only really be appreciated when made from scratch. Though, if I knew much about broccoli, brussels sprouts, and other potentially stinky vegetables, I wouldn’t be asking for advice and copying it down in a little list.
The new Safari update is stupid. I now have a horizontal scroll bar- in the middle of the screen. What rhe hey?
I always read that stuff about ‘talking in tongues’ that way. I mean for fuck’s sakes, being able to speak and be understood by other languages is USEFUL. What good is babbling away like an infant and calling it a ‘spiritual language’?
Sorry Walton, but you’re still relying on ‘the state’.
You say The State shouldn’t regulate speech, yet you’re relying ‘The State’ to regulate speech. Speech you think should be regulated.
And the ‘well, we all agree’ argument doesn’t work. We either have total free speech, or it’s regulated by … The State. (Which, as I mentioned, is ideally us.)
It’s quite the conundrum, but one can’t be an absolutist.
@TLC, extractor fan. Done!
/gordonramsay (again)
Oh, and, @chigau: “2 * 216 nanodots”.
I thought for a while that was going to be a knitting pattern. Google englightened me. Yay for magnetic golden balls!
Speaking of hate speech, here’s a particularly appalling example of racist hate speech right here on Pharyngula.
Please, people, stomp on this nonsense. Please. I don’t have the energy to spend the whole night arguing with a racist moron alone. (But I’ll have to, at this rate. Given the absolutely appalling immediate human cost of anti-immigration sentiment in Britain – anyone who’s read up on Campsfield House and Yarl’s Wood will know that I am not kidding – I can’t just let this sort of shit lie.)
OK, caught-up…ish.
Did somebody mention Santorum? I hate the bastard like death, but this story, with its hypocrisy-by-association logical FAIL and its transparent slut-shaming pissed me off. </blogwhore>
***
WRT Republican voter suppression, first a whine, then a request for Horde assistance: I FB-shared a link to a news story about proposals to make voter registration easier in CT, with a comment that I was proud our state was moving to improve voter access while so many others were going the other way, and some dimly remembered asshat from my old Texican HS days chimed in to ask if I was proud that “more Democrats are charged with Voter Fraud than ever in History.” WTF? Okay, that was the whine, now the request: Can anyone point to data refuting that charge? It seems ludicrous on its face, and I’ve always understood that actual cases of voter fraud are extremely rare, but my Google-fu failed me in finding hard data.
Well it wasn’t just one word, you know. As usual, it’s hard to pin you down, except that you don’t like restrictions on speech. Of course, neither do I, yet here we are disagreeing about … something.
——
Mormon madness:
This claim was refuted decades ago.
Thanks for the list, Bill!
Today kind of stunk in a variety of small ways. I think I’m going to go curl up for the night.
Funny thing that happened today: I was at my parents’ business to help them, and while I was using the laptop, I felt something hit the top of my head. At first I thought someone threw something at my head, and started to look at my dad. But he was working with the crabs, and so I was wondering what he could have thrown at me, so I looked at the ground. It turns out dad didn’t throw anything. A freaking mouse fell from the ceiling light, hit my head, and dropped on the ground. That kind of hurt. Also, I was laughed at by my mother. I am glad there wasn’t any customer when that happened, though.
@Bill
Don’t be too distraught. The burden of evidence is on them. Seriously, what a ridiculous statement. Biggest ever in history? Seriously?
ibyea:
That’ll teach you to leave the antigrav switch alone.
Bill, IOKIYAR:
Ann Coulter
Charlie White Indiana Secretary of State (for now)
Willard Romney
IOKIYAR. Voter registration fraud is of course a major felony and can suppress organizations that would register voters that may not vote republican. [/snark]
Has there ever been a challenge to white males voting?
Bill D.
This is the only voter fraud case of which I am aware. It is from Kentucky. The comments state that both GOP and Democrats were arrested.
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7001
Yeah, I agree with you on that one. I don’t honestly care about Karen Santorum’s alleged one-time boyfriend, nor do I see the change in the Santorums’ views over time as a worthwhile news story. I’ve changed my views a good deal over time, and am embarrassed by some of the things I said and wrote at age eighteen; I don’t want to be judged on them for the rest of my life. (It’s just a shame that Rick Santorum’s views went in such an awful direction.)
And the detail about their respective ages, and the fact that he had delivered her as a baby, is just an attempt to induce an irrational squick-reaction in the audience (I think you hit the nail on the head when you called it “symbolic incest”). They were both adults, and there was (as far as the article discloses) nothing particularly wrong or immoral about their relationship. Why the hell is it anyone’s business? :-/
Good post by Ed Brayton:
Why the ACLU Opposed the Oklahoma Law
Oh, but it works so well the other way! As the cooking of brussels sprouts approaches zero, so does the smell of sasquatch ass.
–
They are Not Food, no matter how fresh they are. Feed ’em to the hogs, and eat bacon (and the wide array of other pork products)!
–
An acceptible alternative treatment of the problem, but it yields no bacon.
–
Deliberate?
–
Steam the broccoli and sauce the cheese; use the water for something else.
–
Indirectly, as college students are routinely targeted for disenfranchisement, and some college students are white men.
But not directly. White men have not been targeted for being white men, the way that black people are targeted for being black.
Isn’t that an old instruction for serving cucumbers? Something like “slice them thinly, dress them with salt and vinegar, and then throw them out the window as good for nothing”. Too lazy to Google it, and anyway, I like cucumbers.
Cicely,
I was in fact only talking about broccoli, I don’t eat sprouts and find cauliflower unmissed.
We all know about brussels sprouts and cabbage, but fewer know that it is actually possible to make broccoli and cauliflower smell like farty arseholes. All cruciferous veggies contain sulphur, which will turn into horrible smelling gas if you overcook them. I’ve done it by accident. I have since learned that if I’m going to check the internet for just 5 minutes while the veggies cook, I MUST set a timer.
If you have actually done this, you must throw them out, there is no recovery. And open lots of windows.
Short cooking times is the key, but I find roasting cauli & sprouts is more forgiving than steaming or boiling. I love sprouts, cook with just a short steam, or a 15 minute roast, and serve with pepper and a drizzle of your acid of choice. Cider vinegar for my Mum’s classic, or use balsamic or lemon juice or rice vinegar, as you wish and as suits the cuisine.
Also, if you make soup, you need to stop the cooking as soon as the veggies are done. Unlike many other soups, you can’t leave it to simmer happily away for hours. And be careful in reheating. Refrigerate leftovers, and reheat just the portion you want. A quick zap is OK, but if you reheat too long or leave it to simmer it will continue to cook. You DO NOT WANT sulphur soup.
Disingenuous interpretations for the ages….
“OK, he asked her for coffee in an elevator at 4 a.m., but that doesn’t mean he was hitting on her!”
“OK, he said he was going to hunt them down, but that doesn’t mean he intended them any harm!”
And an assertion about Andrew Jackson that I have never seen before but I have seen twice today, once in an old dK diary and once in a current Digby thread: “Just because he forced the Indians off their lands and marched them far away doensn’t mean he wanted them dead!”
Fuckdamn. Has anyone else heard that last one before?
Sigh. Mallorie Nasrallah has personally irritated me quite a bit, and I’ve been sort of stuck inside my head all day today. It’s very frustrating.
—
My best friend and I have discovered video calling, which is pretty exciting. He communicates better through speech, and I communicate better through text, so I mute my mic and he keeps his on. It’s fun.
(And since we’re both accommodating each other’s preferred styles of communication, lol heartbreaking and not real friendship!)
—
To my dismay, I’m going to be adding a fourth language class. Apparently the class will be going at a pace that my other professors deem manageable for me, which is lovely of them but at the same time aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. I’m trying to work on my Aeschylus and it’s already trying to break my brain because what even are these structures and what are these words. Everything is many-gilded and well-bolded and bow-conquering. It’s very puzzling. But I spoke to my professor today and she seemed to think that the troubles I’m having right now are to be expected and I just need to keep doing what I’m already doing (writing out the text, marking it up, trying a translation, reading the commentary, revising my translation, testing my translation against a professional translation, writing out a vocab list, seeing if I can read the clean text with just the vocab list, then going back to the marked up text until I can).
Oh, and a fundie story from a friend of mine who’s been in the hospital for a few weeks due to assorted issues.
She doesn’t give a fuck about religion, but her mother is really churchy, and a bunch of her friends came by to see M. to hassle her about her “soul.” One of the doofuses actually demanded to know, “If there’s such a thing as evolution, then how did rocks evolve?”
…. yeah. (Did I mention this is in Kans-Ass? That’s what M. calls it.)
They left shortly after another of them warned M. that she needed to “get right with Jesus,” and she said, “Oh, if he were to show up in this hospital room right now, I’d get right with him!”
I hate cucumbers, but I love kosher dills, the closer to cucumbers the better. Strange.
Watching the Colbert Report. Scott Douglas is awesome.
I’m sorry to hear that.
I don’t read much of what she posts. I find her pathetic, and her words make me cringe.
(The segment I’m talking about.)
Thanks. :)
I have to remember where she’s coming from – insisting that she’s big and strong and tough and demeaning everyone else, while she mascots and whines about other people being mean to her. I probably oughtn’t to admit it, but the whole “you’re dangerous to innocent people and shouldn’t be out in public” thing actually succeeded in making me feel… I don’t know. Sick, necessarily irrational, whatever. For a while. Now I’m mostly just annoyed.
SC:
Same here. If she’s got any intellectual chops at all, her desperation for male approval obscures them.
If it helps, I thought your response to Zach was powerful. It probably wouldn’t have been so moving if you hadn’t been “stuck inside your head,” so…suffering produces art. Or something. Anyway, thanks for doing it.
CC:
That sucks. My sympathies.
I found that remark not only assholish, but the kind of stupid that makes you sit there and blink several times. I mean, lots of people have those sorts of reactions, sometimes due to trauma, sometimes due to a strong startle reflex. Military training can exacerbate the response, as hospital workers who know better than to shake awake certain veterans can tell you. I don’t want to assume this is common knowledge, but it’s hardly specialized information, either.
Going by MN’s photography blog, she’s actually not a stupid individual, but her style of argumentation comes off like that of a sheltered, privileged older teenager or very young adult.
Classical Cipher,
If this relates to the discussion at Crommunist’s blog: what Nasrallah said to you was sick and indefensible. It looked to me like she was engaging in a classic bullying tactic, deliberately saying things she knew you would find hurtful (after you’d talked about your experiences and feelings) in an attempt to manipulate you. (I’d say the same about Liam, who was being just as much of an ass, though I have no idea who he is.)
Anyway… moral support. I doubt there’s much else I can say on the subject, but I just wanted you to know that I agree with you. And *hugs* if you want them.
Cicely –
I did indeed, and thank you for reminding me. What I didn’t remember, however, was the goddamn melody. Just the first phrase of a few notes. Tried to get the rest, but what I came up with was trite and ass. Must remember to keep staff paper out because I’ll always forget something the next day.
It’s even worse here, because you can’t really be a “veteran.” It’s like asking soldiers who’ve experienced the greatest trauma to address and neutralize it as a personal psychological issue while they’re still fighting. Absurd.
@CC: virtual hugs, if you want them. What MN said to you is unconscionable. This is not in any way your fault. You are not being irrational.
ClassicalCipher: Actually, I felt a bit of a sympathy cringe in my guts when I read that shit too, but I had no idea what to actually say. I wasn’t sure if the blog owner had a different comment policy than pharyngula or not.
You did well in your response, though.
Oh! That reminds me! I’d mentioned that I wanted Dragon for Christmas, but then checked out the reviews. People generally liked it, but several – and they didn’t sound like kooks – said it was a waste of money if you had a fairly recent OS because these come with speech-to-text capabilities and you just have to get a cheap microphone. So I checked it out, and sure enough they do! We can all be Michael Keaton in Night Shift.
Sounds like you need just a little tape recorder.
Somewhat late but still –
As evidence in support of that idea I would point out that he *twitters*. Badly.
Shit, SC, you’re so right! I need to just do a little audio recording singing a melody or harmonic progression when it comes to me. I can transcribe it later. Why the hell didn’t I think of that?
You’re a Certified Genius.
:D!
And…obscure movie references r me.
Someone just forwarded me this macro.
@ LM ॐ 26
{fixxy} —- 1. Constitutional republic (NOT rethuglic!) based on he principal of consensus politics. ….. The country should be ruled by
LAWa constitution (I think I meant to say the law of the constitution (it was getting past bed time for little tardigrades)) – not lawgivers, not courts, not police … other than enforcing legitimate laws (as defined by the constitution). —-Sorry that came across so badly. Thanks for pointing it out. Let me try as follows:
We basically need to get to a situation in which the highest appeal goes to a set of laws in the constitution. These are in place to ensure inter alia that all basic rights of all people are protected. Even in spite of the general running of the country by the powers-that-be or by any rules and regulations that follow. The rule of law that I meant to refer to is this constitutional law which stands above the general laws, rules and regulations… or the powers of those charged with upholding the law.
Example 1: In the case of USA, people can vote on a bill to disallow gay marriage. However, with a proper constitution this new bill would be declared null and void (by way of being unconstitutional). Here even “democracy” bows it’s knee to an impartial (umbrella like) law. One might even argue that vocally seeking to deny a whole group of people their constitutional rights constitutes hate speech.
Example 2: A Texas governor signs off on the execution of a prisoner, while making a facetious joke abou … *PAARP!* … Sorry, this is not allowed in terms of the constitution. Governor, you are obliged to spare that persons life. (Item 11: “Everyone has the right to life.” eg: Link to South African constitution)
SG, I think most of what you find iniquitous about America (I am with you here of course) would be considered unconstitutional in terms of South Africa’s constitution. Not only would such legislation be overturned but much of the fundagelical/rethuglican discourse would constitute hate speech. The old chestnut “I am against teh ghey marriage because …Gawd ™” is specifically not allowed:
I still think it peddles too softly to religion even as it works to take away a lot of religion’s poison. On the other hand, and as a simple exercise, consider the effects of applying such a constitution in a consistent manner to the current situation in USA. I predict an incredible improvement on every front (even as I realise this is unlikely to happen in reality.)
theophontes, it doesn’t sound like you’re proposing a different system but a new constitution.
(I agree with the need for a new constitution, but also think a new system is needed.)
Excellent.
theophontes: Leaving aside constitutional reform (which I’m too tired to get into right now) I’ll explain why I do not think a criminal prohibition on “hate speech” in America, specifically, would achieve the goals you’re looking for.
Suppose that Congress were to enact a statute, at some time in the next few years, criminalizing hate speech. To be both specific and reasonable: suppose that the statute made it a federal criminal offence (a) to engage in threatening words or behaviour, or (b) to publish or distribute written material which is threatening, if the person doing so intends thereby to stir up hatred on the grounds of race, religion, nationality, sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression. (Language partly sporked from Britain’s Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006, but I added a few other categories, not just race and religion.) And suppose for the sake of argument that this statute survived a constitutional challenge in the federal courts (it almost certainly wouldn’t, but let’s leave that aside).
Who do you think would be prosecuted under this law? Someone, probably. But my guess is that the people prosecuted would be the fringe haters: Fred Phelps would probably be a prime candidate. Or fundamentalist Islamists, or KKK revivalists, or St*rmfronters. That is to say, people who almost everyone condemns. Such a prosecution might be satisfying on some level to those who’ve been insulted by Fred Phelps (which, as far as I can tell, is basically everyone in America); but it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference to the rights of LGBT people or to the decency of American political discourse, because everyone hates Fred Phelps anyway. and he has no serious political influence.
Who would not be prosecuted under the new statute? Rush Limbaugh. Focus on the Family. Bryan Fischer. FAIR. The National Organization for Marriage. Rick Santorum. Pat Robertson. Tom Tancredo. Robert Jeffrees. Ann Coulter. All of these people have undoubtedly said or written things that could reasonably be considered to incite hatred, and (more importantly) all of them are actively promoting government policies which seriously hurt immigrants, LGBT people, women and ethnic minorities. But they would not be prosecuted. Why? Because if Eric Holder’s DOJ prosecuted these people for the federal offence of inciting hatred, the Republicans would argue that it was a nakedly-partisan attempt to silence critics of the President and destroy political opposition. (And in truth, they’d be right.) Conversely, if a Republican administration were in office, there’s no way these laws would be enforced against prominent Republican donors and backers.
You can answer, of course, that the response is to rewrite the Constitution (as you seem to be advocating), and change the entire institutional structure of government to avoid this problem. (For a start, in many countries, prosecutors are far more independent from the executive than they are in America, for instance: this is true of both your home country and mine.) But then we’re shifting from the realm of something possibly plausible into the realm of pure fantasy; which is fine, but let’s not pretend that it’s a serious policy prescription for actual modern-day America.
Tantrum :)
I find it very interesting that you portray real or hypothetical hate-speech laws as merely satisfying some irrational bloodlusty needs of people who’ve been “insulted.” You do this also when you talk about content vs. context, as though EDL leaders making rousing speeches in local neighborhoods is the same as mailing pamphlets to their members. I’m going to agree with Caine here, and suggest that your frame of reference does not include the lived experience of marginalized or victimized people.
Whatever the negative consequences, “it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference to the rights of LGBT people or to the decency of American political discourse” is an empirical claim, and you have not supported it. You can argue, as you appeared to be doing earlier, that concrete effects are not important because any such laws are fundamentally immoral, but then don’t go making claims about supposed consequences. Before you do so, maybe read and talk to some people from marginalized groups. (And I say this with no agenda here.)
Thanks to everybody for the hugs and empathy. It really does mean a lot. I also knew that a defensive startle reaction was common to veterans among others, and now that I’ve thought it through more clearly I’m frankly a little bemused by the fact that these people apparently don’t know anybody who has such reactions. Like, really? I was startled, so I moved like I was going to hit somebody. Which the jogger probably didn’t even notice. Shocking. But hey, I’ve decided to be amused now. I mean, looking at me, people apparently tend to get the impression that I’m a small, shy, harmless, mildly eccentric high school student. Nobody suspects the terrible truth, which is that I’m a dangerous lunchbox-wielding maniac. (…Who is 24.) Fine. It’s basically more fuel for my River Tam complex. :)
That’s not precisely what I meant. In my understanding, the main argument in favour of such laws is that they serve to reduce the power and influence of hate groups in the political process, and, therefore, reduce the likelihood of oppressive and discriminatory laws being enacted in future under the influence of these groups. This may sometimes be true (I think it’s arguably true of the anti-Nazi and anti-Holocaust-denial laws in Germany, for instance). But I am arguing that introducing hate speech laws in America would not effectively serve this purpose (and I argued above that it hasn’t worked in Britain either, with regard to the likes of Nick Griffin).
I understood this to be the basis of the debate. Certainly, I understood theophontes to be arguing that America should have hate speech laws because such laws would solve some of the problems with the American political system. I don’t think that’s true, for the reasons I’ve given above. If you’re proposing that such laws would serve some other purpose which I haven’t considered or understood, you may be right, but if that’s the case, an explanation would be very welcome.
I can’t really respond to this allegation, because I don’t know what is being expected of me here. Of course I can’t lay claim to the lived experience of anyone but myself; and I wouldn’t try to. And of course I’ve led a sheltered and privileged life by anyone’s standards, something I regularly acknowledge. Because of this, there are things I can’t understand, things I used to get very wrong, and things I still get wrong. Yet I still have to form opinions and make judgment-calls on political issues, as do we all.
All I can say is that I’m in the process of choosing a career path working with and on behalf of marginalized and victimized people, I do care (even if I don’t always understand), and I’m doing my best to get these issues right. Indeed, the reason I’m so mistrustful of the penal system, and of the concept of criminal punishment in general, is because of the immense amount of harm that the existing punitive penal system (and associated institutions of the security-industrial complex, such as immigration laws and their enforcement machinery) inflicts on marginalized and victimized people. (Something you yourself have written about plenty of times, as have I; indeed, as it happens, I just read an excellent AlterNet discussion on the pervasive racist oppression in the criminal justice system.) Thanks to conditioned instincts on this subject, I find it extremely hard to accept a prescription of more state coercion as an answer to anything.
My point is that prosecuting Fred Phelps would not really affect, in any direction, the likelihood of serious political change on issues of civil and social equality for LGBT people; because he’s already a marginal figure who has been condemned by both parties and has no real influence on the legislative process. I think it would be hard to dispute this observation.
The haters who are influential, and whose influence is actually contributing to taking civil and political rights away from LGBT people – the likes of Bryan Fischer, Rick Santorum, Focus on the Family, NOM, Rush Limbaugh, and so on – would likely not be prosecuted under such a law.
@ Lynna
What
Superman, The MovieMormon Doctrine is Really About.I have just cringed through this cartoon (Link to youtube.) and as much as I would like to think it is all batshit crazy, I know enough about Mormonism to know that this shit is perfectly normal to some people.
@ SC
Obviously USA needs a lot of major structural changes to the way in which it functions. If there ever was a way to guide those changes it would be a humanist (or at least humane) constitution. Also note that your democratic system would need a major overhaul to a republican system (NO, not Republican/rethuglican). But a lot of the drivers for these requisite transformations are inherent to such a constitution.
The ground rules are basically just there to create a level playing field and ensuring equity. The bottom line is simply “Be Nice.” Easy to understand but very hard to carry across in an environment of iniquity and entrenched priviledge.
@ Walton
No worries, this is an ongoing debate. I think it to be a very important one and one that is worth keeping alive. I am aware of the problems in bringing this about. (SG has indicated this as well. eg: How on earth do we achieve this?)
There are two points that I would like to make in this regard though.
In the case of South Africa, I could never have dreamed that such a constitution could be put in place or that it would come about in a relatively short amount of time with (generally, there where a few small incidents) no violence. All the parties just got together and realising they would be totally fucked otherwise, ironed out their differences.
There where of course some cultural/traditional factors that helped.(“bosberaad” (Afrikaans:(secluded) council to break deadlock)/”imbizo” (Zulu: (national) forum of hearts and minds). Obviously the USAian approach will have to be adapted.
The second point is one of keeping the flame alive. There is nothing wrong with talking about what needs to be done. We can be very pragmatic as to what an ideal USA should look like – even if we do not know exactly how to get there. We can map the terrain before we set a course of action. If I can just raise some examples of how it does work (case studies) in other countries and examine some of the current US problems in the light of these, I will regard it as time well spent.
(I don’t actually think Waltonocracy would be such a bad thing, I just think Theocracy would be a better thing. Oh, wait…. I have a rather unfortunate nym! Make that Theophontopia… ;)
@ Josh
(Marmite and cottage cheese on hot buttered sourdough toast is delicious, thank you.)
*burp*
And I hate to dwell on this, but if we’re talking about sexual assault, no one is a veteran or lives in a post-authoritarian regime in which they’re fundamentally safer than they were when they were victimized. This isn’t an individual problem.
This is all true. And frankly, people who have been assaulted have even more reason to be afraid. Revictimization statistics are pretty scary shit.
Rick Perry, moronic about Turkey: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99NTRo0xFtY&list=UU1yBKRuGpC1tSM73A0ZjYjQ&index=1&feature=plcp
theophontes: Yep, I’m an admirer of the South African Constitution (which I’ve read; I was a serious constitutional law geek at one stage, with a particular interest in Commonwealth countries). As I understand it, it’s remarkably progressive in terms of creating an independent judiciary and strong guarantees of individual rights. (As, for instance, with the decision of the Constitutional Court in Minister of Home Affairs v Fourié, which recognized a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, the only African country to do so.)
My biggest criticism of the South African model of government would be that it gives the President too much power, and that it fails to provide for a separation between the head of state and head of government. (Which most other parliamentary systems have: most Commonwealth countries have a President or Governor-General who is the ceremonial head of state, and a Prime Minister who is the actual head of government. Botswana is the only one I can think of, offhand, which follows the South African model in this regard.*)
(*Although the constitution of Botswana is much older, dating from 1966.)
I think you’re probably wrong. The main argument is about more immediate effects. But it doesn’t matter what the “main” argument is – you need to address all legitimate arguments.
But you can listen.
My concern is that you’ll go the ACLU route. And I’m fond of the ACLU in many ways. But…
Let’s be clear: You made the prediction that this (alone, presumably) would be the result of any such hypothetical laws.
Your unsubstantiated prediction is your unsubstantiated prediction. But it’s not just a point but an empirical claim. My point is that you can’t both disavow consequentialist arguments and make them at the same time, especially if you’re not going to support them empirically.
If your argument is that the cons do or will outweigh the pros in practice, then you need to defend that, taking both seriously and addressing them honestly and fully.
I’m a big fan of the ACLU and largely share its positions on most issues. Career-wise, of course, I plan to work specifically in immigration, asylum and refugee law (an area in which I imagine you and I would largely agree). But of course activism is another matter.
I expressed my dislike of consequentialist arguments on this subject earlier; but I’m making them anyway because I think it’s worthwhile to respond to the empirical claims one’s critics are making, even if one doesn’t share their moral assumptions.
And I find it hard to envision any scenario in which prosecuting Fred Phelps (as, indeed, people of both parties have advocated; the Respect for America’s Fallen Heroes Act of 2006 passed both houses of Congress with a large majority) would do anything much to advance the cause of LGBT equality in America. Do you think it would?
Might be useful for you sciency types here:
Food web
No, he was an illustrative example of someone who might be prosecuted under hypothetical hate-speech laws. I can imagine St*rmfronters, KKK revivalists and radical Islamists being prosecuted too, for instance, and other fringe groups that don’t have a great deal of political support or big-money backing. I responded about Phelps specifically because you criticized my claim about Phelps specifically.
I am, however, fairly secure in my prediction that the likes of James Dobson, Rush Limbaugh, Robert Jeffrees, Rick Santorum, Ann Coulter, Bryan Fischer, FAIR, NOM and so on would not face criminal charges if such a law were to be enacted; because I can’t see how any DOJ, under any Attorney General of either party as things stand, could bring such charges without catastrophic political consequences for itself. Of course this problem might not arise to the same extent if theophontes’ favoured constitutional reforms were put in place, but I was talking about the consequences of enacting such laws in the current American political climate.
This is silly. You obviously don’t dislike them. Even your anti-consequentialist arguments are really consequentialist arguments once removed (“Our society could do with a great deal less racial hatred, and if I believed that hate speech laws would actually end hate speech without having catastrophic consequences, I would be in favour of them.”). You’re saying these laws would be immoral because their consequences would be bad, but you have to show this on balance.
Again, it is your prediction concerning hypothetical hate-speech laws that this would be the sole result. If you’re going to talk about possible direct and indirect consequences, you can’t limit yourself arbitrarily to one or two.
I think you’ve raised several very realistic negative consequences of these laws, and people need to take those very seriously; but you need to do the same with other consequences.
Oh, I doubt that’s entirely true. I’ll bet Walton has been called a fucking faggot, and I’ll bet he’s known fear because of it.
He hasn’t said as much, and maybe he’ll tell me now that he’s been lucky enough not to know fear because of it; but I think it’s a pretty safe bet.
As cr has pointed out, you need to be more attuned to goals.
But this is so odd. You argue otherwise that these laws should not punish merely despicable views, but here you seem to be arguing that they would have to to be effective. You don’t seem to acknowledge, even hypothetically, any effectiveness in any form for such laws.
So I suppose my questions are: How would you define the goals of hate-speech laws, and do these goals contradict others? Do you think they can attain these goals? If so, why? Do you think they do or will have negative effects? If so, what?
bankrupt
back to sumo
Prosecutions of fringe figures probably would not directly make a lot of difference — your claim of not a damn bit is of course too strong — but you may be overlooking how people learn morality.
We know that people erroneously mistake legality for morality, and accurately learn social standards from the law.
So it would take a couple of generations, but it’s reasonable to expect that hate speech laws would shift young people’s opinions about what is socially acceptable.
(To be clear, this is not personally very important to me either way, and I don’t particularly care whether the USA, while lacking economic democracy, ever enacts hate speech laws. I know it won’t happen during my lifetime and I can’t imagine whether it’ll be a good idea when it’s eventually possible. It’s just that I suspect you’re wrong on the internet.)
So…by the way…as Ophelia (who bends over backwards to not block anyone) said:
? Yeah, but I’m just not sure what quote 2 has to do with quote 1.
Sorry to just flounce in with nothing serious to say, but my eyes are glazed over from two days of working on search-engine-optimization and redirects for my website. All I have to say is. . .
Good lord it’s windy as shit tonight.
My windows are rattling in their frames and I’m sure I’ll wake up to Francine’s winter cover having been blown to who knows where. It’s ridiculous. If it were summer I’d be gathering up the cats and heading to the cellar in this kind of weather.
It’s gonna be tornado nightmares tonight. Mmm-hmm.
Both relate to the lived experience of people in (or perceived as being in) marginalized groups subject to epithets that carry implied hints of violence. Quote 2 suggests the problems with the idea that a norm made law about such language would only have the effects walton mentions. If he’s had the experience described in Quote 1, it’s a potential basis for a deeper common understanding.
@ Walton
Perhaps at the time the need was felt for a strong leader in the president. We had always had “strong man” leaders before. Perhaps some of that authoritarianism carried through or was justified for some other reason. (I agree with you of course.)
This level of power is a bit unfortunate. You will recall for example Mbeki’s woo getting into the steering in the not too distant past. His idiocy caused thousands of deaths because he did not throw his weight behind the calls to intensify the battle against Aids. Instead he was instrumental in blocking sensible policies and appointing
a fucking idjitManto Tshabalala-Msimang as health minister for almost a decade. That was a complete and unmitigated disaster.A constitution is a vehicle (means) for positive change. There is no guarantee some fool won’t drive it into a ditch anyway. (Thank FSM it has remained quite robust, in spite of some blistering attacks. The more people who understand and accept it, the safer we all will be.)
South Africa always used to be ruled via the Prime Minister while the President held a more ceremonial role above the fray. The current consolidation of the two offices is actually fairly new. (Well not that new, about two decades … my, how time flies.)
Dear stupid people,
I am not suggesting that these epithets be made illegal.
SC
@ Josh
Vertel, vertel ! Desnoods leggen wij geld bij.
{translation} Tell, tell! If needs be we will bribe you.
@ All ‘Merkins
The Pfffffft of All Knowledge is dead *. Please complain bitterly. Link.
*(… for 24 hours.)
Due to lack of marijuana, I made myself some Not Apple Cider.
Recipe:
1: Mix powdered cider packet, water, whiskey, and a drop or two of lemon juice.
2: Drink the shit
3: Desperately pretend it tastes as good as real apple cider or the weed I get.
this sucks.
Theo:
Don’t bother bribing me. I’m not worth it. All I can tell you is if you’ve got a Joomla CMS, install the sh404sef extension. Play. Then schedule a conference with someone smarter than you in web architecture.
You can try sacrificing a slice to Phoenicia but I don’t think she oversees such things.
SpokesGay places conference call to mom and sister:
Hello? Yeah Ma? This mothafucka needs some weed. Mmm-hmm. Yep. Mmm-hmm I know. Yeah. But see he’s about to bust a gasket. Thanks babe.
SpokesGay places call to Laughing Coyote:
Girl. Or boy. . whatevah. Can you get your ass to upstate NY? Yes. That’s right. Well if you can’t make it up here then why the hell did you call? Sheeeyit.
:)))
Ah Josh, I appreciate it, but unless they give away weed for free in upstate NY, I’m still SOL.
I had pegged your cheap ass. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm-hmm. I know your type. Smokin-on-other-peoples-weed-tryin-to-party-for-no-money-at-all-lazy-ass. .
Oooh. what? Oh, I’m sorry. I was talking to my girlfriend.
:)))
Too Tired to Tell the Truth: Self-Control Resource Depletion and Dishonesty
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2680601/
Josh: My problem is, well, an old asshole employer (biggest douchebag I ever worked for. Imagine the Sheriff of Nottingham from that animated Robin Hood movie with the foxes, taken human form. Same huge gut, same Pat Butram-esque voice, even the same little bottom fangs sticking up) described it once referring to someone else, but the term he used is a racially insensitive one that would get me shouted off Pharyngula. Basically, I get money, I ‘feel rich’, so I end up spending it all.
I was getting good at budgeting myself, but this last 2 months I’ve gone to shit. This is my hard lesson. I have to sit here weedless. Until the 25th.
It also doesn’t help that I just spent 110 bucks on a new Ka-Bar knife either…. but whatever, a Ka-Bar knife is supposed to stick around for a lifetime, weed burns up in a few days.
Still… *pathetic dogwhimper*
There, there. If it makes you feel any better (and I know it won’t) I know how it is to go without your vice-of-choice.
Actually Josh, it does kinda make me feel better. Most people either just tell me to stop whining, or that I shouldn’t be spending my money on weed in the first place.
:D
Still…
:(
Nah. Anyone who tells you to not spend your money on whatever indulgence you like is an asshole. We all need recreation, whether it’s food, drugs, alcohol, weed, or playing video games.
The only reason to stop or cut it back is if it interferes with your everyday life or your health. Believe me – I never would have stopped eating like a pig and smoking Marlboros if it weren’t for the heart attack. Them shits is good. :)))
I do want to quit cigarettes someday.
Physical addiction vs emotional addiction: I’m physically addicted to cigarettes. They never tasted that good, and too many makes me feel gaggy, but I smoke them anyways because one day as a stupid teenager I wanted to fit in and eventually got addicted. I do not like the aggressive, angry creature I become when lacking for cigarettes. My thoughts turn just horrible without me even being aware of it at first. I catch myself just thinking low, horrible, uncharitable things about people who care about me and who have done nothing against me intentionally, and then I’m like “Whoah up, wtf is wrong with you?” to myself.
Weed on the other hand, I love the taste, I love the relaxation, I love how it helps me sleep, I love how it makes me feel peaceful and gentle and stuff, but I’m not actually physically addicted. Going without just makes me high strung, emotionally ‘weird’ but not nasty, and extremely anxious.
Cigarettes can go fuck themselves someday, but I hope I die with a smoldering roach on my lips. I’m starting to think that the only way I’ll ever truly quit cigarettes is if I seclude myself in the wilderness for a week or two, where the inevitable withdrawal risks hurting no one but myself.
Good morning
My gran swore it would help to boil them in milk.
Remedy after the fact: bring water with cloves to boil.
CC
If it helps any, I was seriously impressed how you dealt with that scumbag of Mallorie. I don’t think I could have done.
*sigh*
#1 made #2 a gift. Now there’s two puking kids around and one of them is unhappy as hell because her favourite “Wauf” needs to serve a term in the washingmachine.
Try an e-cigarette one day. A nicotine vaporizer. All the nic, none of the damaging tar and smoke. And you can cut down to no nicotine at all (though know that it’s not the nicotine, but the burnt particulates, that do you harm – nicotine is on a par with caffeine in terms of bodily harm). If you ever want to try, email me. I left two packs of Marlboros a day for the e-cigarette after 22 years of smoking. My cardiologist is thrilled, and so are my lungs.
How do I email you Josh?
Also I warn you, I chose my email long ago and intentionally chose the dumbest address I could that wasn’t ‘randomword691337 at whatever dot com’.
Laughing Coyote:
I’m at spokesgay at gmail
Hmmm, the Crapple Cider is kicking in.
Josh:
From #174, I gather that you’re trying to write some music? In regard to using an audio recorder for that, if I may give a bit of unsolicited advice: do a lot of different takes. You’ll often find that you introduce subtle variations each time you do it, some not so subtle, whether or not you’re intentionally trying to do so. Listen closely and you’re bound to notice some interesting changes, with which you can derive a lot of good ideas or at least develop the idea a bit more. I’ve found myself changing rhythms, pitches, the melodic contour, implied harmonies and rhythms in the accompaniment, come up with countermelodies, etc. Then you can record more things, and the whole process can feed into itself. Lots of possibilities, and that opens ’em right up. Kicks it up to eleven, and so forth. But try to keep yourself from thinking of one version as definitive for as long as you can, because you can easily get stuck and not know where to go from there. Good luck to you.
——
p.s.: You fuckers make me want to light up. Bad, bad fuckers. I’ve almost completely given it up for the past several years because it’s interfered too much with my work: it makes my head a bit too foggy sometimes to get much done and it can eat up a lot of time. For some reason I have this silly idea that I ought to be doing something, but that may have just been the weed talking. And it can get pretty fucking expensive. Now if I could just get a bunch of free weed and have someone take care of my bills so I don’t have to do this “work” shit, I’ll be set. So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to implement my brilliant new plan. *walks off*
@ Josh
……..wwwooooo000OOOOOOOOO000oooSHhhhhhhhhhhh…………….
That was the sound of that response going over my head like a rocket. Waaay too sofistimikated for me. (I meant your website’s address.)
@ TLC
{switches to Mother Grundy voice}: “TLC, you shouldn’t be spending your money on weed in the first place. You should know better than that….
.
.
.
.
.
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.
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..
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You should be GROWING YOUR OWN!”
Memo to Sally Strange:
One of your squeaky toys, elisabetht, has returned of late.
I expect you can get some more satisfying squeaks out of her, since she is apparently prone to paranoia.
I confess, I chewed on her a bit just now. I hope I didn’t break the squeaker. We’ll know if she replies fffffffffff ffffffff ffffffffffffff.
Oh no, I forgot what things are. Wikipedia is down. What is a car?
It’s good to see Freethought Blogs supporting the SOPA/PIPA protest.
The best part of using Dragon. Next! (Also medical.)
I realize that I use TET as my private ranting outlet. But it helps to blow some steam before I yell at someone. Hm, I need a blog.
Anyway.
It feels so great to be the only idiot at work who actually, you know, works.
Grrrr…
My contract only lasts until the end of the month and I would like o be called back when they need someone again. But as things go, it will soon be obvious that our department has done a lot less than it should have in the alloted time.
Classical Cipher:
After Dad got back from a 6-month stint floating in a tin can for the Navy, the first fight he had with my mother was when she shook him awake. And he wasn’t even in combat.
####
TLC:
Try being sedated for a week. It worked for my dad. (They didn’t sedate him for smoking cessation; he had a heart attack, but the smoking was a nice side benefit.)
I appreciate the anti-SOPA/PIPA page, but can the people in charge make it so the main page redirects you properly to the main page? I can’t click past the anti-SOPA message when I’m on the “http://www.freethoughtblogs.com” page.
Vice of choice?
You mean I have to choose one?
No, choosing one is itself a vice.
Everything in moderation, including moderation.
Vice-of-choice, eh?
Well, I prefer a nice workbench vice, nice and sturdy, keeps things in place, but an ordinary C-clamp is good too cause it is portable. Difficult decision, but I’ll give up the workbench vice I suppose.
For everyone struggling to know stuff during the wikipedia blackout (though that’s easy to circumvent), there’s Guardipedia.
You people use Wikipedia? I think you all know where the fountain of true knowledge is..
heathens
When I was in high school (yes, last century, you damn kids!) I worked summers as a whitewater raft guide on a class II-III river (the lower Shenandoah). There were a couple of summers which featured long droughts and the water level got really low. Low enough that making sure passengers got wet in the rapids became a challenge.
One brutally hot summer day, we had sixty girl scouts (along with three leaders) on an afternoon trip. It was 100F, the dewpoint was in the high 80s, and the water temperature was in the 80s. Not a fun day.
We reached the point in the trip where we stop for a while and let the passengers ride through a small rapid in their life vests. All the guides who smoked went up on a rock and lit up. Those who didn’t took positions to keep the kids from ending up in Georgetown. I decided I needed a break, went up on the rock, and bummed my second cigarette (my first was given to me when I lived in Arizona by a Mormon friend).
Two days later, I bought my first pack of Camels. Within a month, I was up to a pack a day and decided to quit. And couldn’t.
So I bought a pipe and some pipe tobacco and became a pipe smoker (and the occasional cigar). Luckily, western Maryland is an area in which a sixteen-year-old smoking a pipe was not all that weird.
Today, I smoke an occasional cigar or pipe. During the winter, I can go weeks without smoking (I only smoke outside — and it has to be at least 45F to make it worth doing). That is one of my vices. Others include real Cherry Coke (three to five 20oz bottles a day) but I haven’t had one since January 1st! And homemade bread, but that’s only a vice when I eat the entire loaf with butter.
I tried marijuana when I was a raft guide but, this being the 80s (1980s!), the stuff was weak and only made me hungry. I decided I didn’t need it or want it.
So I smoke the occasional pipe or cigar. I haven’t been really drunk since I was 21 (and required 21 stitches in my hand). I don’t smoke grass or do any other recreational drugs other than a beer or two, or some tequila or scotch.
Damn, but I am boring as hell. Sorry for the long involved comment to get to me being boring.
Apparently if you disable javascript you can get to wiki. I haven’t tried it yet but there you go.
-32°C and the Intertubes is on strike.
This is all about me, isn’t it?
SC, sorry for the lack of a reply on the subject of hate speech laws; I was asleep, and this morning thus far I’ve been too busy responding to the idiot who seems to have filled the other thread with anti-immigration bile overnight. (Apparently I’m an “anarchist nutter” now. Who’d have thought?)
Oh, and …
Bebe quits smoking.
Aaaaarrrrggggghhhh. And on a related note, Romney panders to racists.
Ha, that was great.
***
No problem. I was asleep, too. Don’t feel any obligation to respond. I’m not even sure why I involved myself in the discussion, as I’m not really making an argument about these laws. Anyway, I’m enjoying watching you guys play with the squeaky toy.
By the way, I think I’ve recommended Dirty Pretty Things to you in the pasy, but can’t remember if you said you’d seen it. You’d probably also find the play Nocturnal interesting.
I have an issue I am undecided on and welcome debate
http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2012/01/18/cato-v-heritage-on-defense-spending/#comment-56812
Ing comment
I don’t understand. Is this highly relevant? Did the issue come up? Why spend time doing this and defending an organization you’re against when the complaints against them are not relevant right now, and it’s time you could spend talking about and defending your own position?
Baah, frickin’ neurotypicals. I DEFAULT to honesty and have to conserve my self-control TO lie.
—
I prize my matched C-clamps in my kit, but I have to say, there’s nothing like the THAT SUCKER AIN’T MOVIN you get from a workbench VISE.
(Spelling pedantry being my, er, vice. *flees*)
I’m able to get on Wikipedia through any browser (not just the one with script blockers) from a campus connection as well as with mobile device from anywhere. Blackout? Nah.
@ SC
I trust you are not talking about our SG. (There is certainly no exaggeration in any anger that he may display. I wish I could always remain as calm under equivalently frustrating conditions.)
“Next!” is hilarious.
***
True. The whole thing was funny. I didn’t know that’s what the symbol was, and it’s funny that she was ignorant of the Molly connection and read it that way.
Well, you haven’t clipped any of your hair in months. Clearly you are not to be trusted.
Don’t know if anyone else is having issue but on can’t get past the plugin if not logged in. Even after following cache advice
Theophontes,
Oh, my. That Mormon video was bizarre.
___
pterryx,
Never removed a stuck free wheel then. I have broken two bench vises, and not the little things either, we are talking six inch units.
Vices:One of my favorites is the old foot-operated carver’s bench. Easy to use, and doesn’t mar up your carving projects. Instructions for making one should be relatively easy to find online.
Really though, my absolute favorite all purpose vice and clamping tool is the one on my face. It’s the one I use most often. It’s also the original vice, clamping tool, and third hand. It costs nothing to acquire (but may cost a lot in maintenance) and is always with me, 24-7, even while I sleep.
Might be early to celebrate, but…
TLC,
The kind of force that I need to push through my bench vice pretty much rules out my mouth, it does get a lot of action on the holding stuff end but pressure is seldom involved.
Dhorvath: It also makes an excellent bottle-opener. Though I do wish friends and family would stop cringing and telling me off whenever I use it that way…
Seriously though, wtf am I supposed to do? Play fiddlyfuck with a lighter or coin? Chip up one of my knives? try and carefully ‘pop’ it off on a sharp corner of a table or something so it fizzes up and goes flat super fast?
Or should I use the tool that works every single time and gives me the delightful satisfaction of ‘biting the head off’ of what is frustrating me?
My vices: Diet Mountain Dew, baked goods, and monarchy.
(I know nothing about the other kind of vice, so won’t comment on that subject.)
TLC,
I am seldom more than ten feet from a bottle opener, but I can appreciate, I bite my pop cans open.
I would imagine chipping up a knife would be preferable to chipping up teeth.
Rey Fox: Clearly you don’t share my love of good quality knives.
Or biting stuff. I <3 biting things.
TLC,
This may not work for you, as being American (?) you probably smoke weed neat, but what worked for me (long, long ago) was:
Stage 1: Stop smoking cigarettes. Roll joints with a mix of tobacco and weed. You get your nicotine hit, but you get used to not smoking cigarettes, and not smoking in all the times and places where smoking weed is not an option.
Stage 2: Reduce the amount of tobacco per joint, or the number of joints containing tobacco, until there’s none left.
Stage 3 (optional): Stop smoking weed.
I’m Canadian, and here in the west we definitely smoke weed Neat.
I had an interesting cultural exchange once with a teenage stoner from Paris. He rolled up a french two-paper weed and tobacco spliff. It wasn’t terrible, I suppose he went light on the tobacco, but usually my take on it is ‘worst of both worlds’.
Don’t quite get my tobacco fix, and the lovely natural spice of the weed is overpowered by the tobacco taste. Also, there’s just something that feels ‘wrong’ about polluting good quality weed with tobacco.
But lots of people do it, so I suppose it’s just a matter of what one is used to.
I wonder if I’ll ever run across that Parisian stoner again. Cultural exchange is fun.
I never really quit smoking because the notion of never having another cigarette makes me indescribably sad. However, I have cut down to a few cigarettes per month. Boy, I enjoy those cigarettes.
Almost as difficult for me as almost not smoking is almost not drinking yerba mate. There is no social proscription against drinking the yerb; I could drink it from a plain coffee cup in class, in my office, in a seminar, while driving, etc. Further, when I drink a lot of mate I am just much smarter*. My thoughts race, I don’t sleep, and I feel incredibly antisocial, but I get a lot done. So I have cut back on that as well, but I miss it sometimes.
*Hey. Take it easy.
You might have something there, Antiochus.
Any time I decide to just ‘quit’, the thought of NEVER HAVING ANOTHER CIGARETTE AGAIN makes me want one desperately. Maybe I could trick my brain a little the way you describe.
People act like it’s some crazy all-or-nothing deal when it comes to this stuff, and to be fair for lots of people it is, but maybe that’s not the only way?
The only problem is that I’m weak. And when I’m bored, the urge to just sit there smoking becomes hard to resist. It slowly creeps back up on me.
New poll on the Cranston Prayer Banner
http://news.providencejournal.com/breaking-news/2012/01/boisterous-crow.html
(Oddly enough they seem to take the results seriously there…)
Can’t live without yerba mate either – though I go for mate cocido (well chai actually – 80% mate, 20% assorted spices). Litres of the stuff every day these days!
Do you prefer the whole mate and bombilla thing (and possibly carrying a thermos of hot water around with you), or just brewing up? :-)
I had a couple of Swedish exchange students in my class during college who changed the way I get my nicotine forever. Mind you, they’re the only Swedes I’ve met in person so I don’t know how widespread their “system” is but they assured me that it was pretty common in their social circles. First you have to find a source for snus (and not the awful candy kind they sell in the US). Once you have a supply of snus, it becomes your primary source of nicotine. Then if you decide to go out for drinks, you switch out your snus with an auxiliary pack of cigarettes for the night. Now instead of an ashtray, my mouth tastes like elderberries and I can breathe at all times; even after climbing several flights of stairs! I’m told the snus habit is harder to break than the cigarettes, but I’ll worry about that later.
TLC: FWIW, my wife hates cigarettes and shuns me when I smoke. This makes not smoking during idle moments much more tempting. If I lived alone, I’d probable have a gasper going at all times.
I’ve never smoked tobacco, weed, or anything else; the prospect of putting a burning stick of something in my mouth doesn’t really appeal. But I can entirely understand the addiction problem; I have a similar dependency on diet soda, and find it very hard to get through the day without at least one or two. (My current preference is Diet Mountain Dew, but I’ll settle for other sodas depending on what’s available.) And then there’s my Internet addiction, a trait I imagine almost all of us share.
I guess so. In Europe a lot of hash is smoked, for which you must either use a pipe or similar, or roll a joint with tobacco or something else herbal. IIRC, it was a couple of years after I started before I smoked any form of cannabis without tobacco. The two highs are definitely different.
Amusingly, in the Dutch “coffee shops”, it’s now illegal to smoke tobacco, as it is in any indoor public space – one pictures the Dutch cops going round asking:
“Have you got any tobacco in that joint, my lad?”
Hell yes, that’s the really big one!
Pin tokes. That’s all.
Oddly enough, I still dream about smoking cigarettes occasionally. In the dream, I generally light up without thinking, or just find that I am smoking one, then feel disappointed in myself – after so long! But in waking life, I never miss them.
Dhorvath, OM,
Ah, yes, I’d forgotten that method.
One trick we used to do with mixed joints – pure showing off – was a “shotgun”. Person A takes the burning joint, checks its construction carefully, takes a deep breath, and puts the burning end inside their mouth. Person B empties their lungs, and leans in close to the roach end. Person A then exhales hard, while B inhales similarly. The amount of smoke B then exhales is quite astonishing. Strangely, I never saw anyone burn their mouth doing this.
KG: in my experience, the reason shotguns rarely result in a burned mouth is that when the cherry starts to get hot, the shotgun is quite abruptly over. Of course, I’ve never seen anyone do it with a joint; we always used blunts so there was much more room to work with. Also, the shotgunner and shotgunnee have to delicately wrap their hands together to make a chamber for the smoke; that breeds friendships.
Antiochus:
So, since that second sentence pretty much describes me normally (caffeine dulls it enough that coworkers don’t try to kill me), what you’re telling me is that I should stay far far away from yerba mate.
I actually had a “friend” (read: weird guy who hung around a lot) who drank yerba mate constantly. Never really seemed appetizing to me (well, the drink, but him too neither as my mom would say). But then, given his track record of not knowing what he was talking about, it’s entirely possible he was “doing it wrong.”
… Okay, now I’m actually curious to try it. Maybe next time when I don’t have to see anyone for a few days.
I can haz dragon
In case you’re wondering, I spent all day with at least one kid on my lap and pompoms is something you can make with one hand. ;)
I doubt whether I can manage to make pompoms with two hands, but that dragon makes me wonder.
Sorry about the kid lap connection, I assume some sickness still?
Bruce Springsteen – Fire
Robin Thicke – Get You Alone
The Police – Every Breath You Take
The Sailor may appreciate this: Nation’s Sound Engineers Gather To Talk About Their Ponytails
Walton,
That was comic gold. Thanks for sharing.
Predator Handshake,
With a poorly-rolled joint, the burning end sometimes fell off – hence the careful check of the construction. Never happened with one I rolled, of course :-p
So I wanted to link to my new post about the American Psychiatric Association bullying a blogger. I went to my blog and the post was gone. I closed and reopened my browser and it was back. Is this part of the protest? If so, it worked – freaked me out and drove things home. Was it temporarily removed? Or was it some bizarre glitch?
Coyote – u haz email.
Smoking – yeah, the “I can never have another” thought is terrifying. Best to trick your brain out of it. That said I sincerely doubt a cigarette or two every month is really that much of a danger, so I kinda don’t get why anyone would be anxious to give that up.
SC,
Short comment added to your queue. I hate that tactic, it gets used to protect basically nonsense IPs in the bike industry constantly.
Has anyone noticed that the anti-SOPA “Not the page you were looking for?” screen, which appears today when one accesses Freethoughtblogs, calls SOPA the “Stop Online Privacy Act”? Something of a Freudian slip there.
The Privates of Penzance coming soon to a stage near you.
Hmmm.
Magic Ponytail Moves On After Bestowing Boon Of Youth On Area 54-Year-Old.
(Although: 1997. I feel old.)
The sword fight scenes are epic.
Giliell: That’s awesome. I love dragons. “Scary” dragons and cute dragons and goofy dragons alike.
I actually like a bit of a combo of the three. A scary looking dragon with a few goofy features and a ‘cute’ personality.
Natural Selection, I will never forgive you for failing to provide us with fire-breathing, flying, full-sized dragons.
Regarding Shotguns: A variant on that one is the ol Kiss-toke. I did that with an ex girlfriend once. Problem is, while inhaling, I sucked back a big wad of her spit by accident. Yuck.
The rituals around weed smoking fascinate me. Even before I started becoming fascinated by anthropology, I could recognize the traditional means of pot-smoking for what it is: A good old fashioned primate bonding ritual.
If I hadn’t started smoking pot, I would have never learned to start being less afraid of people. I never would have learned the things about human interaction I know now. I never would have felt like ‘one of the tribe’ for even a second or two.
…But without the Internet, I have to go out and socialize with well-meaning bigoted people. At least between furry cons. <_<
Thanks, Dhorvath. I’ve put your comment through.
It’s…disappointing to see the APA resorting to these corporate/quack/religious-zealot tactics.
Pteryxx: Feel free not to answer, but:
1: Do you consider yourself a furry?
2: If so, what critter?
I don’t consider myself a furry…. but I recognize that I’m a hell of a lot like one in some ways.
Oh! – I read The Lives of Animals while traveling this weekend, and recommend it.
Josh, OSG,
May I email you as well for e-cig recommendations?
I think I’m falling in love with The Crommunist
Thanks Walton, that was a hoot! I’m sending it to my
oldprevious colleagues. And not just the ones who still have hair;-)++++++++++++++++
Kitty, I have many vices and many vises. Nice C clamps are a vice of mine.
++++++++++++++++
I used to strip insulation from wire with my teeth because they’re just so handy, $3k later I no longer do that. Unlike what I said to myself at the time, it really is worth the time to go get wire strippers. Even when you’re inverted in an amp rack and the show is about to not go on.
Giliell,
That is snark of high calibre right there.
Sailor,
I did the same until I tried a nice pair of wire strippers and have never gone back. My teeth do not have the same edge that quality steel holds.
Sailor: Well, I am very careful about anything that actually damages my teeth. Popping beer bottles doesn’t damage them. There’s a little blade or something on one of my molars or premolars that hooks the bottlecap perfectly. A bit of well applied pressure and off it comes.
Dhorvath: You have a good and impossible to ignore point. I blame natural selection. I mean, I know our brains and our hands are our major ‘tools’ as primates… but would it have killed our distant ancestors to have chosen mates with larger and sharper teeth? I mean, brains are cool and all… but carnivorans have CARNASSIALS! Why can’t I have carnassials? It’s not fair! Even gorillas and chimpanzees get to have those wicked fangs!
And don’t even get me started on baboons. Lucky bastards.
Umm, if someone has specific e-cig recommendations I’d like to see them. The hype about them turned me off.
TLC – “Well, I am very careful about anything that actually damages my teeth.”
Yeah, so was I.
Anyone is free to email me about this. I have a six-point buyer’s guide I wrote after making all the mistakes the first time around.
Trust me, Sailor, the right ones are unbelievable. As a two-pack-a-day Marb smoker for a couple decades, my e-cig satisfies me and the improvement in my health is enormous.
Fantastic, Josh. Thanks. You’ll have email shortly from mike at iamlabboy.
Seconding the Crommunist-luv.
—
Via Crommunist, re food stamps:
Source linked via Crommunist
—
@TLC: I’m on the furry spectrum (I like animals, empathize with them, draw them, and design them) but I don’t have a particular totem animal or a fursona identity. My archaeopteryx birdsona is specifically my internet avatar, and to some extent, the birdsonification of my ADD.
I stand by my claim that the furry fandom is by far the most tolerant I’ve ever experienced; but with Crommunist, Namazie, and now Natalie coming on board, and all the discussion being sparked, FTB is rapidly climbing the rankings.
O hai! Haven’t caught up! Will go to bed ASAP!
I understand Classical Cipher could make good use of a hug or two? *tight hug* Haven’t read up on what happened.
The homeopathic treatment of burns.
Seconded.
Hm. Over here, the page first loads, then it disappears and is replaced by the blackout notice.
I once encountered a paywall around a Chinese journal that worked this way. Interrupting the loading of the page early enough actually made the paper in question visible. :-)
Sailor: I take your point. I really do.
But the instinct to bite stuff is too strong in me.
Also I know what you mean about the hype, it turned me off too. But people really are recommending them, and I don’t think my relationship with cigarettes is working out as it is. It’s just becoming unworkable.
Argh. Forgot to explain that carnassials are not canine teeth. They’re the last upper premolar + first lower molar and used to cut flesh. Look them up on Wikipedia tomorrow. :-]
Pteryxx: Interesting. I used to be involved with the furry fandom’s nuttier cousin, therianthropy. The complete opposite of the ‘warm welcoming community’ of which you speak.
The fact is, I just never ‘felt human’. I still have trouble with it. As mentioned on a previous thread… the only way I can come to terms with my own humanity is to remind myself that a ‘human’ is, after all, just an upright walking tool using talking clothes-wearing primate ANIMAL. It works most of the time.
I have no idea why I never ‘felt human’, but I’m starting to think it’s an ASD thing. I can remember being in preschool though, and being asked what I want to be when I grow up, and without hesitation I said “A rattlesnake”.
Marjanovic: I know. I specifically didn’t mention canine teeth because humans have them (in shitty versions).
Actually, I have a few carnivoran skulls… marten, bobcat, coyote, and bear. I like the little ‘series’ they show, with the carnassials, from pure cutting implements in the cat, to cutting implements with crushing ability in the coyote, to almost humanlike crushing molars in the bear. Sure, I can read this shit on wikipedia or look it up on google images, but actually having the skulls and observing it for myself is infinitely more enjoyable.
I thought I was neurotypical, but I also have great difficulty with lying, even when it’s socially appropriate.
But maybe I’m just too hip to jump on the neurodiversity bandwagon, man. Like, I was honest and maths geeky and bad with people before it was trendy *dons sunglasses indoors*
@TLC, similar… I don’t feel much like one of those human things, either. Not sure if it’s aspieness, deception fail, faceblindness, queerness, or just asking too many questions in a narrow-minded world. But I also put great store by smell and touch, kinesthetics and visualization, and prefer to work on all fours.
Ever read Temple Grandin? She says Aspie minds work more like animal minds than is usual for humans. (“Animals in Translation” is one kick-ass book.)
Reading the DSM IV led me to think that no one is neurotypical.
There can be only one?
I have no problem lying, sometimes I do it just for fun. Usually I do it to make myself seem a better person than I am.
But I would never lie to you.
That’s VERY interesting Pteryxx, because I’ve always had a bit of a theory similar to that. But of course, voicing it without care or in the ‘wrong way’ could be taken to mean ‘Aspies are just animals anyways’ or ‘Aspies are ‘less human’ than proper humans’. Gotta be careful about giving people ammo.
She says people on the autistic spectrum are more like prey animals: horses, cattle and rabbits.
This also implies that people not on the spectrum are more like predators.
I dunno, I think animals are closer to humans than most humans think they are or will admit, especially the kind of humans that’ll call other humans animalistic in order to depersonalize them (the other humans), if that makes any damn sense.
Basically, I think the word “animal” ought to be reclaimed.
I’m just an artist. The fact that I have “fox” in my user name and my avatar means nothing. Move along…
I’ve done my time in the furry world, and I just don’t have the temperment for it. If you ever see any of the caffeinated “scritchy” types at the cons, you’d understand. I’m also not a role-player. And the aforementioned theriantopy is the special blend of woo found around those parts.
Also, I hate rave music (and in furry, they’ve been partying like it’s 1999 since 1999).
I do appreciate the tolerance of the furry community, and the general lack of sexual hangups found therein. It was furry art that lent me an appreciation for gay sexuality that I probably could have gotten nowhere else, and also where I first learned about polyamory. Of course, with that seems to come a certain, shall we say, lack of respect for boundaries. Maybe it’s gotten better over the years, but I’ve heard horror stories that would make Elevator Dude seem mild.
Let’s replace that “could” with “would”. Still, I’m hard-pressed to think of other cultures where gay, straight, bi, and other mix together so well.
Nice one, Ms. Daisy Cutter! I may have to send that to certain members of my family.
–
:( :( :(
I hate that kind.
–
I’m addicted to tabletop RPGing. Gotta have it.
–
Giliell, dragon iz kyute.
–
I’m…not good at lying. I do better with misdirection-by-omission.
–
Um, as I recall that’s an overgeneralization, though it’s been a few years and my memory sucks. (And so does my internet, so this won’t be much of a fight.) She said the fear response in autism is much like that in prey animals, IIRC: hypervigilant, focusing on little details and such.
Scandalous Photos Reveal Grover Norquist Carried On Secret Affair With Taxes For Years
“All these years, the founder of Americans for Tax Reform has led a double life,” Reid added. “An anti-tax zealot by day, and a tax-obsessed sex maniac by night. The pictures of him and excise taxes are disgusting.”
In three particularly salacious shots taken one night during last summer’s debt-ceiling standoff, the powerful conservative lobbyist can clearly be seen smiling while doing his taxes in a chair, on top of his desk, and in the hallway against a wall.
You recall correctly, and this is what I was thinking of. But I don’t recall her otherwise saying that autistic people were more like animals in general.
(That is, I thought you were overgeneralizing.)
Another funny entry from the Onion: Apparently the Supreme Court overturned Right v. Wrong: http://www.theonion.com/articles/supreme-court-overturns-right-v-wrong,27077/
@lm: I might be, overgeneralizing that is, but I’d have to go back to Grandin’s book to find the citations to make sure. She characteristically says exactly what she means, no more and no less. I’m more literal than most but I do reinterpret and summarize.
This is the best I could find on a net search, in Grandin’s own words. (Most other sources are rephrasing her words as “autistics are like prey animals” which clouds my point.)
http://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html
– visual,
– associative,
– fearful/hypervigilant (prey animal specific)
I think she’s saying that people with autism think more like animals in general, and are specifically like prey animals in the dominance and workings of fear. Also, most of her examples are of horses and cattle, but that may be because she’s a livestock expert and has said she feels the most kinship with cattle. I don’t think she’s ever claimed that autistics are more like the prey subcategory in respects other than fear.
@191
What’s really a kick is that mormons commenting below that cartoon say that its all crap, that they’ve been members of the LDS Church lo these many years and have never heard such silly stories.
Ummm, read your own history, people. Brigham Young, Joseph Fielding Smith, McKay, Kimball and lo these and many more prophets all talked about Elohim, the Adam-God theory, spirit babies, folks running and populating planets and so forth.
Present-day mormons may well ask themselves why all this “crap” is hidden from them now.
The cartoon you watched is really old. The “I’m an Ex Mormon” series provides a more current view of mormonism. Here’s one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3lvKgN_htA&feature=relmfu
Here’s another one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTDXHjUy-As&feature=relmfu
Well, I found my copy of “Animals Make Us Human”, which rocks, but I can’t find my copy of “Animals in Translation”. This annoys me, because I had so many scribblings and marked passages in the latter that it was half again its thickness with all the sticky notes hanging out. Anyway, I left the one book out where I can see it, to remind me to search again.
Had my first biology majors today. They coded matrices and made wee cladograms.
Took the children to get formal pictures tonight, for the first time in about, oh, 7 years. Figured we needed a set before the braces go on. They actually did well and we got a few good shots, and of course ended paying over twice as much as we expected to. Ah, memories.
Pteryxx: These books sound fascinating. It would probably explain a lot for me.
I wanted to be a little kitty. As I’ve mentioned here before, I had extraordinary dedication to the idea that I was a kitty. I climbed trees, hissed at people who tried to talk to me, refused to answer questions that weren’t framed by meowing, the whole nine. This was not a short phase.
Then, after some consideration, I decided I’d rather be a wolf. I feel like I “get” canines. They’re sensible.
The collar, however, is a whole different thing.
:)
Ha, I just discussed privilege with one of my christian friends. Out of that whole crowd, she seemed the most likely to ‘get it’. I don’t think she ‘got it’, but she was close.
It turns out she’s having a harder and harder time relating to any of them, just like me. She says it’s because most of them don’t seem that smart… I think she’s mistaking ‘privileged and sheltered’ for ‘dumb’, but at least she’s noticing that something is ‘off’.
It makes me sad, because I like them well enough… but I just can’t relate to people who might be accepting, and will certainly not personally reject me, but who still vote for jackholes like Harper because he says ‘Gawd’.
I also loathe the ‘tough love’ attitude of those types. Like kicking me off disability or reducing my benefits would maybe ‘be good for me’.
If I hated them, it’d be easy for me to say ‘Fuck them and everything they stand for!’ and move on, but I don’t, because they aren’t bad people. Just sheltered, privileged, and ignorant. And they vote.
P.S. Thanks, David! Always ready with the hugs. *hugs*
CC, the fact that we will likely never meet face to face as long as we live kind of makes me sad.
Want my facebook?
snip from Animals Make Us Human, which is about how to give animals the best emotional lives:
—
bits from Animals in Translation here:
http://www.grandin.com/inc/animals.in.translation.excerpts.html
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I was never a specific animal even as a kid… I’d be a horse to gallop and roll, be a tiger to pounce on things and rip them up, be a dolphin or otter to swim. Now I sort of have critter-shaped emotions: archaeopteryx for ADD, to flutter and skitter and snatch; badger for focused determination, horse for righteous rage. Some part of me’s always had wings though.
My MIL, who is honestly well-intentioned, brought over a stack of casseroles for the fridge. I think that she looked for “recipes” on Cooks.com and made several of them without actually ever having tried them herself. The one that Mr Kristinc threw in the oven tonight was typical: it involved Stovetop stuffing, boneless skinless chicken breasts, shredded Velveeta and cream of mushroom and cream of mushroom soup.
And when it came out of the oven I devoured a whole plateful of it, and I swear — at least right now — it ranks in the top 10 of the best things I’ve ever tasted.
I feel kind of dirty.
Kristin – I was about to say that casserole sounds goddamn delicious. I’m sorry but white trash casseroles are freakin’ scrumptious.
It’s good, comforting peasant food, isn’t it Josh? I didn’t have expectations for it based on some of the other concoctions my MIL has served me, but I should have known it’s hard to go wrong with a stick of butter and Stovetop stuffing.
Thread bankrupt.
Anyway.
I was planning to make orange/cranberry muffins this weekend, but when I looked at the recipe again, meh, it didn’t wow me. Instead, I’m going to make cherry/pecan muffins. OM NOM NOM.
Okay, back to my book.
Exactly, Kristinc. Comforting peasant food. I grew up on stuff like that. . except, believe it or not, that would have been considered special occasion fancy food. Velveeta and Stove Top being too expensive (Velveeta really is costly!). Scalloped potatoes and ham left over from a boiled dinner was the more usual kind of fare.
@ Dhorvath
Well, he was a confidence trickster before the word was even invented. In those days he would be called a “juggler” who claimed to be able to see buried treasure beneath the ground. From there a small leap to finding Moroni’s treasure conveniently buried nearby.
@ TLC
{theophontes drifts away on romantic sentimentality}
@ Giliell
Awwwwww, sooooo cuuuute!
I will take some pictures of dragons today and post to TET later. (2012 is the year of the dragon.)
@ Lynn
Thanks for linkies.
TLC, sure :)
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Regarding the casserole, that sort of thing is what I grew up on too, what I still have when I go home for the holidays, and what I would probably cook for myself if I had time. Hearing about it is making me hungry – and making me remember that I actually forgot to eat dinner today!
Remind me to set a time limit for DDO from now on. There’s one player on there who’s fun to quest with, but then it always ends up with us joking around and wasting time that I’d use to practice or writer. She’s also a bit hyper. Even in a game I seem to attract the ones who act like the kids in school.
—————————–
Comfort food rocks. So long as it’s not a steady diet. Besides, butter makes almost everything better.
—————————-
I can’t seem to stop watching this one video of gameplay from Tomb Raider Anniversary. I think I’m mostly just so taken by how Lara’s appearance has changed. She looks almost like a real person (and IMO a bit more proportional in regards to chest size -but I speak as someone who’d rather be one size smaller than I am. YMMV and all that). Even the way she moves is much less . . . well, it looks more natural. And I don’t think they had it where her skin would actually glisten when she gets out of the water, like real human skin does.
—————————–
Ugh, I’ve already emailed Obama and my congresswoman about PIPA and SOPA. I’ll be surprised if neither of them hates me by the time they’re both out of office. Fortunately it seems Blumenthal isn’t crazy about SOPA or PIPA, so I’m not too worried on that front. I just hope neither act passes, or preferably they both go down in flames, leaving the way clear for a more sensible approach.
CC: OK, check out this cool picture I made with some online digital program. And then add me. :D
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1584670851743&set=a.1120391725055.2018725.1084897594&type=3&theater
[mormons] Tactics.
I HAVE HAD THAT CASSEROLE SO MANY TIMES. Well, without Velveeta, and with the chicken shredded. But I adore it. Spouse won’t let me make it within a specified distance of him. :) My mom’s recipe called it “company chicken”. The original might have called for Velveeta, but the only thing we used Velveeta for at our house was melting over popcorn.
If Ardbeg 10 year old is this close to god nectar I think my head will implode with Usiegedail. And I can’t even think about aligator.
Becoming a single malt fan should not have taken me this long, though my wallet is happy it did.
Carlie:
Exactly. When we were kids this would have been considered fancy food when company came for dinner. Oh, nostalgia. :)
Coyote–that pic is beautiful. Also you haz email—I made some crucial corrections to my e-cig buyer’s guide.
A couple of things:
* Analysis of the toxic anti-atheist memes emerging from Cranston, Rhode Island
* Cranston prayer banner image macro — type in your replacement for their school prayer. Just select any text that’s there and replace it with your own.
Markita: My quick, dirty, and surely unclever banner edit: http://tinyurl.com/78rwfbg
http://tinyurl.com/79d4hfj here’s a slightly better effort, because that last one sucked.
TLC, Pteryxx, and Rey Fox, re the furry community: My impression as an outsider is that it is too tolerant for its own good, in that it has internalized the Geek Social Fallacy about ostracization being bad. I’d say that if you’re raping people or animals or if you’ve got a track record of committing fraud, you deserve to be shunned, but that does not happen as often as it should.
Pteryxx, #343: I think Grandin is generalizing. As someone who has several autistic relatives and some ASD traits myself, I disagree that all autists have “mostly simple emotions,” do not ever feel ambivalent, and cannot learn how to conceal emotions. It’s a lot harder to do that, but it’s not impossible.
Everything is relative with Ms. Croft, of course. But it was fairly impressive how they made her look years younger in that game than in Legend, since it preceded that game in the reboot timeline but was still set in 1996. I hear they’re doing it again for the latest (very delayed) Tomb Raider game, don’t know if that’s another damn reboot or not.
I believe that the creator of the original Tomb Raider game left the franchise before the second game out because he was mad about how Lara was being sexualized. They’ve been ever-so-slowly shrinking her infamous rack over the years, but old habits…
Markita, re the Cranston prayer banner macro:
http://tinyurl.com/bowelwall
The text comes from this … uh, interesting story.
Ms Daisy Cutter: Hahahahahaha, classic.
Oh, to a degree. Zoophiles and pedophiles have found shelter therein. But their art was finally kicked out of the biggest online furry gallery.
TLC, how did you get those shareable URLs for the banner generator? When I click “Share”, nothing happens.
TLC, done. Thanks. And yeah, I agree with Josh, the picture is very pretty :)
—
This. Most of the emotions I have access to are powerful and simple, but I have definitely experienced a great deal of ambivalence toward other people. (Although my general tendency for powerful simple emotions has contributed to some problems in the past.) And I feel like I conceal emotions pretty well now. I smile quite a lot. Possibly too much, but I’ve practiced it and it’s a pretty easy way for me to control my expression most of the time. *shrugs* The only time I really have trouble is when I’m tired or when I’m particularly anxious.
Rey Fox: When I click ‘share’, a big long URL shows up both across the screen and in the address bar. I copy and paste said URL into tinyURL.com, the better to not flood the TET with a big stupid-long URL. If it’s not showing up across your screen, see if anything changes in the address bar when you hit ‘share’.
Ugh… you could have added a warning as to what you meant by “interesting story”. For that matter, a simple NSFW would have sufficed. (I’m not at work, but I could have lived without learning that there was such a thing as Star Wars droid-porn fanfic. Rule 34, I suppose. But still.)
That’s a really interesting article.
Does anyone have a link to a good explanation of religious privilege?
Switched to Chrome, got it.
Oh lord…
Oh dear fuck I’m reading it. This is all your fault. In retaliation I present…
http://pastebin.com/VGmebs73
Scooby Doo and the Trip of Lust. Original author: Unknown. Original website: Unremembered. I saved it to my computer because it’s both disgusting AND stupid, so I once read it out loud to a group of people over the mic, after depriving myself of sleep for three days.
Read at own risk. Seriously. It’s both disgusting AND stupid.
Pteryxx, I see your point now. There are some a general claims about animals, not just prey animals.
I guess that since she talks so much about prey animals with regard to fear in autism, and for her more general statements she seems to be always using prey animals in her examples (like the horse above), I did overgeneralize and assume she was not making any comparisons which would extend to predators.
Glory and Hallelujah.
elisabetht is back again.
Love Moderately: Thanks for the link. Great reading. It makes a lot of sense to me.
Pteryxx linked it first. :)
Damnit, I missed it when pteryxx linked it. But thanks to him too. It’s intensely interesting.
Except I want to point out, small to midsize opportunistic generalist carnivores have a pretty well tuned fear response too. :p
If you are going to startle a cat, be well out of claw range.
There’s something I love about wandering around at night and coming across a roaming cat who’s willing to exchange a brief greeting. Usually they run away, but occasionally there’ll be one that’ll come up quickly and let me give hir a quick pet before going about hir business. It’s like they recognize me or something. Being ‘recognized’ by a cat on the prowl is kind of a big deal to a critter like me.
As long as it’s a cat not big enough to kill me, of course. :P
@lm, thanks. I *think* Grandin might make comparisons of autistic people to predators incidentally, when she’s talking about dogs/cats/exotics, but I’ll have to go into those chapters to find out for sure.
—
re “mostly simple emotions”: Yeah, a qualifier like “most autistic people” may have worked better there; but given that Grandin also says autism is a continuum with no clear dividing line between autistic people and normal people, “mostly simple emotions” with that caveat still might be applicable.
She also talks about the competition between emotional drives in animals when discussing the “curiously afraid” behavior of animals investigating a suspicious new thing. I’d say that’s an example of ambivalent emotion.
Personally, though I sure have been told I can’t hide my emotions worth a damn, I’m less convinced that aspie-type people actually have simpler emotions instead of just lacking the neurotypical ability to lie to ourselves and others about what we feel.
—
@Ms Daisy Cutter:
I agree, but given how often this sort of behavior gets excused in general, I’m not convinced that the furry community is actually any worse at justifiable shunning than any other community.
Note that everyone believes this of themselves. The ones you call neurotypicals even have a cliche about it. Folks aren’t predicting the results of this study precisely because this is an area where introspection is not reliable.
@lm: since I caught flak for it most of my life, have undergone specific politeness training built around lying, and have books on Aspie coping that reference honesty as a problem (and others as a diagnostic), I’m fairly certain this is not just my own self-perception. If it’s a myth, it’s a darned pervasive and apparently supported one.
Good morning
Well, i have a slightly better kid this morning and one who’s almost healthy again.
Things are getting better.
Rev. Big Dumb Chimp
You’re calculating badly.
Mr. and I have mathematically justified pretty good red wine and single malt a long time ago.
Before we got into good quality alcoholic beverages, we would go to bars at the weekend. We’d trink some beer or such, maybe a gin tonic, and often take a taxi home. Costs would reach 50€ quickly
Well, even before the kids came, we hardly went to bars anymore because they’d never have the stuff we actually wanted to drink. Bordeaux and a single malt that’s not Johnnie Walker are hard to find. So we stay at home, have a bottle of good wine or half of it and a bottle of single malt lasts several weeks. So the total costs are much smaller than going to a bar or pub.
I’m a bit chesty tonight, but at least back online, had some outage here. Aussies, have you noted that, of all people, Charlie Teo the dodgy neurosurgeon today is educating us on racism ? What a farce.
Don’t cry
Sweet Child O’ Mine – Live At The Ritz 88
And the first comment on that vid :
There is hope !
Live And Let Die – Live In Tokyo 92
Play The Game Live Montreal
I still think LM’s basically right that many “neurotypicals” tend to believe honesty is easier than dishonesty, though it’s often qualified to apply to particular kinds of situations. That is, aside from many ethical concerns they may have with dishonesty, people do generally think honesty is less difficult, which is not to say they’re more likely to be honest but that they think being honest often requires less effort and intention, that it’s the natural thing to do in addition to being the ethical thing to do. Obviously, the boundary between neutotypicals and everyone else is quite blurry, so it’s not too surprising that there is a lot of overlap.
It’s also true that introspection isn’t reliable, ever, but to the extent there is a well-defined difference in behaviors, coping strategies, and so on, what you’re saying seems to be consistent with all of that.
TLC,
Tell that to the monks at the Tiger Temple in Thailand.
I don’t know how old you are, but one of the lesser-known effects of aging is that the teeth become more brittle – I’ve had several bits break off in the last few years (I’m 57) when biting something hard, but considerably less so than a bottle cap!
Jesus Christ, you guys ! I knew how to open beer bottles with a lighter/spoon/any fulcrum really from the age of 12 ! Over here in Oz, incidentally, we have screwtop beer bottles. Bit boring, and no way to impress any chicks with that.
@consciousness razor, thanks for clarifying the distinction about honesty being thought of as easier than lying.
On looking at lm’s citation, I also notice that “lying” may not be the best term for what happened in that study – they were measuring accuracy of self-reporting with performance rewards at stake, which I consider to be prone to a somewhat different set of cognitive biases (fairness, perceived harm, self-evaluation, etc) than polite social lying involves. However, I really need to read that paper when I’m awake.
In case y’all Crommunist fans didn’t already see:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/crommunist/2012/01/19/shuffling-feet-a-follow-up
Aaand Al Stefanelli has this huge, bulletproof and fiery post. TL;DR: “Bring it on.”
http://freethoughtblogs.com/alstefanelli/2012/01/19/the_citizen_newspaper/
Well my problem is that my taste in wine, beer and bourbon is pretty much on par with my new found obsession with single malts. And has been for years. But that’s kind of my MO. Champagne tastes beer budget and all that.
When I go out to the bar I usually drink beer and then maybe some good bourbon if it’s a long night. If Mrs. BDC and I go out to a nice restaurant (which with our schedules isn’t that often) it’ll be one or two pre-meal drinks, a nice wine with dinner possibly either port, bourbon or single malt after dinner depending on if I’m having desert and what the establishment offers.
But the single malt thing is mostly having a dram or two at most at home.
I will say this, though I’ve gone a bit crazy and now have about 12-13 bottles of malt in the house, I don’t drink nearly as much as I do when their is good bourbon around. Part of that is that I’m drinking the scotch neat (bourbon usually on the rocks) and have been getting into the identification the various flavors and aromas (yes i’m a nerd in many ways, when I get obsessed, I get obsessed) and differences between distilleries and expressions and part probably because I just don’t drink as much as I used to. I also have been getting up at 5:00 am every morning for the past year or so to work out so continuing my previous drinking habits kind of works against that. I don’t drink enough to “get buzzed”.
So yeah your math is right on time. But it’s that upfront hit that gets you. I find my-self justifying (rationalizing) much higher per bottle costs that I do on Bourbon.
I went and ordered a bottle of Bruichladdich 10 year old “The Laddie” from my local liquor store last week. Pretty excited to give it a try. It’s the first real release (from distillation through bottling) from the new owners of the distillery, and I’m all about Islay malts.
If anyone is interested I’ve fired up the old Pork n Whiskey blog at a new URL and have been going through beer and whisk(e)y reviews but will be adding new recipes and other food and bev type things. It’s still a little rough around the edges, and the writing isn’t any better than my typical blabbering here but it’s a outlet for some of my obsessions.
/end tmi
*Johnny Walker is a blend fyi
Barn owl wings adapted for silent flight… well, duh!
I should have made it is the title, rather than the article, that I was commenting on!
Mitt Romney Jokes.
Hmm, well, honestly, I already sort of regret that it was muddled and not very useful; but if it helped somehow then that’s nice. I haven’t taken the time to read that study, because I’m very tired. I wanted to elaborate a bit on situations in which dishonesty is generally thought of as easier, but that’s a complicated subject.
For example, a politician tries to gain support by lying rather than telling the truth. He or she may think lying is easier in the sense that it’s an easier method of manipulating public opinion in some cases, but may also think it’s more difficult for himself or herself to produce and support a lie in those same cases. Of course, knowing and telling the truth, not to mention getting people to believe it, takes a bit of effort too. So on the one hand, there are differences between groups of people in what they perceive as the cognitive effort needed for a behavior (as well as the perceived difference in the total effort needed to satisfy more “external” factors); but on the other hand, there are also differences in how people weigh those various factors and come to a decision.
I don’t know how Aspies might tend to differ on this sort of thing, but (being sort of a borderline case myself) it does seem like there’s at least a difference in emphasis.
By the way, it’s annoying as fuck that Letterman’s shtick is making lots of shallow “he looks like the guy who…” jokes.
Rick Perry is dropping out.
not a big shock
Can I draw on the wisdom of the hivemind?
Human Rights Campaign is having a big membership drive today. Have they gotten their heads out of their asses about transgender issues, or are they still best avoided in favor of supporting other groups?
But will he tune in and turn on?
HAPPY FRIDAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Last night the Rachel Maddow Show did a good job of illustrating that Congress does not understand the internet:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#46048983
The Stop PIPA protests were covered.
CNN was on at the gym.
Commercials I saw from their sponsors
Glenn Beck TV
“PSA” from the Petroleum Industry
More Glenn Beck TV
Another Conservative Think Thank posing as a PSA
More Glenn Beck TV
….Um should I be worried by this? Liberal media my ass.
Rachel Maddow also showed a pie chart that displayed the SOPA Supporters. Those funding the bill were:
33.9% Cable & satellite TV production & distribution
16.2% Entertainment Industry
16% Recorded Music & music production
14.2% Motion Picture production & distribution
13.4% Commercial TV and radio stations
6.3% TV production & distribution
Pteryxx, #379: That’s a fair point. Though I was thinking also of behaviors such as an anecdote I’ve heard and, obviously, cannot validate: “Cat people” at an anthro convention setting up a human-sized litterbox in the closet and using that instead of the suite’s toilet. If that happened, I feel terrible for the chambermaids who had to deal with it.
Carlie, #399: As far as I know, HRC is still fully committed to the rights of affluent white cis gay men in urban areas. Hopefully that will answer your question.
Unrelated to anything: Yesterday I heard a passing mention of a band called The Flying Buttmuffins. (I can’t find them on teh Google.) I would watch that band, no matter what genre of music they play or how good they are. I also would love to see the logo for their drum kit and their concert T-shirts.
@ Giliell
Dragons … they are everywhere. Linky.
I’d heard in the past about issues with transphobia within HRC, but I just googled and found this blog post by an African-American transwoman which suggests it was once much worse than I’d previously been aware.
However, as far as I can tell, they seem to have improved a great deal in that regard. I’m on the HRC mailing list (though I’m not a member and haven’t been involved with their work), and I gather that they did campaign earlier this year (successfully) against obnoxious anti-trans stereotypes in an ABC TV show, for instance.
The next time I’m reading “unfair sexist gender prejudices” when somebody talks about women’s fear of getting raped by men I’, going to scream.
Rev. BigDumbChimp
Not enough space for that here. At the moment here’s Talisker, Bowmore Legend, Blackstone, which is a decent but realitively budget-friendly 12 yo single malt that the discounter sometimes offers, some Johnny Walker (you’re, of course right, it’s a blend. That bottle has probably the longest survival time in this household ever. It was a gift from somebody who knw we like whisky and wanted to give us a treat) and Conemarra, which is the only peated Irish Whiskey.
See, there’s already a beneficial effect for your health, less alcohol!
Personally, I can’t stand bourbon, but I’ll be always gratefull to all bourbon-drinkers for keeping the cask-production up.
Did I ever tell about that pub in Sligachan on the Isle of Skye? The bar in the pub was about 6X2m, split in two equal halves. Along the top of those halves ran a board on which they had the whisky. Yes, a full 20m of whisky-bottles and hardly a bottle twice….
*sigh*
Want to pick the Groupthink’s Hivemind on something.
Cross posted: http://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2012/01/13/what-is-objectionable-about-this-comic-strip/
It may be racist but there may also be a grain of truth to it. IIRC weren’t there studies showing that most people are best at determining faces from the ethnic groups they grew up in? Therefore if someone has traits that are not seen in their usual peer group it over shines other distinguishing traits and they have more trouble distinguishing members of that group?
I’ve heard white friends for example, not that they all look alike, but honestly be unable to see the difference between say Korean and Japanese where it seems more obvious to me that there are on the whole distinguishing differences.
—————————————————–
However, I’m second guessing myself now. The study about this was presented in the Human Evolution/Evopsyche class I took, that while better than most, still makes me question it. Anyone else notice this or heard anything about this?
In Moments of Mormon Madness news, apostles and prophets of the LDS Church are taking care of important business.
In a campaign year that features way too many depictions of Mitt Romney in his magic mormon underwear, the powers-that-be in the morridor have decided to focus on … magic underwear.
They have issued revised guidelines for the temple-recommend interviews that the sheeple must endure yearly. The new guidelines include stricter codes for underwear, mentioning specifically that all worthy mormons must wear their garments when doing yard work.
After insisting that there be no more bare-chested men, or bare-shouldered women doing yard work in these latter days, mormon authorities went one step further and added some mormon doublespeak that sorta, kinda gives you permission to do whatever you damn well please … if you don’t care about being damned for eternity.
http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,395649
And you wonder why Mitt Romney’s position on important issues is difficult to understand.
consciousness razor @148: That was very LOL-worthy. Thanks for the link.
So much for god and space travel. “Excuse me, I have a question…”
Mormons need to watch more Star Trek.
Ing @408: I know what you’re talking about but unfortunately not well enough to give you a link or title. I do know that my own ability to distinguish between different SE Asian ethnicities has improved over the past few years with more frequent interactions.
We Are Ing
anecdote
A Chinese (from China) student being shown around a western Canadian University was growing agitated and even angry.
When questioned about it he said that it had been very, very difficult for him (Chinese!) to get a visa and how is it there are so many Mongolians here?
All the people he pointed to as being Mongolian were people of Canadian First Nations (Native “Indians”).
Speaking of groupthink…
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-the-new-groupthink.html
It’s about the corporate fad for forcing people into “big happy family” type groups, purportedly to stimulate creativity. It fails.
Pteryxx:
You know, the ability to hide emotions is not something all neurotypical people share. Some neurotypical people can have very expressive faces and gestures, with emotions are easy to recognise, and others don’t. Some of us are also more extrovert than others, and just speak their mind whether it’s socially awkward or not. My mother was like that, and one of my siblings too. They could be very difficult to be with, because they never stopped to consider that they could say very hurtful things sometimes, without even meaning to. (And then they’d be surprised by the reaction.)
I know that I’m a lot more guarded myself, and that part of it stems from the difficulty of living with people who always say what they think: I tended to first imagine the previsible reaction of those carelessly extrovert family members before letting myself say something, because more often than not, it would have been critical, or mocking, or just downright irrelevant.
And that doesn’t even account for cultural differences in what is or isn’t socially acceptable to show of your personality, emotions, ways of thinking, etc., and in what circumstances. Some cultures value individual expression more than others, or on the contrary define very narrow sets of circumstances where it’s permissible to be unguarded. (For instance, you can be more free among people of the same age, sex and social class, but maintain social fictions toward elders or the other sex or people in position of authority.)
LM:
Aren’t we talking of two different things here? The meme that “it’s easier to tell the truth” is often taken to mean “it’s more practical on the long term to live with it” (because then you don’t have to worry about what hidden stuff coming to light), or simply that you won’t have to rack your brains to keep track of what untruth you’ve told to whom, but just say the same thing to everyone.
But of course, “practical” or “useful” doesn’t necessary mean “easier to do”, or “less damaging to your image of self”! Which is why even people who don’t have objective reasons to lie (no crime to hide) still spin altered versions of reality that are more pleasant to their ego, or socially easier to admit.
Some polls now showing Gingrich ahead in SC primary.
Let’s see what his ex-wife has to say about that.
Apparently news orgs were debating whether it was ethical to give his wife a spot light to talk during the primaries.
They’re fine with letting him come on to talk about how Santorum and Perry should step down for the good of the nation, basically letting him get free campaign time but THIS they question the ethics of? Presumably because it could affect the election.
WELL NO SHIT!? What’s the alternative? Sit on incriminating facts until the fucker is elected? “Oh hey look turns out the candidate was actually a sadist who talked about how he was ‘totally gonna jack this nation’, too bad he’s in office now haha!”
This isn’t even about giving “both sides” this is hand wringing over going against the accepted official story.
Cause you know, apparently the news is not supposed to have any IMPACT on anything.
Wife just watched Perry’s quitter speech. She declares that she detests proselyticians with a passion.
I like the word ‘proselytician.’ And I plan to start using it whenever possible.
Right now Talisker 10, Ardbeg 10, Aberlour A’Bundah (wow), Caol Ila 12, Dalmore 12, Highland Park 12, Glendfiddich 12 , Glenmorangie 10, Macallan 12 Sherry Cask (not the new “fine oak” expression), Balvenie Double Wood.
Nothing too outrageous but all of those are great and I recommend them.
The one malt I have that I’m not that high on is Lismore. It was recommended by a few review sites for big bang for your buck. At $19.00 a 750ml it’s cheap but I just can’t get into it. Really tight. Going to try it on the rocks and see if that helps. I might need it watching the Debate tonight.
The one Blend I have on hand is Compass Box Great King St. And it’s as good as some single malts. Really well done. It’s the first I’ve had from Compass Box. Apparently most of their offerings are great.
Damn.
I really need to get over to the Isles. My wife is Scottish descent and I’m Scot-Irish (not that that really means anything). We’d both like to make a big long trip there. She’s been to Scotland and I’ve only made it to southern England. Back in my climbing days I had big plans to climb some alpine routes on Ben Nevis but that never panned out, like a lot of things. Maybe once our schedules calm down a bit whenever the fuck that’ll be.
If Gingrich makes part of his platform “family values”, whatever the fuck they are, his family values are free fucking game as far as I’m concerned.
@Rev
from the NYT article and other stuff it seems that the news has regressed to an infantile position. They seem honestly shocked and scandalized at the idea that they actually influence or affect anything. In fact they have to be so neutral that stuff that would be very shocking has to be buried or toned down, least it cause any major change in society.
ugh
or if I’m being cynical I might suspect that it’s not fairness they really care about but the story. They’re enjoying the narrative of this primary and aren’t in the business of informing, they’re in the business of entertaining (poorly). If actually revealing a story would end the narrative early that wouldn’t be very good now would it? Nah best to let it play out and be as dramatic as possible to delay having to choose a new hyper focus of media attention. Newt is an awful person isn’t the story they want, they want Newt is the old guy making a come back and making jabs at Mittens! or Newt is the asshole who is making sensationalist and entertaining insults at the other runners!
Ohhhhh THESE family values.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/marianne-gingrich-newts-ex-wife-says-he-wanted-open-marriage/2012/01/19/gIQAJzgwAQ_story.html?hpid=z2
So, in the course of my argument with elisabetht on the other thread, I was informed that I’m a scary scary angry leftist anarchist Islamist-sympathizing Maoist extremist who wants to re-enact the Cultural Revolution and turn Europe into Somalia. (Because apparently, in her mind, being expected to coexist with immigrants from foreign countries is just like being rounded up by the Red Guards and sent to labour camps. And apparently letting more foreign people move in will automagically cause Our Civilization™ to crumble. Who knew?)
And now… as soon as she goes away, another drive-by xenophobe appears and posts a Pat Condell video. *sigh* I just wish the constant stream of racist nonsense would end someday.
Hey look, somebody posted a gripping takedown of a year-old sexist Slate piece, and it turns out the author is a sociology professor right up the street from me at UT Austin. He has a new book out on premarital sex which his webmaster apparently doesn’t like very much, because the description page on his website got Comic Sans’d.
Just how “shocking” is this revelation that Newt wanted an open marriage. It is already well known that he was having affairs during his first two marriages and married his mistresses for marriage number two and three. If this was not enough to expose his hypocrisy about his support of “family values”, how will this change a think.
Just keep in mind that Newt’s core audience will overlook his actions (We are all sinners.) because he will keep up his attacks on the truly evil, welfare recipients (Black people) and teh gayz. We have to get back to the nineteenth century when poor people understood the dignity of the sixteen hour workday and the fags kept out of sight.
Well the timing of the release of this interview is significant. It will bring it right back to the forefront and people who vote on what they consider important “social issues” side of the Republicans might be damn well tempted to back Santorum instead. Either way I think this probably helps Romney unless Santorum charges ahead.
It is not. For example, Newt Gingrich’s call for the repeal of child labor laws is just an excuse of hiring cheap unskilled labor and claiming that is is helping the poor (black) underclass.
Santorum, the man who wants to use the bully pulpit to explain to us how much harm the use of contraceptives have done to society.
It almost makes me nostalgic for the days when Tipper Gore made the case that rock music was a satanic and homosexual propaganda form.
Annoyingly asking for an open marriage could be one of those potentially responsible good but not x-ian things that ruins him like PErry’s vaccinations.
Of course he did it as an ultimatum and is an asshole all around and…UGHHHHHHHHHHH the thought of him. I threw up a bit.
I love Rick so much I want to punch his fat face in.
It is because I love you that I have to inform you that your actions will cause the destruction of civilization and that you condemn yourself and other to hell.
This kind of love has a body count.
If we’re talking about Republican racism, it’s worth noting that Romney is also a racist, and has been seeking the endorsement of anti-immigration hate groups like FAIR.
There is no Republican candidate left whose record on immigrants’ rights is anything other than horrifyingly awful. Even Ron Paul, despite his libertarian positions on other issues, takes a hardline anti-immigration stance and demonizes “illegals” just like the rest of them – which isn’t surprising, given his past ties to racist groups.
Did anyone else hear a huge record-scratching sound in their head right there?
So Newt’s ex-wife thinks that asking for an open marriage will totally sink his campaign? I thought it was going to be the locations of actual bodies buried in the back yard or something. No, this won’t even be a blip. He’s repented, so all is well.
Shit. I don’t wanna share any platforms with that brick.
I just finished reading ‘Bella Coola Man’, by Clayton Mack, last night.
If you live in or just love British Columbia, you gotta read Clayton Mack’s two books: White Guys and Grizzlies, and Bella Coola Man.
Clayton Mack died in a hospital bed in ’92, and his books were transcribed by the doctor tending to him. Some of his stories are educational, some are incredibly hilarious, and some are achingly sad. All of them are told in his own words. It’s impossible for me to read him without reading it in a native accent in my head.
Makes me think of Old Frisco, that old, skinny, white-haired Native I met crossing a river that almost went up to his neck, telling me native stories around a campfire as doobies circulated. He stumbled into the clearing at the end of the path years ago, and I’m still a sad about that. There were times he’d laugh and call me his ‘white grandson’. Because I loved his stories. He once taught me a bit about how the natives would net fish, though we didn’t catch anything that day.
Why do I bring him up? I suppose because it makes me sad to think that all the old guys who remember those times are dying off. Guys like Clayton Mack and Uncle Frisco are getting rarer and rarer. Didn’t realize till after Frisco died how lucky I was to know that old man.
Careful there, Carlie. You are dating yourself. You do realize that most of the students you are teaching never played a record and do not know the difference between a 33, 45 or 78?
(Speaking as someone who spent too much time in used record stores.)
In cosmological headlines this week, we see that scientists have devised a way to take a picture of a black hole. Link at Scientific Computing. Excerpt:
That’s all very nice, but they have missed the most important point. Mormon cosmology tells us that the planet on which God himself resides orbits a sun at the center of our galaxy. This latest news from scientists tell us that the mormon god is circling a black hole and is in danger of going down the drain.
Or perhaps we can conclude that mormon cosmology is a black hole. Do not approach the Event Horizon.
Mormons worship the Collector General from Mass Effect?
Does this mean each galaxy gets its own god?
No Moggie each man is a god and each man is free
From the Mass Effect wiki:
No way the mormon god is that cool.
Additional info regarding the “each man is a god” doctrine: there’s still a hierarchy as far as I can tell. Polygamists from mormon recent history (mid 1800s to early 1900s) thought the hierarchy depended in part on how many wives one had. IIRC, a man needed at least three wives just to get to the desired mormon level of the Celestial Kingdom, the one where you get your own planet.
As far as hierarchy goes, there’s still the God over all the minor mormon god-men. The God has Joseph Smith and Jesus Christ at his side. Sort of like assistants or advisors, I think. Joe Smith probably knows who masturbated and who didn’t. Somebody has to keep track.
I really don’t know if The God sends the minor mormon gods to other galaxies in order to put them in charge of planets. That’s some sophisticamucated theology there. Too deep for me.
Most mormons don’t bother with all the man-becomes-god stuff. Either they don’t know about it, or they think it’s no longer official doctrine, or they put it on the proverbial shelf where all things go that they don’t want to think about. And with the Mitt Romney campaign foremost in their minds, they’re busy denying denying denying wherever it pops up on the internet.
Telling details from an ex-mormon posting about mormon women who took the magic underwear, and the advice to never take it off, seriously:
This is how I’ve often felt. Maybe it’s not fair of me, since usually I feel it most keenly after a disagreement with Mr Kristin, but it seems to me that contrary to the stereotypes about aspies I’m perfectly fine at reading body language, nonverbal communication and indirect communication — what I lack is the habit? inclination? ability? to pretend that those things are not saying what they obviously are saying. Usually when they contradict what a person’s verbal communications are saying.
It seems to me from my experience that neurotypicals very highly value the practice of believing or pretending that the face level of a conversation is the only existing level. At my most cynical and misanthropic I sometimes believe this is actually at the root of so many aspies being told we don’t handle nonverbal communication well.
My comment was quoting the movie Pumaman
Pronounced “pyoo-MAME-an”.
Re Gingrich, it’s worse than I knew. Apparently his demand for a divorce was only months after his second wife, Marianne, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He knew that the stress would be especially harmful to her because of her medical condition; he didn’t give a shit. (And this was at a time when he was loudly condemning Bill Clinton…)
Of course, famously, he demanded a divorce from his first wife, Jackie, when she was in hospital recovering from surgery for cancer. This seems to be a pattern of behaviour.
Not to mention that he’s also an obvious racist. I can’t believe he’s still being taken seriously as a presidential candidate.
Newt’s A Victim!
Just ask serial monogamist, Rush Limbaugh.
So, the god directed One man/one woman can be circumvented as long as the head of the family asks for permission?
WHY THE FUCK DO THESE ASSHOLES WANT TO PASS LAWS ABOUT MORALITY WHEN THEY CANNOT AND WILL NOT LIVE BY THEM!
Sorry, I forgot my place. It is because people like me insist on existing that these fine moral people stumble.
Walton, those of us who lived through Newt’s years as the Speaker Of The House were well aware of that story. For many of us, it showed that not only was Newt’s politics were bad but that he is a horrible human.
They don’t care about morality, they care about guilt and the control it offers.
The Limbaugh-Gingrich worldview seems to be that the government needs to prescribe strict rules of restrictive sexual morality which must be followed by the plebs, in order to keep them in line. (Because, after all, regulating the sex lives of the unwashed masses is what the government is there for. Especially if they happen to be female, gay, or both.) On the other hand, if one happens to be a rich powerful politically-connected Republican dude, one can, apparently, sleep with as many women as one wants, and discard them when one gets bored, with zero consequences. Because apparently the rules only apply to poor people.
(Of course, I guess they’ve been faithful to the teachings of Supply Side Jesus.)
The word ‘Morals’ has to be the dirtiest fuckin word ever written, in the TLC dictionary at least. “Morals” aren’t about ethics, treating people fairly, or respecting people’s rights. “Morals” as they use them are all about keeping up appearances for the neighbors and church and making sure to uphold the status quo.
I piss on morals. They can shove it straight up their assholes, with the rest of the feces.
It makes me fucking mad. They care more that two grown adult men are having consensual sex than they do about the fact that people are being exploited by the corporate ‘Job Creators’, whose feet they lick. They care more about their stupid family values than they’ll ever care about human dignity or quality of life.
Morality is a curse word to me. A dirty, foul curse word.
Give me ethics, give me dignity, and fuck off with the ‘morality’.
Walton,
I travel a step further down that path. I think that the expectation is to have transgression of these wretched moral rules to better hook the congregation and allow for easier manipulation on other topics which the leaders feel more passionate about.
No he DEMANDED one…from a sick woman. That’s emotional, and frankly depending on the details possibly sexual, abuse
Ha! I was just coming on to post this video that John Scalzi tweeted yesterday. It’s him showing his daughter (early teens) a record for the first time. It’s hilarious in that “oh crap my retirement fund should be a lot larger than it is because I’m gonna need it soon” way.
Well, crap. I went to his twitter feed to get the link again, and turns out he had to disable comments because so many people on youtube were talking shit about her. People suck.
“Open Relationships” are only ethical if its open for BOTH parties. Yeah, Gingrich wanted to go have sex with other women. Great. But how would he have felt if his wife wanted to bone someone else?
I think by ‘open relationship,’ he meant ‘Harem’.
QFT.
There’s a world of difference between Situation A: two consenting adults willingly choose to have an open marriage because it’s what they both want, and Situation B: a lying asshole, having been cheating on his sick wife with a much younger woman, tries to pressure her into accepting an open marriage in order to avoid the bad publicity of a divorce. The former is perfectly fine; the latter is extremely abusive.
Why else have rules that are so impossible to follow perfectly?
It’s like the abusive husband beating his wife for scrambling the egg he wanted fried, and frying the egg he wanted scrambled.
Hooray, the blackout has ended! I got sucked into a never ending “This is not the page you were looking for” vortex yesterday, and I am completely threadcrupt.
—
Happy late birthday to Gilelle, I hope your wee ones are soon fully recovered and you celebrate it properly.
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Nice artwork TLC.
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Today I had an epic battle with an insurance adjustor, and I WON!!! Yippee, I will actually get a reasonable settlement reimbursement check by the end of the month.
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I think I might actually be on the spectrum after reading the autism/Grandin posts. I am intensely aware of body language, and thus I often find human behavior very confusing. Animals communicate clearly and they never lie, human animals lie all the time. I also find it exceedingly difficult to mask my true feelings unless I go into robot mode.
—-
*stomach growls*
*mind reels* Giving birth is a very messy process. Poor women have to push out a baby, and come home with horrifically stained laundry?
___
Where is Caine? We need more rats up in here.
__
Walton
My, what sniny teeth you have.
Indeed. Gingrich’s abusive tendencies seem to show through equally in his personal life and in his political life. He craves power and control. Politicians like that are very scary.
Ah, I think this helps me understand what TLC and others were talking about wrt animals being “more sensible”. This has never manifested for me in the form of wishing *I* was a non-human animal, but animals have always made far more sense to me than humans and they never confuse me in the way humans often do.
*sigh, why can’t I remember how to spell this correctly? sorry*
Happy late birthday
GilelleGiliell.The GOP proselyticians only want morality for lesser folk. The authoritarian rules to not apply to the ruling class authoritarians.
…that makes ALL THE SENSE.
I know I can read body language extremely well in certain contexts (generally sports – you do NOT want to try to deke me.) It makes sense that I may be receiving extremely clear information over one channel while losing information over the face channel, while normality/politeness presumes the ability, skill, and desire to do the reverse.
Snowboarding Crow
Re: ASD communication
There may also be a problem that the person speaking may think xe feels one way but, really, all of hir body language and style communicate another position entirely. I’ve gotten people angry at me for pointing out that the language and body language they used was completely contradictary to their stated (and presumably “conscious”) position – usually in cases of subtle prejudice.
But all I said was …
I heard somewhere before someone make the claim that Newt doesn’t think of himself as Newt Gingrich, but as The Historical Character Speaker Gingrich.
Gay men need diapers.
But what of women who engage in anal sex?
…
…That may have happened to me without me knowing it; in fact that phenomenon might be why I almost got fired for “misunderstandings”. Invariably, it was because I believed someone’s literal words when they were actually sarcastic, lying or furious.
Women don’t have sex. Isn’t that their train of thought?
You know Limbaugh wouldn’t give a pass to a Democratic Party candidate that treated his wife like Newt treated his second wife.
Nope. Not even if said candidate did ask god for forgiveness.
Lots of rightwingers love Newt for this particular sin precisely because he asked god for forgiveness, in public. That must be because Newt talks to the Republican god, who is notoriously misogynist.
Bill Clinton must be condemned for all of his affairs (And all feminists by their convoluted logic.) but Newt Gingrich is off limits. With that, you are trying to tear down a man who stands for a christian US.
In this Moment of Mormon Madness we find that mormons learned very little when they got their PR feathers singed during the Prop 8 battle in California. They’re meddling in anti-gay politics again, this time in Minnesota. And they’re doing so in a provable manner. Sheesh.
http://prideinutah.com/
I predict that LD$ Inc. will claim that their letter from on high does not tell members how to vote.
More detail related to the anti-gay legislation in Minnesota:
link
Another link to info about the mormon campaign against gays in Minnesota:
http://www.keylimepiety.com/?p=31
Lynna,
I think you missed something out – I’ve added it in bold.
“We, the First Presidency and the Council of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, solemnly proclaim that marriage between a man and a woman and another woman and another woman and another woman and another woman and another woman and another woman and a few terrified fourteen-year-old girls forced into it by savage beatings and threats of eternal damnation is ordained of God and that the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children.”
Not all mormons are going along with the anti-gay campaigns. Here’s a comment from Chris MacAskill:
KG@479, mainstream mormons would reply that their church outlawed polygamy in the late 1800s.
It’s the FLDS, Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, a breakaway sect, that still practices polygamy.
Of course, mainstream mormons still expect that polygamy will exist in their Celestial Kingdom. And they did fudge the anti-polygamy manifesto deal, encouraging and supporting members who fled to Mexico and to Canada in order to continue practicing polygamy.
Still, we can’t pin the polygamy button on present-day, mainstream mormons.
From the author of the Key Lime Piety blog:
nothing to do with mormons, but:
1: Cut fatty bacon into little chunks, fry until starting to brown.
2: Cut sweet potater into little chunks, fry with bacon until also brown.
3: Cut up some onion, and fry with bacon and sweet potater.
4: add water, butter, and salt to taste.
5: Dump in a handful or two of frozen or fresh corn.
6: (optional) dump in some frank’s red-hot sauce. (I put that shit on everything!)
7: TELL ME IF YOU LIKE IT!
I just came up with the idea now because I’m bored and couldn’t think of anything to eat.
Just for fun, I’d like to see other people’s recipes that they came up with in the same situation.
TLC,
Quick and dirty recipes? Suits me. I am huge on frittata, grab whatever veg saute well out of the fridge, dice, saute, add scrambled eggs to just cover, reduce temp, cover pan and let the egg set through. Eat with hot sauce, I prefer smaller batch thicker stuff than Frank’s myself, but it’ll do in a pinch.
Or the non-clam clam bake.
One part onion, two parts potato, one part sausage of choice. Cut into equal pieces, around bite sized or so, dump in corningware with some Montreal Steak Spice and olive oil and bake at four hundred until the onions start to caramelize. Yum.
*omits multi-pages of frothing rage about Mormons/SOPA/racism/etc*
…Someday, I need to learn the comforts of bacon.
Re Gingrich’s open marriage “request”…
Limbaugh’s snarky little anecdote…
…is high-grade bovine effluvia: Gingrich only “asked his wife for permission” after he’d already been cheating for FSM knows how long.
Of course it’s only a minor footnote to all the other reasons to despise Gingrich and keep him as far from power as possible, but characterizing his infidelities as “open marriage” risks setting back the cause of ethical nonmonogamy by untold amounts.
***
Janine:
You’re right about Carlie’s students not knowing what a “record” is… yet somehow that scri-i-i-i-tch sound effect seems to persist. I guess people know what it means even if they don’t remember where it came from.
Dhorvath: Nice. I like the second one because it suits my bushcraft hobbies. There are cast iron lidded pot type deals you can buy for campfire cooking, and that recipe sounds ideal. You just stick them in the coals of a fire, dump some coals on top of the lid, and let it bake. I’ve even seen instructional videos for making bread in them. I could see that cooking away for a few hours in some embers while I go do stuff in the woods.
Montreal steak spice is delicious. Even when not used for steak.
Pteryxx: Bacon is indeed comforting. I like almost all smoked meats these days. I’m not much of a piscivore, for instance, unless it’s smoked (or raw and rolled up with some sticky rice, seaweed, wasabi, and soy-sauce, but that hardly has anything to do with ‘cooking’ now does it?)
We got a deer’s front leg thawing in the fridge right now. I’m trying to convince my brother to let me make jerky out of it. That way we can also donate the raw bones to my aunt’s bullmastiff, Daisy.
TLC,
Crack the eggs before you head out and store in an old PB container in your pack. It’s good for the day unless it’s warm out.
TLC, I’m a fan of cubing and frying something usually-starchy (potatoes, sweet potatoes, leftover spoon bread was a favorite, zucchini’s not bad either), adding cheese and then plopping a poached egg on top of it. In non-frying situations, couscous cradles a poached egg nicely too.
You might want to watch out for deer legs with dogs. Those weight-bearing bones are really, really dense and hard and a lot of raw-feeding people I know refer to them as “wreck bones” because they can actually break teeth.
This. It’s only recently I’ve been beginning to explore the idea that maybe ethical nonmonogamy is the thing for me. I couldn’t divorce it in my mind from simple ‘cheating’ and ‘betrayal’ for years. Society and media teaches us that it’s the kind of thing ‘sluts’ and ‘scumbags’ do, and what Gingrich did was incredibly scummy.
No sir, I don’t like it.
Kristinc: Hmm… maybe I could break them all in half first? Daisy is, after all, a bullmastiff. Though one with an extremely atypical face (completely non-show quality…. but I actually like it BETTER than the show-quality type. Looks more like a natural dog to me).
Good idea, Dhorvath. Every time I bring eggs out there in an old yogurt container, they crack anyways. I try to keep them whole though, because sometimes I like popping a hole in the fat end and then just sticking them straight in the coals of a fire.
I just loaded up a container of assorted dried beans into the pack. Because why the hell not? Dried beans don’t go rotten. Very palatable. And not very heavy.
Cookware is a challenge though, because of its sheer weight and bulkiness in the pack.
http://boingboing.net/2012/01/17/in-praise-of-skeuomorphs.html
The record-scritch sound persists on My Little Pony… I saw it in the closed-captions as “record screeches” even, IIRC. (Though, in pony world, they use vinyl records on a gramophone. WTF?)
Cheating requires set up, most people build the idea out of assumptions about how intimacy should work. This is not the only perspective.
Ing – “It may be racist but there may also be a grain of truth to it.”
More than a grain, and it’s been used by white people of my acquaintance to describe black people. Back to the ‘more than a grain’; facial recognition is a very complex pattern matching task depending on several factors.
Being around different races.
Having a need to recognize them.
Being able to.
I personally am somewhat faceblind, and I have a poor memory for names. It’s not because I don’t try and don’t know the mnemonic tricks. Once the face is locked in I tend not to notice changes in outward appearance. Voice and gait are my main clues.
And no, the cartoon wasn’t racist and shouldn’t have been withheld.
It’s funny because all predators look alike to prey. And Non-Seq was making fun of the stereotype while having a reason to do so.
If Newt Gingrich were a Democrat, how many of you think that, with all the marital shenanigans he has pulled, he would still be considered a viable candidate for the party’s nomination?
Eh… John Edwards came pretty damn close in 2004. And Bill Clinton was hardly an angel either, even before his presidency (cf Gennifer Flowers). I don’t think the double standard is so much Republicans versus Democrats as rich high-status white guys versus everyone else.
]
Bullshit.
Though there were rumours of Bill Clinton’s infidelity, it was not publicly acknowledged as reality. The one time that we know, for sure, that it actually happened was after he was already elected for his first term. Edwards’ infidelity came to public knowledge during the primary season and he was immediately out of the race.
Look at McCain’s history with wives. Or Gingrich’s. The marital history of both would have made them unelectable in as Democrats.
On that point you’re right: my apologies. I had confused the 2004 and 2008 primaries in my mind, and had been thinking that Edwards’ infidelity was already public knowledge when he was picked as Kerry’s running mate; in fact, his affair with Rielle Hunter wasn’t revealed until 2007. I could have sworn I remembered there being some scandal about Edwards in 2004, but apparently not. (There are so many sleazy politicians that evidently I can’t keep mental track of them all.)
She stops, ashes her cigarette, exhales, searching for the right way to express what she’s about to say.
“He believes that what he says in public and how he lives don’t have to be connected,” she says. “If you believe that, then yeah, you can run for president.”
http://www.esquire.com/print-this/newt-gingrich-0910?page=all
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/marianne-gingrich-interview-6641643