I need the html version of a gel ink pen. Anyone got one?
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Brianne Bilyeu reminds me that I completely missed Ada Lovelace Day! Not surprising, I’m forgetting everything every day.
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Frederick Sparks discusses the case of a murderous paranoid schizophrenic who has been sentenced to death rather than mental health care. Amusingly, the reason his plea of insanity was dismissed was because the killer claims to be “the ‘Prince of God’ and will be resurrected with Jesus in the afterlife”, which the judge found to be a normal Christian belief.
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Ophelia Benson reveals that Reddit favors “free speech” over taste and legality and respect for individuals. It’s the Libertoonian version of free speech, of course, which translates as “I get to do whatever I want, no matter who it hurts.”
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Ian Cromwell leaps on the ‘binder’ meme. So does the Republican party. Why? I don’t know.
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Digital Cuttlefish is deep in grading — I feel his pain — but takes a moment to notice the curious adoration of the undecided voter.
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Dana Hunter flaunts an image of a slumping, collapsing mess. I’ve been there, literally.
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Maryam Namazie highlights Muslims shaming the Taliban.
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Natalie Reed dissects yet another transphobic article. Sadly, that’s a niche that will always be there.
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Chris Rodda notes that Mikey Weinstein has been threatened with imprecatory prayer. I’m sure he’s trembling in his army boots at the prospect of magic curses.
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Taslima Nasreen looks at some women leaders. Guess what? They can endorse misogynistic policies, too!
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Steven Andrew reports the discovery of an earth-sized planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. My retirement plans might be firming up.
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Zinnia Jones is working on her signature. I definitely need to get some glittery gel pens.
Nice post from Ian. He covers the ground well. I may steal for future use his idea that Republicans take a 180 from the truth and then sprint.
On the issue of Romney’s “binders full of women” bit, he started that mini-lecture with this phrase, “If we’re going to have women in the work force …”
“If,” fucking “if”? Holy mormon crap, Romney. You expose your id every time you open your mouth. And we don’t want to see that anymore. Keep that thing under wraps.
“If we’re going to have women in the workforce” Can I say how much I hate this sentence..We (the United States) have ALWAYS had women in the workforce, it’s just in the second half of the 20th century that many more middle class women went to work.
If your family was working poor, the women in your family often did not have a choice but to go to work. My paternal grandmother was a cook and a housekeeper, my maternal grandmother worked in a factory. My mother worked in factories on the line and transitioned to doing data entry later on, my husbands mother worked for the telephone company as an operator and was active in working for unionization. Maybe in Mitts world women don’t work outside the home. Here’s a little test for Mitt: Look at all the names of the 146 people who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in 1911, how many are women?
http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/victimswitnesses/victimslist.html
I’m pretty sure the BLINK tag has been deprecated.
Signs you watched too much Walking Dead this weekend: You read updates like this.
The reason I find it hard to laugh at these sorts of religious threats, as I began to suggest in my comment there, is that while we see a clear distinction between reality and the world of their imagination, they don’t.
When I was young I used to ask why Christians who thought being gay was sinful and that their god would punish gay people in this life or the next bothered with making gay people’s lives miserable themselves. If they believed that, why not let their god take care of it? But I was already losing my religious enculturation and forgetting that this is a culture that believes people can be called on to execute God’s will and can act as agents of divine law or with divine blessing even in the absence of being expressly called. In their view, the distinction between their own actions and the acts of their god just isn’t very clear.
That’s why prayer threats aways read as not entirely imaginary threats to me, even when the language in and surrounding them isn’t as menacing as it is in this case.
Army boots? ARMY boots? You may have stepped right into a pile of interservice rivalry.
It took me three tries to read that as “glittery gel pens,” an extraneous ‘i’ kept sneaking in.
I know Free Thought Blogs needs cash to operate, but do you really need to earn it via that something-or-other Rex financial services ad that keeps moving like a little pop-up window? It has an X in the corner but you can’t close it because you can’t catch it, and when you miss it opens a new tab with the whole ad (I assume; that tab I can close). It settles down and then I have to scroll to see more and it move, catching my eye and annoying me.
Static, quiet ads offering to prove the existence of God: fine. Static, quite offers of T-shirts: fine. Hideously over-expressive faces offering to refinance my home: not fine, but only marginally annoying. Moving windows that won’t close: Seriously annoying.
How about comic sans font? With each letter in a different color! And vary the font size slightly from word to word. That should do it.
About that retirement lot you were looking at on Alpha Centauri I.
Hope your plans don’t include watching the sun sinking slowly into the sea each evening. You see, being close enough to A. Centauri to have a year of 3.2 days, it will likely be tidally locked so that like our Moon one side will always face inwards. No sunrises, no sunsets. That is, unless it has managed to have an orbital resonance like our Mercury.
Not exactly sure what any sea there would consist of, but certainly not water. Lava most likely.
Nice place for the right kind of robot with a webcam, but I wouldn’t want to live there.
‘I need to get a glittery gel penis’. That’s what I read in the last description. I’m with Chimp – you see strange phrases when you skim to find the most interesting parts. Thank you Pzed, for passing us such a glorious menu.
To Mitty Romney, ‘if’ means ‘if we allow’ (women in the workplace).
Of course working class women, who have always worked, are not even human, to him. And he doesn’t see parenting as work. What a piece of work this nasty, joke of a man is. He’d be laughed off any stage, in Glasgow.
How can anyone vote for a man who shut his dog (Seamus) in a car roofrack cage, for a long journey, then stopped at a garage and, in front of his kids, hosed him down with cold water, in situ, when he’d dirtied all down the back windscreen, – and carried on driving, for hours more. That’s enough for me. Mitt Romney is a sociopath.
@JohnieCanuck
Although I think the Christian fundamentalists will be happy to see him there.
Damn, these days i’ve really understood what must it be like to be a rationalist from Texas watching the news (or similar situations).
I’m a redditor, have been for years, from before the Eternal September effect started to change it. It now has an above average amount of every variety of jerk known to humans, but thankfully they concentrate almost exclusively on the default subreddits. The rest of us stay in smaller non-default ones, where the site is still as it used to be, with fun, insightful silly, or bizarre content, but always interesting.
Yet the fame we get is because of the jerks, the ones that do all of this, and which are not even the majority.
Although in this particular case i must play devil’s advocate and say that there’s some evidence that things are not as the Gawker article says (the “outed” moderator was apparently not behind all he’s accused of), there’s no excuse for the cries of censorship about this from a vocal minority in the site (actually opposed by the majority).
Oh well…