This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.
Status: UNMODERATED; Previous thread
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.
Status: UNMODERATED; Previous thread
Scary dog.
Gives me a ‘Cujo’ vibe.
Tibetan mastiff?
Tibetan Mastiff.
Ha!
I saw that puppy a few days ago.
I thought I was hallucinating because when I refreshed, it was gone.
beautiful dog, really.
ThunderDome: an angry pit of endless ranting, entirely unsympathetic to human life and …
wait, is that a puppy? Ooooohh. Puppies!
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Also, another definition:
Reputation, Horde: characteristics attributed to Pharyngula commenters despite p(true characteristic of at least 51% of commenters) < 0.001
Please, please please folks, do not use the bible as toilet paper. I implore you to not use the bible as toilet paper. Don’t do it.
The pages come covered in shit direct from the publisher.
Well, now, cag, that was useful and informative: I now have a clear picture of the structure of my frontal lobe that I would have lacked if you hadn’t pointed my eyes that way.
CD
I want to see a picture of the internal structure of your skull.
’cause when I do that, all I see is Dark
and sometimes I fall off my chair
onto the pile of shattered Irony Meters
Does anyone have a universal translator for this comment by Vijen:
*twitch*
When I had a CT scan of my head, the nurse said it was the only circumstance in which she could advocate drinking alcohol as a recovery measure (to get rid of excess iodine, used as a contrast marker).
It was the weirdest procedure ever.
Tony! The Fucking Queer Shoop! at #10
Its woo talk for minds being fragments of God. Its solipsism disguised as religious woo.
@chigau:
If I ever manage to get one taken, I will send you a copy. Honestly.
I probably won’t remember, but something like that I would comment on here, and as long as anybody remembers the promise, I’ll live up to it.
Arawhon:
My thanks for the explanation.
****
chigau:
I just noticed your post nym. May I inquire as to why you’ve added that?
My first ever step into thunderdome, and the place is %100 thunder-free. Not sure what I was expecting, or hoping for. Perhaps I should be glad?
Tony! #14
re: my ‘nym extention
an ongoing bit of pettiness on my part, see here
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/06/05/oh-america/comment-page-1/#comment-807547
–
Thanks for the reminder, I’m going to change it back.
PDX Greg:
We’re just having a dry spell at the moment. I’m sure someday in the not too distant future, we’ll have a creoturd or libertarian scuzzbucket drop by. Then the thunder will shake the heavens.
****
Editor of the Wall Street Journal says don’t raise the minimum wage bc workers learn from poverty:
Yeah, bc young people are the only ones living on minimum wage jobs. Compassion deficient fuckwit.
PDX_Greg
Just wait a bit
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You are a big poopey-head!!!
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.
See?
@PDX_Greg:
You don’t, by chance, work at a small institution on the Willamette, a bit south of downtown, do you?
@ PDX_Greg
The eBil oBerlawd ™ has forced us to wait until visitors have made at least three comments¹ before we are allowed to attack in a berserker frenzy of blood and gore. ²
…
¹ The so-called “Three Comment Rule”. It is because of such repressive legislation that the Politburo of this thread has decided to form our own breakaway People’s Republic of Southern Pharyngula.
² Red food dye and Ketchup.
I fucking love Tibetan Mastiffs. They’re like lion dogs. I wish to meet one one day :(
cag@7 Best of all, they used both sides of the paper.
That Tibetan Mastiff would be perfect as a Final Fantasy summon.
I’m like PDX_Greg. My first time in Thunderdome and I’m waiting for carnage……..
I have generally avoided the Thunderdome threads since I get fed up with pages of bile and bickering. Today I actually wanted to see who was getting chewed out over what, so I peek in and see a lot of talk about puppies. Unless this turns into a bloody battle over which breed of dog has the cutest puppies, I will be disappointed.
thepianoman2020: Say something stupid and see what happens. What we have here is a powder keg awaiting a match. I can see why the puppies would mislead you about our explosive nature.
theophontes: We* formed a breakaway sham republic (Democratic Republic of Brayton) about a year ago. We meet in the library Thursday afternoons and see what’s in the old wallet before routing coup plots in meatspace. And then we get tea at Starbucks. My point is that I got my hands full with this political pseudo-entity that I created. Otherwise, I’d be the first to fire up the propaganda machine.
*The royal “we”
@ pianoman & Greg:
Be patient. Chas or ‘schach are bound to comment here sooner or later. Infighting ensues, generally.
(Has Morales been banhammered? If so, I would love a link to the proverbial straw.)
I think he just stopped posting.
Pity. An asshole, but at least an erudite and interesting one. I rather enjoyed his contributions here, for one reason or another.
It’s not always with contrast, is it? Or am I misremembering the two I had (when your migraine aura includes one-sided numbness, they tend to want to look at your head)?
I’ve also had a plain old x-ray of the head (for braces) and an MRI of the head (for – I’m not sure at this point), and the only one I got to see was the plain x-ray, which is rather a pity. And I am afraid that after one of the CTs I really did say to the doctor “So, you looked at my head and found nothing?” My only excuse is that I had at that point had a couple of doses of what I believe was IV morphine for what was a very, very bad headache.
In other weird imaging facts, me, my mother and my son have all had cardiac echoes, for completely different reasons (well, as different as you can get and still stay in the heart).
John Morales was not banned.
Tony:
As far as I can tell:
“I’m not only going to ignore all evidence you present, I’m also going to act smug about it.”
It’s quite similar to presuppositionalism, actually.
Extremely similar, actually.
Pardon my negativity, but there seems to be a large brick wall in modern science and everything seems to be hitting it. Not only does the Turing Test story seem to be an outright hoax, but the BICEP2 experiment seems to have gone up in smoke (or interstellar dust, take your pick). Are seeing the very limitations of the scientific enterprise in our own lifetime?
Gerard O@34
More the limits of current semi-conductor technology. So much of our progress seems to come from issues that, frankly, require a ludicrous amount of processing power due to multi-variable issues, such as DNA SNP analysis, Weather modeling, and large scale statistical analysis. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the current state of computers was acting as a bottleneck on other forms of progress.
There’s no brick wall in my field, even though I sometimes (every few months) have to run calculations that take a week on an ordinary desktop.
I sometimes fail to find plants that I’m looking for. It’s like they don’t even want to be found, or something.
So, more generally, a failure of nature to cooperate with my plans.
Solidarity, comrade.
Yeah, i appreciated John Morales when he was posting, even if an occasional post was annoying.
I’m sure no one is ever annoyed by even a single post of mine, though, not even Chas, so I’m definitely superior in that sense. :-P
I, too, am unwilling to declare the End Of Science because of a recent flurry of really bad reporting.
David Marjanović, Antiochus Epiphanes@36,37
True, the more prominent thing I’ve noticed is that much science reporting/public perception seems to be on science growing in ‘Leaps and bounds,’ when the more accurate metaphor is the ‘slow and steady grind towards progress’ I see within my research agency (agricultural science) where the only big discoveries tend to be bad things, like discovering that Zebra Chip Disease (potato pathogen) has managed to migrate to the Pacific Northwest : /
Clearly the end of science is nigh.
We build ever more complicated machines to tease out signals from ever more frustrating noise. Just modeling thermal noise effects and quantum effects on the folding of a single protein is vastly complex. We should be able to issue a couple of voice commands to the computer in our flying car, have the car model the protein folding and give us both normal folding and how folding can go wrong, then go through a library of chemicals that might bond with the protein, and where, then synthesize it and puff it into the air of the car’s cabin, bringing us instantly to a state of combined physical orgasm and emotional rapture.
The car should do this in a few tenths of a second, while flying us to our favorite vacation destination at a leisurely cruising speed of mach 5, giving us just enough time to enjoy the immersive holographic thrideo the car is simultaneously projecting into the cabin.
Seriously, I could imagine that 30 years ago, and I’m still just imagining it. Obviously science and technology are at an utter standstill.
There have been so many disappointments in the realm of science that I’m convinced now that the truest means to gain knowledge may have to come from subjective philosophical insights rather than empirical data.
I didn’t want to leave it in the other thread. I just couldn’t. I wanted my comment there to stand on its own, but I have to scream here. I have to scream against the violence. I can’t help but think of my good friend Mary who spent years of her life at Reynolds. I can’t help but rage.
Fuck.
Fuck I hate violence.
Fuck, what am i saying, I have another friend who spent years of her life there, too, and was probably there today. I totally forgot about the present thinking about the past. Now I don’t know if she’s among the shot. She would be the kind to put herself forward to save kids.
Fuck. I’m not mentioning her name, cause I don’t want to start speculation (and because she wasn’t necessarily there today, and she might even have transferred schools in the last year: I love her but we don’t always keep in great touch). Families deserve good info, not spreading rumor. But holy crap.
Did I mention I really hate violence?
Gerard O
And that works better, somehow?
What a joke.
CD:
I think it would be a good thing to rage against violence in that thread, seeing as a stalwart gun defender showed up at comment #5.
What the what???
Please explain.
In particular, explain how anything subjective can lead to insights for other people. An insight you can’t communicate is, after all, worthless!
What “disappointments” do you mean? Are you referring to the fact that science is hard?
Why do you think a purely subjective method would give us any greater knowledge? Indeed, without any objective method to verify statements, how do you propose to have any knowledge at all about anything other than your personal states of mind?
You’re making some rather big claims here. Time to back them up, I think.
Gerard O:
Seems to me you should pay attention to science through channels which are not popular media. An actual understanding of various science disciplines would help, then you could read and understand science publications, rather than opining over one or two things which have garnered attention in popular media.
@inaji, 46:
The website for Reynolds is down.
I don’t know if the person who was one of my best friends (but from whom I drifted apart when she partnered with someone who needed a lot of physical care and assistance leaving us little time) was still working at Reynolds again this year.
I don’t know if she’s been shot, or if she has been if the injury is trivial or critical. I take the likelihood as low, since there is only one reported victim on staff, my friend doesn’t teach PE (where the shooting was initially to have broken out), and school transfers aren’t uncommon and the last time she told me she was specifically working at the high school was a while ago.
So the odds say that my friend is safe, at least physically. But I feel horrible thinking that it **isn’t** her, because surely whoever got hit has as many loved ones as my friend does, and how selfish of me is it to wish this on someone else? And I feel horrible thinking of that small chance that she was shot, knowing that we haven’t talked as much as we should have in the past few years.
I’m not letting this shit into that thread to be told I’m too emotional and blah fucking blah. I’m not saying the personal isn’t political. I’m not saying that this isn’t exactly part of the reason why we need better anti-oppression work, better mental health, no fucking guns, all of it. I’m just not going to wander into that thread feeling this and be told I have to be reasonable, too, because, hey! Skepticism! Political Reality! 2nd Amendment! Crazy Blaming! And anyway, it wasn’t misogyny/racism/shit for which someone other than the shooter might need to be accountable!
I’m not wandering in there and having them tell me I have to respect their political fee fees.
Fuck them.
“Subjective philosophical insights” sounds suspiciously like code for “God.”
CD:
I understand. It’s a good day to be gone, I think, and I will be shortly. Have to head into the pain clinic today for spinal shots and other therapy.
Hope it’s helpful, Inaji. I’m always thinking about you.
Gerard O @42:
Seriously? Can’t trust them scientismists? Gotta just use the old noodle? You mean like Aristotle did when he figured out there were four elements — earth, air, fire, and water? Or deduced (quite wrongly, I’m afraid) the number of teeth in a horse’s mouth — but never bothered to check to see just how far wrong he was?
Sure. Let’s go back to that system. Worked OK for hundreds of years in the … what was the name … it’s on the tip of my tongue … oh yeah, the DARK AGES.
Asshat.
Gerard O.,
OK, just who do you think the folks are who are discovering the issues with these results? Do you think they are philosophers wearing togas? Dude, that is how science works. You get a result, and then your best buddies in the field try to tear it apart. Methinks that the problem lies not in science but rather in your lack of understanding of how science works.
Crip Dyke, thinking of you. Hope you are OK. I know it’s not about that, but I’m sorry it’s hurting you as well as those who are right there in it.
Gerard O #42
[bolding mine]
This point refutes itself, does it not?
@Mudpuddles #25
Rottweilers, goddammit! They’re like tiny bears!
German Shepherds. Because they are the best dog all the time ever forever under all circumstances always, and unbefuckinglievably cute.
Also Gerard O is an incoherent idiot with less than no idea what science is, what it does or how it does what it does. And he’s a blithering halfwit with – on present showing – less than nothing to offer in terms of knowledge or analysis.
Gerard O:
And what system of checks and balances exists to verify that subjective philosophical insights (SPI) accurately reflect reality (and do so significantly better than empirical data which has served us quite well)?
Can SPIs assist in finding a cure for cancer?
Can SPIs help put man on Mars?
Can SPIs help build roller coasters or monorails?
How can SPIs give us more knowledge about how this elevator went out of control and crashed into a roof?
CD#50
Yeah…I don’t personally know anyone near there, but it’s about 10 miles from where I’m sitting as I type.
opposablethumbs
Whatever, just keep them the hell away from me.
I used to fear and hate dogs, after being mauled by a german shepherd at a sandpit being maybe 3 or 4 years old. I’ve grown over it, now I just strongly dislike them.
Weed(less) Monkey:
That sounds horrible. I can see why you don’t like german sheperds
Ah. you mean disappointments like the discovery of the Higgs boson, a couple of thousand extra-solar planets, fossils documenting the evolution of tetrapods, birds and hominids, evidence of running water on Mars, hydrocarbon lakes and rain on Titan, new ways to produce stem cells, metamaterials with novel optical properties, and evidence of primordial inflation?
Nick:
I can’t wait to see what knowledge has been gained by SPI. I’m sure Gerard O will be able to counter all of your wonderful examples in 3…2..1.
Holy Fuck:
He apparently apologized.
And claimed he was joking.
I just…wow.
Waiting at Pain Clinic. Gonna be here forever. The best fucking dogs ever are whichever ones need rescuing at any given time.
Weed(less) Monkey I think that would put anybody off; I sympathise, and you (obviously) have every right not to be bothered by them. I love ’em rather a lot and enjoy being around them, but I respect the fact that not everybody shares my predilection (and that they are non-human animals, and don’t presume to impose myself on unknown ones without a body-language invitation).
Ahem. I almost forgot where we are. BETTER THAN ROTTWEILERS ANY DAY, YEAH!
If that’s the case, he should be able to explain what the joke was. What interpretation, other than the racist one, is there for that comment? I don’t immediately see one.
#68, Yup. Ours is a rescue (she was found on the street and taken to a rescue centre, which is where we got her. The vet at the centre reckoned that some dog breeder might have chucked her out for being deaf (and therefore unsaleable). We were happy to have her, and started learning about training for deaf dogs – all that visual cues, silent training stuff – and got her a vibrating collar so we could “call” her even if she couldn’t see us :-) (and then about 6 months later she unexpectedly got her hearing back – might have been an ear infection or something, maybe, who knows).
But I have to yell at Thumper about which puppies are cutest, because Thunderdome.
Hope you don’t have to wait much longer, and that you get good pain treatment Inaji.
X-Post from the Gundamentalism thread (Portland School Shooting)
A woman of 29 berates people for ‘going soft’ with their kids
of note from that article:
This article pretty much sums up the problems with the US. We can’t very well treat children with respect, now can we? Of COURSE they’re going to have to go through the same barbaric, idiotic hazing and human tribalism bullshit everyone else did. Why would we ever want to change it? After all, WE turned out just fine. Just because some pansy-ass yuppies got their knickers in a twist, we have to treat everyone like porcelain [/sardonicism]
Seriously. So much pining for ‘The good old days’ from someone who never even SAW the 40’s and 50’s. This is such bullshit
Oh, look-the KKK is looking to bolster its membership (with returning military personnel) in anticipation of an impending race war.
Spreading hate. Racism. Masturbating over the idea of an impending race war.
Sounds like business as usual for the KKK, rather than “doing something different”.
****
Xaivius:
I do find it ridiculous that children have gotten in trouble for using their fingers to mimic a gun.
Other than that, I don’t agree with anything else she said.
Xaivius:
from your link-
Yes, it’s silly to label children as threats when they mimic guns with their fingers. That said-GUNS ARE NOT FUCKING TOYS. They should not be treated as such, and I don’t think children should grow up thinking guns are “cool”.
This is so simplistic it boggles my mind. She’s basically saying that bullying is not a real problem and that people who engage in bullying behavior shouldn’t be punished. She doesn’t appear to understand the psychology of bullying and how it impacts the victims and the perpetrators. She doesn’t seem to care either. Her lack of compassion is cringe worthy.
No. That’s not what they’re being taught. I wish I could say children are being taught to respect the bodily autonomy and rights of others, but I don’t know that that’s the case (not to the degree needed).
I wonder if this fool is a right wing libertarian.
Xaivius:
(from your link)
Yes, it’s silly to label children as threats when they mimic guns with their fingers. That said-GUNS ARE NOT FUCKING TOYS. They should not be treated as such, and I don’t think children should grow up thinking guns are “cool”.
This is so simplistic it boggles my mind. She’s basically saying that bullying is not a real problem and that people who engage in bullying behavior shouldn’t be punished. She doesn’t appear to understand the psychology of bullying and how it impacts the victims and the perpetrators. She doesn’t seem to care either. Her lack of compassion is cringe worthy.
No. That’s not what they’re being taught. I wish I could say children are being taught to respect the bodily autonomy and rights of others, but I don’t know that that’s the case (not to the degree needed).
I wonder if this fool is a right wing libertarian.
Now my comments are getting eaten up…
From the link @72:
Yes, it’s silly to label children as threats when they mimic guns with their fingers. That said-GUNS ARE NOT FUCKING TOYS. They should not be treated as such, and I don’t think children should grow up thinking guns are “cool”.
This is so simplistic it boggles my mind. She’s basically saying that bullying is not a real problem and that people who engage in bullying behavior shouldn’t be punished. She doesn’t appear to understand the psychology of bullying and how it impacts the victims and the perpetrators. She doesn’t seem to care either. Her lack of compassion is cringe worthy.
No. That’s not what they’re being taught. I wish I could say children are being taught to respect the bodily autonomy and rights of others, but I don’t know that that’s the case (not to the degree needed).
I wonder if this fool is a right wing libertarian.
Inaji
I’m sorry. That sucks.
CD
That sucks too.
Thunderdome sucks. Why did I come here?
Oh yeah…
It has come to my attention that I don’t give a flying fuck what any of the “responsible” gun-fondlers excuses are for these shootings. Terrorist? Mentally ill? Whatever. But what’s the common denominator? Fucking guns. Doesn’t it just make sense to start by eliminating that?
awakeinmo:
I’m fine with eliminating guns.
I’ve come across 3 or 4 new shooting incidents in just the last few hours. This shit is happening far too often.
Frankenstein/Igor
LykeX:
I suppose for the sake of the pedants your comment should read:
?
I have had better days. Crystalizing experience: I am now quite sure that reputation and plausible deniability are more important to the owner of the business I work for as well as the owner of the chain he franchises from, than satisfying their customers. I had suspicions after the last major complaint from a customer and how it was handled, but I am now quite clear that store reputation means more than individual experience. I may be done. They actually told me not to contact the customer in question to apologize and offer to help while they draw up a response detailing how we have just followed instructions from the customer. Maybe I am not suited to working at all, clearly being my own boss went poorly, and now that I think about it I have railed against every place I have worked.
Anyways, I come home to find an envelope addressed to me in hand writing. It’s close to my birthday so I think no further, (well I did read the return address but didn’t really think about the number and street,) and open it. It’s from my Uncle. Who died last month. A last bequest to his ‘expert bicycle mechanic nephew’. A very substantial portion of my passion for cycling came from this man. I cry.
Hugs for anyone reading. I have them to share.
Dhorvath
*hugs*
My friend is fine. Turns out she isn’t working there now. The teacher was only grazed, so there were no serious injuries, only one killing and one graze and one suicide.
I don’t know exactly what I feel, but it’s better than what I felt 6 hours ago.
and since this is the Thunderdome,
I’d like to add *the absolute opposite of hugs* for The Postal System.
Dhorvath, I’d like to offer you some of those hug-things too. Or whatever might be acceptable (sorry, that’s very un-Dome-like of me).
@ opposablethumbs
The neocons speak of “tough love” when refering to corporal punishment. As opposed to this “love”, might I suggest “tender hate” when refering to proffered hugs.
chigau (違う) @ 82
I like the idea of anti-hugs. The sort given by large constrictors. Or Yetis.
Has anyone ever taken the time to complete the mind-dumbing (not a typo) task of reading Mike Adams’ bio?
http://www.healthranger.com/Health-Ranger-Biography.html
Seriously. No offence to 12 year-olds but I’m pretty sure that may be who wrote this.
it goes on.
I expected him to say something like
@chigau, theophontes & Xaivius, AHMLNDGTI:
ahem. … aHem. (owlbears) A-Hem… coughcough.
I’m sorry, did I say something? Just had a d20 caught in my throat.
CD:
♥
Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden@87
I have a friend in troutdale that I was worried about as well, but she was apparently over in beaverton at the time.
yep. That’s now official. My next campaign is going to be so wonderful when I tell them to roll initiative against invading anti-hugs.
Semi-Related note: Finally got to one of my dreams. Ordered an Emissary from Geek-Chic. so neat!
Rev BDC, ‘Mike Adams’ needs to hang out with this guy and learn some humility.
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blbyol3.htm
That blunt, repetitive sentence structure makes me want to stab my eyes out, before even getting to the ridiculousness of the content.
This is why it’s important for everyone to study liberal arts, even tech majors. Especially tech majors.
And this:
The rest of the bio gives detail almost to the level of what he had for lunch, but he has a “bachelor of science degree”, and only gives his minors. What is he hiding about his major? Was it in the mythical studies of underwater basket weaving? What a weird thing to so obviously dissemble about.
Anti hugs was a sure smile.
The Internets is Wonderful Thing.
I have a little app that tells me when the Space Station is passing within my sight.
I finally figured out how the app works, just in time to look up and say, “Oh! There it is!”
Sometimes, I am overjoyed to live in interesting times.
Now, I’ll go catch up.
@ chigau
“… app …”
Linky or it never happened!
Just thought this might be of interest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VABSoHYQr6k
theophontes
It called GoISSWatch.
I don’t know if it’s available for anything other than AppleThingys.
yeah, bc all of those are
::rolls eyes::
My favorite, in a sense, part of the Health Ranger bio:
“Over the years, he has developed numerous algorithms for finding hidden signals in large bodies of text. Adams possess the technology to monitor trends and make predictions about bank runs, epidemic disease, race wars and other issues reflected in human communications on the ‘net. To date, he has not deployed such a technology and has not announced any plans to do so.”
So, an asshole, then.
He avoids coffee? But then why are there so many articles about coffee enemas on Natural News?
I have an interesting project that I’m finally trying to work on, but every project could do with some criticism and I thought that the Thunderdome might be a good place to see if I can get some constructive abuse.
I have been very fascinated by areas of cognitive enhancement in people with different mental characteristics like myself (tourette’s). I have always thought that programs that try to help people with different conditions like tourette’s syndrome, autism, and schizophrenia should not only help them with problem areas, but also help them to take advantage of unique strengths. This is my first attempt at an overview on strengths associated with tourette’s syndrome, with a historical example and I was wondering if I could get some criticism? I’ll take compliments too if I did a decent job.
http://www.tourettesyndrome.ca/showthread.php?7399-Taking-possession-of-your-TS-related-cognitive-strengths
Oh, if anyone decides to help me out with criticism or flamethrowers I’ll look for that here.
Why do I still laugh when I hear liberals heaping praise upon The Bestest Pope Evah!
Even when I write less than one line, people still try to read between my lines. Unbefuckinglievable!
892 guns found by TSA in passengers’ carry-on bags:
There are probably legitimate reasons to take a gun with you on a flight, but I don’t understand why anyone needs one in their carry-on bag. And “I forgot” just doesn’t cover it for me. If you’re not taking your killing machine seriously enough to know why it’s in your bag, perhaps you shouldn’t have it.
Of course Joe [Sharkey; guy who wrote the article] doesn’t want to discuss the politics surrounding guns bc they’re soooo complex:
I was going to comment that the bit about Tombstone was a non-sequitor, but then I remembered that a guy drew his gun on a father who was teaching his daughter to ride a bike and a brother shot his sibling (and then himself) over an argument. People using (or threatening to use) guns in heated disputes still occurs today.
I do wonder what’s so difficult to talk about though? Gun violence is a problem in the US. People are dying in the tens of thousands, year after year and no legislation has advanced to reduce those numbers. That includes people who use guns to commit suicide:
I find it odd that Mr. Starkey didn’t want to discuss the laws, emotions, and recriminations surrounding guns in the US…he just wanted to talk about guns without all that.
Trigger Warning: Suicide
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/magazine-features/guns-and-suicide-the-hidden-toll/
I thought it might be best to bring this to the ‘Dome. I had no idea the short amount of time that elapsed between decision and effort. That’s scary. And yet another reason to enact stricter gun laws (like mandatory waiting periods and psychological screening).
Tony!
The formatting of your linked article is too hard on the iPad.
I’ll read it tomorrow on a real computer.
but I have a gut feeling (we know what that’s worth) that the apparent impulsive nature of these suicides fails to take into account that the people had thoughts of suicide for a long time before the final act.
On another note
the party next door, rather than featuring really shitty pop music on the stereo
is featuring a guitarist who knows three chords and a sing-along
I am torn.
@chigau, #107:
Ouch. I suck and I can play F#maj7 without thinking twice. I haven’t specifically added up the chords I can play, but certainly all the majors, all the minors, all the major 7ths and all the minor 7ths as bar chords, then a, c, d, e, open, with their minors and 7ths and minor 7ths. G open. G7th open. That’s just off the top of my head. It’s actually easy to play a lot of 9ths as well.
Seriously, playing melodies can be tough, but a, c, d, & e are all a piece of cake. G can be a stretch when first learning it, but it doesn’t take long to get used to it. If you can’t play interesting music after 6 or 8 months, you’re not trying.
@ chigau
That seems to be an i_phony app only. The google indicates there is an android version, but for some reason I can’t find anything in the app store.
@ Tony!
You might want to read Mano’s thoughts on modes of thinking: Cerebral and visceral reactions , which also refers in turn to his previous post here: Why do we jump to conclusions? The Trayvon Martin case . That last refers to Daniel Kahneman’s book “Fast and Slow Thinking”, which we have discussed on the Thunderdome (It is well worth reading).
Our impulsive, “System 1” thinking has the potential to overide our rational, “System 2” thinking. In turn, system 2 can prime system 1, so that a long period of cogitating (2) on suicide could suddenly flair out impulsively (1).
@ chigau
I know just what you mean. Decisions, decisions,… Might I suggest this.
@theophontes:
Or a Lassiter.
Either one.
CD #108
I’m not really all that torn.
I will happily listen to someone noodling on a guitar with a drunken sing-along over autotune-elevator-music
any day
any time
I am having a flashback to living in Res in my first year of University.
My room was one off the stairwell.
The stairwell had great acoustics.
The guy with the guitar “played” Mr. Bojangles.
Just Mr. Bojangles.
Mr. Bojangles
Mr. Bojangles
And then, I moved into the upper floor of a seedy, studenty house.
The people just under my bedroom played Stairway to Heaven seventyjillion times at 2AM.
Not the album, not the side, just Stairway to Heaven
over and
over and
over
I resent the implication I was in any way associated with such an act. I would only play, “I hate myself for loving you,” seventyjillion times in a row. In my house, Stairway to Heaven went over like a lead balloon.
I passed my robotics course last night. I still have a few tests to go, so I am going to be able to raise my marks yet. What is interesting about all this on Thunderdome, is that robotics uses some very simple descriptions in order to discuss the underlying principles we work with to achieve autonomous aerial navigation.
The bit that got a bit of a chuckle from me, was the section on describing the robots-eye-view of the world. Sure, we could fly the devices mainly by remote control (for example using radio control transmitters,wifi ,infra-red, bluetooth etc.) The problem is, that this would need a human pilot to do the processing. Our objective has been to run the robots on autonomous missions. In order to do this it cannot use a human god-controller to relate it to its real world circumstance. This task must be taken over by a range of sensors. We utilise visual means by way of cameras, but there are a whole host of sensors: GPS, echo-location, gyroscopes, magnometers, pressure sensors, etc etc.
At the end of the day though, we can never get the robot to form more than a very limited view of its surrounds. Furthermore, the sensors are subject to error. We use statistical methods to derive an on-board Belief System that, we hope, relates appropriately to the World System, that is to say: Reality. (See picture I made here.)
The robot tries to gain a functioning Belief System from calculating significances from data inputs from the sensors. It also ties to calculate from the effects of its actions. These are then subject to statistical calculations by the onboard computer(s) to try and predict the most appropriate course of action (generally not more than adjusting commands to the servos and the motor’s electronic speed controllers). What with the effects of noise, a changing external (real) world, actions of other agents, this can be quite difficult.
In principle, we could fly entirely on a function of our actions (that is without external sensing) and a map. The problem with this, is that the statistical model becomes highly unstable very quickly. This is inevitable. To reach our objectives, we really do need a constant reference back to the real world, to maintain a sufficiently stable stochastic process to act meaningfully in the world.
My mind quickly leaps to an analogy of map|bible and action|xtian-lifestyle: there are very fundamental, non-trivial reasons why these can never work without constant reference (observation, but in the broadest sense: science) to the real world.
….
[invocation] SGBM is ahead of the curve in such statistical methods. [/invocation]
Rev BDC/#86:
Impressive. It’s a bit like someone wrote an entire page of considerably less-funny-than-usual and somewhat less-hyperbolic-than-usual Chuck Norris facts. About himself.
The chief export of Mike Adams is… this page.
Mike Adams passed kindergarten. Then grade one. Then grade two. Also he fingerpainted some stuff. With his fingers.
Mike Adams clips coupons.
(/Behind Mike Adams’ chin is… his mandible.)
@ CD
Aaah, but it’s broken and can’t fire lasers. At best we could lob it at the offending guitar.
CD #115
I really like Stairway to Heaven
but 5 – 6 – 7 repeats at 2AM??!
frothing madness
Parachuting in with a nonsequitor: I’ve been looking up census information on household income and insurance rates in the SEER counties and all I can say is…Damn, can we have class warfare now? Seriously. Kentucky and Louisiana are both poor as snot and yet both reliably vote Republican. Why? What makes people think that voting for the 1% (really the 0.00001%) is a good thing while they’re all starving? Literally, in some cases. There must be some serious gerrymandering and propaganda going on around there. Because otherwise I just don’t understand the logic at all.
And Georgia. Holy shit, why?
@ dianne
I suggest reading: The Authoritarians by Robert Altemeyer.
It is the go-to book for Authoritarianism 101 and will help you see that the authoritarian personality does a pretty fine job of fucking up everything, itself included.
Thanks, theophontes. I’ll try, but it looks like exactly the sort of book that I find very hard to get through because it’s so depressing. Probably all the more reason for me to read it and stop being in denial.
The Rational Wiki summary contains:
There has been quite a bit of work since, but the above suggested book is a good starting point to build upon.
@ dianne
The depressing part is that the authoritarian sensibilty is very much dyed-in-the-wool. It is very hard to change. The anti-depressant part of the book is that it highlights how people behave who do not suffer from RWA mindsets. Difficult situations become highly resolvable, and consensus can be reached, by simply removing (there is no alternative) the aggressive RWA’s from positions of power.
Look out for the terms:
RWA = Right Wing Authoritarian (“Right Wing” refers to “being right”, it is not political)
SDO = Social Domination Orientation
Interesting, especially given that I doubt you’d find many people in the US who think of themselves as authoritarians. Especially not as followers. A number of the more difficult movements are actually appealing to antiauthoritarian sentiment, i.e. the open carry gun nuts are all about freedom and being able to defend themselves, the anti-vaxxers are defending themselves against the Pharma conspiracy, etc. Yet all us rugged individualists (TM) are nonetheless authoritarians and mostly followers at that.
Brony @ 100:
One tangential question (I did find the piece interesting but must read it again when more awake. Woke at five two mornings ago, four-thirty yesterday, four today. Presumable in two weeks I need not bother going to bed at all). I don’t see the attribution for the quotes about Samuel Johnson – is it in there and I missed it? I think I’ve read them before – possibly in “The Professor and the Madman”, but I can’t remember if they were original to that work or quoted in it, and I may have loaned the book out; at any rate I’m not sure where it is.
@ dianne
Authoritarians won’t read such books, and likely would not describe themselves as such. They are deaf to the actual message.
Their leaders sell them The Merkin Flag ™ , Freedom ™ and The American Way ™ – even as they may claim not to be “followers”. Authoritarianism is a mental state, not massed rallies.
theophontes/#128, re ‘authoritarians won’t read such books’…
Vaguely amusing, if I guess predictable: I took one of those online authoritarianism test thingies just now. It’s one of those which in addition to giving you your result, shows where you fit on the general curve of all who’ve taken the test.
… and from the the curve you see, you’d get the idea there really aren’t that many authoritarians in the world. But then, of course, I figure people who’d score higher probably don’t go looking for these things much.
(/You scored 0… With all the rest of us who actually know where this test is. Congratulations!)
@ Crip Dyke
I missed this in the previous Thunderdome thread – http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/05/22/thunderdome-50/comment-page-2/#comment-806504
Can I thank you from the bottom of my heart for having that link? I stopped following news from that area and lost touch with a lot of people, so I was unaware of the case. But it’s nice to know that piece of shit finally got a little of what was coming to him. At least a few of the folks he abused got some measure of justice. I wish all of them could. If he got a year for each person he abused, he’d have been in the slammer for a couple centuries.
@ theophontes (恶六六六缓步动物) 100
Owch. This is not a way of looking at dual process theory that I had considered. I’ve thinking about how things like fallacies and biases might relate. My understanding of how the systems would work here is different though.
From what I gather system one is more about automatic reactions from familiar routines, regardless of how rational or logical those routines are. It’s more like straight-up “stimulus response” dependent on the context. So it’s not that it overrides system 2, it’s that system 1 is where we spend 95% of our time and is as efficient as we put in the effort to improve its quality.
System 2 is when we bother to look more closely at something and consider letting that thing alter our system 1 responses. When we concentrate, ruminate, or introspect we are mentally casting a “wider net” (using more mental resources) and considering inhibiting a normal system 1 response, or creating a new system one response as a permanent change of behavior globally or in specific contexts (a repeated system 2 process can become a new system 1 process). But system 2 is also only as good as what we know and our ability to use what we know.
Excessive use of system 1 can also become a habit that allows individuals to avoid examining their own decisions, but this might be what you were specifically talking about so my apologies if I misread your comment’s intent.
Here is a pair of papers I like to link where I can (they complement those books). They have to do with cognitive debiasing in medicine and they provide a really good overview of dual process theory, and set up a hypothetical framework for removing bias on a larger scale. Anyone familiar with cognitive bias and the logical fallacies they create should be able to relate this information more broadly.
http://www.improvediagnosis.org/blogpost/950784/170746/Cognitive-Debiasing
System 2 is bias and error-prone like system 1 (but less so), and your general point stands in that a person ruminating on suicide might be selectively collecting and emphasizing information that would support altering system 1 in a way that would make impulsive suicide a possibility.
Another related issue. Statistical differences between Republicans with and without fox news. Imagine the state of both systems in fox news viewers.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118066/brookings-survey-fox-news-home-most-conservative-republicans
I need to read The Authoritarians.
@ theophontes (恶六六六缓步动物) 116
This comment made me think of this paper.
“Learning autonomy in two or three steps: linking open-ended development, authority, and agency to motivation.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24155734
@ dianne 123
Don’t focus on the nature of the world that is in that way, after all this is the way that it was, you just did not know it. Think of books like this as an opportunity to shape and alter your own system 1 and 2 processes so that you have these concepts as cognitive tools that you can use strategically in all sorts of contexts.
Knowing how authoritarianism and mental processes function (we all use them to an extent, it just needs to be rational and logical) gives you an advantage in zeroing in on areas where people who are irrationally authoritarian are being irrational and illogical (same thing for other sorts of thinking processes used in irrational and illogical ways). With experience that eventually leads to rhetorical effectiveness, and then you get to have more fun.
@ ledasmom 127
This was a first attempt, but I should have cited that more clearly and gone farther than simply quoting wikipedia even in a forum post. A big bad habit I still need to rid myself of.
The quotes outlining the observations that Johnson finished the dictionary orders of magnitude faster than teams of contemporary academics and that the scope of the words he covered was far more complete than contemporary dictionaries was from Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr Johnson’s Dictionary by Henry Hitchings. I found a mostly complete copy in google that can be perused.
http://books.google.com/books/about/Defining_the_World.html?id=0RyQEwv4VgwC
The quotes observing that one of Johnson’s innovations was to illustrate meanings and usage via literary citations is uncited (unless it’s that #8 from Hitchings, I need to read it again and one of the things holding me back on this is that I lost my copy. No excuses there, I need to buy another.), so I need to do some work there.
The quote about the level of meticulousness is also from Hitchings.
The examples of humor and prejudice are right from a scan of the original edition available online.
http://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/
Thanks for the observations!
Crap. Wrong version of the online copy of the original dictionary.
Volume 1
https://archive.org/details/dictionaryofengl01johnuoft
Volume 2
https://archive.org/details/dictionaryofengl02johnuoft
Ed blogged about a ruling by a NJ judge in favor of ‘Reversion Therapy’ victims
I found more information about the type of “therapy” given to the gay coupleshere:
(bolding mine)
I knew that conversion therapy had been condemned by medical organizations across the country and that there’s no scientific evidence that homosexuality can be “cured”, but I never knew the techniques used in such “therapies”. I’m even more appalled to learn some of these techniques, most especially the misogynistic technique above.
Y’know, I’ve never known …unless you count Quakers, and I’m not sure of Quakers’ theological underpinnings… a single christian community as unrepentantly feminist as the least feminist of the 3 most left wing Jewish congregations in Portland. They are awesome. And there are tons of Jews that light candles Friday night, smell the orange peel on Saturday night, and make absolutely no bones about saying that they are atheists and feminists.
And yet, shit like JONAH and the Lubavitchers (AKA Chabadim) and too fucking many others are every bit as bad as the worst of the SBCers in their regressive, anti-woman actions. I’d say that they are worse, but that’s probably familiarity with Lubavitchers and unfamiliarity the SBCers and whoever else might be the most gender-regressive of the christians (some of the pentacostals, maybe?).
Argh. I know I shouldn’t be any more outraged at JONAH than any other reparative therapy group, but I’ve seen what openness and what thirst for justice Jewish philosophy can inspire. It just crushes me to hear about boys being told to beat effigies of their mothers with sticks.
Hey!
It’s Friday the Thirteenth!
Far out.
Chigau:
Awesome.
Friday the 13th and a full moon. Well at least it was that here, yesterday. Lucky thing that Americans can play at friggatriskaidekaphobia for a few hours more…
Lofty:
It’s also a honey moon. Or strawberry moon. Take your pick.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/time-warner-ceo-defends-cnn-711814
Time Warner shareholder laments the lack of female representation at DC:
I’ll believe it when I see it. I don’t deny that she believes this to be the case, but institutionalized sexism exists everywhere and there is fierce and powerful opposition to changes in the status quo.
Another shareholder decided to express his ignorance and stupidity:
He wants more coverage of Benghazi and he thinks CNN shows liberal bias. I wonder what channel he watches regularly…
Sometimes the ads on FtB are fun.
I’m seeing one from a Rabbi pleading for an end to chicken-sacrificing,
right beside an ad for a Passion Play in Drumheller, Alberta.
chigau @142: When I think of Jethro Tull albums you could associate with Drumheller, Aqualung and Thick as a Brick come before A Passion Play.
President Obama spends 8 minutes going off about gun violence in the US.
Rob Grigjanis #143
You’re gonna need to explain to me the Aqualung connection to Drumheller.
’cause they really don’t have much water there.
the Brick thing I can grok.
chigau @145: Doesn’t every male south of Red Deer look like this?
Rob Grigjanis #146
Ah.
I didn’t recognise him without the mesh-back and pick-up truck.
OMG
All of my Tull is on vinyl.
I just had a short discussion with a friend on Facebook. He said that he enjoys and agrees with most of what I comment on, but disagreed with my “anti-gun” comments. Just the fact that he said anti-gun was enough to tell me he’s not reading my comments carefully. I’ve talked about gun deaths and spoken about the need for increased gun control. There is one comment I made a while back that indicated I’d be fine with a ban on guns, but that I know that’s not likely so I support gun control laws. In any case, in pointing out how wrong he was, he made the comment that gun violence in the US only seems awful bc of the media.
::Headdesk::
We quit chatting, and I composed a lengthy note (with tons of links) that covered my thoughts on gun control. Hopefully he’ll read it. We’ll see.
But one thing I find curious is that he made a distinction between gun violence and gun related gang violence. Which is odd. When I’m talking about gun violence, I’m talking about *all* gun violence, which includes gun casualties from gang violence. It also includes domestic violence involving firearms. And non-lethal firearm injuries. Plus shooting sprees and school massacres.
I wonder if my friend (along with other people in the US) thinks that gun violence= only school shootings and other mass killings. I should send him these two links:
http://gawker.com/waffle-house-cook-shoots-customer-to-death-1590617504
http://www.ajc.com/news/news/griffin-officer-shot-and-killed-at-waffle-house/ngBL9/
Hi guys, sorry to interrupt. My google-fu is haywire. I was reading the other day a response to George Will’s horrific column that campus rape makes rape victims “privileged” and confers a “coveted status” on them. The response’s title was something like, “Let me tell you about all the privilege that being a rape victim has given me” and described the rape itself in pretty graphic terms — although the woman had consented to intercourse, the penetration was so violent it ruptured the cervical wall, caused abdominal sepsis, and lots of future medical problems. I did not have time to finish reading the column, and now I can’t find it again. Can someone point me to a link? Appreciate it.
PZ:
If you drink coffee, you might like the first image.
http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2012/10/creature-cups-a-wildlife-surprise-in-your-coffee-cup/
@Tony!
I have a tea cup with a sculpted ceramic frog hanging on the edge…which is cute enough, I guess…but on the bottom is a little glazed image of a dragonfly with impossibly huge, “Zoinks!” eyeballs. I love that thing.
I went out to get shots of a nesting Mourning Dove and I saw a Cedar Waxwing! I am excited all out of proportion here.
I remember Cedar Waxwings in Southern Alberta.
Sometime none. Sometime eleventyzillion.
Never just one.
But I do suck at bird identifying.
Crip Dyke @135:
Would you like me to actually answer that? Because I can go on at Marajanović-like length on that topic.
Esteleth #155
I am interested.
Most of what I know about Quakers comes from Wkipedia.
and a few ex-Quakers who tend to “Oh, look, squirrel!” when the subject is raised.
Chigau:
I’m envious. They’re usually in deep cover, so you can’t spot them. I’ll go stake out the crabapple trees at the school, see if I can spot any.
Well, I have somewhere to be in a bit, but here’s the Cliff’s Notes version:
In 1650 a dude named George Fox had a vision in which he took Galatians 3:28 its logical conclusion. To wit:
(1) Men and women are equal theologically
(2) People of different races are equal theologically
(3) People of different socioeconomic classes are equal theologically
(etc, boiling down to “no matter how you slice it, all people are equal in the eyes of god”)
Which was pretty radical for that day.
Fox was a bit, ah, charismatic (which is to say he had the habit of standing on street corners haranguing passersby) and a bit of a dreamer. So he decided to go whole-hog theocrat and say that what is ordained by god should be the law (legally and socially). So he – in the seventeenth century – started ranting about how sexism was bad, racism was bad, and how you should treat everyone as if they were your absolute equal. There’s a story that he got arrested (see: “habit of standing on street corners haranguing passersby”) and decided that the thing to do was address the judge at his trial by his given name (this apparently went over poorly).
At its core, Quakerism remains thus: all people are equal in the eyes of the divine (“divine” is variously defined, and there are Quakers who are atheists), and the laws of society should reflect that. This is coupled with the – somewhat famous – pacifistic absolutism.
There have been gross wrinkles, such as the Quaker defense of slavery (which started with “well, see, PoC aren’t people, so therefore the “all people are equal” thing doesn’t apply” and went downhill from there), as well as some oddities like “it isn’t violent to lay siege because you aren’t actually doing anything to them.”
Quakers also have a tendency towards inflexibility and moving slowly. The absolute demand for consensus at all costs (peace must be attained at home before it can be attained anywhere else) is the dream-come-true for conservatives – refuse to compromise, and nothing can happen!
That’s the short version. There is theology, but it gets floppy fast.
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/14/why_i_left_libertarianism_an_ethical_critique_of_a_limited_ideology/
He didn’t leave libertarianism as much as he thought.
If he thinks ending government assistance programs and replacing them with charity would make the world better, he’s a fucking fool.
If he thinks eliminating regulations on corporations would make the world a better place, he’s an even bigger fool.
Yes, but what I am really interested in, Esteleth, is whether or not Quakers consider themselves Christians…
For instance, does the AFSC have a stance on jesus’ divinity? That sort of thing.
Also: Quaker marriages in the 17th century were not recognized by the English crown. Quakers, being a new religion, got most of their adherents by conversion. When one converted to quakerism away from Anglicanism or Catholicism, the rest of your family tended to get upset. Also, many conversions happened when someone non-quaker fell in love with a Quaker.
So, the Quakers were branded anti-God (they were the wrong religion after all) anti-family (why else would you do that to your family, you heretic?) and sexually debased (look at all those people who joined Quakerism just because they found someone they wanted to fuck!). Moreover, their egalitarian movement was more popular among the dispossessed. Thus classism led the crown to stereotype them as dirty and disease ridden. And, as lower-class folk who enjoyed (and had no strictures against) good, hearty, lower-class beers, they were sometimes branded drug (as in alcohol) abusers.
Yes, that’s right, Quaker marriages were denied because those evil people were anti-God, anti-family, sexually debased, disease-ridden drug users.
I don’t remember a whole lot of the theology, but when in the 90s I was researching radical marriage, I learned a bit about the relationship between 17th century Quakers and the state.
Quite revealing, really.
Look! A bigot tries not to seem bigoted. He fails:
http://news.yahoo.com/religious-freedom-not-serve-jews-131600509–politics.html
*snicker*
*tee hee*
*bwahahahahahahahaha*
The Pullet Patrol judges give the folks in Tony’s #164 a 9.5/10 for bigoted tap dancing in the face of terminal hypocrisy, and losing.
I’ll throw some grog soaked their way once they get off their backs, stop thrashing their wings, and stop cackling up a storm. About a half hour from the looks of it.
Those are the same thing. Lolwut?
No, Brony.
She’s saying that she’ll be in the same chapel with gay people. They can be in the wedding party, they can officiate, they can play the organ. And she’s fine with going to a wedding in a room or venue where gay/lesbian people also exist.
What she’s not fine with is a gay man marrying a gay man, or a lesbian marrying a lesbian. According to Staver, she would also be fine with a gay man marrying a lesbian. Because she’s open minded. But it’s one thing to be in the same room with them, it’s another to **celebrate queerness**! [everyone pop a monocle now, please] She won’t go to a celebration of queerness. She will go to a celebration where queers happen to be present.
CD
I can answer that. Yes, they consider themselves the true christians, just like every other sect. The main difference is that they don’t think that everyone else is going to hell for not believing correctly.
Hmm, this is a little harder to explain. Most of the Friends congregations that I grew up in are of the liberal persuasion, and they are generally very anti-authoritarian to the point that they reject clergy.
Quakers don’t spend much time worrying about divinity, they believe that all of us are gods children. They do hold Jesus up as the example of how to be a good christian. There is a big emphasis on spiritual growth, personal responsibility, charity, good works, and the golden rule. It’s also why they do not baptize infants. You have to choose god and the church as an adult. (no, I was never baptized)
Thanks, Tethys
I’m reminded of Proposition Infinity, especially the NOM ad parody:
@Crip Dyke
I mean legally these would would have to look like the same thing to a government that did not make decisions based on religious reasons, or reasons of personal taste on the order of political preference. I mean how can businesses have rights like people, right?
@Brony:
Oh, yeah, I think legally there’s no reasonable way to distinguish the two cases. Legally, Staver is full of crap. He’s trying to make a distinction that is resistant to the interpretation that this is discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, but fits neatly into a framework of invoking one’s freedom of religion. But he fails. And he’s full of crap.
I just interpreted what you said as confusion about his fundamental assertion. But maybe you knew exactly what he was asserting and were still, bwuh? In that case, I apologize. I was only trying to help you read BullshitLegalRationalizationese.
Quakers?
I don’t know any personally, but I do remember the time we got a Quaker on Pharyngula. Very Friendly, but as with all theists, a bit frustrating when trying to dig into fundamental meanings and concepts.
Starting here, or if you prefer reading the Old School threads (which also have the non-ASCII characters displayed correctly, the internet archive of the original
Crip Dyke:
Some do. Some very vehemently do not. About the most you could get all Quakers on board with is that the early Quakers were all Christians.
I doubt it. AFSC strives very hard to be pan-Quaker, which means that they aren’t going to make doctrinal stands.
answering my own #150, I found the reference. The article was ” Here Are All the ‘Privileges’ I’ve Experienced as a Survivor of Sexual Assault” by Lynn Beisner at RH RealityCheck.
Owlmirror:
Goodness. I remember Rudy. I miss a lot of people who were in that thread.
Direct link to Lynn Beisner’s article. It’s worth reading, though by no means pleasant. Thanks maddog.
Has SGBM left for real this time, or is he just taking a very long break?
I think there was some trouble shortly after his return from the last hiatus, but I don’t remember him being banned (or what trouble was about or how it ended).
wow, Beisner’s Survivor Privilege article is fearsome writing. Thanks, maddog and LykeX.
It’s disgusting to contemplate, but I wonder how many of those who would (and did) dismiss her experience and her injuries would’ve thought any differently if the same damage had been inflicted by a knife or a bullet. I’m thinking nothing would have changed, because obviously a woman that goes within range of a penis deserves whatever she gets. *spits out forever*
Oh fuck this shit:
http://jezebel.com/awful-law-would-force-brain-dead-pregnant-women-to-incu-1590466766
@Crip Dyke
No problem. I actually interpreted what you said in 168 as sarcastic humor directed at the lawyer restating the obvious. These lines can get a little too fine at time :P
I never knew fashion blogging was so lucrative:
Wow. $80K in a month…
****
http://jezebel.com/colleges-silence-and-fire-faculty-who-speak-out-about-r-1586169489
There’s quite a bit more at the link.
Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring
The Winter garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly – and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Edward FitzGerald.
I'm tired of rain.http://jezebel.com/high-school-boys-talk-about-why-theyre-feminists-1588857613
It’s great to see high school boys discussing why they’re feminists. A few of the young men defined feminism rather broadly, and in some cases, I think incorrectly, but they seem to genuinely want to understand. I think we need more of this.
unclefrogy in the Dark Enlightenment thread:
I had to read this sentence twice, slowly, to understand it.
Here’s a way to make it readable really fast – without moving any words around, and without touching its (useless) integrity as a single sentence:
“I think that not taking into account the actual history of humanity is at the very root of their errors – that, and delusions of grandeur that are matched only by their resentment; all lead to a story that hangs together, but fails to match the observed reality it is supposed to be making a statement[…] about.”
The dash is Cmd+- on the Mac, and Alt+0150 (on the numeric key block) elsewhere.
Note how the voice goes up at every comma, how it goes down at the semicolon, and how every dash is a pause followed by emphasis. You can hear punctuation; the few cases where this gets unreliable are the cases where the rules differ between languages.
A comics creator led a 6 week workshop for elementary school students aimed at developing their writing abilities:
(excerpt)
http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2014/06/eben-burgoon-on-helping-kids-make-comics-at-916-ink/
Baby Mourning Dove. Babies everywhere.
^ So much awesomeness!!!
David:
I think so, too. It’s amazing, getting to see how everything works, before they mature. So very different from adults. That little dove almost looks built out of straw.
That’s what feather sheaths look like. They’re going to fall off, letting the feathers unfurl.
The photography is awesome, too, not just what the photos show. :-)
Huh, it seems that whole writing about Jesus, Jesus, Jesus business didn’t work out so well for Anne Rice. She has a new Lestat novel coming out.
David:
Oooh, I didn’t know that. I’m lucky I got to see it.
Aaw, thank you.
They babby’s eyes are the same size as the adult’s eyes.
http://www.newsarama.com/21349-nycc-se-2014-reimagining-the-female-hero-panel-live.html
I found this ↓ portion interesting. I can’t imagine how a group of male artists would discuss drawing Red Sonja (or maybe I can…)
Chigau:
Makes them look even bigger!
Ináji
It’s an optical illusion!
(sorry)
When the SO is in the “right” mood and someone calls to conduct a telephone survey…
oh the humanity
what? I would imagine that situation to be resolved with…
*click*
as you turn off the phone…
well, yes, there is the illusion the eyes are bigger, but there is also a real physical measure there, which is the relative eye/face size ratio.
yes, they eyes are not actually bigger, but that ratio has a regular effect on response, regardless.
Ichthyic
Quite right.
That is the method I use.
The SO is a different matter.
Ichthyic
eye
optical
illusion
joke
never mind
I got an ad on FB from this company called Trunk Club. It’s a company with a personal stylist that handpicks clothing for men and ships it to you. I commented on FB that even if I had the money I wouldn’t use the service. A friend left me this comment: “Wow. You can be judgey sometimes”. I found it funny bc people judge all the time, and not just in negative ways. What restaurant do I want to eat at? What movie should we see? What toy do you want? Which song do you like? What’s your opinion of Rick Santorum?
Judging something is nothing more than evaluating it and coming to a conclusion. People do it all the time, yet for some people, judging something is seen as bad. I find that odd and wonder if it has something to do with christianity (the bit about not judging others).
In any event, I pointed out to my friend that he didn’t know why I made the comment (I also told him that I judge all the time and I’m not ashamed of it). It’s bc I like shopping and prefer to do it for myself, rather than letting others do it for me. My comment about not using the service had nothing to do with thinking the company sucked or it was a shitty idea. In fact, it probably is a good idea for someone looking for that sort of thing.
Where was that thread about over-paid “Commencement” speakers?
http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3391#comic
Chigau:
Hee. An opportunity to use that doesn’t come along too often. :D
I missed a meme.
“judgey” apparently means “daring to have an opinion that is not identical to mine, on a topic to which I feel the slightest personal connection”
opposablethumbs:
It’s rather ironic, bc he was making a judgement of me.
He and I used to kinda sorta date (he lives hundreds of miles from me, so it wasn’t anything serious, but there was a connection beyond just the sex; it didn’t work out, but we’re still friends), so we know each other to a decent degree. Of course when we dated, I wasn’t a feminist, nor was I open about being an atheist, and I didn’t care about politics or social justice, so I’ve changed a bit since we last hung out.
Part of me would like to talk to him more about this bc I’d like to see if he recognizes that
people judge all the time (other people, places, things, etc) and see if he can explain what’s wrong with judging. But then, I’ve beaten a dead horse into the ground before, and this isn’t that big a deal to me, but it’s one of the mild curiosities.
@ chigau
Get your Tull onto the cloud, stat!
Hmm, so competitive mothering is a thing. In an unofficial way:
Any competitive moms here?
Exactly. The thing is to be aware that we are doing it (be aware of our own biases etc.), and to recognise that we sometimes need to actively make an effort to set our own biases aside.
Re parenting, I’d readily hazard a guess that most of us who are parents sometimes (or often) worry about our kids and may want to check how their progress compares with whatever is typical for their age – but I also think there is a hell of a lot of unhealthy pressure (unhealthy for all involved) to push kids. And push them not to do well and fulfill themselves but to do better than the person beside them. Bad news all round. I also think the pressure to do this is probably greater for women, because of the cultural expectations that women should live both for “through” their children (instead of having a life of their own). Not to mention the pressures to give up any career aspirations you might have had, etc. etc.
Insidious, and definitely something to be avoided as much as possible – and something that mainly leads to problems for all concerned.
A FOAF on Facebook was tossing this around this morning:
Peer-Reviewed Survey Finds Majority Of Scientists Skeptical Of Global Warming Crisis
It’s a guest opinion piece in Forbes by a Heartland Institute hack claiming that a peer-reviewed study found the majority of scientists actually DON’T think human’s are driving climate change.
It’s pure bullshit of course.
@188 / Inaji:
Here in Amsterdam, the canals are full of baby waterfowl (mostly coots, ducks, and grebes). Last week, we were watching a crow steal eggs from a nest and carefully eat just the yolks while standing on the roof of our neighbor’s houseboat. Last night, we watched a heron dive bomb the same nest and fly off with a baby grebe. Sure is hard not to anthropomorphize the mother’s honking as grief.
myeck waters #212
It seems the study was conducted on members of APEGA, The Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta. I’m not sure exactly what this covers or whether these people are in any way climate specialists. Is it supposed to be specifically engineers with expertise in climate and geoscience?
I ask because 75% of the respondents were classified as “engineers”. A quick look at APEGA’s site seems to imply that this means any kind of engineer. If that’s the case, it’s a survey of people in a completely unrelated field. I’m not sure what that’s supposed to prove. You might as well ask biologists what they think about string theory.
I looks to me like a blatantly cherry-picked example, chosen to bolster a pre-existing conclusion. Bullshit indeed.
AJ Milne
Enough to do a lot of damage.
Brony
It does overide system 2. That was an important point of the book. Something as simple as whether a judge has had lunch or not, could add years onto a jail sentence. That is not trivial, and is but one of many examples cited in the book. System 1 can horrifically overide system 2. Only through careful study can we realise just how bad it can get.
You may be overthinking this. Too many people simply don’t (system 2) think at all.
This comment gets to the heart of the problem. We really are (intellectually) underpowered for maintaining the pretence of being “human”. Smoke and mirrors create the impression that we are system 2 beings, whereas this is not the case. We are system 1, with rare flashes of higher intellect. (This counts for all of us. It is rather sobering to realise the import of all of this.)
I might need some time to read your links.
The robots I am speaking of are not AI, they are somewhere between bee and turnip (with more emphasis on the turnip). There is certainly no question of moral competency. They are little more than flying data collectors. (The term used upthread:”thick as a brick”) The moral issues raised, fall entirely upon their owners/controllers.
Inaji @ 156:
I saw a cedar waxwing last week, eating what might have been cherries from a tree in a tiny yard right next to a major road. The last time I saw one was years ago, a bunch of them flitting (really flitting!) from tree to tree in the park. It’s been a good bird year for me; also saw two Baltimore orioles (not the nest, though) and a couple of male towhees having a disagreement.
Derek:
Oh my. I expect they do grieve, most birds are very good parents, and a lot of them mate for life. It’s a hard life.
ledasmom:
Oh, exciting! I haven’t seen another waxwing (natch), but I’m going to plant a crabapple tree this year. Baltimore orioles have been visiting fairly often, but only the males – I haven’t seen a single female this year. Spotted Towhees are here (supposedly), but I have never seen one. They are more to the west and south of where I am, I think. All of the birds have been more fight prone than usual this year, especially the doves (collared and mourning) and the black-capped chickadees. It’s like bird fight club out there.
LykeX @214
Oh dog, that is hysterical. Alberta – home of the Athabasca tar sands ! Not only are they not climate scientists in any way, shape or form – the majority of them have a vested interest in denying global warming and dismissing even the vaguest possibility that their full scale processing of tar sands could somehow be bad.
@ theophontes (恶六六六缓步动物) 215
I think that we are emphasizing different aspects of the system for different reasons and it’s not really a disagreement. I agree that system 1 does override system 2, especially when things get more intense for various reasons (sort of an autonomic grading of responses. I guess that I think that it’s better to characterize the relationship as one where system 1 is “default mode”, and system 2 is engaged when we choose or are able to spend time considering the information that informs system 1 responses.
I can agree that we are likely to be individually different when it comes to how well we use both processes. But even the most authoritarian people are still more willing to use system two in their group. It’s the balance between the systems in different behavioral contexts where things get interesting. In a highly charged political disagreement on the internet thinking in terms of undermining system 1 responses while encouraging system 2 is a useful frame. Sure it’s going to be hard, but I think it’s the difference between being armed with scalpels versus guns metaphorically speaking.
I agree, but I also find it pretty nice that we have an intellectual equivalent to bodybuilding. So it’s not all bad news. It’s more like finding “best principles” of mental fitness.
I thought the subject was interesting but was mostly out of my depth. I thought it was a tangent as well but could have been more clear about it just being an interesting item related to artificial constructs and learning.
David M:
You made a comment about using punctuation here, as well as upthread @186. I agree that punctuation would make reading comments easier. I also think addressing people by nym’s and/or comment number does much the same thing (in that it enables people to follow a conversation much easier).
I just feel compelled to share this link: Why Would Someone On Food Stamps Have An iPhone?
It’s a bunch of posts of people relating the stories about how assholes have hurt them by insisting that they were not allowed to have anything nice if they are poor, including one story about how an asshole neighbour screamed at a young man and his autistic brother (who had just spent a considerable amount of time and effort trying to get his big brother a nice gift) because the young man was poor but had a Nintendo DS, and the terrible emotional damage done by that incident.
@ Brony
If you enjoy “Fast and Slow Thinking”, you might also want to look out for Pascal Boyer’s “Religion Explained“.
Another way to get around our mental limitations, is by the application of the scientific method. By approaching problems as a communal endeavor, we can go a long way to clearing out biases, inappropriate inferences and the like. How is this panning out? Well, in spite of having a rigorous means to clear away these mental artifacts, their tenaciousness is driven home to us daily.
As far as robotics goes, I don’t happen to know any that don’t lean heavy on the maths. There is no particular reason that the general principles can’t be explained without going into “too much” maths, so there might be some out there. I’ll have to look around a bit.
Short and up to date Boyer: Religious Beliefs As Reflective Elaborations on Intuitions: A Modified Dual-Process Model
@ Brony
Your linked article was fairly heavy going. Not least in that they create a dichotomy with Authoritarians on the one extreme and Libertarians on the other. One could almost take away the message that Libertarianism (as we understand the term) is a good thing. ie: The presentation could almost be taken as apologetics for Libertarianism. Perhaps they could have been clearer as to what they mean by the term.
Right at the end they seem to come out with a different interpretation of Libertarianism. That is: not the very selfish, simplifying version we contend with daily. Rather, a type that praises autonomy within the acknowledgment of a broader community and environment. I almost wish they had rather invented their own term, as it might obviate confusion.
I would be fascinated as to how such a robot would be expected to function. Perhaps they are being overly anthropomorphic? The problem in robotics boils down to cost. Flying computers don’t come cheap, nor do the sensors. They might be capable of opening up to the complexity of the world, but I am afraid that such devices might just be too heavy to take off.
I can imagine a philosophical rice steamer, I just cannot imagine why (other than novelty) anyone would want such a thing.
If anyone’s looking for a chew toy, there’s a racist on the Dark Enlightenment thread babbling about how intelligence is genetic and race based…and has posted references that supposedly support his/her position. I love it when they do that because it provides so many opportunities to demonstrate how very wrong they are…
Oh fun
Now the first person around here has been severly injured when he fell out of the car in an after game car parade.
Idiots, the lot of them…
Hmmm.
Are SoccerFans a Race?
@pHred #218
Good catch. That connection didn’t even occur to me. Of course, these are exactly the people likely to be hired by the fossil fuel industry.
If they are they are not the smart one
@ theophontes (恶六六六缓步动物) 222
I’ll check out “Religion Explained”. I’m really enjoying that paper PZ shared with us on the evolution of costly displays.
Agreed, but not just on a group level (though the confirmation part needs that). I often tell people that the scientific method can be applied and eventually internalized by anyone as a regular way of thinking about the world. See thing you are curious about, read/learn what is known about the thing, make an attempt to explain the thing, collect data (information) to look for things that must be true if the explanation is true. Finally see if anyone has noticed the same things and think the explanation makes sense.
You can apply this to weather-proofing your house (if heat gain/loss is occurring it may be detectable with an infrared camcorder), why your newspaper is disappearing (experiment to see if neighbor is stealing it), many things. The benefit is that when someone gets good enough at testing their own explanations, testing the explanations of other people fairly gets easier. You get practice at not BS’ing yourself so you can more easily detect BS in others and deceptive practices (the effects of cognitive heuristics, biases, and their fallacy manifestations) become recognizable forms.
The tenaciousness is because they work on a more visceral social level. Much of human culture is more primitive behavior in symbolically more complicated presentation. Dominance displays get attention (debates, politically aggressive bluster…), exaggerating the symbols (representing more complex arguments) of others into hyperbolic forms for one’s group and fence-sitters can persuade those with less education (often not their fault if their childhood culture did not value education), turning descriptive words into in-group words of dismissal that shut down thought (feminism! socialism! libertarianism! Just being honest about some folks on that last one).
Rationality, logic, and the scientific method need to achieve ritual status in order to be more valued because right now people just see the effectiveness of standard political behavior. The best of us use these tools and combine them with knowledge of language, culture, and rhetoric in their own political dominance displays which work best when we pick a favorite area, master it and then pick our battles while learning new areas we care about. Hitchens was effective for good reasons. Any political community with a legitimate axe to grind needs skilled cultural brutes that can metaphorically swing a club around.
Teaching the value of an idea, or belief, or philosophical tool involves not just the benefits inherent in the idea itself, but the success of the community in competition with others where there are competitors.
@ theophontes (恶六六六缓步动物)
I get the impression that they are not using a standard definition of Libertarian and a perusal of the literature might show more of this non-standard usage. Something like “Individualist” might better map to what they are doing. Otherwise I agree that what we currently call Libertarianism has very little acknowledgement of the surrounding community and environment except in terms of resources for personal gain.
The programming would be broad enough to contain more than just human cognitive capability, the requisite behaviors are pretty common in the animal kingdom. There would have to be a “social sense” among such robots with some sort of division between “individual goals” and “social goals”. Individuals or small groups of individuals would have to be able to modify individuals whose chosen actions and goals were “less fit” or contradictory to the group overall. (I start thinking about the implications for us and what is selected for in humans here. It’s fascinating when the really abused stuff is still morally neutral in selective terms.)
The 7th book in the Iron Druid Chronicles is out today.
Please hold your football fan bashing until Brazil – Mexico is over, I’m kind of busy here.
Ahhh, I see that we got a well-rounded asshole in Pazvante Chiorul. Why don’t we spend equal amounts of time talking about all that horrible racism black people are committing?
Ignoranus. Someone who is stupid and an asshole. I like it.
Inaji @233:
Thanks for the new word. Got to use it in the Feminist Frequency thread.
Not going to lie, I didn’t catch the difference the first several times and was really confused. Damn auto-correcting brain, lol.
And is it just me or does pronouncing it sound like “In your anus”?
oh my goo’ness
I’m so drunk.
chigau,
Cool.
Any rum left to share?
Beatrice
yup
there is a wee dram
hold out your cup
Thank you.
almost better than morning coffee
rum + coffee = breakfast of champions
Nah.
Red, White & Blue beer poured over Rice Crispies.
That’s the breakfast of champions.
I prefer Shreddies.
chigau:
I think around here they call that Chex.
I do use shredded wheat biscuits when I am baking bread. Sometimes.
Oggie
You put shredded wheat into the bread dough?
What is the result?
I like to try different textures in my bread.
chigau:
Yes, I put shredded wheat biscuits in my bread dough. I soak them in milk or water (whichever the liquid used in the dough happens to be) and toss it in with the yeast, flour, sugar and liquid — adds a nice grainy texture to white bread. And for multigrain bread, tends to get away from all the little balls of stuff.
Some random thoughts…
I’m starting to find all these movements a bit off-putting.
Atheist movement, skeptical movement, A+ movement… and when talking about all these movements they usually kind of blend into the movement (The Movement if random capitalization is your thing).
When we talk about atheism and I use we when talking about something related to my atheism it can happen that I accidentally proclaim myself part of a movement. And I still don’t understand what or how these movements work .Are we all parts of it just by being Pharyngulates?
I don’t know. I realize that people have to unite to accomplish big things, and also that I am threading dangerously into dictionary atheism territory, it’s just that all these movements are a bit confusing. Especially the skeptical one.
Could that be an American thing? Like with all the leadership bullshit, which movements are quite convenient for. After all… all those leaders need someone to lead.
Obligatory. :-)
The Wine Somg
—
Give in to the dark side!
It’s OK: you can still be progressive, just not necessarily because you’re an atheist (or a Pharyngulite).
Somg? Song.
Tony:
Credit goes to Kevin Hearne, who introduced it in his latest book [Shattered] via the character of Manannan Mac Lir.
JAL:
You’re leaving the ‘g’ out. Same as ignoramus, just changed that one little letter. :D
In case anyone is not paying attention
everything and everybody is stupid,
.
.
.
especially my particular pad/router/provider combination.
Request for advice:
I’m thinking of reading some Ursula Le Guin, but I’m unsure of where to start. I haven’t read any of her stuff before. I don’t mind jumping into a longer work, I just need to know I’m not missing some important background.
I know there are people around here who have read her stuff, so please leave me a recommendation.
@251 / LykeX: Well, I’m pretty sure the first one I read was A Wizard of EarthSea, but that would have been in the mid-80s. Oh, apparently it’s a hexology now – it was only a trilogy back when I read it.
LykeX
My favorites
The Left Hand of Darkness
The Dispossessed
Many people are crying into their beer here today. Spain hit by a double whammy. Out of the world cup and a new bloody king.
(At least this one won’t be shooting any elephants)
Seconding Left Hand of Darkness.
@ Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought 246
I think of movements as a big complicated venn diagrams. They are on many levels groups of political convenience and strategic organizing like political parties, but inside of them you have people sorting into different factions as they want movements to do different things as they relate the the overall mission. Disagreements about which things are more important for the movement at large are probably never ending, and some people inside of the efforts to shape the groups behavior will be more or less aggressive and disruptive.
WE refers to that set of things the whole group shares, and we all want it to also refer to the things we are trying to get the group to do as well (many of us also use WE to mean the group shared things and the things we want, but that starts to get into politically shady behavior unless we are honest about it being rhetorical efforts to persuade).
As for Pharyngulates, some are part of the movement, some are not but often act consistently with the movement and can be considered allies. But mostly it’s fans of PZ’s writing and activism and “movement” happens to come along often because PZ talks about related issues a lot.
I think it’s a human thing and that you see it in political movements all over history. People will interact with others like them and that is part of what forms a movement. People will also interact based on shared goals, and conflict over conflicting goals causing movements to evolve over time. Depending on the trajectory of evolution this can cause a lot of negative feelings like feelings of betrayal.
People are also differently responsive to authority which is a totally natural instinct. An authority is a reflection of the group that respects it in many ways so we tend to (rationally or irrationally depending on mental shortcuts and reality) associate the authority with the group. Some fall into a set of behavior that we call authoritarianism and put way too much value on respect and obedience to authorities, or are willing to put up with more bad behavior on the part of authorities. But authorities are also convenient ways to spread a group’s message and organize group behavior.
I think it’s general human behavior in all it’s inefficient, chaotic, but still useful and necessary glory.
Reading on wikipedia led me to believe that The Left Hand of Darkness was in the middle of a series of books. Is that wrong? Is it an okay place to just jump in with no knowledge of the world it takes place in?
:-D
I’m sorry that I still haven’t gone back and read the replies I got several Thunderdomes ago when we discussed that on the occasion of that creationist from debate.org. I still want to do that, but I won’t have time this or next week at minimum.
Thus, all I can say now is that I don’t understand how mentioning names or numbers helps to follow a conversation. Few if any people remember the numbers, so they don’t make it easier to recognize the topic*; I don’t remember well who said what**, so names don’t help me or anyone like me much; and I’m really, honestly not addressing individual people so much as everyone who can read what I write. I reply to what I quote, not to who happens to have written it this time – sometimes, putting a name on such a quote would even be unfair in that it would single someone out for what lots of people say/do/believe.
I promised to quote more context. Have I been living up to that? (Obviously, I’m not a good judge of that myself!)
* A few people – I don’t remember who – have occasionally mentioned just numbers in their comments, with no names or quotes. I find that very annoying, because it means that if the reply doesn’t make the topic obvious, I must scroll up if I want to have any idea what it’s about.
** Remembering people I’ve met in meatspace is one thing.*** Remembering people I only know as written names – on a blog or in scientific papers – largely fails, at least if I haven’t interacted with them a lot. For example, I’m really bad at keeping track of where my colleagues work, or where particular fossils are kept when I haven’t been to that collection and seen them there myself.
*** Though even there, most people seem to be quite a bit better at recognizing faces than I am. I clearly don’t have prosopagnosia, but still.
To some extent, yes – together with the phenomenon of “I identify as a”, which I don’t quite understand either.
“Leadership” may be the opposite: maybe it used to be much more widespread and has fallen out of fashion in and around Germany.
Ok so there is no longer any doubt Suarez still is on top of his game, Uruguay still is one of the greats, and England still… just quite isn’t. Nice try, though.
LykeX #257:
Left Hand of Darkness was my first Le Guin book and I didn’t feel lost at all.
When Alice Munro won the Nobel, it occurred to me: that was Ursula’s! Now, I love me some Alice Munro, don’t get me wrong, she’s had an amazing career, and she’s as insightful and quietly powerful as any short story writer you’d care to name.
But in terms of influence on the culture at large, ambition, breadth of work, and social justice awareness/advocacy, Ursula is easily her superior. Science Fiction in general has had such an enormous impact on the culture, the “genre ghetto” that some of its best practitioners have been forced to labor in is now widely regarded as the product of unjust literary snobbishness, it just seems inevitable, that someday an author best known for fantastic or speculative work is going to get one. And I say it should be Ursula, like tomorrow (she’s 81, I believe, about the same age as Munro).
Ursula K. LeGuin for the Nobel! pass it around.
(My $.02 on the question: you don’t need any prior knowledge to enjoy The Left Hand of Darkness, in fact, that or Earthsea is probably the place to start, or a collection of short fiction.)
LykeX @251: Seconding or thirding or whatever, chigau’s recommendations. The Left Hand of Darkness is a fucking masterpiece. And I don’t use naughty words much.
Weed(less) Monkey @259: Yep. Uruguay earned that win, and good for Suárez. Oddly enough, if Italy win their last two, and England beat Costa Rica, England can still go through. Almost hoping for a draw in Italy v CR tomorrow, so that my stress levels can go down and I can just enjoy the football. Almost.
:) I don’t really have a natural favourite team in these games, but I’m interested in teams from Northern Europe: Netherlands, England, Germany.
And seeing any of the big stars do what they do best is luxurious.
Of course that could be Messi leading Argentina to the top, and that would be fantastic.
LykeX @251:
Umptee-umphthing The Left Hand of Darkness. I would also add, The Word for World is Forest.
Looks like one of those ‘midwest gone bugfuck’ storms is headed into my patch, with a vengeance. I expect the power will be out soon enough, so I suppose I’ll have an early night.
Thanks, everybody. I appreciate the help. Library trip is planned for next week.
Yay for libraries!
Just looked at the Doppler, and the first wave of grumble storms should hit in about an hour and it looks vicious. The second wave looks a lot tamer.
Six Liverpool players on the pitch and the one I didn’t want to score did. Twice.
*sigh*
#comeonitaly (#weneedyou)
Stay safe, Nerd. I’m gonna hunker down and hope we ride it out without much damage.
Well, Gerrard got an assist on the winning goal. Urgh.
We’ll if worse comes to worst, I can shove the Redhead in the coat closet, surrounded by thick real plaster walls, without any window.
Seeing how bad and good they were in their first matches I wouldn’t call that impossible, just very implausible.
What do Kurt Vonnegut, The Rule of Holes & Genesis have in common?: Linky.
Congrats on your reduced stress. But holy crap, two games in and Costa Rica already is a giant killer.
Trying to get to my e-mails; being informed of Costa Rica 1 : 0 Italy.
And they played like giants. Shut the Italians down very effectively. Watching them proceed will be fun. Almost as much fun as watching a Germany-Netherlands match (please, please!).
I’m quite interested in getting the last one on that list to be kicked out of the tournament soon, but I won’t hold my breath.
Football championships make me cranky because for weeks the whole world expects me to care. Mr. is currently sitting in the armchair and I think he must be talking to himself…
For all my grumbling about football, I’m watching Switzerland vs France with mum.
I can enjoy watching fotball, I’m usually just too annoyed by all the fans and noise and nationalism.
And I wouldn’t mindCroats getting kicked out soon
Then I could watch the rest of the games in peace.
In Finland football fans are pretty much invisible and rare (probably because the national team has never accomplished anything). Ice hockey fans, on the other hand… they have a World Cup every year.
Simmering gegen Kapfenberg.
The baby Mourning Doves have left the nest.
Rats below, I’m so glad I don’t shop at Target. I’m not in Texas, but I don’t want anything to do with an establishment that thinks this is okay.
LykeX @ 257:
Left Hand of Darkness is one of LeGuin’s Hainish novels, but those are not so much a series as a setting, a concept, a background, a frame. That is, they all take place in the same universe with certain technology (the technology does change, but to me LeGuin’s novels all have the feeling of history, though if they are in our universe they must be in the far future of it. That is to say, the events feel as if they’re being looked back on from a distance, and with an exception or two there isn’t much sense of the individual stories being in linear order), but they make use of enough of that universe that often you can’t really see one story from another. So enjoy them in any order you like. I happen to love Left Hand of Darkness absolutely passionately; it is one of those books that I read and say to myself, I do not know how this author came to write this; I do not know how this bit and this bit and this bit, especially this bit, came into her head, or how she put them down just so, but I am grateful for it.
For shorter LeGuin, “The Matter of Seggri” or “A Woman’s Liberation”, though the latter is tough reading, and the one I can’t come up with the name for just now – there was a mother who in order to understand and study a culture raised her two children in it, and the story is told in first person by her daughter. I know it’s in one of the books here, but I can’t remember which one.
This is incomprehensible.
When money is lacking, as it usually is at a zoo, you go public, call for donations and shame the politicians! You don’t close part of the zoo forever – I’m talking about the National Zoo of the US of A, BTW – with just six days’ notice.
What, if anything, are the responsible people thinking? I don’t get it.
Petition.
ledasmom @285:
“Solitude”, in The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
Rob Grigjanis:
Thank you. That was going to trouble me for a bit otherwise. The subtle world- building in that story just blows me away.
Well, fuck. I tried to comment on the Kids for Cash posting at Ed Brayton’s blog, but, apparently, I am an imposter and am not allowed to comment there. Weird.
*poke*
Just registered at another site to be able to buy wheelchair parts. Still looking for “hub cap” for the big wheel to replace one that fell off (I don’t care, but the Redhead does, guess who wins). Usually they reappear in the “trunk” (its a hatchback). Haven’t seen this one since Memorial day. I think this one fell off at the Thai restaurant on our way back from the Gem and Mineral show that weekend.
Found the hubcaps! Ordered half a dozen so I can lose more….
Harry Potter and the Prisoners of Collectivism.
I’ve been threatened with a banning over on JTs blog. Apparently its demonisation to accuse someone of being dishonest.
I am amused.
Never mind, I have been banned. I am extremely amused.
These are the statements for which I have been banned:</a?
—
—
Ow! Someone poked me.
Sorry. The stylus slipped.
Weird tonight.
Sorry.
(does that make it feel more normaller?)
Oggie
Yes, indeed!
Have big old *hug*.
Going to be a long night for the Nerd. I got to bed early, then the Redhead called for a pain pill after half an hour. Just getting back to sleep and she called up to make an adjustment to her wheelchair. Starting to get sleepy and she’s complaining at the edge of my hearing about more sore points. Get up and take care of that, making a few adjustments, including changing her seat pad, and now she’s sound asleep. I’m wide awake.
Nerd #301
If you have a digital clock
treat the characters you see as a number
e.g.
11:25 = 1125
try to find the prime factors, in your head, within one minute.
This will either give you something to do or bore you into a coma.
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/honour-killings-speech-prompts-boycott-of-festival-of-dangerous-ideas-20140624-zsk03.html This may be worthy of a post by Prof. Myers
Wondering if ThunderingFool will make a long YouTube video in support of Luis Suarez.
Wow.
It’s really late.
I should go to bed.
Evolution and Living Pterosaurs
Evolution disproved by a simple equation plus Live Modern Pterosaurs bonus!
Rev. BDC:
No, evolution was disproved year ago by a pig’s tooth from Nebraska. True facts.
I’m shocked.
m0fa said something that I can agree with:
Bafflement warning.
Trigger warning. Well written; mentions the fact that patriarchy hurts men, too – and that that fact comes back to hurt women.
I was privileged to see a male Downy Woodpecker feeding his son today.
microosoft and goooogle and probably all the rest are a bunch of festering fuckwits
appple, too
Apologies if this has been discussed before, but I just heard about this and found it incredibly disturbing:
http://www.burntorangereport.com/diary/15344/racebaiting-open-carry-advocates-to-march-through-5th-ward-in-houston
A bunch of heavily armed overwhelmingly white right-wingers were planning to march through a black neighborhood the day after a holiday celebrating the end of slavery. Luckily they called it off, apparently someone in the group has a moment of self-awareness and realized how bad this would look to those outside the FOX News crowd, but the fact that they even seriously considered going through with this Know-Your-Place March is fucking terrifying. I have nothing but loathing for the right, but even I never thought they’d actually sink to marching their heavily armed thugs through minority neighborhoods just to send a threat. I was wrong. I feel sick wondering what’s gonna happen when one of these marches actually happens. A dark and cynical part of me genuinely thinks it’ll end in a massacre when the marchers decide they’re ‘threatened’ by the locals and choose to ‘stand their ground’. If the right-wingers were able to convince most of this country that a black teenager attacked a white man twice his size without any provocation or motive they’ll have no problem convincing the public that an entire black neighborhood also suddenly got the insatiable urge to murder a white person and had to be shot in ‘self-defense’.
samihawkins
Holy crap, more Orange Marches.
……………….
Quoth PZ:
Our Resident eBil Oberlawd & Poopyhead
Computers now used for time lapse embryo imaging to improve chances of IVF: Link here.
At 78% viability, this means that new IVF techniques are more efficient at preventing miscarriages (ie: YHWH murdering unborn babies) than regular up-n-down sex (AFAIR: 70-75% viability). I can only imagine that pro-lifers will, in future, stick to their inveterate religious principles and only ever reproduce by this method.
RRRRRRrrr! I want a custom avatar, but it’s not working!!!
@Inaji (or anyone else who reads the Iron Druid books)
I’ve had a thought about the real answer to Granuaile’s persistent queries about why Atticus only responds to magical threats to Gaia, and doesn’t seem to care about environmental devastation etc. I suspect that the bottom line answer is that those problems just aren’t real to him on a gut level. He’s spent ~2000 years knowing about the various sorcerers, monsters, rogue gods etc. that fuck with the mystic energies of the Earth for their own power, and he knows about dealing with that. Meanwhile, for the majority of that 2000 years, the effects of human habitation were, relatively speaking, minor, temporary, an pretty much self-correcting in the long run. By contrast, the idea of environmental catastrophe in that context is really not more than 60-70 years old; no one was really thinking or talking in those terms until Rachel Carson. So Atticus’ basic mindset doesn’t really include the conceptual space to properly appreciate what’s going on. Granuaile, by contrast, is the opposite; for her, environmentalism and the concepts that underlie it are the bedrock of her reality and have been all her ~30 years of life, while the magic is a recent overlay, perceived as just another tool for dealing with the real issues. That said, she’s handling the idea of Ragnarok being a real threat better than Atticus is handling the idea of global warming being one.
Dalillama:
Agreed. I wasn’t very happy with the latest entry, I didn’t care for the split narration, nor the dropping in of every previous minor character. I wasn’t happy with the Granuaile aspect either, as the story seemed contrived and unnecessary, and Granuaile is increasingly depicted as an ‘over emotional female’, which grates. It’s possible to be a good warrior, one with empathy and an eye to the larger picture without falling into the over emotional female trope.
I’m curious to see where Hearne is going to go with the series, and whether or not he will address actual concerns as well as all the magical stuff.
Even though I can’t say I was surprised about which direction the ruling went, I am disgusted (at the vote pattern) and incredibly saddened.
Seriously, the USSC needs to pull its collective heads out of its collective asses.
Not wanting to introduce to much cuddliness into the Thunderdome, thanks for the bird pictures, Inaji. Animals are about the only thing I ever ponder getting a camera for (my smartphone cam sucks), but haven’t gotten around to yet. Anyway, looking forward to more!
Mncht. Sorry for boldface-fail.
Thanks, Gorogh! I know some phonecams are bloody amazing, you can’t tell photos weren’t taken with serious gear. I’m running an old Nikon D80 (with a 70-300mm) lens for the bird shots. I’ve recently been making noise about getting a Canon, because as much as I love love love my Nikon, they do not excel in low light.
Animals are a good reason to get a camera. The past couple of days, I’ve been able to see and photograph (badly) a male Downy woodpecker feeding his son. Those moments, they are beyond special.
I’m gonna be pretty much out until Monday night.
Keep well, Everyone!
xpost
@ brianpansky
I had success with gravatar (link here).
[Moriarty] My avatar I have stole from the British Museum. Mwahahaha…[/Moriarty]
Arrivederci 2IC !
I’m beginning to think I have personally pissed off a thunderstorm/rain god. Or 500.
[rant]
Augh, communication *snicker* with the Redhead can be problematic. The latest problem goes back to her present wheelchair becoming to narrow. Guess she likes my cooking, or three meals a day instead of one increased her girth. Offer to buy her a new wider wheelchair. Measure the seat area, 18 wide by 16 deep, a standard size. Next size up 20 wide by 16 deep. The Redhead remembers 16 wide. Lots of noise and complaint about the width of the chair, and how it can’t work, and somewhere in that noise is one sentence saying “buy it”. I couldn’t hear the signal for the noise….
[/rant]
Hey T’Domers, I was over at WeHuntedtheMammoth where they have a thread following the AVfM Men’s Rights conference going on right now. Commenter Damselindetech left this comment:
And I thought it was a pretty cool idea, to flood their otherwise hateful hashtag with actual pro-men tweets from feminists, and thought some round these parts might want to jump in.
*hugs* for here, too.
but nasty, prickly ones
Carbon dioxide is like crack to those thunderstorm gods, you know. Makes them prematurely incinerate all over the place.
Richard Dawkins tweeting with Slyme.
Dawkins is digging himself a deeper and deeper hole. What a fuckwit.
@ brianpansky
Ooops… here is a better link. Linky.
Richard Dawkins learns the term “Social Justice Warrior” and he declares it good.
An attempt to put my last two links in context.
I am absolutely disgusted by you. All of you. And yet I’m not surprised anymore, either.
The moment I saw him say that, I knew you people would be doing this. My god, you’re myopic… no, that’s not the right word. You know damn well what he’s saying, but you don’t let that stop you–not when bullshitting and indignation are so much more satisfying than actually examining your beliefs and methods and growing up a little.
He stated what works he, personally, would add to a hypothetical time capsule. Somebody took issue with the fact that the three creators he mentioned were white. He asked who they’d pick–who they thought was a better poet than Shakespeare.
Heina, who I guess follows him despite being very eager to believe he’s racist, popped up and decided to try and reframe this as if he had claimed that white people are best at everything. She is not this stupid. She did that on purpose, and you all know it. She willfully, deliberately tried to make him out to be a white supremacist for liking Shakespeare, and all of you are smart enough to see that.
Goodnight.
I am really sorry to have hurt your feelings, endorkened
I’m sure everybody here feels equally ashamed. I have no idea how we can ever make amends and live up to your expectations, but I made you a sandwich.
Bless your heart
Are you possibly referring to the tweet where she asked him to explain what he meant?
Indeed, I think we’re all smart enough to spot see when you’re lying. You’re not being very subtle about it.
While we’re on this subject, can we get a sockpuppet check on endorkened? This is just a little too convenient.
Which is, btw, bullshit.
The fact that the only people he could think of worth preserving for any potential sentient lifeform to discover were white guys, held in high esteem by the western world, and that he could not think of anyone greater points to his own massive blind spots and his stout refusal to even entertain the possibility that he has those.
There’s some interesting research on that matter: The less biased people believe themselves to be, the more biased their actual decisions are, because they never stop to think about whether they might be influenced by prejudices, but constantly rationalize their own decisions as “fair, unbiased and rational”. I think that Dawkins is a perfect example of this.
No she didn’t. It was an attempt to nudge Dawkins into a slightly wider awareness. Y’know, that people of colour (people including women) have made very important contributions to the world. It’s interesting that Dawkins wants to laud Einstein, but doesn’t give one thought to someone like Omar Khayyam and algebra (al-jebr), given that Einstein (or any other scientist) wouldn’t have gotten very fucking far without such contributions.
It doesn’t take much effort to think outside of the old white guy box – you’d think that would be all manner of easy for someone like Dawkins, eh? But no, he keeps his mind in an itty bitty box, bounded and reinforced by assholes.
Apparently Richard Dawkins is a consumer of big tit porn; he has openly stated his dislike for fake bosoms, which is rare for those other than natural boob lovers.
Dawkins, being himself, thinks that it’s actually about Shakespeare
I love Shakespeare.
I also love a dozen more poets, I wonder if he ever experienced the beauty of people like Neruda or Hikmet, although I guess they’re not great since they forgot to write in English
I honestly don’t get the fuss about Shakespeare. Was he influential? Absolutely. Did he have a flair for words? Yes.
Is he the be-all-end-all of English language literature? Meh.
Poetry is an art form, and like all art it is subjective. Meaning that what moves person A can leave person B utterly cold.
I’ve always been a fan of Emily Dickenson. Which I suppose says something about me. But this poem always got me in the gut:
As it was pointed out by others on Twitter, Richard Dawkins did not need to even have to stumble like he did. While there is a definite bias towards western classical composers, the Golden Record on Voyager 2 contains music from around the world.
But I guess it is easier to believe that SJWs are surround him on all sides, looking to trip him up with the truth is, Dawkins does it to himself.
Christ, it’s still raining. Been raining since last night.
Giliell:
So do I. Many volumes of Shakespeare are on my bookshelves. That shouldn’t blind a person to the wealth of poets, past and present, who brought very different views to bear on common subjects. In the realm of ‘yep, more white guys’, I would have chosen Walt Whitman or T.S. Eliot over Shakespeare. Or William Butler Yeats.
Or Baudelaire. I *adore* Baudelaire’s work.
I would be tempted to make sure that some of Octavia Butler’s Earth Seed line were on that hypothetical spaceship.
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
is Change.
God
is Change.
Thanks, theophontes!
I do love how Endorkened talks about “all of you”, when Janine linked to two tweets and I made one comment about Dawkins. Who knew the two of us constituted “all of you”. Or that our views about Dawkins are indicative of how everyone else feels about the dude. Sheesh.
Tony, well you know most of the Horde doesn’t place Dawkins on a pedestal, and has no problem pointing his biases out, here in The Church of Echoes.
Fuuny thing, I would still recommend Richard Dawkins’ books that relate to his field of expertise. Anything else he has to say? Let’s just say I prefer Sagan or Gould when it comes to social issues.
Janine @ 348, that would be a good choice. I’d like to know Angelou’s Still I Rise was out there, somewhere…
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.
And Dreams, by Langston Hughes.
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
Perhaps the sad little sockpuppet/troll Gerard O would like to contribute some poetry, since their malodorous bait has found no takers?
And Yeats’s The Indian Upon God…
I passed along the water’s edge below the humid trees,
My spirit rocked in evening light, the rushes
round my knees,
My spirit rocked in sleep and sighs; and saw the
moor-fowl pace
All dripping on a grassy slope, and saw them
cease to chase
Each other round in circles, and heard the eldest speak:
Who holds the world between His bill and made
us strong or weak
Is an undying moorfowl, and He lives beyond the sky.
The rains are from His dripping wing, the moonbeams
from His eye.
I passed a little further on and heard a lotus talk:
Who made the world and ruleth it, He hangeth on a stalk,
For I am in His image made, and all this tinkling tide
Is but a sliding drop of rain between His petals wide.
A little way within the gloom a roebuck raised his eyes
Brimful of starlight, and he said: The Stamper of the
Skies,
He is a gentle roebuck; for how else, I pray, could
He
Conceive a thing so sad and soft, a gentle thing
like me?
I passed a little further on and heard a peacock say:
Who made the grass and made the worms and
made my feathers gay,
He is a monstrous peacock, and He waveth all
the night
His languid tail above us, lit with myriad spots of light.
opposablethumbs @ 355, nah, I wouldn’t be interested in such a contribution. And I don’t give a shit about what porn he may or may not watch.
Esteleth, that one … I love that one. Tears me apart, but I love it.
Ahhh, but if we’re talking Yeats, it must be
Probably my most favourite piece of poetry
The whole concert is a work of beauty, but the first piece is a record of Neruda himself.
And finally:
This is still a sad collection, spanning only the western world, and I’m very sure that there’s lots of great stuff I simply don’t know about, but at least I’m aware of that…
Giliell:
Oh, yes.
And so much of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám…
And Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694), it would be near criminal to leave him out of poetry sent out to the universe.
Dave Stewart & Barbara Gaskin – The Cloths of Heaven (1991)(youtube link)
Poetry recitations in the Thunderdome‽
I’ll go out and come in again.
Actually came by to leave this – via Mousavi at Margin of Error, the clearest summary explanation I’ve yet seen of why Iraq is a mess, by way of reminding Western folks not to assume everything’s about what *our* policies did or did not do.
Mousavi:
Infidel753 from a previous blog entry here:
And
Well, Dawkin’s gotta be good for something
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/06/26/1309755/-Pivotal-ruling-by-Canada-s-Supreme-Court-gives-Fist-Nations-title-to-traditional-lands-for-1st-time
It doesn’t make up for the centuries long oppression of First Nations people, but this was a good decision.
what
what
Facebook’s Unethical Research Project (at Skepchick)
Pteryxx #368, what you mention is the reason I never completed my facebook registration. Just too much “i have to be public” when a real modicum of privacy is necessary to prevent firing in an “at will” state. Maybe after I finally and officially retire…..
Forget the end of that sentence. Just this part:
Whenever they do any amount of this, it pisses me off. I hate not having control of what shows up in my feed. They always do this silly “top stories” option as the default, and I always have to switch it. So annoying. The worst is when the option to control the feed yourself disappears. Ugh.
Something seems odd to me though about this. I mean, services change features in annoying ways all the time. But when they do the same thing for research purposes, that crosses a line (well, depending on who you ask, apparently). Hmmm. Well, maybe the actual information gathering of the fallout is the difference between the two.
* eh, another difference is that they are actually trying to be effectively manipulative in the research situation. They want results.
Well, I always say that I don’t have a Facebook account because we can’t agree on Terms of Service. Guess I was right. What pisses me off is that college stuff is now done via FB because everybody thinks that everybody else has a FB account…
Ugh, Facebook.
It didn’t appeal at the beginning when all I got were invitations to play stupid quizzes or silly gifts. Got out then, before the thing got popular.
… now it looks even worse.
And yeah, it’s terribly annoying that everyone assumes that you have an account. Luckily, we had a fairly popular forum at the college, so even if some people exchanged information on facebook, everything (I think) ended up there as well.
I don’t have faisbuc, mainly because I don’t know how to prevent it from connecting things I don’t want connected (e.g. like many of us I have more than one online presence that I want to keep non-overlapping, thank you very much dear bookofface people). My ignorance about how to control things like this also stops me from making the best use of google features.
I would be very grateful for any info or pointers in this regard, or any suggestions of the best place to look for how-to guides (preferably suitable for someone only by the skin of their teeth right on the margins of the very bottom edge of competence with anything IT-related).
Is it possible to have more than one faisbuc account using different names, and prevent them from linking up? (while having only one computer, I mean)
Hey!, brianpansky, you’re lookin’ good.
(Glad that I could help you.)
From the epic Afrikaans poem by NP van Wyk Louw:
.
.
.
This is part of a long poem about The Other and the acceptance of The New (for better or worse) into Culture. It has an aspect of threat throughout, asif some natural and unsettling force, so seductive and sensual, will permeate traditional ways of doing, and corrupt them. In one way I am tempted to translate into English(this would be a real challenge), but in another, I know I will break it in doing so. The sounds of the words are important. The poem is felt , more than it is understood. (Try reading aloud…)
By not knowing the “fine,fine net of language [lit: “the word”], by which shiny fat fish are hauled from many waters”, Raka’s lack of appreciation of traditional culture, destroys it.
[Raka is Dawkin’s worst nightmare.]
Beatrice:
Same here. I haven’t had a regret over it, either. I have enough to maintain on the ‘net without it.
Theophontes, thanks for that poem!
I think the sad and ignorant commenter ‘opposablethumbs’ needs to lighten up a bit. I still have a soft spot for ol’ Dicky, and I completely agree with him on fake bosoms. May enormous natural boobs rule for eternity.
and a message for some others, that I am:
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, AND NOT TO YIELD
The baby Blue Jays have hit the deck, adding their hollering for food to that of the baby Grackles.
Gerard O:
And I think you ought to just shut up and never comment again. I guess neither of us is getting what we want.
opposablethumbs:
I have a few friends on FB that have separate accounts, usually a public one and a private one (the latter is used specifically to be anonymous), so yeah, it’s quite possible. I’m fairly sure that no separate computer is needed. If you repost this in the Lounge, you may find some people with advice.
Gerard:
Well, ol’ Dicky spouts off all over the net. One place he isn’t is here, so why don’t you toddle off to follow ol’ Dicky around? You might be able to chat about breasts with him.
You certainly aren’t wanted here, we have our quota of ignoranuses.
Hi Tony! – thanks, and yes I should probably post that in the Lounge, ta!
.
Gerard, why don’t you toddle off and take your malodorous wafflings with you – there’s a good little trollikin.
Fuck.
I just read the post on Thunderf00t. That part about the men’s rights conference and the joking about his son being raped. That’s just — shit. Not sure where I am going with this but it ain’t a good place.
Memo to self: when feeling down, do not read a post about Thunderf00t. Almost guaranteed to be triggering.
Ogvorbis:
I’m sorry to hear that my friend. Please be well.
Ogvorbis:
I had an unpleasant, visceral reaction to that, too. To say I was appalled is a serious understatement. There you had a parent who was very concerned, fearful, and upset over what might happen to his son, and they fucking laughed. I don’t even have words.
Be well, Ogvorbis, and stay outta that thread. (It’s quiet now, but it will heat up.)
It did strike me, when reading, that most of those men seem to think that a proper man (in prison) would be the rapist, not the one who is raped, and any man who was raped deserved it, ’cause they weren’t a proper manly man.
Which makes me feel very queasy and awful. Seriously awful.
Inaji:
I share your queasy feelings. Being gay, I’d probably be seen by them as not a proper manly man. Fuck that noise. And fuck the notion that there’s anything like a proper way to be a man.
Oggie
*hugs*
Hope you’re OK, Ogvorbis. And yes, if
then I sure as hell hope I don’t know a single “manly man” and never will. I hope.
Take care, Oggie.
—
somewhat related, triggering but useful reading.
You know you’re a survivor when… tumblr
Yeah, I think I’m going to curl up in a bottle of Kraken rum tonight. Sorry.
Pteryxx
When I’m in better shape, OI’ll take a closer look.
You know you’re a survivor when, almost 40 years later, the sight of a cub scout uniform still sets off a panic attack. Didn’t happen todya, but it sure did yesterday.
Mother and Daughter Downy Woodpeckers.
Portraits showcasing the beauty of mixed race families
http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/john-lopez-scrap-iron-sculpting?context=featured
Tony:
Cowboys are often found on ATVs these days, not horses.
I was just out prepping the feeding stations for the evening, and got to watch a male Downy woodpecker feeding his baby, while I was standing about 18 inches away.
Ogvorbis, I hear ya. I had a panic attack yesterday because someone mentioned my abuser’s name. For much of that tumblr I was going ‘that’s me… that’s me… yep, that’s me’ Which is basically the point, that we’re not so alone.
Good rums and soups or whatever else soothes ya, Oggie.
I. Fucking. Loathe. Fireworks.
Hear, hear.
Dalillama:
Assholes are setting off the ones that sound like a massive fucking explosion, mere yards away from my studio window. Really helps the PTSD.
Also, the assholes who decided to start setting them off today? They chose a day with 40 to 60mph winds. Jesus Christ with a firecracker up his ass, I. Fucking. Loathe. Fireworks. And. The. Assholes. Who. Set. Them. Off.
I’m tired.
But returning to normal.
#401 / Inaji: A good (safe) Fourth of July fireworks display is actually one of the few things I miss about living in the States. They tolerate pretty massive personal fireworks for New Year’s Eve here in the Netherlands, and people (mostly, young Dutch men) are complete idiots with them. The brother of my first Dutch girlfriend is blind in one eye; the first year she was here, my wife got knocked off her bike by a rocket.
This is not a good place to be for New Year’s if you’ve got explosion-related PTSD…
Tony / Opposable: How to set up a secondary FaceBook account: http://www.ehow.com/how_8553139_make-second-facebook-account.html
Please. I’m just glad I popped the orchestral version of Isolde’s Liebestod into ClearFi just to balance out the stupid. Hoechste Lust!
Derek:
I can tolerate a professionally run display, as they aren’t usually close to my windows. That’s not the case, unfortunately. The people here in town won’t even go out to the baseball field to set shit off.
I have to admit that I have fond memories of growing up in Southern Maryland, riding in the back of Donnie’s truck, and chucking firecrackers out the back (there wasn’t a lot of traffic back then…)….
THIS.
Laypeople should be forbidden to handle fireworks. Germany has the same problem as Netherlands
Well, there have been fewer injuries the last few years than in previous years, but Dutch papers have been attributing that to the bad economy – people just can’t afford the super expensive big bangers. The cab driver down the street usually spends what I would guess is three or four hundred euros on his explosives, and I’m amazed that some of the bigger ones are legal.
Oh, and OF COURSE everyone lighting off the fireworks is completely drunk.
Derek:
Oh, we have that, too. Every year, a drunk fireworks reveler manages to set someplace on fire.
[fireworks]
There are some amazing kites flying in the park near my hotel here in Beijing. They are all lit up by LED’s (?) with long streamers also all lit up. It all looks like an ongoing, silent, fireworks display.
@ David Marjanovic’
Yup, I travelled so far East, so I could wish you happy birthday before the rest of the horde. Pop the champagne in the freezer and start counting down the next 20 minutes ….
Thank you Derek Vandivere – much appreciated.
Theophontes:
I could live with that, easily!
re: fireworks-
Until 2011 I worked at a bar/restaurant that was actually 2 separate (yet linked; confusing, I know) restaurants, with 3 bars. One of the bars was outside, along the water. I live in Pensacola, FL, so that view overlooked the Gulf of Mexico. Every year for the 4th of July, the city would put on a fireworks display on a barge locate less than a mile from the bar. People would arrive early to get good seating. The city would close off a stretch of Bayfront Parkway (the road along the water) so that people could line up to watch the fireworks.
We were always busy for the 4th, as people love any reason to drink. I always marvelled at how excited people got when watching fireworks. Personally, I don’t get it. I’ve seen fireworks. I saw them as a kid. I saw them as a teen. I’ve seen them as an adult. There’s nothing special about them. I don’t begrudge anyone watching them, but I don’t get the appeal of watching them when you see them every year, sometimes twice (4th & New Years Eve).
One good thing–when the show started, the bar slowed down. Almost no one orders drinks bc they’re watching the preeeeeetty lights. That was always a good thing, bc the lead up to that was always busy. Not being a fan of fireworks, I could wander off and use the restroom, grab a bite to eat, or even just sit down in air conditioning for about 15 minutes. Then once the show was over, it was always time to clean up bc people left in droves.
Tony:
That reminds me of Christmas with the Dead, by Joe R. Lansdale, where the sole survivor of a zombie outbreak discovers that stringing up xmas lights and plugging them in pacifies the zombies. They like looking at the pretty lights.
Inaji:
I wonder if that’s the result of some residual trace of humanity within them.
And that reminds me of George Romero’s movie ‘Dawn of the Dead’ which dealt in large part with his views on American consumerism:
BTW, I’ve been meaning to ask-what is your gravatar? I can’t quite make it out. Almost looks like a string of popsicles.
The Black Dog eats at my table regularly. I try not to feed him, but he usually finds something to gnaw on.
Despair.
Any semblance of human decency in our benighted politics is long dead.
Predatory capitalism rules all.
Religion is about power and the imposition of control, nothing more.
The planet is dying.
There isn’t enough time left for us to evolve enough common sense to survive.
Thousands of suicides were directly attributable to the recession. (I’ll dig up the stats later.)
Caring about our self destruction isn’t enough.
I can’t fix any of it and I don’t want to be around to witness much more of our slow death.
Despair.
morgan:
I did not know this, so I looked it up.
Damn:
Now, Inaji, have enough people kindly told you how to do your job our should we go and find some more? The nerve some people have…
Tony:
It’s a tiny bit of this piece: https://www.flickr.com/photos/67993470@N03/11260907673/in/photostream
Giliell:
One’s enough, thank you. Mr. Oh I paint miniatures hasn’t bothered to enlighten anyone as to whether or not that’s how he makes a living.
Morgan,
As the probability of a good outcome vanishes, what is left is distilled hope. Don’t lose that.
Recently, my wife came across a video of a bunch of pleasure boaters who came across a juvenile humpback whale trapped in a drag net. After having struggled for hours to get free, it was exhausted and near drowning. The boaters spent 4 hours hauling up the net and cutting it away from the poor whale until finally it was free. The whale then proceeded to put on an amazing aerial display, jumping, breaching, slapping its tail with the joy of being free and alive. This video illustrates perfectly the dichotomy of our nature as humans. No other species is capable of such thoughtless destruction–as illustrated by the drift net. At the same time, no other species would have taken four hours of slaving away at considerable risk to save a member of another species from the drift net. At our worst, we are the worst blight on a beautiful planet. At our best, we will sacrifice everything to give another creature a second chance. It is up to each of us which of these natures we embrace and which we encourage in others. The only church I belong to is the Church of the Second Chance. (read “Dinner at the Homesick restaurant,” by Anne Tyler.)
a_ray:
Thanks for mentioning that video. Waking up to read the disheartening double punch of SCOTUS twin rulings put me in a mood similar to morgan’s, so your words, and this video were much appreciated. And many thanks to your wife for bringing the video to your attention.
Here it is.
I’m watching the video right now. The compassion of the boaters is amazing. They’re aware of the inherent danger in trying to assist this beautiful creature yet they do so anyways. At one point the whale actually drags the boaters along the Sea of Cortez, like they were sightseeing. Wow. Good tears now.
Inaji, I’m moving this over here because I don’t want to sidetrack the HL thread any farther – was the Irvine art store Sterling Art? They went out of business a few years back, and I still miss them. Art Supply Warehouse in Westminster is still going strong, though.
Also, the Elder Daughter and I are really enjoying your bird photos – whoever finds the newest one first tells the other, and we both oooh and aww over your birds.
I really needed that video. Thank you, A_Ray and Mrs. A_Ray.
Anne D:
Yep. Loved that place.
There are new bird photos up – a grackle stuffing banana bread, and a baby Downy woodpecker. Thanks!
Tony:
Me too. Still dripping.
a_ray
Thanks. I’ve seen the whale video, many times. I always cry. I agree with everything you said, intellectually. But how do I keep pulling the blade out of my gut that the world insists on ramming back in. There are more of them than there are of us. Some of us were born to care deeply… some of us have no familiarity with that emotion. And the latter are winning. And I am so tired of fighting.
I will read “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.” I enjoy Anne Tyler’s work.
Distilled hope.
Wish there was a way to distill and bottle empathy. Put *that* in drugstores.
I’m going to struggle to manufacture some, and hold on to it if I can. I haven’t quit yet.
feelgood chaser: Big Cats like boxes too – youtube
Tony!
There is, actually. The human hormone oxytocin is the “fall in love” magic elixer. It is what makes parents love their children.
I saw a TED video some time back that spoke of this and if I recall correctly the person actually had an aerosol of the stuff.
The next best way to stimulate the production of oxytocin in another human is to give them a hug. Proven in the lab.
Those of us who care deeply are destined to suffer. However, as long as we persist, we do not suffer alone. And then there’s always the pig joke:
A salesman is driving down the road when he sees from the road what looks like a pig with 2 wooden legs in a farm yard. Doubling back, sure enough–a pig with two wooden legs. He has to hear the story, so he walks up to the door and knocks. A farmer–straight out of American Gothic–opens the door.
“Excuse me,” says the salesman. “I was driving down the road and couldn’t help but notice you have a pig with 2 wooden legs. I have to know the story behind that.”
The farmer swells with pride, his slightly slumped shoulders pulling back and his chest inflating. “Well, now, Mister. That there pig is no ordinary pig,” says the farmer. “One night me and the missus had both gone to bed and a fire broke out in the house. And that pig, he jumped the fence, he runned up to the house, he turned on the garden hose with his snout, and he had the fire out by the time me and the missus responded to the noise.”
“Oh, my God,” says the salesman. “What an amazing animal.”
“And that’s not all,” interrupts the farmer. “Another time, a fire broke out in the barn. Well, this time, the garden hose wouldn’t reach. But that there pig, he runned up and down and made so much noise that we made it out in time to save all the animals!”
“Wow, what an amazing animal!” says the salesman.
“And that’s not all,” interjects the farmer. “Another time, a bunch of the kids was swimmin’ down by that swimmin’ hole, and one of ’em swum out too far and started to drown. And that pig, he jumped the fence. He runned down to the swimmin’ hole and he swum out and he saved that kid. And another time…”
“Wait,” asks the salesman. “How’d he get the two wooden legs?”
The farmer looks incredulously at what he now can see is a big-city rube. “Well, now, Mister. A pig like that you just don’t eat all at once.”
I once got a friend of mine to pass oatmeal through her nose telling her that joke. You need to laugh. Laughter is the way we humans say that we aren’t beaten yet.
LOL! Oatmeal splat!
A_Ray:
I remember Blake Clark telling that joke on the Tonight Show (when it was Johnny Carson’s).
Oatmeal through her nose.
I keep repeating that in my head because it’s so wacky. I can understand though, bc that joke was funny as all get out (hmmm, where’d that phrase come from).
Once, at a Con, I told a friend of mine, one I’d only meet at this Con, a funny annecdote. With us was my BFF J whom I see once a week. Halfway through the story my good friend J, while drinking her mead, remembered that I’d told her this before and she remembered the funny part.
I do not recommend taking a shower with mead, especially with sweet mead.
The Con friend never heard the end of the story….
brb
*baking you Internet out of lavender cookies*
At least in German we have two Officially Greatest Poets & Playwrights Ever (Goethe and Schiller), so the absurdity of picking just four Officially Greatest Artists Ever is a bit more apparent…
Funny that you mention Yeats. In Unweaving the Rainbow, a book I continue to recommend, Dawkins wrote he’s somewhat ashamed to admit who his favorite poet is: “the confused Irish mystic William Butler Yeats”.
I don’t think Shakespeare is mentioned in that book at all; several other poets are (Keats and Shelley come to mind – it’s been a few years since I last read it), and at least two poems are quoted in full.
^_^
I don’t do champagne, though; I like neither alcohol nor carbon dioxide (every bubble a sting of a needle!) nor even grape juice. :-)
Cross-posting from the Lounge (which in turn was crossposted from FB, thanks to the ever wonderful SallyStrange):
More Baby Blue Jay photos. They are too cute.
When my wife and I decided to tie the knot, we decided to tell each other our favorite jokes. Mine was the pig joke. My wife’s was:
Three ropes walk into a bar. Two sit down, and one goes up to the bartender and says, “Hi, I’d like a beer for myself and one each for my two friends.”
The bartender’s eyes narrow, and he says, “Ain’t you a rope?”
“Well…yes,” the rope says warily.
The bartender says with a menacing voice, “We don’t serve your kind here.”
“But we have money, and…” the rope says until he is interrupted.
“I said we don’t serve your kind here,” the bartender says emphatically.
The rope looks dejected and heads back to the table. “Hey, guys, I think we need to find a friendlier bar.”
The second rope want’s to try, but the result is the same: “I told your rope friend we don’t serve your kind here.”
And as they are getting ready to leave, finally the third rope gets an idea. She twists herself inside out and musses up her hair, then walks up to the bar and says, “Hi, I’d like a beer for myself and one for my two friends.”
“Ain’t you a rope?” the bartender says in a growl.
She replies, “Why, no. I’m a frayed not.”
Thank you, folks. I’m here all week. Don’t forget to tip your waitress.
More thanks for that whale video. That is all.
It is fucking raining on my Ipad.
Maybe I should go inside.
although the little rainbows are kinda cute
If it would stop raining for … oh … twelve hours
it might become possible to actually walk on the garden
More material for Anita Sarkeesian?
Happy Canada Day!
Well, I guess I can pick up my million from Randi now…
Does anyone think that this might be useful for real activism? I have been thinking along similar lines myself. My ideas might not be the best, but this seems like it has a lot of potential.
http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2014/06/you-wanna-keep-harassing-women-at.html
Carefully planned protesting with groups that plan for the worst but model the best could be really effective. The “gently counseling” argument would go both ways, protestors stay back and counselors try to talk to people at the door or by their cars. Tables can be brought up with literature. Everyone has a camera ready just in case. We could record the information of the people attending the church with violent protestors and wonder about the sorts of people that would associate with them.
Also some make the argument that debates are useful because you can plant intellectual seeds even though few actually change their minds at the debate. Despite the people reacting intensely to such a thing there will be some who are curious about why people would protest in such a way.
cm (from the mental illness thread):
I already said I misinterpreted him [pharyngsd]. Yes, my reading comprehension needs work.
Pharyngsd believes that unqualified people can diagnose mental illness in others (as seen here, here, and here).
So when I read this:
I was confused about who was “recognizing a possible mental illness…”. Was he saying that Person A can recognize mental illness in Person R, or was he saying that Person R can recognize mental illness in themselves? My confusion stems from the previous sentence, because that seems to imply that pharyngsd feels that others should not label someone mentally ill. Which contradicts his opinions as expressed in my links above.
Yes, I didn’t give him the benefit of the doubt. I let bias color that. I’m sorry for that. I am *still* confused though.
Tony!, the thing is that if you’re going to complain about people (random non-qualified people) diagnosing mental illness on the Internet, then, well, PZ’s ‘This is real mental illness’ is doing exactly that. That’s it, basically. Except that I’m being snarkfully argumentative. ;-)
—
pharynsd has been willfully stupid across a bunch of threads. But, what pharyngsd said in that particular thread was basically true, and since it was being illogically attacked, and I hate illogic, I retain my right to be all Vulcan about it. :-)
—
*peace*
Ehh, there’s a ‘g’ that needs a home in the 2nd paragraph of #453.
Here it is. Somebody write a Greasemonkey script!
cm:
You’re right.
That doesn’t negate my confusion though.
Did y’all know that PixieStix still exist?
SO is carving a spoon.
Using a tool which is actually known as a ‘spoon gouge’.
I will let y’all know the results, if we don’t need to take a trip to Emergency.
There is also a hatchet involved.
mmmm PixieStix…
Chigau @ 456, yes.
I finally got some half decent shots of Hairy woodpeckers. (Yeah, yeah, let the jokes commence.)
Stupid question time………………
Why are they called Hairy woodpeckers?
So you don’t mix them up with Freddy woodpeckers.
Morgan, no idea. The smallest known woodpeckers, which look like the Hairys, are called Downy woodpeckers.
In principle I’m not actually uncomfortable with non-experts trying to point out “mental illness” in principle. It just that the act of doing so has a lot of elements that make it difficult to do well and anyone trying to do what is normally done by experts should also be able to endure a challenge that an expert would face.
The first thing is that anyone trying to do so should be able to back up their fact claims with very specific references to brain science literature. They should be able to pick out specific observations and compare them with defined conditions, and related conditions that produce similar observations through damage or other pathology. They should also be able to know when any specific diagnostic category is known to be a placeholder for a cluster of similar things or other area of disagreement or controversy in a subject area.
The second thing is that anyone trying to point out “mental illness” should know that the quotes indicate that the term is filled with a whole lot of conditions that arise from a lot of causes, and they should be able to talk about those differences fairly.
Some of these conditions are not really worth the social stigma attached to the words “mental illness”, stigma that arises from a conflation of many characteristics from many conditions that most people mentally lump together when they consider the term. Depression, psychopathy and other things should not be easily connected without cause.
Some of these causes remove personal agency from the actions taken by the person with the condition, which is probably why many wanted to believe that Elliot Rodger was mentally ill. Some examples of removal of personal agency are obvious and involve damage, genetic problems like gene deletions, and other obvious large changes to brain function.
But others (and this one is very speculative because while it’s a possibility the science is full of unknown unknowns) may involve people responding to natural emotional states that can end up in very distorted thinking that may be unchangeable. How do we deal with people that followed their emotions or social group to a toxic and unchangeable state without realizing this would happen?
There are also mentally ill people who have conditions that alter thought, even in large ways like damage and severe mutations or experience, but don’t take away agency and choice and instead shape how that choice and agency manifests in intuitive and intellectual realms.
Finally you have the people who are mentally ill, got there through their own emotional choices and can come back from that state through other choices.
Anyone who wants to seriously talk mental illness should be able to do all of that or at least be willing to learn to do so through experience.
We washed the windows on the ground floor.
uuumm
I guess it’s been a while, ’cause Holy Shit! is it ever bright in here!
Chigau, do you know what’s happened to Daz?
Inaji:
Good question, re: Daz
****
A comment I left at Think Progress about the Missouri Governor vetoing a 72 hour waiting period on abortions:
This was a response I got:
The fuck. So I’m wrong for stating a truth? Women have told me they were happy to get an abortion. I’m not lying when I say this.
I also see the commenter assumes I’m heterosexual.
Ináji
re: Daz
I have no clue.
I’ll put a note in Monitor Space.
Thanks, Chigau.
Tony, you can put me down as someone who was happy to get an abortion.
Relieved of a burden, stress, prospects of financial woes, health woes, intense physical pain? Grateful that you were allowed access to a medical procedure that allowed you to exercise control over your own body and choose your own fate? Satisfied with the quiet resolution of what would otherwise be a dramatic, life-changing event? Content with the decision you have made and with being able to return to life as normal?
Sounds like happiness to me. Oh, but this about abortion, so it can’t be happiness. Because everything about abortion must be somber serious because BABEEEZ OMG!!! No one will quibble about people getting any other operation truly not being “happy” but virtually everyone will if that operation is abortion. Fuck.
YES!!!! Too bloody right. I totally felt this kind of happy – both times!
The woman who doesn’t believe me when I told her that I know women who were happy to have abortions didn’t even acknowledge the link I posted to Imnotsorry.net.
Perhaps she’ll change her mind once she reads the comments by two women who said they were happy to have an abortion.
I pointed out to her it’s a double standard to expect me to listen to her, but not to the women I know.
(Incidentally, this community is where I first learned that there are women who were happy to have an abortion. It was foremost in my thoughts when commenting over there)
That’s a common thing with RW types. The MRA/PUA contingent is big on telling women what they should feel, not shutting the fuck up and listening to women. Shutting the fuck up and listening isn’t hard, but you must leave your preconceptions at the door. That is the hard part.
oops
the wind just shifted
For cis people who are interested in learning a little bit about the experience of being a trans woman, take a look at #YesAllTransWomen.
Janine:
Thanks for that link. I’m seeing some tweets from some real assholes. Like the one that says “if you were born with a penis, got it cut off and got breasts you are still not a woman & don’t insult me with that #yesallwomen”. Not sure how to link to that.
In her bio, she says she has a vagina but she is not a cunt about it. Yeah, I blocked her silly TERFy ass.
In her bio, she says she has a vagina but she is not a c*nt about it. Yeah, I blocked her silly TERFy ass.
Tony, linking to a Twitter comment is easy. Hit the minute/hour counter on the right side of the top line. The will make a page that will contain the statement plus all the comments that came before and came after that point.
I don’t think I’ve read much of anything by Dan Savage. But this column at the Guardian highlights some insensitivity and a lack of awareness:
(bolding mine)
Society has become more accepting and tolerant, but it’s far from perfect. Not to mention, in this very article, he appears aware of the difficulties in coming out as bisexual. It’s a little demeaning to suggest that all bisexual people are immature (that’s how I’m interpreting “grow up”). It’s also not easy to come out. There’s still a lot of pushback. Yes, for the closeted young person, seeing a high profile person who is lesbian, bisexual, or gay can be inspirational. But coming out still has its difficulties, be it in the workforce, with friends, or with family and it isn’t right to expect anyone to do that. If someone chooses to be a public role model and source of inspiration for others, that’s their call, but its not anyone’s inherent responsibility especially given that there’s often a cost associated with being out. It’s a fine line to walk, and I get what he’s trying to say, but he fumbled saying it.
Janine @477:
Thank you for the help.
Ináji and all
Daz is fine.
Internet provider issues should be solved by the middle of the month.
I really detest Oppression Olympics.
Tony,
Yeah, Savage usually errs on the side of vulgarity, which can definitely ruffle feathers (e.g., he got in ‘trouble’ for using a slur for ‘transsexual’ in the context of why he doesn’t use that word anymore). I’ve been reading and listening to him for a bunch of years now, and he’s almost universally sensitive when he’s answering individual questions – and he has apparently inspired a lot of bi people in hetero relationships to come out as bi.
But his basic calculus is exactly right, I think.
So I don’t think it’s a lack of awareness, it’s just recognizing that coming out is also difficult for bi folks but that’s the only way forward.
Wow, some of those tweets were pretty vile.
Tony, Savage has a very bad record when it comes to bisexuals.
No shit, Sherlock. Assholes like yourself don’t help when you spend years speculating on how bisexuality isn’t a real thing, at least when it comes to men.
Josh (spokesgay) and I had a *long* talk about bi peoples on TET, way back when. A lot of the problem is that bi people aren’t accepted by gay and lesbian people, unless they are in a same sex relationship, then it’s “eh, you’re just gay, you don’t want to admit it” shit. If you’re in a mixed sex relationship, “you’re really hetro, you just don’t want to admit it” shit. Hetro people have a special dislike of bi people, ’cause you could be looking at either partner! omgwtfbbq’.
Chigau:
*phew*. Thanks, Chigau!
Ogvorbis @481:
Is this related to anything around here (or FtB at large)?
****
Derek:
I have no problem with vulgarity. Bigoted slurs are different story. Those, I don’t like.
A way of going forward.
An important way of moving forward.
Not sure that it’s the only way forward.
Brain doesn’t want to function that well today, so I don’t have any alternatives, but I’m reluctant to believe there’s only one way to achieve the desired goals in this situation.
****
Inaji:
I wonder where that comes from too. At one point (in the years prior to my joining the community here) I felt the same way about bisexual men and women. I thought it was either a phase they were going through or they were lying or worse, “they wanted to have their cake and eat it too”. I thought “if you a man who sucks dick, ever, you’re gay” or “if you’re a woman who eats pussy, you’re a lesbian”. There was no room in my narrow understanding of sexuality for an understanding of sexuality as existing along a spectrum. Nor did I even think that my view of peoples’ sexuality wasn’t informed by listening to them, but rather, from projecting my opinions onto others.
Suffice to say, in time, I came to realize how wrong I was and wish I could kick myself in the ass for thinking like that.
I’ve continued to comment on the Think Progress article I linked to @466. The above is a response I just got from a commenter.
I got a good chuckle out of how deeply wrong he is (and of course I *had* to respond).
Tony!:
Over at Ed Brayton’s Blog — Poll Shows Support for Equality.
Everyone knows and misses slimy dumb Ben Stein,
Say hello to Creepy Ben Stein!
http://jezebel.com/ben-stein-writes-truly-bizarre-essay-on-being-a-creepy-1599361600?utm_campaign=socialflow_jezebel_facebook&utm_source=jezebel_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
http://www.today.com/money/ceo-indra-nooyi-thinks-working-women-cant-have-it-all-1D79883460
When they’re talking about mom or dad not being home enough, it almost seems like they’re hearkening back to some bygone era of family perfection, where kids got the ideal amount of time with their parents. When was this?
Savage is full of shit. He has on his podcast either cited bullshit studies claiming that male bisexuality doesn’t exist, implies it’s a phase among women, and the like. Multiple times.
He doesn’t have a moral high ground to bitch at Bis for not coming out when he contributes to being a shit head to them.
huh a post got eated
but the gist of it was that Dan Savage is full of shit. He has repeatedly erased or denied the existence of bi people on his show then gets on a high horse.
Tony / Inaji: Can you explain how coming out as bi is more difficult than coming out as gay? Is it in the sense that many gay folks still don’t believe bi people exist? Or that it gives parents the hope that you might slide back into straight after a little adventure?
Ing: No big loss, then. Let’s see: his letter of the day yesterday was talking to bi people about the perceived relative difficulty of finding bi women or men for threesomes, and an appropriate term to find them. Maybe he was a jerk years and years ago, but it’s ridiculous to say he’s erased or denied the very existence of gay people in recent years. If I’m wrong, show me some real examples.
Derek:
I’m gay, so that’s the only coming out experience I can fully relate to and I’m not comfortable speaking about other peoples’ experiences when I know so little of them. For my part, when I was in high school, and began realizing I had an attraction to men, I didn’t admit it to anyone, and I had girlfriends. When I began to accept my attraction to guys, I considered myself bisexual, bc I thought that was “safer” than being gay. But I didn’t know anyone who was openly bisexual. Hell, I didn’t know anyone who was openly gay until I was 19. I had no one to look up to. No role models, no examples to model behavior after. I didn’t know what it was like to live as a gay man, let alone a bisexual man, so all my opinions were formed in response to the prejudices around me. I absorbed those so deeply that even after I came out of the closet @20, I still retained prejudices about gay or bisexual men for years (and I won’t even start on my assumptions about lesbian or bisexual women).
I think your guess may be close though, bc I do know that some gay people, even today, deny the existence of bisexual people. It’s the whole binary thinking again. Either you’re gay or you’re heterosexual. There’s no in between.
Also, given the unique circumstances everyone has, I’m not certain it’s more or less difficult to come out as gay or bisexual. I think they can both be difficult.
Having heard every one of the fallacies in Dan Savage’s post numerous times in my adult years as an openly bisexual person, I’d like to say he’s pretty close to 100% full of shit on this topic. For example – and it couldn’t have been much closer to home – even my own brother assumed I was lying when I claimed to be bisexual while in a long-term same-sex relationship; and numerous folk in the gay community I associated with were happy to assert ‘all bisexual people are liars’ or ‘bisexuals are incapable of being trusted’ etc. etc. etc. Sometimes people would even flaunt this sort of crap in company in full knowledge that I was bisexual, expecting me to take the bait by arguing with them. So my opinion of Savage’s viewpoint quoted above is, he’s worse than worthless.
Oh, and speaking of worse than worthless, what is going on with the bizarre performance art in the Poemsplaining/Mansplaining thread? Is Otis Idli a sock puppet for some known troll such as Steersman, or someone equally obtuse, verbose, and irredeemably boring?
So the leader of our left wing political party said ‘I’m sorry I’m a man’ to a womens refuge group he was talking to.
Naturally the media and the other politicians focused on the policy he was announcing around domestic violence and didn’t fixate on one line from his speech.
Oh… Wait.. No.. I got that wrong…. http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/10232457/David-Cunliffe-I-m-sorry-for-being-a-man
So angry with the media now. I heard two or three journalists and political commentators talk about how the issue was important and how they wish they could focus on that. I sat there and yelled at the radio “SO DO THAT. RIGHT NOW! TALK ABOUT THE ISSUE.” I don’t think they heard me though.
Anyway, just needed somewhere to vent.
Inaji
Yeah, I’ve been wondering about that. Bi people seem to challenge everybody’s dearly and most sincerely held beliefs about sexual orientation.
I know Mr. and I got a few stinky eyes in our time when we went out with our gay friends to gay bars and arrived first. Quite often we were not served until our gay friends showed up.
Now, I get the problem of straight people appropriating queer spaces because it’s hip, but I always thought they were making a whole lot of assumptions about us. Ok, they were mostly right in our case, but when I showed up alone they assumed something different.
In short, they were not any better than all the people in college who always thought I was in a heterosexual realtionship with my gay BFF
Xanthe:
Oh god that’s a trainwreck.
I don’t get the guy.
I listed a definition of mansplaining and gave examples as well as a link to plenty more. Yet he redefines the meaning of the word and says the examples don’t say what I claim.
WTF?! I don’t even know how to argue with that. He deserves the mockery. Doubly so b/c once he began whining about being mocked. Triply so bc he felt the need to demonstrate his credentials.