Here’s a weird mashup for you: Dark Buddhism, one man’s attempt to fuse Buddhism with Randian Objectivism. To his credit, he’s quite clear on the flaws in the Cult of Ayn Rand, but it’s still strange to care so much about Rand’s bogus philosophy that you want to rescue it by stitching it up: building a hybrid of selflessness and selfishness is a contradiction sure to spawn deepities.
I don’t think he has a chance of getting the presidential nomination, but the more I see of his campaign the more I like him. He represents a side of the Democratic party that has been neglected for decades, and it’s about time it started demanding more attention.
You think you’ve seen it all, and then along comes someone to dig even deeper. A company called Skaldic Games came up with a little game they had up on Steam, before it got pulled. It was called Kill the Faggot. It was appalling, as you might guess from the title.
It was a pathetic little arcade style shooter: you moved a crosshair around the screen, clicked a button, and shot whatever was under the crosshairs. Only the targets were running groups of people, some of whom were stereotypically gay, and others were cartoonishly transgender individuals. And you got points for killing them.
I am home, all alone, except for the cat.
I have completed all of the grading, and have submitted all of the grades, and am completely done with the semester. I was hoping to get a pat on the head or a cookie, but nope, the place is all empty and quiet. Except for the cat. And she just sank her claws into my thigh, rather than handing out cookies.
Maybe I’ll kick back and read a book. Or take a nap. Or try to read a book and take a nap instead. There are amazing awe-inspiring vistas of non-grade-book based activities ahead of me now.
Here it is, explained for Americans who watch Game of Thrones. It’s exactly the same! Except for the lack of incest, naked women as backdrops, and bloody torture and execution.
I was offended! There was this wildly defamatory rumor spreading around the internets that claimed that beards were disgusting collections of contagious bacteria. This is sort of not true! It turns out that the source was a news report that swabbed a few faces and found fecal bacteria, and squawked about it without context. Reality is that you can find bacteria like that everywhere, even on smooth-faced people. This was not news.
The following is a fragment of the story of a white Ph.D. working at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, but it’s probably universal for any of us who worked at an urban university on the East coast — many of them are located in poorer neighborhoods, where property values are low, and we work there in a little artificial bubble of privilege.
The narratives that students and faculty told about Baltimore were stories of fear. There is almost a hazing of new arrivals. You’re told where not to walk, where not to go. You’re told where is not safe after dark. You’re told of all the muggings and the murders (even if, when you finally look up the statistics, you realise that affluent whites are not at all the victims of Baltimore’s crime problem). And it seeps into your skin.
