Some days I feel like this:
https://twitter.com/emilysears/status/1665750833097764865 (I’m pissed at how useless Twitter has become — no more imbedding?)
Others, I’m like this:
Being a man isn’t hard, but it can be confusing.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Wow! I looked up @watchfulcoyote on TikTok and he has lots of videos like this. Everyone should definitely watch them!
Very much appreciate no embedding. While I can block those requests in my laptop’s hosts file, I don’t know how to do that in iOS (from where I often read your site) and would prefer not to make even passive requests back to that shithole company.
Stories about Twitter from the last fortnight…
(1) Twitter is now worth one third what Musk paid for it
(2) Twitter’s advertising revenue dropped 59% in the last month
(3) Twitter has just lost another Head of Trust and Safety
(4) Twitter has decided it no longer needs to honour contracts, simply won’t pay Google for the cloud service they are using
Some interesting wrinkles with (3) and (4). So the Head of Trust and Safety resigned suddenly after many months talking up how supported she felt at Twitter and how reasonable their policies were. Neither Twitter nor the leaving Head are telling anyone what happened, but it coincides with Musk’s decision to undercut her and publicly call it a mistake that her team ‘limited the reach’ (i.e. not censor completely but reduce the casting width) of a transphobic video post from a professional right-wing shitstirrer account, with Musk expressly saying that ‘misgendering’ is not a violation of Twitter’s hate speech policy and in fact does not even fall under abuse and harrassment.
As for not paying for contracted cloud services, apparently Musk threatened the same to Amazon…but Amazon is also an advertiser on Twitter and said they’d pull their spots if Twitter didn’t pay. Truly a moral paragon and business genius.
They are almost on a daily basis getting more and more useless.
I just followed a link to a news report about the war in Ukraine to Twitter.
They said it was restricted to those over 18.
This isn’t adult content, it is a news report about the war in Ukraine.
To read it, I would have to log in to my Twitter account.
Because kids can’t lie about their age and create Twitter accounts, I guess.
I don’t have a Twitter account and never will so that was the end of that.
Then, a followup llnk took me to the Twitter main page.
Which was mostly garbage including a Tweet by Musk.
I am not surprised that most of the comments above deal with twittle and the ‘head twit, the elongated muskmelon’ in a critical way. I am in complete agreement that twitter is now almost entirely a huge, useless, aggregation of crap. And, the heat twit is being as dishonest and spewing as many lies and crap as the rtwingnuts he seems to want to encourage and lead. Thanks, PZ for stopping embedding twitters, I never messed with twitter anyway.
As regards the cartoon… My late wife wrote a story with a different take on the usual werewolf issues. See https://www.kithrup.com/~djheydt/moonrise.html The full story is in “Stories You Never Heard Of”, which is downloadable from https://www.kithrup.com/~djheydt (4th entry down).
Back to PZ’s point. Being a man has so many varied and crazy implications, especially if remarks in society are any indication. Do we have to engage in testicle tanning to be a real man? Must we, like the rtwingnut xtian terrorists be misogynistic to be a real man? Must we submit to having our genitals examined and have the resultant binary judgement of our sex/gender branded on our foreheads? Or, can we show some sensitivity and care for others? I’ve never been ‘in step’ with mainstream society and even though peer pressure is a powerful force for conformity, I’ve always tried to be guided by my principles of honesty, logic and decency. (as an old saying goes: ‘at midnight in the light of the full moon I turn into a thing of unspeakable horror. . . a human being’)
I think for me really being an adult man in our society started when I realized how badly society lies to us about what being a man means.
If we use the alpha male concept as an example you can find public personalities who endorse the alpha male idea while also trashing academia. It’s like this one thing gave them BS ideas they agreed with so that’s the only thing to come out of academia in the last 50 years that they think is even vaguely okay.
Jealousy is another good example. We get mixed up messed up stories that try to sell us on some really backwards ideas about relationships. Like, showing jealousy means you show you’re really in love with someone. But jealousy isn’t a form of love, it’s an expression of insecurity. Or if your partner cheats on you, you should be mad at the person they cheated with. What’s the point of that? Your partner might be lying to them, too. And even in the rare case where the other person is maliciously trying to mess up your life, it’s only your partner’s decision to cheat on you that allows this to happen in the first place. Society doesn’t just lie to males about jealousy but it fits here because it’s another lie about what a healthy relationship looks like.
I really feel like if you buy into all this BS the best you can hope for is that nothing puts any stress on your relationship with your partner. If anything does, some of your responses are going to be backwards because you’ll be trying to use the problems themselves as solutions and you’ll be blaming the wrong people. You can’t solve any problems with those approaches. Fortunately for men in our society, they get the privilege of an easier time shifting the blame onto other people. Don’t think that’s the case? Just think about the relative frequency you hear about “crazy ex-girlfriend/wife” stories vs “crazy ex-boyfriend/husband” stories and you’ll start to come around (or double down on mysogyny I guess).