Ok, fatlogic people, let’s talk about Rubens. Peter Paul Rubens, specifically.

Those who support their god-given right to a miserable life and early death cite Rubens as “proof” that in the past Western society preferred fat women to those damn waifs.

Well, it depends on what past we’re talking about. And as usual, people writing about it utterly misunderstand the historical context.

First, before we get to that, it’s good to note that Rubens’ paintings were an historical outlier. His contemporaries did not paint such voluptuous models, and in fact in Western art models as large as those in Rubens’ depictions are and have always been an extreme outlier, all the way back to Etruscan and Greek art.

However Rubens’ choice of models was not about beauty or aesthetics, but rather his reaction to the tendency of other painters at that time to depict very thin or nearly-starving models to support the church’s view that privation and denying oneself earthly pleasures was virtuous.

Rubens’ painting were a rejection of this church doctrine and had nothing to do with the aesthetic preferences of anyone directly.

So.

You can kind of see where not understanding historical and cultural context can get you. And that place would be called “Dumbassville.”

I think people should be as fat as they want to be. It doesn’t harm me at all. In fact, it might help as obese people tend to die quite a bit earlier thus reducing lifetime health costs. So thank you for that. My insurance premium thanks you as well.

But I hate disavowal of truth and those who just are stubbornly resistant to operating outside of their own cultural context.

Rubens is not some example of how in some delightful past fat women (or men) were upheld as paragons of beauty. With a few very rare historical exceptions, they just weren’t.

Rubens was making what today would be called a political point, or using painting as an editorial.

(By the way, the picture of Lorde has absolutely nothing to do with the post. I just like the hairstyle and photo. The milkmaid braid is great. She also looks like an alien this way, which I also appreciate. Aliens are cool. Lorde aliens are cooler.)

I’ve told numerous people that that $20 shirt they bought in Target would in today’s dollars cost ~$5,000 in the year 1400. They tend to not believe me. But they are as usual wrong.

This person says $3,500, but she acknowledges not accounting for some production costs.

When you realize historically speaking how fantastically rich our society is – and even how much richer it’s gotten since say 1950 – you then know that the idea that we can’t provide universal healthcare and a UBI is just poppycock.

I’m likely one of the few Americans not of French origin who had ever heard of Charlie Hebdo much less read it before the Paris massacre.

Not some sort of humblebrag, but context. I read French periodicals and though I don’t speak French well at all – about like a four-year-old — I understand it spoken fairly well and read it just fine.

That said, most Americans – and especially Tumblr – writing about the magazine really just have no fucking clue.

They don’t understand French culture, they don’t understand satire and have no idea of the context of the debate or even really any knowledge of history.

That’s what’s tricky about two-layer satire like Charlie Hebdo’s: the joke only works if you see both layers, which often requires conversant knowledge of French politics or culture. If you don’t see that layer, then the covers can seem to say something very different and very racist.

Yeah – after the massacre, I saw consistent and pervasive interpretations of the cartoons as being racist when all the ones I saw cited where specifically and (to me) obviously making fun of racism and racists.

That’s what context and actually knowing something about French culture can do for you.

I’m amazed at how many people are willing to spout off at the mouth or at the keyboard in reference to things about which they have absolutely no clue at all.

My mom made $2.13 an hour base in 1990 working at Cracker Barrel.

Servers still make that now.

Just unacceptable.

Why in so many personal ads and similar do people insist that they are “down to earth?”

This isn’t appealing to me at all. I am not interested in people who are down to earth. This translates to “boring” to me, almost invariably.

Since I am barely convinced I was born on earth, this is a sure sign we’d have nothing in common.

“Down to earth” means in reality “I hold all the conventional opinions of my milieu and social class, and will not challenge you or your ideas in any way.”

Damn, hell no.

It’s always amusing when people pretend that the only racist place in the US is the South.

History and current events say otherwise.

Of course, the South is used as a scapegoat and a culpability transference mechanism for others in the rest of the country to show how racist they (allegedly) are not.

I do actually agree that there is probably more racism in the South. I think probably 60% of whites are actively racist there, and in the rest of the country it’s probably 40-45%.

However, personally, the most racist statement I’ve ever heard anyone make was – check this out – in Seattle.

And I grew up in the South where I heard some truly heinous racial utterances and imprecations.

Anyway, for most white people their idea of racism seems to involve something like attempting to run over a black person with your car, while their thoughts about how black people “really are” are just the obvious truth.

That form of racism knows no boundaries, and is nearly as prevalent in the North and West as anywhere else is what I’ve found.

I didn’t realize there was some dumbass SEO argument for not putting dates on posts.

There are sites I don’t visit any longer because of undated posts.

Probably relates to my field and me being picky, but if I’m reading about something in IT, it really, really matters if it was written two years ago or today. If I can’t figure that out, I won’t be visiting your IT-related site again.

I think that proclivity has spilled over into my browsing of non-IT sites.

Something I figured out early in life is that a lot of people — like most of my family — will tell you that you are doing something wrong merely because you aren’t doing it the way that they would.

But that’s not all of them. Some — like some other parts of my family — actively want to harm you.

Both sorts of people are toxic, but the latter are far worse. Finding out that they way — which is typically unusual — that I prefer to do things is actually faster and better in real world performance most often was a real revelation, as most of my teachers and my family castigated me extensively for my methods.

I’m over it, but it’s worth remembering that not everyone works the same. What to you appears scatterbrained and disorganized is how I best remember things, and how I’m best able to learn them.

I was going to comment on this article from Wired, but it’s so confused and confusing I don’t even know what to say.

As usual when they discuss anything to do with the internet or net neutrality, it gets many things wrong, but what does the headline mean in the context of the article?

“Sprint’s Net Neutrality Reversal Shows How Bad Things Are for ISPs”

What does that have to do with the article? Bad for what ISPs?

It seems that Wired — which pretends to be a technology magazine — would get some writers with experience in the technology industry. Instead, they just write up whatever comes in the press releases their corporate sponsors send them and call it good.

Hey, Wired, I was a photojournalist for five years and have worked in the technology industry for 15 more after that.

I’m available, though I doubt you could afford me.