This woman is my hero.

While most students at Columbia University will spend the first day of classes carrying backpacks and books, Emma Sulkowicz will start her semester on Tuesday with a far heavier burden. The senior plans on carrying an extra-long, twin-size mattress across the quad and through each New York City building – to every class, every day – until the man she says raped her moves off campus.

Society needs more people who do crazy brave ridiculous things. Go Emma. Too bad she would probably face legal penalties for releasing her rapist’s name. (Also it’s cool that her nail polish matches her shirt. (Yes I do notice things like that.))

Examining the minimum wage and the idea of raising it from a purely economic standpoint is insufficient and abhorrent.

Accommodations like the minimum wage and the 40-hour workweek are not economic concerns solely, but instead serve as a signal delineating and clarifying what sort of society we wish to have.

For the most part, I think the social justice habit of lecturing people on their privilege is counterproductive.

It mostly makes enemies and hurts the cause. No, no, it doesn’t matter if you’re right. Even if absolutely every word is 100% true.

It’s better and more useful to appeal to empathy, to justice and to fairness. Your harangue on how privilege allowed someone to get somewhere they otherwise would not have might sound in the swim to you, but all your unlucky listener will ever hear is: “Your life is a sham, you don’t deserve what you have, and you are personally evil.”

Warning, again: even if it is true.

Because this is what happens. Your natural allies say, “Well those people are mental and I am having nothing to do with them.”

It probably seems like I am more conservative than I am from writing these things. But I only attack my own side because I care about it. I am quite radical in most ways,  more so than most people would believe. I’ll spell that out sometime.

Other than in an academic setting – where it is useful and valid – for actually changing the world, all the “privilege” talk should be left in the privy where it belongs.

Mozilla has now completely screwed up the right-click context menu in Firefox 32. What is going on over there, did someone deliver meth instead of sugar for the tea and coffee?

Anyway, it now unfortunately looks like this.

I tried it in a VM and as expected it is terrible, and slower.

Most liberal causes are just and good. However, the sanctimony often found there is a problem as well as blindness to observable facts.

Liberals believe it is racism when it is observed that when people from a culture with vastly different values and standards for treatment of human beings and women immigrate, said members of that culture shockingly continue to mistreat and abuse women.

In the liberal mind, stating that a large influx of men who believe that women are little better than cattle is going to make life worse for the women there is akin to genocide.

I personally don’t care which side is wrong in a debate. I won’t be a part of it.

Yes, the “Eurabia” of the conservatives is 99% bullshit, but at the same time pretending immigrants have absolutely no effect on anything ever is pure blatherskite. It’s only something someone with an agenda other than knowing the truth could believe.

The simple fact is that if a bunch of people with values averse to yours show up — especially if your society is already pretty damn sexist — bad things are going to happen to women.

Just as we shouldn’t believe that everyone from North Africa, Pakistan and other Muslim countries are demons, we also shouldn’t take the liberal goo goo approach and pretend they are all angels.

That way lies madness — and rape.

If people want to continue living in California long-term, nuclear-powered or less feasibly solar-powered desalinization plants are probably the only answer.

Desalinization uses enormous amounts of energy. I am not sure it can ever be worth it with solar or wind. Fossil fuels aren’t the answer, obviously.

Nuclear it is, then. As for the rest of the desert Southwest, better start building some pipelines I guess.

(The best solution is for people not to live there at all in great numbers, but yeah, humans don’t work like that.)

This makes perfect sense.

A recent article in TheAtlantic.com pointed out that hedge funds run by women make three times as much money as hedge funds run by men, and that companies with female CEOs outperform companies with male CEOs by nearly 50%.

To succeed as a woman in business, you have to be two or three times as good as a man holding or aspiring to the same position. It only follows that these women would outperform their male competitors.

Most interesting comment I’ve read today, from here.

Recall that endeavors demanding cross-field expertise are low-status, presumably because they’re hard to credential.

The parent post is pretty interesting, too.

Another reason I am glad I didn’t go into science: all I am interested in is cross-field questions, really.

Sounds like Ta-Nehisi Coates had a childhood much like mine.

And if Michael Brown was not angelic, I was practically demonic. I had my first drink when I was 11. I once brawled in the cafeteria after getting hit in the head with a steel trash can.

It wasn’t because I got hit in the head with a steel trash can, but I once brawled in the cafeteria, too!

Got suspended. The bully got suspended for longer at least that time.

This is for those – especially the many engineeritis infectees – who persist in thinking that literature and the humanities don’t matter.

I found empirical support for the idea that the Harry Potter series influenced the political values and perspectives of the generation that came of age with these books. Reading the books correlated with greater levels of acceptance for out-groups, higher political tolerance, less predisposition to authoritarianism, greater support for equality, and greater opposition to the use of violence and torture. As Harry Potter  fans will have noted, these are major themes repeated throughout the series. These correlations remained significant even when applying more sophisticated statistical analyses – when controlling for, among other things, parental influence.

Other studies show similar things about other literature. This is not a fluke. It’s why I’ve long supported the idea that before anyone gets any STEM degree, they should be required to take two or three years of liberal arts/humanities courses only.

It might not make them love the humanities, and maybe it won’t even make them better people, but it can only help statistically speaking.

That is, assuming college were low-cost or free. In the current “fleece and extort everyone” model, this is untenable.

Depression isn’t new, but its prevalence certainly is.

I wonder why? There has to be some cause, some reason why it affects so many when historically that seems not to have been the case.

My guess is that the narrative of depression – that it is something that just is – is not correct. My hypothesis is that depression is caused by a proliferation of choices in the modern world.

No, my prescription isn’t to roll back modernity, and yes I do think depression is a real thing.

But like a lot of real things understanding the actual reasons for it occurring, even if those are uncomfortable, is necessary for treating it.

I like Iggy Azalea I think because I identify with her.

Two feet in the red dirt, school skirt
Sugar cane, back lane
3 jobs took years to save
But I got a ticket on that plane
People got a lot to say
But don’t know shit bout where I was made
Or how many floors that I had to scrub
Just to make it past where I am from

Other than the fact that I wore very few school skirts, her story while not exactly like mine really resonates with me. They are mirrors.

I got on a plane for the US Army when I was just over 18 years old. I came from nowhere, from a white trash family. Everyone told me I would be a failure, even some of my “friends” and nearly all of my family. That I was crazy. That I didn’t have what it took to do what I wanted to do.

Fuck them, I think, as I make it through basic training.

It’s 1995. I’m standing in line at Fort Bragg, NC. But there are two lines. One is for the people who are going to be paratroopers. I’m in the line for non-paratroopers because that’s where I’ve been assigned.

I look at my line. I look at the other line. “The people in my line look like losers,” I say to myself.

I find a person in charge. “How do I get into the paratrooper line?”

“You want to be a paratrooper, soldier?” the sergeant asks.

“Honestly I don’t know but I don’t want to be in that loser line,” I say.

He laughs. “Then get in the other line, soldier, you’ve already got what it takes!” It was then that I notice the jump wings on his chest.

I get in the other line, and then I pass airborne school though I was dead fucking sick nearly the whole time.

Fuck them, I think as I get the silver wings pinned on my chest.

Yeah, Iggy, I know what you are talking about. I know it.

When I am forced to use a PC without dual monitors, I actually get pissed off. Like truly angry. It seems like an affront against all that’s good and right in the world.

Not having dual monitors is crippling. How people can work on a tiny postage-stamp-screen laptop is beyond me. At least I have the consolation that I’ll always be vastly more productive than they are, sort of like people who attempt to use tablets to work.

Dual monitors are the best thing I’ve ever done to increase my productivity when working, bar none.

I write about this a lot, but this is really striking.

We’ve met the enemy, and it is us.

A whopping 68 percent of Americans think there should be a law that prohibits kids 9 and under from playing at the park unsupervised, despite the fact that most of them no doubt grew up doing just that.

What’s more: 43 percent feel the same way about 12-year-olds. They would like to criminalize all pre-teenagers playing outside on their own (and, I guess, arrest their no-good parents).

This is also a good quote.

I doubt there has ever been a human culture, anywhere, anytime, that underestimates children’s abilities more than we North Americans do today.

When I was either 7 or 8 years old, I got my first “real” bike. At that time, I was permitted to go anywhere within 2-3 miles of my home with no supervision at all. I would often be gone from 8AM in the morning until 8PM at night with my parents having no real idea where I’d gone.

When I was 10 or 11, I got even more freedom by getting permission to cross the main, busy road a few miles away and go wherever I liked.

This is just unimaginable today.

I understand where this person is coming from, but it also has huge problems.

I grew up a Southerner from the deep, deep South. In many places especially where there are large black populations – as there was and is where I sprouted – BEV and white Southern English overlap significantly.

In other words, when I’d travel outside of the South one or another of my northern relatives would tell me that, “You talk like a black person!”

No, I talk like a white Southerner, dumbass.

Whose culture was I appropriating when I was four? My own? How is that even possible?

(In Seattle, I also got accused of eating “black people food” because after the Southern exodus, things that ALL people eat in the South like catfish and collard greens – which I fucking love – became associated by clueless northern folks with black people.)