There’s always a difference between the purpose people think their actions and statements serve, and their actual service. Usually, being vassals to their own culture, in the main most people are mostly unaware of the cultural reasons for their own cogitations, oblivious to the influences of the shepherd dogs guiding them into well-defined corrals of thought.

Which is to say that “trigger warnings” mostly serve as a way to police heretical thoughts in a group, and also in a much larger sense are designed (and I use “designed” advisedly, as there was no designer) to reduce potential communitarian world-altering efforts to atomized, individualistic bits of trauma, like processionary caterpillars circling until they starve, sapped thereby of all power and political efficacy.

Thoughts above were inspired by this, though lately I’ve been pondering cultural shifts, their frequent undetected celerity and then the subsequent denial of the previous state of existence by many.

Not sure how that relates to trigger warnings, but it does. I am still thinking about it.

Another thought about trigger warnings. Similar to how the euphemism treadmill works, the most likely long-term effect of such warnings is for the signifier itself to come to stand in the mind of the warned as the thing signified. In other words, the trigger warning itself will trigger by its association with the trauma the re-living of the traumatic episode, thus nullifying any possible benefit.

That is alas just how human minds work.

This is good.

The outrage about the Facebook “emotional manipulation” study has me puzzled.

The reality is that Facebook is making these choices every day without oversight, transparency, or informed consent.

Facebook collects all your data, sells it to god knows who, advertises incessantly, already does all the things (and more) the researchers did fucking all the time, and people only get pissed off when it’s for research? What in the hell?

I have so little in common with most people. So very little.

Welcome to the Everything Boom, or Maybe the Everything Bubble.

High productivity + inequality + declining middle class + bad policy + bad economic understanding of structural changes == no good investments and everything gets more expensive.

I’m always surprised by how much people change in their late teens and 20s, because I did not. Not very much, anyway. Sometimes it seems the person is completely different, completely renovated, from 15 to 25 and if you knew them in adolescence, you don’t know them in their mid-20s.

Then I realize that I did nearly all of that changing from when I was about 8 or 9 to 13 or so.

The bildung of my own life has never matched anyone else’s I’ve ever known, and thus when people tell me “what’s going to happen,” it has never made any sort of sense to me as I’d already well passed the milestones and thoughts they’d set for me. I must’ve seemed so strange, so removed and odd, to my peers and to my teachers. I know I did,  but even stranger than I realized then I think.

I’ve got so many examples of that, and I don’t really feel like explicating them all in this post.

However, a brief one is that I knew by the time I was 10 years old that I didn’t want to have any children. Since I  am not much different than I was at 10, that conviction has not changed in the least despite people (oh so many people) assuring me that it definitely would.

The Right doesn’t know how birth control works, yes, but it also doesn’t care.

I’ve seen a lot of good little liberals helpfully explaining to the crazy right how birth control isn’t an abortifacient. Save your fucking breath. They do not care. Just like they’re content to ignore all evidence of global warming, the evidence is meaningless to them.

Punishing “sluts” (as they see it) and tribal identification is what really matters to them.

The Left likes to focus on the data, the evidence, and all that. It’s why they consistently lose even if they have a majority opinion. You can’t fight irrational beliefs with rationality, especially in the short term. Attempting to do this only harms your cause, not helps it.

This is probably the stupidest trend I’ve ever heard of, and I grew up in a place chock full of people like this, so I’ve seen some pretty goddamn stupid things in my life.

Where I grew up, people were already burying guns in their back yards, long, long before the Tea Party (early to mid-80s). They were already talking about the Amero, and the imminent UN takeover of the US.

But at least then, people were thrifty (because they were poor) and just didn’t throw money out the window on something so heinously stupid as “rollin’ coal.”

Everyone always thinks their country/culture/way of life is in decline, but sometimes it really is.

This is one of those times.

Same, same.

I also enjoyed reading the classics because I was a vocabulary junkie and nobody could understand how I could sit through Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, Jane Eyre, and Crime and Punishment as a middle-schooler.

I started a little earlier – in elementary school – but I’d read most of the Western classics by the time I was 13. Though I have never read Jane Eyre, and probably never will.

For some reason, Moby Dick was my favorite when I was a kid, perhaps because I read it so early (8 or 9). I’ve since read it again and didn’t care for it nearly as much.

Lately, I jump back and forth between reading YA, short stories and textbooks. For instance, at the moment I am reading a book of dystopian short stories called Brave New Worlds, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are?, Marcus Chown’s Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You and An Introduction to Middle English by Simon Horobin and Jeremy Smith. The latter is a textbook.

That doesn’t count any technical reading that I do (related to IT) which also happens/is happening at the same time, which is usually another 2-3 books but right now is only one, title not important.

I usually read more than one textbook at the same time, but the Middle English one is difficult enough that I just can’t.

And that’s about my typical sort of reading list, though strangely there is no YA book or series that I’m actually into at the moment.

Amazon? Hachette?

Who fucking cares. Both are evil. Both should be nuked from orbit, just to be sure.

This is good, and good advice.

Taking the initiative in such situations as Gia faced is almost always the right answer – punching first. Because I don’t have the luxury of using my size (I’m small but fast), I do the same thing.

Taking real self-defense classes is one of the best things I’ve ever done. And it also makes you less likely to be attacked as it changes how you walk, how you speak, your entire appearance. In other words, you look like someone a criminal would not want to fuck with.

No, it’s not a superpower, and no, it doesn’t insulate you from all attacks. But just like anything, it’s another tool that is useful. And I think it’s particularly useful for women.

About real fighting, though: most people, even those who spar, have never really been punched or kicked. It’s a whole different experience from sparring.

If you have a sparring partner you trust, I recommend you at least once go beyond sparring and feel what a real, unrestrained punch feels like. It’s a whole different thing altogether.

In a real fight, yelling also helps. Not screaming. More bellowing. It freaks people out. Anything to get an advantage, and that will give you one.

And any faux-feminist who says that teaching women self-defense is victim blaming doesn’t even deserve to fucking be in the conversation.

I’ve noticed more tech jobs using these TrueAbility tests to “determine” if you have the technical skills that you say you do for a job.

And I put “determine” in quotes because they don’t really determine any such thing at all. I’ve taken a few of the tests and I did ok, but they actually don’t have anything to do (at all, at all) with how well anyone will do in a tech job.

In most real tech jobs, most of your time is spent researching and troubleshooting, and the vast majority of that time in any job above Level II helpdesk tech or so, you are almost always doing something completely new or at least something that has no set script to follow.

Yeah, you do need a basic understanding of how routers work, how networks work, operating systems, computer science, etc., but that’s all. You don’t need to know the exact command to set up a VLAN on Juniper router to know something useful. That sort of stuff, any idiot can look up in a second or two.

All of the TrueAbility tests will to do is to help hire the people who have rote memorized certain things, and will actually weed out the people who are generalists but can do anything in IT quickly and with deep understanding.

It’d be like hiring someone for an Ancient Greek professorship who can quote the 437th stanza of Virgil’s Aeneid, but who has never even heard of Homer or the word “hellenic.”

Only an MBA could design such a monstrosity, one that’s so counterproductive and that will only hire the worst and least creative and knowledgeable candidates.

But hey, they did it in a quantifiable way, and that’s all that matters to an MBA. It may be shit, but it’s shit we can measure.

The people who seem to labor under the belief that the Supreme Court’s “Hobby Lobby” decision is going to be “limited” – as seems to be the prevailing wisdom – are going to be in for a very, very rude surprise soon enough.

Amazing how ahistorical Americans are.

With the Supreme Court’s latest decision regarding Hobby Lobby’s religious “rights”, even with the weak Court proviso that it only applies to contraceptives, the smartest move for a corporation or corporations would be to litigate for religious exemptions in more corporation-friendly districts to such practices as standard working hours, overtime pay, non-discrimination, etc.

Since a corporation is now officially more of a person than an actual person, this would be fairly likely to succeed. Doing a sociopathic cost/benefit analysis, this is a winning strategy since the cost (a few tens of millions of dollars) would be more than paid off by the hundreds of billions of dollars of gain if even one ruling is successful – such as receiving a religious exemption to paying overtime.

From a strictly pragmatic (evil) standpoint, corporations would be stupid not to try this, so I am sure it will happen.

If I ever made an album I’d be forced to call it “Eclectic Dialectic.”

What other choice is there?

I’ve seen the stats. I know a lot of people have trouble losing weight. And yet I didn’t. I lost over 25% of my body weight in less than six months. Because I am not that big anyway, I had to buy three new sets of clothes in that time period.

That weight has been off for almost five years now.

But I’ve long wondered why people have such trouble. Thinking about it more and reading this, I’ve realized that people mainly (in my opinion) have great difficulty keeping weight off because we frame it as a punishment, as yet another instantiation of our Judeo-Christian “sin/punishment” guilt-cycling belief system.

This is doomed to failure.

Because I am not strongly connected to my culture and don’t understand much of it, thinking about weight loss this way would’ve never (and did not) occur to me.

So why do people gain it back if it’s so important to them? If they’d rather be blind or have a leg amputated, why can’t they just keep up with their weight management efforts? Is it because as Tara describes their bodies work against them? Certainly in part, but I think the bigger reason is because they’ve likely chosen inane methods of loss and maintenance – like those described by Tara. To lose their weight they’ve gone on highly restrictive diets, they’re denying themselves the ability to use food for comfort or celebration, they’re regularly white-knuckling through hunger and cravings, they’ve set ridiculous Boston Marathon style goals for their losses, and they’ll often possess highly traumatic all-or-nothing attitudes towards their efforts. In short? They’ve chosen suffering as their weight management modality.

I have the best “diet” ever. Check this out: I eat whatever the fuck I want.

I just don’t do it whenever I want to. If there is something I really want, I say, “Well if that still sounds good on Saturday, I’ll eat it.”

So I do.

Or if I absolutely just can’t wait (which is rare), I have a tiny bit of it, maybe a spoonful or so.

But it turns out that if you reframe how people think about weight loss, a large percentage of them can and do keep the weight off.

Paying attention to intake, exercising, and applying the education they received from their expert research team. And would you take a look at that graph!  By year 4, of the folks who’d lost more than 10% of their weight in the first year, some did indeed gain it back, but 42.2% kept off nearly 18% of their presenting weight for the full 4 years! In fact they kept off virtually all of their year one losses. Moreover, looking at all comers of the trial and not just the folks who lost a pile in year one, nearly 25% of all participants maintained a 4 year loss greater than 10% of their initial weight.

That’s sure a far cry from no one.

Like anything else in life, you’ll get in return what effort/thought you put into it. Surprise.

I stole this from somewhere, but now I can’t remember where and I can’t find it.

But some wag observed – accurately – that the definition of YA had expanded so much that all that being a YA novel now means is that it is a novel people actually want to read.

So true.