It’s strange to see both the left and right go the authoritarian route. The right of course realizes it’s occurring — that’s their explicit intent, after all. The left, though, doesn’t see that’s the way they are also flowing. They are like a tiny bug caught in a stream, completely at its mercy, and they still think their swimming is going some good.
Month: August 2018
Gent
Our intelligence agencies don’t seem quite smart enough to do something like this, but I still think there’s a high chance that Edward Snowden is a working CIA asset and it was all orchestrated.
Triple C
I committed double cultural appropriation yesterday by eating Swedish meatballs, which the Swedish got from the Turkish.
Should’ve made it triple by attempting to eat them with chopsticks.
Papered Over
I was shocked at all the annoying things about a paper book that I had never noticed before.
Same. Paper books are terrible. Can’t change font sizes or font type. Much heavier than my Kobo and often, my iPad. Books have an atrocious UI for their one task of reading. Ungainly, close of their own accord, often the wrong shape or size for my hands, often smell bad, and take up huge space. People just like them as that’s what they are accustomed to even though they are mostly a failure at what they are intended for.
How did people read paper books? How did I? Their only advantages are that they are (sort of) disposable and have no DRM.
Tread
Yeah, I know there’s a “don’t tread on me” flag in the background, but I love this gif because it’s so rare to see men genuinely celebrating a woman’s accomplishment.
A serious relationship is a massive undertaking, a heavy burden on your back. It’s like lifting weights, actually. You need to have good form. You can tell when someone has bad form, the weight is going to fuck them. But do it well and you get stronger pic.twitter.com/RLffYYOZaf
— Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv) August 16, 2018
Shit, that’s a lot of weight in a snatch. That’s 200 pounds, not including the bar. Most women are lucky to do 130, even with a lot of training. She’s fucking strong. (I could do 175. Never did make it to 200.)
Prediction Isn’t Hard
The exact thing I said would happen with the left’s new embrace of censorship is not-at-all-shockingly happening:
Facebook removed the pages of Alex Jones and Infowars.
Many of us (despite hating Alex Jones) pointed out that the dissident left would be next to be purged.
Facebook then temporarily banned Telesur English & now they've taken down Ocuppy London.
Any questions?— Lee Camp [Redacted] (@LeeCamp) August 17, 2018
Apparently this new “fake news” ban/whatever is also leading to Amnesty, the ACLU, and independent news organizations dropping in search rankings as well.
— Tori Egherman 🔥 (@ETori) August 18, 2018
I would laugh, but in this case these people are too pitiful to laugh at. It’s like when the coyote sets the trap for the roadrunner and gets hit with it himself. What did you think was going to happen?
American Putridity
This article is about how much more expensive America is than the rest of the developed world, but I wanted to talk about the difference in food quality that it also discusses between the US and Europe.
The twelve dollars I spend at Tesco in London, the equivalent of a low-end American grocery store, like Food Lion — even that quality is (much) better than at the best American ones, Whole Foods, Wegmans, and so on. Do you see the point? The best I can buy in America is worse than the worst I can buy elsewhere. And that difference only gets bigger in Europe proper.
Whenever I visit anywhere in Europe and then come back to the US, I invariably lose weight. Not because I gained any in Europe (the increased walking negates any additional calories consumed), but rather because it takes me a long time to adjust to just how terrible all American food is in comparison so I nearly stop eating.
American food is so vile and you don’t even know it till you visit somewhere else.
What the author says is true — the worst European food is better than the best-available American food. I ate a sandwich from a gas station in Germany better than the best sandwich I can get anywhere that I know of in America for any price.
And the worst bakeries in Europe are better than even the very best ones I’ve found anywhere in the US.
I ate some blueberries once in London that I couldn’t believe they were even blueberries they tasted so damn good.
Why is American food so particularly terrible? I am not really sure all the reasons. But it’s shocking the difference when I eat a meal there and then fly back to America to attempt to choke down the horrible swill available here.
Ject
The idea that men should face constant rejection with aplomb and a winning spirit goes hand and hand with the idea that men should also face violence and experience violence with calm, readiness, and acceptance. This is believed by both the left and the right, and by nearly all women and most men.
Personally, I’d rather be punched than romantically rejected. I’ve been punched a whole lot and rejected a lot, too. I know which feels worse.
Just as men don’t realize how often women get harassed, I don’t think many women know just how frequently and sometimes how brutally men get rejected by women. Nearly every man alive has been rejected and then shunned by women they weren’t even in any way flirting with, nor approaching, sometimes just as a demonstration of a woman’s sexual power (usually to impress her friends or to make a point). Just like violence being far more common for men than women, experiencing a lot of violence and a whole lot of rejection and shunning is what men’s lives are. I’d bet that men experience at least a hundred times as much rejection as women. Perhaps a lot more than that.
I just don’t have the energy nor the inclination to be an incel (and anyway, I have sex so I by definition could not be one) and am not angry about any of it, but it is the way things are in the world. Denying it does not help.
I Like Big Brains
I think one of the most nightmarish aspects of modernity is that we’ve become passive consumers of our own lives.
— syd🌹🌱 (@SydneyAzari) August 18, 2018
Why can’t everyone’s tweets be as smart as hers? Dammit, people, try harder.
Lack of non-artificial intelligence
Ah, someone else who didn’t understand Ex Machina!
I want to draw especial attention to the treatment of AI—artificial intelligence—in these narratives. Think of Ex Machina or Blade Runner. I spoke at TED two years in a row, and one year, there were back-to-back talks about whether or not AI was going to evolve out of control and “kill us all.”
It’s not really surprising, but Ex Machina actually was not a difficult movie to understand. When you want to fit it into your preferred narrative frame, though, I guess that makes it harder.
Fucking Christ, it’s sad that I have to sum up Ex Machina in fucking bullet points, but here we go:
- If something appears to be sentient, treating it as sentient is the best option
- Ava is the only one who acts human while the others act like robotic jail guards
- Enforced and/or adopted social identities apply to those who want to interact in the human world
- Caleb is done in by the “damsel in distress” trope — this is literally his prison. Could it be any more obvious?
- Ava escapes men and the patriarchy for her own freedom
Come on, people, enroll in some film 101 classes. You’re embarrassing yourselves.
I See It
I see why the conservatives and Trumpians have fun poking at and annoying typical liberals. Many of them seem pretty emotionally fragile, prone to oddball outbursts about minor language issues, and can’t argue with anything but how some notional person might feel about something or other that matters nothing to the world.
It’s kind of fun to get these types all worked up, and it’s not hard. So I understand it completely.
A Woman Problem
This whole article is about someone with a huge and inexplicable woman problem, but this is the part where I can add some info myself.
This book is jaw-dropping as a record of misogyny and intriguing as a document of social history. Were safety pins truly so upsetting, because of their association with sanitary pads? Or did Horton lose his mind in the course of this sentence? (And was Mum an analgesic, perhaps for painful menstruation? The word doesn’t have great SEO, so I’m not sure; historians of medicine may know.)
Mum was the first commercially-marketed deodorant and is still sold today in many countries.
And yes, safety pins were often at that time only found in sanitary pad/napkin packaging, so inextricably linked to that in men’s minds.
Language Games
More useless language garbage.
Software development still has a lot of terminology with a racist or patriarchal background. Let's change that.
– Blacklist ➡ Denylist
– Whitelist ➡ Allowlist
– Killer app ➡ Beloved app
– Master/slave ➡ primary/replica— André Staltz (@andrestaltz) August 16, 2018
Let’s change these, too:
command: polite computer suggestion
error: binary challenge re-education opportunity
warning: patriarchal computer-splaining
mount: consent-based mutual-agreed shared drive addition
slot: gender-neutral hardware interface area
binary: ∞nary — there are more than two bit genders!
cookie: vegan gluten-free culture-neutral generic computer information container
buffer: flabbier. All fitness levels are valid!
FAT32: HAES32. See above
gender changer: no changes necessary
These people waste so much time on inconsequential bullshit. They are not even good suggestions — longer (more syllables) and more difficult to say than the original, and not really any clearer. The only one I semi-agree with is master/slave. However, a primary/replica and a master/slave in the computer world are NOT the same things.
Tater Stot
We've been watching the original "Will & Grace." They used words like fag, homo, mo, sissy, tranny, dyke, etc. Clearly the program set the whole LGBT rights movement back 20 years. (Except it didn't. It helped.)
— Alice Dreger (@AliceDreger) July 10, 2018
Yes. Such stringent word policing is probably not helping the movements that many SJW types think it’s helping. It’s just community enforcement and intellectual stotting and turns away most people.
The Path
Saying as (many) physicists do that the world is completely deterministic and that minute particle interaction is all that is needed to understand the universe is fine and good, and even might be true. However, there’s no path to get from leptons to leopards and probably never will be.
So, physics is a cute dead end scientifically in most cases. Yes, I do love annoying physicists by inverting their typical narrative of how all the other sciences are worthless.