By David Futrelle
A quick little update post.
First off, GIANT THANKS to everyone who’s donated during this fund drive! I can’t do this blog without you, and I appreciate everything you all do to help, whether your donations are large or small or if you contribute to the blog in some other way.
If you can’t donated yet, please do! Pledges are running behind what I need to cover costs, and every little (or big) bit helps!
I’m going to extend the pledge drive for at least a few more days, and will have another update soon. THANKS!
Second, sorry that posts have been light over the past couple of days!
As some of you know, I have problems with chronic migraines that can interfere rather severely with my productivity. Right now I’m in a difficult spot, trying (on the advice of a neurologist) to break a vicious cycle of rebound headaches by more or less going cold turkey on my regular migraine meds and all other painkillers, which means I basically have to deal with my headaches raw for now in hopes of fewer headaches in the future. Hopefully this process won’t take more than a few more days, but until it’s over posts will be light.
I’ve also fallen behind on emails, but please keep on sending tips!
Thanks for understanding. Thanks for everything!
I make a lot of chappatis. Does that count?
Whoah, no new post yet. David, I am sorry you are having such a hard time. I am doing some serious wishing for your better health. Or whatever it is that atheists do instead of pray.
@Alan
Well, if the Wikipedia article is accurate then chappatis absolutely count because the term comes from a Hindi word for “flat”!
I’ve been wanted to try something like that.
Way back in ancient days of yore when I was an undergraduate at university I had a summer job working in an American Revolution museum. They had an outdoor exhibit of a recreated encampment for a company-sized unit of the Continental Army circa 1782. We used it do some living history activities, one of the more popular of which was cooking in a field kitchen. We actually dug one…it was really cool. We made god-awful corn-meal “fire-cake” (a rudimentary and foul but perfectly edible flatbread)…people liked seeing it. It was easy to document and provided a really related-able example for the visitors as to the soldier-level effects of the logistic straights of the late-war Continental Army. Sometimes we actually ate it with our lunch just for the hell of it. (The one corner that we cut in terms of historicity was that we used modern commercial cornmeal….the visitors never looked close enough to see the difference…and it was clean and not maggot-infested.)
Well that’s today’s fascinating fact taken care of!
Chappatis are easy to make. Just buy a sack of chappati flour (which lasts about a year even at the rate I go through them) and a chappati pan. That’s like a sort of round flat shovel thing.
You can also make them by slapping them on to the inside of a tandoori oven; but obviously that’s a bit of investment. Especially as you’re not supposed to ever turn them off (but with modern ones you can).
Holy shit, Dave! That sounds rough! Migraines are a real, well, headache! Hope you feel better soon with help of the kitties.
Hope the new treatment works and you feel better soon.
Man, he’s still not back. Shit must be rough for him right now.
Random topic, but a post on GamerGhazi had me curious. I’ve been tuned into this whole realm of garbage people versus regular decent people for a number of years, at least since GamerGate itself, but the origins of the term “SJW” have eluded me. I’ve seen quoted that it came from a Tumblr blog that catalogued other feminist Tumblr users who made use of the language of social justice as either a cudgel to beat others with or somehow weren’t sincere in their beliefs and were just doing it to look good (I guess “virtue signalling” in the parlance of the garbage people would be closest.)
Now, I only use Tumblr for dirty things, so I have no context for this origin story. It just struck me that for a term that seems to get bandied about the circles I travel with ever increasing frequency, I don’t know who this was meant to be applied to. Who were these original “SJWs” and what did they do that was so bad? For that matter, where did this stereotype about “Tumblr feminists” originate? People just seem to accept that stereotype as a given, but I’ve never encountered it. Any Mammotheers travelling Tumblr around that time have any idea?
@GussieJives
I think there was something to the original use of SJW.
There is a tendency on the left and probably elsewhere to criticise the things that disappoint us more. So for example, when Girls came out it faced a lot of criticism for not featuring POC or disabled characters, even while it was recognised as ground breaking for showing women who were flawed, unsuccessful, struggling and not all conventionally beautiful. And a lot of that criticism may have been justified, but it wasn’t directed at more traditional male led or conventional shows with anything like the same heat. Progressive people were more disappointed with Girls’ flaws than they would have been with the flaws of an averagely male-centric show of that vintage.
Similarly, it was very common on tumblr and left wing blogs for people to bite each others head off on the comments for not-including a certain viewpoint, or using a term that someone disagreed with even when it was almost certainly used in good faith, or implications that an authors privilege in certain areas invalidated their experience in others. I used to read a now-defunct feminist blog called Shapely Prose where the comment sections would regularly erupt over accusations the main author was too pretty or too hourglass to experience sexism or fat prejudice like other women and therefore the blog must be a crock.
A lot of this reflexive infighting died down about the same time Trump started campaigning. The disappointment element will always be with us, but some of the pettiness was inexperience with new kinds of politics, some of it was inexperience with the new internet forms of discussion, and a lot of it was the left eating itself because the real enemy seemed to entrenched, subtle and difficult to deal with. Trump and the alt-right are cartoonishly evil, but that also makes them easier to unite and fight against.
“Virtue signalling” on the other hand is mostly the only way the far right can understand altruism, decency or basic empathy. They don’t believe those things really exist, therefore it must be some kind of hypocrisy.
I’m also curious about the origins of this term. It makes sense that it would be linked to call-out culture and the like, but I’ve seen plenty of infighting on the left and I’ve never heard this term used. Has anyone else?
If we’re talking explicitly about the term itself (and not the concept its describing) I only heard it when it was already only used by the right. But the Washington Post had an article about it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/10/07/why-social-justice-warrior-a-gamergate-insult-is-now-a-dictionary-entry/?utm_term=.bff471efa87b
But was it common enough to dedicate multiple other blogs to it and spark a backlash? I realize a lot of the jargon and parlance that we use is relatively new to young people who may not be using it correctly, but the way it’s talked about among users of the phrase (which I will of course take with massive helpings of salt), the rise of the “SJW” epithet was some kind of inevitability because there was just so much of it that there had to be a short-form to describe the kind of foaming-at-the-mouth buzzword-spewing Tumblr users that ultimately would be (unfairly) embodied in Chanty Binx.
I doubt the folks unironically flinging the term about even use Tumblr, let alone encountered any to whom the original phrase could apply.
Ironically, the term “virtue signalling” actually was meant to criticize those on the left who just voted Labour and didn’t do anything else (at least according to Hbomberguy who tracked it back to the source). Now it’s used in the manner you indicated, which as you said, is the only way the deplorables can wrap their heads about altruism.
@Gussie Jives
RationalWiki (and Wikipedia, cough) attribute the use of, “social justice warrior” as a pejorative to the title of a blog by Will Shetterly entitled, “Social Justice Warriors: Do Not Engage” back in the 6th of November 2009.
In the case of Mr. Shetterly, it was used to criticize people who, among other things, liked to dox people they didn’t like. The irony that quite a bit of doxxing was later done by people attacking alleged SJWs now should not be lost on us.
Though, to be frank, the word’s long since become another one of those many useless, overused hostile terms like, “liberal”, “cultural Marxist” and, “Fermi’s Paradox”. What better way to shut down a discussion than to simply throw a school yard insult and pretend it’s like some sort of mic drop? For example:
“Why liberal Cultural Marxist clowns look for aliens? Fermi’s Paradox!”
So, how much do you want to bet this guy is a manospherian?
http://www.inquisitr.com/opinion/4378219/reported-to-hr-for-period-pain-womans-menstrual-cramps-made-male-colleague-feel-uncomfortable/
@ Scolar Visari:
Oh fuck, you spoke his Name! Is it safe to do so? Has he turned off his Google alerts and defensiveness, or is this Comment section about to be sealioned while David is out of action?
Isn’t virtue signalling a valid concept in sociology? Something about how people signal common values to potential like minded folk? (using virtue in the sense of characteristics rather than necessarily positive attributes)
@Gussy Jives
It was common enough to be really really annoying and repetitive and depressing and silly although I think angry blogs about it would have been just more of the same behavior. I actually gave up on comment sections for a while. I still think they are only worth it when well modded ( which is not always the same as heavily).
I never heard SJW used to describe that behaviour, or any fixed jargon actually apart from concern trolling but maybe I had given up in the period when people started developing those labels. To contextualise, the period I’m talking about people were writing a lot of introductory essays on privilege and intersectionality and lots of people reading the blogs were pretty new to those terms. I think a lots changed really quickly.
Gah. Just looked it up. Shapely Prose closed down in 2010, so well over a decade ago.
“virtue signalling” is a perfectly fine term in sociology, as a description of a type of signalling. It describes doing something kind or altruistic as a social signal, often to indicate group membership.
This doesn’t imply that the altruism is insincere. We’re humans, humans signal for all sorts of reasons, and the fact that action X signals something to people doesn’t mean we do action X only to make that signal. Usually it’s more about how observers are socially perceptive, and are aware that the action indicates status or membership in a group. The actor is usually unaware of the fact that they’re signalling.
Of course, that’s not at all how the manosphere/alt-right/wtf-they-are uses the term that way. They’re just using it to denigrate any act of altruism, as was said above by the talented and clever @Wicked Witch and @Gussie Jives. In other words, they’re committing a division fallacy. That one’s particularly popular with those peeps, really.
So I think I may have finally perfected sauteed red cabbage. I made it again today and couldn’t stop eating it.
Sorry, no pics, it went into my tummy too quickly.
recipe:
Slice 1/2 head red cabbage into thin slices. Heat a few tablespoons of olive oil in a large pan, medium-high heat.
Now you need to ask yourself, How much do I like garlic? because this recipe will handle anywhere from zero garlic to about three cloves. Decide how much you like garlic and add the appropriate amount of minced garlic to the oil, and cook until it just starts to turn golden.
Add the cabbage and saute until it starts to get soft, about 3 minutes. Add 1/3 cup apple cider vinegar, 2 tablespoons brown sugar, 1 teaspoon ground mustard, and some salt and pepper (maybe 1/4 teaspoon salt but I never measure).
Continue to saute over medium heat until the vinegar evaporates and it starts to get a little sticky, maybe 7 or 8 minutes. At this point, because I’m not vegetarian, I add a little pat of butter to give it a creamy finish. If you’re vegetarian, you can just omit the butter, and it will still be sufficiently delicious that you, too, won’t want to stop eating it until it’s completely gone.
This recipe makes 1 serving. 😀 Well, okay, if you make it as a side dish, you’ll regret sharing, but you could probably spread it around 4 people.
Total prep time: about 15 minutes. Total eating time: about 10 minutes.
“I believe X to be true, therefore everyone should believe that X is true” is probably the “anecdotal” fallacy. Why I wanted to know this, I’m not sure.
I think it’s one of the many problems with politics these days.
maximum garlic
maximum ultra-garlic
Five cloves it is!
Well, it is half a head of cabbage. I’m sure it would be great with 5 cloves.
The original recipe didn’t even call for garlic, but after I had made it a couple of times (and tweaked it already) I thought, y’know, garlic improves everything, so I started adding some. It is MUCH improved with garlic, and the more garlic the better, IMHO.
Mmmm, garlic. I also lovelovelove leeks sautéed with my greens, garlic and butter. Mmmmmmm.
Too bad, it’s really a shame, but I’ll let you know that there are quite good butter substitutes that are entirely plant-based.
*wants to try now*