Hope you all are having a lovely day today, whatever this day means to you (or doesn’t). Consider this an open thread, to discuss whatever, from presents to politics to cats to whatever holiday stress you might be feeling.
And here’s some stuff I found on the Twitter.
— David, who is hanging in there
Merry Christmas, everyone! 🎄🎅 pic.twitter.com/YfyTsQ95de
— Maggie Serota (@maggieserota) December 25, 2017
At this time of year, take a few moments to remember who Christmas is truly about… pic.twitter.com/TQ9tSP5EED
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) December 24, 2017
I haven’t laughed this hard in a while. I needed this. pic.twitter.com/2aQFpugdis
— deray (@deray) December 7, 2017
Brian Eno, Paris, 1973 (with Christmas 2017 augmentation) pic.twitter.com/hRwMDTOUKv
— Brian Eno News (@dark_shark) December 25, 2017
“Fun” pic.twitter.com/tsAdsZeez8
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) December 24, 2017
#MerryChristmas 🎄🤶🏻 pic.twitter.com/IahMZhf5gc
— Melania Trump 45 Archived (@FLOTUS45) December 25, 2017
Same. pic.twitter.com/kcNPdrLy6R
— Adrenalin (@adrenalindenver) May 24, 2017
🎈🐾🐅🎈🐾🐅🎈🐾🐅🎈🐾🐅🎈🐾🐅
All of a sudden …
🐾🐾🐾🐾 pic.twitter.com/fza8NZioI0
— The Cult Cat (@Elverojaguar) December 25, 2017
Human: My cat has an easy life
Me: pic.twitter.com/e8kvlVhUdR— Curious Zelda (@CuriousZelda) December 20, 2017
https://twitter.com/awwcuteness/status/945193410662682624
Shadowplay
this is why on Return of Kings they always say to be afraid of Ukranian women because they will only ‘use you to get to America’ ??
I will have to believe you about what you say about America being ‘insular’ because I don’t really know. and if I did say such things it would seem like I am trying to criticise without fairness. I mean I get this feeling little bit. when I am in Charleston before one black stevedore asked me if there are black people in my country. I said of course! I am surprised – it is like he thinks there are only black people in USA or Africa. also little bit sad((
Edit
I don’t want to say I dislike America. I went to Orlando for holiday and I really liked it! everyone is friendly and they are not afraid to talk with you and say nice things.
I just HATE I must give tips for EVERYTHING! I did not plan for that when I made my budget….?
Teacher accused of sexually abusing student. Student gets suspended.School admins now in court.
Devastating to his career, eh? Maybe, just maybe, DON’T FUCK YOUR STUDENTS if you’re worried about your career and family.
Or is that too obvious?
@Valentin
You’re a good person. That is very fair.
In the interests of fairness – and to save someone else from the embarrassment of having to haul out the tired old “Not all …” cliche – there are many Americans who aren’t insular, or who try very hard not to be so.
They’re just outnumbered.
Edit to add (as I just saw your edit)
Yeah, I like them too. Honestly can’t think of a more generous or cheery bunch, on the whole.
The tipping thing is confusing :D. I mean, how about paying people proper, so tips become what they are in the rest of the world – a bonus for good service instead of tomorrows gas money.
at home I never tip and I don’t know how to make a bribe either. but you are right, you can see on their face this tip is very important to them because their salary is not enough. also when I got drunk I start to give too much money in these tips. I given $20 to one guy and then after my other friends tell me they already given one tip. but only after we left! anyway as soon as I given it it is too late.
You don’t know how to offer a bribe?! ( ﾟoﾟ)
Everyone who travels should know how to offer a bribe (or more importantly, how to spot when a bribe is being asked for) – your cargo officer or whoever deals with the actual dock workers can probably teach you for a small fee. 😛
I also tend to over tip in the States.
At home, it’s usually just round up the bill to the nearest 5 or 10 in a restaurant if the service has been very good (average service or below gets nothing), or a flat £2 tip in a cab. That’s about it.
Shadow play,
I am cargo offcier. 3rd 2nd and Cheif we all do cargo work. I deal with stevedores and port officials every time we are in port. I can know when someone is trying for bribes because they all say same
‘ you have gift for me?’
‘you have soft drinks?’
then they will behave strangely or angrily.
captain maybe will have to make facilitation payments for offiicials in some corrupt places and also gifts but never bribes. this is is against our anti corruption regulations. this kind of bribe is very expensive and will be because of some bullshit. they will call it like ‘fine’ and demand you pay them directly on cash something like $5000. which is why in such places you never meet with officials alone and why also not all captains can work on ships that go in these places. it is stressful.
facilitation payments also prohibited ‘technically’ but sometimes they necessary. in last few years, also this become less. I given gifts before usually jar of coffee or cigarettes. but not for maybe 1 year now.
I talk about small small bribes of everyday life. like my friend with young daughter – he worries he will not get good school place for her because he doesn’t know how to bribe. or bribe for skip doctors queue and save time. I never even think about such things until he told me this and I never really try.
@Kat,
Ew, Katie Roiphe… This person writes The Morning After in the 90s, continues in that vein (getting published and promoted left, right, centre) – and just recently had the cheek to claim that only young ‘uns should use emojis. Tsk.
But outing the author of that list? That’s a new low, Ms Roiphe: congratulations 😐
It’s pretty much the same way as you are used to from work then – you give the people who can help you gifts, or do them favors. Better not to if it’s not absolutely needed though. You’ve seen how it ends up. 🙁
A tech giggle for you all: Bitcoin conference stops accepting bitcoin payments
Now that’s gonna build confidence.
@Mish
Soooo embarrassed that I used emojis without checking with Katie Roiphe!
And because a picture is worth a thousand words: ?
What to do? Will women & men ever understand each other? Will Brits ever find love?
Oh wait. Is Valentine’s Day only a month away? Why, I believe it is.
Lovable or rogue? Britons admit confusion about romantic gestures
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/jan/11/lovable-or-rogue-britons-admit-confusion-about-romantic-gestures
I had forgotten about Katie Roiphe. It was nice while it lasted.
So, it’s bad for victims of rape or sexual harassment to wait to report until years later or only tell your friends because if it really happened they’d have reported immediately. But it’s bad to report away because what if it was a misunderstanding and you ruin an innocent man’s life?
I would think a good compromise for rape apologists would be things like this Google spreadsheet. No official report is made, so no lives of poor, poor menz are ruined. It’s just a way for women to warn each other. The women are the ones having to change their behavior to avoid all these predatory men who are roaming around free. I thought that’s what they wanted?
So I guess the solution is for all women to treat all men like rapists just to be on the safe side. But wait no! That’s mean and feminazish!
That must mean the correct way to woman is just to let men do whatever they want to us without complaint. Oh, but no. That makes us damaged goods and sluts who only get jobs by using sex.
My head hurts.
@WWTH
Very interesting take on Roseanne, thank you! I enjoyed the Wonkette article as well. I can better see the strength of her, Jackie’s and Dan’s characters now. I do love the joy in being loving and sexual that Roseanne and Dan display- and honestly in the positive portrayal of that for large people not usually represented as such. I’ll continue working my way through the show- and probably wait to see what comes of the reboot. Money, complacency and age tend to make people forget the struggle of poverty, uncertainty and youth. Roseanne Conner understood that people who have little to no safety net are not to be blamed for needing help. Roseanne Barr has forgotten the compassion of her strongest creation.
Good News yesterday, Ecuador is finally kicking Assange’s rapey ass out of their embassy.
Bad News today, it’s because they’ve made him a Ecuadorian national so the plan appears to be to get him to Ecuador.
[meta]
Avid reader here, now with a question.
Is there a reason why the ISP I read your site from is now being blocked, and also VPNBook’s web proxy? I had to resort to TOR to read the last few new comments (and to post this). This block seems to have been enacted sometime in the past hour or two, as I checked for new comments earlier this morning from my home connection without a proxy and without a problem.
And please don’t react to this by blocking TOR users. Reviewing the block enacted within the past two hours for appropriateness and scope would be preferred.
If a user at my ISP has launched a denial of service attack: Please consider using Cloudflare or another DDoS protection provider instead of cack-handedly blocking large swathes of users, most of whom are innocent. At least unblock VPNBook — I don’t think such services can relay DoS traffic anyway.
If the abuse was spamming or trolling rather than DoS/hacking: Doesn’t your moderation/whitelisting mechanism suffice to avoid the need for wholesale IP-range bans?
@wwth – Thanks, and sorry everyone for being upset and spitting out walls of text. I think I did the best thing for now – writing on Twitter in support of the people who came forward, but not contacting Prof. B and also not speaking against Prof. X since it’d be irrelevant.
For sure, ableism and intent is a good discussion topic, but I don’t want to call out everyone who said anything mean to me ever. That’d be tiring 🙂
As for the sexual harassment, which is the major problem here, I’ll write to the local paper and say that there should be better rules in place to prevent such abuses of power. (I’ve got other work to do but I’ll pretend it won’t take me a long time. It’s not like I’m wordy or disorganized or anything 🙂 .)
@Valentin – I was thinking about what you wrote here:
I think this is insightful, and probably applicable to most countries (the “stolen identities” part definitely applies to the U.S. and Canada’s treatment of indigenous people). I’m no history expert, but I remember reading some of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, which views national identity as something that’s made up mostly by the dominant group.
@abars
As at least a few of these, I take offense. More importantly, can we all, please, leave the ‘ha ha virgins’ nonsense in 2017? It’s shitty and boooring…
@JoeB
Oh, for fucks sake!
epitome of incomprehensibilty
thanks but honestly this is not my orginal thought – I just said what I heard other people already said. but I think yes, it is about who is dominant. so in case of Russian empire and then USSR Russian is always dominant but then when you think of Russian you think of things which actually are identities of other countries. some identity like Ukrainian or Belarusian almost completely stolen so now it is not clear. but others like Latvian or lithuanain still strong and it is easy to see.
but I think nationalism is harmful too. after all, I agree what you said it is about dominant group who lift themself. it is difficult to say because also history of USA and Canada is different from Europe – but I think maybe principle is similoar. I mean plenty people in USA say white people have no culture.
@ joeb
They’ll literally have to stick him in a diplomatic bag!
(Unfortunately they don’t have to be actual ‘bags’)
Hello, it’s Thursday evening here in Helsinki. I just attended a two-day agricultural science conference at my home campus, hardly leaving one particular building complex. Then I picked up a newspaper and learned that a large decorative statue behind our library building had been destroyed by arson around 4-5 AM on Wednesday.
It was massive black “sitting gorilla” shaped statue made of tons of old tires. As you might guess, there was reportedly a lot of smoke from the fire. Must’ve been spooky since it was dark and a foggy weather. The heat from fire reportedly broke some of the library’s backside windows and (I must guess) damaged the nearby trees.
The library was open later on Wednesday morning. The opening ceremony of our conference was held in that building, in the basement auditorium. We entered and left from the front side entrance, didn’t smell any residual smoke or notice anything.
@Shawdowplay
I agree that Americans are insular, although IMHO most other countries are to some amount as well. Why are Americans this way? IMHO Scale and Power.
Scale: Geographically, and population-wise, we’re pretty huge. Many of our states are the size of other countries, we’re the 3rd most populated country in the world, with a wide variety of subcultures. There’s already a lot of information that goes into keeping up with what’s going on in America as an American, so unless it’s something violent or dramamatic, some relatively humdrum thing from thousands of miles away doesn’t always seem pressing.
Power:
A. Those with less power always pay more attention to the ones with more power, and the ones with more power always pay less attention to the ones with less power. For example, Britian has not much visible power-over the US these days, so many Americans don’t know a whole lot about British affairs. (our interest in the Royal Family probably could be compared to our interest in the Kardashians). If we were still a British colony, you better beleieve that we’d be about as up-to-date as the British themselves.
B. In the current world, it seems like the consequences for bad policies pushed by America are larger than they are for many other countries. (Maybe not all). America has a huge military, with military bases in countries all over the world, so at the very least our state of being in constant wargasm is pretty concerning to the human population as a whole.
C. I believe American’s harbor a certain amount of guilt over our country’s actions that we cover up with patriotic self-centeredness and bravado. Look at how we justify civilian deaths in Iraq, or war crimes in Vietnam, or even how American’s handle the nuclear bombings in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. We don’t want to face the reality, so we deny it, at least in part.
In highschool, I saw many pictures from Nazi Death Camps; piles of skulls, horrible shit. But when it came to the nuclear bombings, (or Allied firebombings for that matter), all I remember is pictures of bombed out buildings. Obviously everyone knows that people die when a city gets bombed. We get the statistics; 20K died here, maybe a 100K died there. We’ll discuss the heath effects of the nuclear bomb, and the panels that studied the health of survivors like they were rats. But a picture is worth a thousand words, so to see the bodies, to face the reality, to pay attention to the world, that’s too much.
So how about we talk about the Kardashians now, Shadowplay?
*All of this is IMHO.
Yeah, I sometimes hear about the insularity thing in reference to China and Russia too.
It should be noted that I personally don’t know very much about Russia (as a Finn) because, while I like to follow international social media, I don’t speak the Russian language (very few Finns do) and also because Russians don’t much hang out on English language social media (I hear many younger folks do speak the language, though).
shadowplay: your link doesn’t seem to be working.
This one does, though: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/10/bitcoin-conference-stops-accepting-cryptocurrency-payments.html
arctic ape
I suggest if you want to learn about Russian opinions – Twitter is really good place to go. also for Ukraine too. there is plenty of English language Twitter accounts which share information and options about Ukraine and Russia.
I follow lots of different things like this which is why I written this in my original post. plenty of people in America have very strong opinions and feelings about Russia but no real knowledge and they don’t listen to real Russians about this. for me I feel there is no excuse for this – because places like Twitter exist which now you can learn many things. as well as mammoth, I learn most of what I know about LGBT and other social justice topics from who I follow on Twitter.
Brilliant piece by a woman who made the Mario Batali apology rolls. It’s infuriating, funny, and sad all at once.
http://www.everywhereist.com/i-made-the-pizza-cinnamon-rolls-from-mario-batalis-sexual-misconduct-apology-letter/
@Shadowplay
No metaphorical sticks are required. Your general rule is good, I’ll keep it in mind. I don’t think I know how to define “survival” at the moment. I’ll have to think about that. It’s been a long week so far.
You said nothing that concerns me, a side effect of my life is that I’m very hard to offend (but tend to be sensitive to offense in others). Your instincts are correct, and it’s more accurate to say that I’ve buried myself in mechanistic territory for most of the last decade. I’ve seen enough Sam Harris’s to take criticism of my ideas seriously though, I’d be happy to respond to any concerns you have. I’m comfortable being clinical about myself, my anxieties are usually about extending social contact. People always feel 7-10 on a 1-10 scale. I’m talking to my therapist about a potential Scrupulosity diagnosis, I’ve noted that the shape of Scrupulously matches my own instinctual sensitivities very closely but also always note that I have not been professionally diagnosed because ethics.
Complications due to ADHD killed my graduate career, but I stumbled across Speeded processing of grammar and tool knowledge in Tourette’s syndrome and I’ve been hooked on self-objectification via Pubmed ever since. The cluster of papers discussing enhanced cognition has helped me in the sense of self-worth department. I’m comfortable making quite a few assumptions about myself, but some I’ve spent years paranoid about making. That TS diagnosis made SO MUCH of my life make sense. I have a lot to map out in my mind though.
This is just the sort of bullshit evolution tends to come up with. There are benefits to the skills, but I can’t say that I can grade my experience of my culture well on the current execution of our social structure. D-. At least I don’t need to appeal to demons, I get to figure out what they are. Try to anyway.