By David Futrelle
Perhaps one of the reasons that so many men are convinced women aren’t funny is that these guys have no idea when women are making fun of them.
Consider this exchange that took place on Twitter yesterday when a women who is definitely not seven and a half feet tall responded jokingly to a Very Serious tweet by white nationalist Paul Ramsey, aka Ramzpaul.
So far, just a fairly normal Twitter convo. But for some reason Alex decided that this was a claim he needed to disprove with SCIENCE. So he tracked down a picture from her wedding and started drawing red lines all over it like a weirdo..
Well I guess that’s that, then.
It’s not clear if Alex also thought he was being funny here, but it seems like a long way to go for a bit that, at best, makes you look like a creeper with a tiny sense of humor and that, at worst, makes you look like a completely humorless dingus and ALSO a creeper.
Another tweeter offered this alternate theory of Amy’s height, though I think it’s possible he might have tampered with the evidence a teensy bit.
Doing my own research on the topic I have determined that, while rare, it is quite possible for women to be seven and a half feet tall — and even much taller, as the poster for this documentary makes clear.
Indeed, judging from the relative size of the cars in this poster, it seems like the documentary makers may have seriously underestimated the size of this very tall woman.
I will investigate further and return with some diagrams.
Note to extremely literal-minded readers: Post contains
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Because god forbid you shake hands with a child, I guess?
@Jenora Feuer
That was just the most perfect description of JT I’ve read. That’s exactly how I feel about him.
I haven’t the verbal skills of Katamount (“gormless smoothlobes”), so I’ll borrow from that 90s icon, Butt-Head: “What a jack-butt-munch-ass-dumb-butt.”
People forget that JT isn’t just his father’s son: he’s also his mother’s. Actually, you could make a horribly stereotypical case out of him in terms of having got his empathy from his mother, softening the father’s intellect. In that PET was definitely an intellectual, but empathy was… not really his thing. I don’t think anyone’s ever qualified JT as an intellectual heavyweight, but a lot of his “I’m such a nice guy!” wokeness strikes me as a way of avoiding some of his father’s worst mistakes.
The difference, of course, is how many of JT’s decisions end up coming across as cosmetic — though even the cosmetic changes have their place. But I don’t think anyone ever doubted that PET had thought about what he was arguing for. He wasn’t so much oblivious as to what even the people on his own side would think as he didn’t care, because he knew he was their intellectual superior. Whereas JT, I sometimes feel, can’t quite see why anybody would argue against him, because he’s such a good egg.
Not, of course, that one should define him solely according to his parents.
@Gaebolga:
Oh, I have pretty much every Epicurus the Sage story written, including the one with Cassandra and the Chariot of Apollo that was a short in an anthology comic once (maybe A1?). That’s where I first heard the bit about him being one of the first to openly accept women as students. (And poor Cassandra in that story. People realize she was right about the events of the story, start to wonder if she might be right about other things, and then she starts cheering about being proven right, and maybe now people would believe her about feminism… at which point everybody else started walking away again.)
And yes, little Alex was absolutely hilarious in his bluntness. “The last time I was with you, we ended up in Hades.” Along with the very Epicurean discussion of the relative happiness of going on a drunken bender versus solving math problems…
@Katamount:
If nothing else, I think Justin Trudeau could have done with more political experience to get a feel for how things work, because the man has absolutely no sense of potential scandals. (See also the invite list for the trip to India.) Granted, he was the best of a messy lot at the time, and Bob Rae was smart enough to not stick his head into that firing line.
AsAboveSoBelow,
My personal favorite Beavis and Butthead insult is “fart knocker.” I have no idea what it means. That’s why I like it.
The image of little Alex talking with such gusto about getting black-out drunk and getting into brawls was disturbingly funny. What was he, like 6? Barely knee-high to Epicurus.
Now I’m going to have to re-read that this weekend….
I remember this a lot in college. I’d say something that was clearly, to most people in the room, deliberately silly–“I am, of course, a world-class mathematician”, as I explain how I screwed up measuring something.
Future MGTOW of America, dead serious: “Oh yeah? What’s the triple salchow inverse ratio of Dunsany’s Fourth Quandrangle Extrapolation, then?”
Me: “Uh, eight. Definitely eight.”
FMoA, almost spitting in rage: “You don’t know anything about math!”
Different Dude: “Uh, that was kind of the point of the joke, man.”
FMoA: “This isn’t a joke. She doesn’t know shit about math, and she lied about it!”
Hostess: “WHO WANTS SOME POT?”
Hours later, FMoA is still muttering about how important math is.
Tinder made an obvious April Fools joke and it went right over this guys head
https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/b7deb3/if_tinder_is_implementing_a_height_setting_for/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app
@Cat Mara
When you say university of Kansas do you mean K.U or K.S.U?
@Lainy:
The one mentioned in Weird Eddie’s post, which is KU, I think. I’m not too au fait with all the American institutions of higher learning so when I said “University of Kansas” I assumed there was only one…
@Cat Mara
There is KU which is Kansas university. Then there is KSU which is Kansas State University. They are rival schools basically. KU is the jay hawks and KSU is the wild cats so they basically compete in all the sports and academic type things.
Just like FSU and FU…
(Go, Noles!)
(…which is supposed to be sufficient to indicate the “FU” is a joke on UF…)
(…good jokes being ones you need to explain in some depth…)
Edited to add:
(…oh, god, stop me before I edit again…)
Then you have the one guy who got mad and called me a “man hater” and disrespectful because I DIDN’T shake his hand.
P.S, he treated everyone around him like real garbage and he relished in it and being hated by “brainwashed liberals”. I told him I don’t respect him and I wasn’t going to shake his hand, even when he cornered me the second time around with his cronies, trying to make an “example” out of me in front of his equally assholish friends. It’s like he was going to make me shake his hand, then brag to his cronnies about “this is how you break down a bitch.” Nope. He was the real bitch. Try to picture the abject redness and shock on his face as I calmly acted like he didn’t even say anything and went right to putting my hand over the shoulder and talking with someone else who was in passing about something actually very important. He pretty much pouted, stomped and slammed things against tables anytime I was around and just got even angrier when I didn’t jump once.
So either you run into the ones who see a woman’s handshake as worthless, or you run into these twats.
I mean. I’m literally 6’7″ tall, without heels. Some women are really fucking tall.
Anyway, I strongly, strongly, strongly doubt that is where handshakes originated.
It’s been speculated that might be the origin, but if so, it’s wayway back there in the mists of time, ie, there is no time in recorded history when a handshake was literally supposed to serve as a sign of being unarmed. Greco-Roman art shows husbands and wives clasping hands as a sign of marriage. Female figures are shown shaking hands with one another–the Wikipedia page for ‘handshake’ has a picture of a nice relief of Hera and Athena clasping hands.
In the 19th century, there was somewhat greater gender segregation of handshaking. Women shook hands with each other, but less commonly with men, and if they shook a man’s hand, they were supposed to initiate it, to indicate to him it was acceptable.
Dude basically is inventing a literal significance for the gesture that it hasn’t had in millennia if ever, and then pretending that a social custom that’s been normative for the last hundred years or so is extremely awkward to him because he only clasps hands with other fellow Viking warriors to show that he doesn’t have a broadsword in his hand.
Which should be fairly clear. It’s not hard to tell if someone has a broadsword in his hand.
You mean broadswords aren’t only visible the instant combat starts? And here I was assuming that everyone was carrying around invisible broadswords in their dominant hand(s), so that they could defeat their enemies at a moments notice without struggling to get them out of their sheaths.
Games and books have lead me astray! It’s truly terrible the lies we tell our children.
lol He took it so personally, setting out to disprove a total stranger as if it even mattered. haha
And “Ramzpaul” believing that handshakes were invented by men, for men, and…about swords? Hogwash, certain gestures that are universally understood are far more ancient, including greetings with an outstretched hand that are even used by some other apes, so its roots undoubtedly predate our species long before macho nonsense about weapons.
And if you can’t SEE that someone isn’t holding a weapon, then maybe stay out of the battle. lol
I just caught up with this thread now, and having finished laughing (gosh that Twitter thread was fun; how anyone could think people were being serious in response to that tripe about handshakes is beyond me), I’m just posting a heartfelt thank you for this:
@Gaebolga, thanks for mentioning these, and @Jenora, thanks for your endorsement! I’m just about to order some new books and I wasn’t sure what to go for. I’m so looking forward to these 🙂
@Mish:
They’re fun. And have a bit of fun at the expense of misogyny.
(At one point in one of the stories, Aristotle is opining on how women are obviously less intelligent than men because their brains are smaller, which Epicurus in particular seems to think doesn’t quite follow. Later on, when they have to find out something that’s going on, they need someone who can pass for a woman at first glance, and Aristotle is the only one of them who doesn’t have a beard. While they’re dressing him up, and Aristotle is griping about this, Epicurus comments ‘Oh, just make your brain smaller, Aristotle.’)
Aristotle is full of himself. Plato is that guy at parties who has this idea and just will not shut up about it. Socrates enjoys trolling people. The books just have fun with it.