Woo hoo! Wo-hen!


"Hear me sing! Watch me dance! See my package!" (from Asian Prince on MySpace)

"I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult." - E. B. White

***

A seditious comic strip (which shall not be named) on Theology, aka Intellectual Tennis Without a Net:



B: But A, isn't this 'Sensus Divinitatis' just a way to justify your excess of metaphysical certainty

A: Not at all! But it does explain why I am so firm in my beliefs

B: So why haven't I got a Sensus Divinitatis?

A: You could be suffering from a cognitive malfunction

C: So you are saying that all atheists are retarded?

A: Not at all! Just mentally deficient

A: Or maybe you do have a Sensus Divinitatus, but it has been made moribund by sin

C: She doesn't appear to be persuaded


As C remarked in a previous strip, on not being able to rely on his 'Sensus Divinitatus' (by definition) and having to build his own epistemological life raft:

"But... I don't know Latin"

"As you journey through life take a minute every now and then to give a thought for the other fellow. He could be plotting something." - Hagar the Horrible

***

"Name: Update for Windows Vista (KB940510)
Type: Important

INTRODUCTION
This update enables Windows Vista to detect activation exploits that bypass product activation and that interfere with usual Windows operation. An exploit is a form of software that replaces or modifies authentic Windows components. When exploits are present on a system, it indicates that a software or hardware vendor may have tampered with genuine Windows to enable the sale of counterfeit software. Therefore, the security and the privacy of the computer are put at risk. After this update is installed, you will know if exploits are present on the system.

... Note Installing this update does not affect the functionality of your operating system.

MORE INFORMATION
This update for Windows Vista detects exploits that may be present on a system. An exploit bypasses licensing and activation. This behavior allows for counterfeit copies of Windows Vista to run without ever having to be activated. Activation exploits make alterations to key Windows system files. These exploits affect both system stability and security.

When the update is installed, no functionality of your operating system will be affected. If no exploits are detected, the update silently exits. If exploits are detected, you will be provided a link to a Web site that describes how you can remove the exploits. When the exploits are removed, you may be asked to use a valid product key to activate your copy of Windows. If you do not want to remove the exploits, Windows may disable the exploits and then ask you to use a valid product key to activate Windows."


Nice try.

Though I suppose "does not affect the functionality of your operating system" is technically correct, now that they've removed the Vista kill switch.


[Addendum:

ZDNet reports that the update only runs once, and just notifies you if your system has been 'prey' to a Vista activiation exploit. "Even after detecting a bypass hack, Windows still reports itself as a genuine, activated copy" - it really doesn't change anything after you get rid of the dialog box informing you that you may be using counterfeit software.

My Digital Life has more information on activation hacks this update doesn't fix, and the names of the 2 it does.]

"Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile." - Albert Schweitzer

***

Introducing Incentives in the Market for Live and Cadaveric Organ Donations
Gary S. Becker, Julio Jorge Elías

"Proposals to pay for organs, even from cadavers, have been sharply criticized on several grounds. One of the most common is that payment is “immoral” because it involves the “commodification” of body parts. Individuals who make this argument deny that people have the right to control the use of their bodies.

If women can get paid to host the eggs of other women and bear their children- as they can in the United States -why cannot men and women get paid for selling their organs to save the lives of others? Surely, the moral considerations involved in allowing pay for organs that save lives are no weaker, and for many persons would be stronger, than those involved in allowing pay for the use of wombs to create lives.

Table 5 considers the most important arguments that have been advanced against payment for organs by comparing that system with issues raised by a voluntary army. The first row and first column discuss the claim that monetary payments for organs is undesirable because that involves commodification of body parts. But the voluntary army used by the United States and many other nations allows the commodification of the whole body since volunteers expose themselves to injury and death if they are sent into conflict. Not only has the voluntary army been considered a success in the United States, but several European nations- such as France- that originally favored the draft have been shifting to a voluntary army.

The sale of organs has also been opposed because poor individuals probably would be the main ones who would sell their organs. But should poor individuals be deprived of revenue that could be highly useful to them, especially when their organs might save the lives of persons who desperately need to replace their defective organs?

This argument was also made against the voluntary army, that it would become an army of the poor. However, it did not quite work out that way. The very poorest often cannot qualify for the armed forces because they have insufficient education, low test scores, may use drugs, and so forth. Similarly, the organs of poor individuals who use drugs, or have aids, hepatitis, or other serious illnesses would be rejected as posing too large a risk to recipients. So probably the healthy poor and middle classes would actually provide most of the organs for live transplants under a market incentive system. Of course, a quota could be placed on the number of organs from poor individuals, but is that desirable?

It is also claimed that payment for organ donations from living individuals would encourage impulsive and reckless provision of organs, partly because donors would not be able to sufficiently calculate the risks involved. If impulsive donations were a problem, a few weeks cooling off period could be required to give donors sufficient time to change their minds.

... Row 4 of table 5 mentions the opposition to paying for organs because that might reduce the supply of organs from altruistic reasons. Although paying for organs does not prevent persons from supplying organs out of altruistic motives, usually to help relatives, altruism clearly has been an insufficient motive under the present system. Otherwise, the demand for organs would not be so much larger than the supply.

Again, a comparison with a voluntary army is instructive. Critics claimed that it would be difficult to get volunteers at a reasonable price because paying for volunteers would crowd out persons who would otherwise volunteer for patriotic motives. In fact, people have enlisted under a voluntary army for a variety of motives, including patriotism. In particular, military volunteers surged after the terrorist attack on 9/11 because of patriotism.

The long wait for organs under the present system has encouraged the development of a black market in live or cadaveric organs, where donors or their heirs get paid. These transplants are available only to wealthier individuals who usually must bear the total expense themselves. They are also often much riskier because organs are not screened as carefully for disease, are not matched as closely to recipients, and operating conditions and the quality of surgeons tend to be inferior.

Allowing the purchase of organs would essentially knock out the black market in organs, and all its problems of quality control. The purchase of organs would also reduce the advantages of wealth in getting organs since poorer individuals in need of organs who cannot afford the black market would no longer have to wait so long before getting their organs through the Medicaid or Medicare payment system.

But above all, the most effective answer to the critics of paying for organs is that the present system imposes an intolerable burden on many very ill individuals who cannot afford to wait years until suitable organs become available. Increasing supply through payment would largely eliminate this wait and thus enormously improve the efficiency of the transplant market."

Sociological Images: Seeing Is Believing: French Ad Uses Sex to Argue for Changing Housing Policies


"Certains prétendent que les étudiants n’ont pas de problèmes de logement...

Construction de logements pour les étudiants!
unef
le syndicat étudiant"


Explanation: "This ad came from an issue of the English version of the Spiegel. According to SocProf, it was "created by a French student union...to underline the issue of housing shortage for students," which is forcing many French students to continue living with their parents."

That line may work on European bureaucracies... But then again, the students can always take to the streets instead.

The Canadian Press: Obama faces parodies, questions about his promises in Democratic race

"Beyond the humourous backlash, some in the media are starting to ask just how Obama plans to deliver on sweeping promises to unite the country, bridge the racial divide and break the partisan logjam in the U.S. capital.

Delivered with so much charisma, the specifics of these noble goals haven't seemed to matter all that much.

Last week, David Brooks, an influential New York Times columnist, said supporters are starting to suffer from the Obama Comedown Syndrome. "Up until now, The Chosen One's speeches had seemed to them less like stretches of words and more like soul sensations that transcended time and space," wrote Brooks...

Other columnists and TV commentators have wondered if Obama's support has gone from movement to "personality cult."

It's perhaps a valid question about a man who was cheered at a Dallas rally last week for blowing his nose and whose Yes We Can slogan has been turned into a pop music video.

Kurtz has noted that scattered attempts so far to take a detailed tough look at Obama's career have "barely caused a ripple."

They included a Time magazine piece on Obama's penchant for sidestepping issues in the Illinois senate by voting "present" and a look at how he watered down a bill affecting a nuclear power company that contributed to his campaign.

It's hard to imagine that any new such revelations would put a dent in the feverish support of many who find it hard to explain his grip.

"Obama has this almost irrational following and I myself can't sometimes explain why I'm supporting him," Noah Norman, 25, recently told the Washington Post.

"He's all things to all men. At least that's how I put it.""

***

AlterNet: Election 2008: Obama's Line On Lobbyists is Misleading

"Opensecrets.org shows that Obama is picking up gobs of money put on the table by these special interests -- including those involved in health care, which will surely have a lot riding on the outcome of the election and will expect to be heard after the election is over.

Consider the sector called lawyers and law firms. Clearly, lawyers and law firms lobby on behalf of their own interests -- like fighting malpractice reform, which could again surface as a thorny issue for the new administration. Clinton and Obama have raised similar amounts from lawyers and law firms -- $11.8 and $9.5 million. McCain and Huckabee have taken far less. The health sector has also given to Obama, Clinton, and McCain. In the pharmaceutical and health product industries, contributions to Clinton total $349,000 and $338,000 to Obama. Again, McCain trails in donations at about $98,000, an indication that the sector sees the real action on the Democratic side of the ballot. Health professionals, which include doctors, nurses, and dentists, have given Clinton some $2.3 million and Obama $1.7 million.

Last August The Boston Globe, in a piece by Scott Helman, took a hard look at Obama's contributions, noting that "behind Obama's campaign rhetoric about taking on special interests lies a more complicated truth." That truth revealed that as a state legislator in Illinois, a U.S. senator, and as a presidential aspirant, Obama had collected hundreds of thousands of dollars from lobbyists and PACs."

***

Die lah.

Something Acidflask sent me:


Google Trends: All your base, Goatse, YTMND, lolcats


Google Trends: All your base, Goatse, YTMND, lolcats, 2 girls 1 cup
It even has news articles!

In other news, the official site doesn't work anymore :(

The Flurl.com mirror is still up, but I'm not taking my chances.

"I improve on misquotation." - Cary Grant

***

Windows Vista Recovery Disc Download - "If you're like most PC users, you probably got Windows Vista with a new PC or laptop... they don't give you a real Windows Vista installation disc with your purchase. Instead, they bundle what they call a "recovery disc" (that's if you're lucky - otherwise you'll have a recovery partition instead) with your machine and leave it at that... Microsoft seems to have realized this problem, and have thankfully made a recovery disc for this purpose. It contains the contents of the Windows Vista DVD's "recovery center," as we've come to refer to it. It cannot be used to install or reinstall Windows Vista, and just serves as a Windows PE interface to recovering your PC."

Windows Music - "Music composed using only sounds from Windows XP and 98, with the free ModPlug Tracker music software."

Fighting Fantasy games find their way on to DS and PSP. Hack and slash without getting your fingers dirty - "Hoping to rekindle such interest, Livingstone and Jackson have decided to bring the concept to Sony and Nintendo's handhelds. "Fighting Fantasy built up a huge, worldwide fan base over the years," reasons Livingstone. "We believe that players will really enjoy the adventures in a new way on DS and PSP. Fighting Fantasy's interactive structure is ideal for bite-sized chunks of gameplay which is important for these devices.""

The Straight Dope: What is perfect pitch, and what good is it? - "Perfect pitch is a mixed blessing for musicians. On the plus side, some burble about the "immediate sensory pleasure" that "adventurous modulation" brings the lucky few who have it. Some claim it adds a new dimension to music, with each note having a character all its own. For just that reason, however, some with perfect pitch find transposing a piece to a different key disorienting--like "seeing purple grass," one writer says--because the feel of the new key is so different... as you age, your eardrums lose their elasticity and everything you hear goes a bit sharp. Most people don't notice the change, but for those with perfect pitch nothing sounds right anymore... Some have found other uses for perfect pitch. You may recall the "phone phreaks," the protohackers who used to delight in copping free calls from Ma Bell. One storied hacker was a blind kid named Joe Engressia. Most phreaks needed elaborate equipment to create the precisely pitched Touch-Tones necessary to operate the switching equipment. Not Engressia. Blessed with perfect pitch, he could whistle them."

Judge drops sex case as 'outrageous' - "A Lehigh County judge has dismissed the case against a woman who was charged with promoting prostitution at a North Whitehall Township spa, ruling that state police engaged in ''outrageous'' conduct when they paid an informant to have sex four times with employees. State police investigating the Shiatsu Spa on Route 309 paid the informant $180 for his ''time'' and gave him money to pay for sexual acts in the spa in June and July 2006."

Virtual terrorists - "On the darker side, there are also weapons armouries in SL where people can get access to guns, including automatic weapons and AK47s. Searches of the SL website show there are three jihadi terrorists registered and two elite jihadist terrorist groups. Once these groups take up residence in SL, it is easy to start spreading propaganda, recruiting and instructing like minds on how to start terrorist cells and carry out jihad. One radical group, called Second Life Liberation Army, has been responsible for some computer-coded atomic bombings of virtual world stores in the past six months."

Boycott 2008 Communist Olympics: Olympics-Taiwan torch relay to spotlight China 'abuses' - "China has lumped Falun Gong followers, Chinese defectors, pro-democracy activists, religious 'extremists and infiltrators', exiled Tibetans and Moslem Uighurs together with 'terrorists' on its persona non grata list, a spokeswoman for the coalition said... 'The government seems afraid that its own citizens will embarrass it by speaking out about political and social problems, but China's leaders apparently don't realise authoritarian crackdowns are even more embarrassing.'"
Hmm, the last bit sounds familiar.

Earthquakes are caused by gays - MP - "Shlomo Benizri of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas Party said the only way to prevent the earthquakes was for parliament to stop liberalising laws concerning homosexuals, AP reported."
Maybe we can have the Arabs realising that earthquakes are caused by Jews!!!

The Revealer: The Intimacy of Killing - "What she encountered was not the stuff of military history, but accounts of killing accompanied by claims of pleasure derived from the act. Sometimes sexual, as for a soldier who compared killing to "getting screwed the first time." Sometimes religious, as for a soldier who called it "joy unspeakable." Sometimes even romantic, as for a soldier who wrote a sweetheart, "every one I gets under the ribs I thinks of you mi dear." As she realized that such sentiments were the rule rather than the exception, her brief against the worst of killers was transformed: It became a study of how society makes killing commendable... The first and last military-history seminar she attended was led by a man who interrupted 'a paper discussing Dismembering the Male with the declaration that "This is a gender-free zone!" The all-male audiences responded "Hear, hear!" and, according to Ms. Bourke, devoted a fair share of the Q-and-A session to "jokes about women's knickers."... "When fear becomes so strong, and you finally get to see the enemy, the man firing a rifle is at last in an exalted state-precisely because of his fear." Should he describe that exaltation as " `an ache as profound as orgasm,' " she adds, he is likely as not simply using the most intense words he has."

Facebook | Atheists, Agnostics and Freethinkers in Singapore

"No man needs a vacation so much as the man who has just had one." - Elbert Hubbard

***



Bob: So...? Has Victoria given you an answer yet, Joe?

Joe: Um... I haven't asked her yet, Bob

Bob: Well, why not?

Joe: 'Cuz I just lost my job! This is hardly a good time to ask her to marry me!

Bob: But she has a job, right?

Joe: What... you expect her to support me and my kids?

Bob: Well, isn't that what's always been expected from men?

Joe: Yeah, but... but...

Bob: Theoretically, she should leap at this opportunity for women's equality!

Joe: Right... Like your theory that giving rich people more money will help poor people

***

In the same vein, albeit ideologically charged and too focused on one single issue (but hey - gaze into the abyss and the abyss also gazes into you), an article I read long ago which seems to have all but disappeared from the net:

How Come Men Have to Register for The Military Draft and Women Don't?

A look at gender roles, citizenship, and the distorted equality paradigm propagated by ideological feminism.

As reported by RICH ZUBATY
from a small island in the SOUTH PACIFIC

I'm sorry I can't be with you at the 1998 American Men's Studies Association conference to lead a discussion about what I consider to be the most egregious omission of modern feminism -- registering women for the military draft. Debates about "glass ceilings" and "sexual harassment" are trivial in comparison with getting shot at in foreign lands defending the interests of U.S. corporations. If feminists were truly interested in Equality, rather than gaining ever more special privileges for women, they would be proactively lobbying the Congress and the courts to register women for Selective Service.

Is it not the very meaning of citizenship that the citizen of a state is obligated to protect and defend that form of government which affords her the privileges and protections of citizenship? How come, when women got the right to vote, they were not instantly saddled with the responsibility to fight in war to defend their right to vote? What mysterious, archaic gender paradigms populate our psyches, blinding us to the actual spectrum of issues which constitute "equality" and "citizenship"? Who has managed to control the gender equality debate to the extent that Selective Service registration has remained absent from it for 70 years? Why do they do it? What deeper paradigms are they skirting, glossing over, concealing?

And...given that men are expected to fight in war and women are not, is it not possible to conclude that men are NOT the oppressors of women, but that men are, in fact, the PROTECTORS of women?

Right now I am somewhat willingly stranded on a small island in the South Pacific. There are no roads, no cars, no electricity, no phones. My hosts are in great part a hunter/gatherer culture. I spend my days with the men, fishing and collecting fruits: papaya, breadfruit, coconuts, bananas. The women stick close to home, sweeping the packed earth around their coconut leaf huts, shooing pigs out of the garden, collecting shellfish off the reef at low tide. Both men and women cook and tend the infants, depending upon who is not engaged in some other activity at the time. As other researchers have pointed out, there is less division of labor in both hunter/gatherer and "information age" societies than in the agricultural and industrial societies of recent epochs.

But the dangerous work is still done by the men. Women don't climb coconut trees (fat as I am, neither do I). Women don't ride small boats out into huge waves to catch fish. Women are not drafted in time of war. As in Europe and America, most families here are de facto matriarchies, governed by the iron will of the eldest surviving family member -- almost always a female. Men appear to have a great deal of autonomy while they're alive, but they simply do not last as long as women. While young women complain about social restrictions and lack of freedom, old women govern the wealth of the family -- in Europe, America, and the South Pacific. Thus, the very things that feminists complain about, are the things that ensure women's eventual dominion over the accumulated resources of the family. The men lead tough, dangerous lives, die sooner, and the family wealth devolves into the hands of the elder women.

"Equality" is not age specific. It's meaningless to ask whether men and women are treated equally at the age of 18, 35, 72. Equality embraces a lifetime of events. And it's clear -- in Europe, America, and the South Pacific -- that over a lifetime women possess more security and authority than men. Why? Because men willingly sacrifice their well being for women. Because men are the protectors and defenders of women. Because men die for women.

Why do they do it?

Because women are widely regarded to be more valuable than men. Women make babies. A deep biological imperative within men supports the notion that women and babies must be protected and defended. That's why there are male feminists. Male feminists are men expressing their innate urge to protect and defend women. Challenging and critiquing women runs against our character. We hate fighting with women.

So what about military service? Is draft registration a moot point since we're not at war? A young man I know of was recently booted out of an Ivy League school -- lost his admission and scholarship -- when it was discovered he had neglected to register for the draft. The school received federal funds, one requirement of which is that all males over the age of 18 must be registered for the Selective Service. The school could lose it's federal money if it doesn't comply, so the young man gets the "heave ho" -- instantly -- no appeal. Female co-eds need not worry about this sort of career disruption.

Bills have been sponsored in the U.S. Congress to register women for Selective Service. They did not pass. They got no feminist support. Moreover, since it is the policy of the Pentagon that women cannot be forced to perform combat duties, the issue of drafting them was deemed irrelevant. Tell that to the guys getting shot at.

I talked to some marines from Somalia. Their beef about women soldiers is that, while the guys are sent into the desert or on combat missions, the female marines guard the embassies and toady about with the diplomats and generals ensuring their own promotions.

It is a well-known fact that, during the build-up to the Iraq War, droves of female soldiers became suddenly ill or, more remarkably, temporarily pregnant -- many with pregnancies which seemed, miraculously, to vanish when the hostilities ended. Is military service just another career track for women? Another way to get a paycheck and a pension without having to risk too much?

And...while the engines of feminist propaganda inflamed the nation over the issue of admitting young women to military academies, the real issue -- registering ALL women for Selective Service in combat roles -- was cleanly swept under the rug.

Why do feminists, male and female, dodge this issue?

Because it is the death knell to their movement.

On every radio show I've ever done with ideological feminists -- where I was able to raise the Selective Service issue -- I was met with a prolonged pause, then a gush of unanimous and unequivocal agreement that women should be compelled to register, then the topic was swiftly changed to something else -- a peculiarly feminine technique for avoiding unpleasantness. They'll talk about it. But they won't do anything about it. Why won't feminists proactively advocate this issue?

Because they know their constituents. They know that the feminist movement would endure an 80% desertion rate led by those gender opportunists who go by the name of Equity Feminists if the ideologues began openly advocating draft registration. Far and away most women do NOT want to register for the draft. They do not want equality -- not if it means they REALLY have to fight for it.

And how about the people who don't believe in war?

Welcome to a bigger problem.

I didn't believe in the Vietnam War. I was drafted anyway. The women with whom I had pursued undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago sailed blithely off to graduate school, while I went underground dodging the F.B.I. It was no fun. And it certainly wasn't Equality.

200 years ago a flurry of democratic revolutions established that a person willing to fight and risk his life could be liberated from monarchy and gain the right to vote for his governors. 140 years later women obtained the right to vote, without being obligated to fight for, or risk anything. Is this not simply another instance of men affording special protections for women? It was men, after all -- the guys who fight and die -- who granted women the right to vote.

Have we not lost sight of what citizenship in a democracy is all about? How can our media focus on the "glass ceiling" and ignore this obvious inequity? I have no problem with women becoming senators, CEOs, or Supreme Court Justices. I DO have a problem with the idea that these women never, ever, have to fight to defend the form of government which permits them to attain these high positions.

Aristocrats are a privileged species of human being. Aristocrats are not expected to perform hard, dangerous, physical labor -- no bricklaying or asphalt pouring or oil well drilling for these folks. Aristocrats are not expected to serve as common soldiers in time of war -- for them are reserved positions of command and supply, far removed from the front lines. Are we not creating an aristocracy of women? Are we not breeding a race of privileged creatures, with guaranteed rights for advancement into positions of authority, who are not expected to perform nasty physical labor nor fight in time of war? It seems to me democracy is circling back on itself, like a snake swallowing its own tail, recreating a type of aristocrat, a privileged individual, one who wears a slightly more attractive gown, yet one who is, as in the olden days, endowed with favored status from her time of birth. Is it possible we are recreating an aristocracy of women?

All the feminist issues of the last 30 years rolled up into one pale in comparison to the image of the male draftee, getting shot at, by people he doesn't know, in a war he doesn't believe in. This is TRUE powerlessness, not TV hype.

Equality is not just about money and political power. It is also about human relationships. Whether it's a father who isn't allowed to see his children, a coal miner or bricklayer working a job he hates to feed his wife and kids, or a draftee getting shot at, the stark oppression of men in the entire arena of human relationships is perhaps the major untold academic saga of this century. We need much more serious academic inquiry into why men get stuck with the hard dangerous jobs, and why men get stuck fighting wars. Draft women. Let them get shot at -- or run from the F.B.I. That's real equality. That's civic responsibility. If women cannot accede to registering for Selective Service their very right to vote, much less their right to become senators, judges and CEOs, is called into question. Equality means equality of responsibility. Women can NEVER be equal without it.

But we -- bio-imprinted males that we are -- will continue protecting them and defending them while they rail at us for being their oppressors. Like cocks in a barnyard, no matter what injustices and outrages we female sympathizers foist on the rest of the male species, we will carry on blithely protecting and defending women and advocating their favorite issues. That's how we were made. Men compete with each other for the privilege of protecting women. And the guy who does the best job of that wins the emotional reward that women offer -- and I'm not just talking about getting laid.

But the joke's on us. Women live longer. Women control 65% of America's wealth (Forbes magazine). Women don't need our protection. Women don't have to fight in war.

Oops...please excuse me. I have to go. It's windy and raining, dark clouds lashing across the lagoon, but the guys want to go fishing and I should go too. Don't ask me why. I'll never understand. It's just something guys do -- enduring pain and discomfort to gain sustenance for the women and kids. That's not likely to change. Not in Europe, America or the South Pacific. Men take natural pleasure in protecting and providing for women. It's part of our bio-make-up.

And it doesn't run in the opposite direction. Few women are dedicated to protecting and providing for men. Few women will lay bricks or mine coal for a husband who stays home cooking pancakes. Equality between the sexes? It's about as germane an issue as financial security for sea urchins. If women want equality tell them to register for the draft. If not, tell them to stop yapping about it.

It's cold and wet out here. There are wild, wind-whipped waves and razor-backed reefs and mean-toothed fish to haul into the boat. It's not ideology. It's not something you discuss in climate controlled rooms. It's something you do.

Rich Zubaty is the author of Surviving the Feminization of America.

Heh:


"'White House'
Obama: ... well first off, that sign's gonna have to go..."


I can't find the original source though.

***



Dilbert: I'm going to a singles' mixer tonight. Do you have any advice?

Dogbert: Don't I always? It's all about knowing what a woman needs. Find a woman who looks hot, carve her out from the herd and read this.

Dilbert: What is it?

Dogbert:It's the ultimate pick up line.

*At mixer*

Dilbert: Um... Hi. Excuse me. 'Criticism completes me'

Woman: (thinking): He's a keeper.

My brother in law thought this was cake:



It's roast pork loin.

E-POLL ON BUDGET 2008 (INDIVIDUALS)

"Two of the key thrusts of Budget 2008 are to continue to build a resilient community through strengthening financial security for retirement and helping the less well-off members in our society, and to provide a full range of education and training opportunities for Singaporeans.

Which of the following measures announced by the Finance Minister are you most satisfied with? * (Respondent can choose more than 1 from each category)

Tax Changes
- One-off 20 per cent personal income tax rebate capped at $2,000
- Removal of estate duty with effect from 16 February 2008
- Reduction in duty rates for liquor and wine"


Yes, I'm sure the less well-off members in our society appreciate cheaper alcohol to numb the pain of their lives.

Also, I always thought that the raison d'etre of estate duties was to stop the rich inheriting their wealth. (For objections, see: THE ESTATE TAX: MYTHS AND REALITIES)


I was told (albeit by the PSC microchip) that only 30% (?) of Singaporeans pay income tax due to a high income threshold and exemptions, but looking at the How to calculate your tax spreadsheet, I'm not sure if that is the case.

Your first $20,000 of annual income is tax free, which works out to $1,667 a month; the average monthly household income in employed households in 2007 was $6,830, which works out to $3,415 for 2 earners and $2,277 for 3. Furthermore, you have to add in Net Annual Value of property (though there's a $150,000 exemption). Unfortunately I'm not familiar with the wild and wonderful world of property in Singapore, but given that a 4 room flat in Tampines is valued at $278,000, and smaller flats are in older and more centrally-located locales (since they only just started making 3-rooms again), maybe only new 3-rooms are that cheap (Caveat: the market now is hot, so this analysis may not apply every year).

[Addendum: I got this bit wrong.

The site says: "NAV is the annual value (as shown in your property tax bill) less allowable expenses. Annual value is the gross amount at which the property can be expected to be rented from year to year."

So actually most people don't pay tax on the NAV of their property.]

There are some forms of relief, but even those which apply to many people, like NSman (self/wife/parent) relief ($1,500-$3,000), Earned income relief ($1,000) and Qualifying/handicapped child relief ($2,000) would seem to make a difference only if you have more than one child.

I am thus extremely skeptical of the claim that only 30% (?) of Singaporeans pay income tax (and am slightly skeptical of the lesser claim that less than half do). Unfortunately, those who would be able to conclusively answer this question are unable to do so.

[Addendum: Given how complicated the tax code is, I wouldn't be surprised if most people made a mistake here and there. We could all be guilty of tax evasion - it's just whether they choose to chase us for it. Gee.

The PSC microchip sent me this URL:

Channelnewsasia.com | SINGAPORE BUDGET 2001

"ROUND UP SPEECH DELIVERED BY MINISTER FOR FINANCE FOR THE DEBATE ON THE
FINANCIAL YEAR 2001 BUDGET
7 MARCH 2001

Mr Low... also conveniently forgets that nearly 70 percent of economically active persons in Singapore no longer pay any personal income tax"

Perhaps this no longer holds true 7 years later.]


Other interesting nuggets about tax relief:

- Grandparent caregiver relief is to "help working mothers take care of their children. Single or male taxpayers are not eligible for this relief." (emphases in original)
- Parent/handicapped parent relief "is a relief to promote filial piety".
- "'Wife relief' is a relief to support family formation, and to provide recognition to male taxpayers supporting their wives." (though on the upside, handicapped husbands qualify you for relief)

"I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it." - Harry S Truman

***

Someone sent me: Feministe » Only Whores Orgasm (maybe because of the cute limerick), which criticised a columnist, Mike Adams, whose worldview apparently was that "if us ladies have the audacity to orgasm, or worse, talk about sex outside of the bedroom (missionary only, by the way), you are a harlot. Harlot!"

On first sight, this was a legitimate complaint against a guy who was for the suppression of female sexuality, especially since the original post wasn't there anymore and many other sites were bashing the guy.

Yet, digging up the original post brings some perspective. Although the paragraph where he used the word 'whore' was unfortunate, the rest of the article is not unacceptable.

Consider that UNC was going to set up an [female] orgasm festival with

"pin the finger on the clitoris" and "locate the g-spot" games followed by contests to see how quickly and properly people of both sexes can put condoms on bananas.

There will also be a "vibrator museum" showcasing various sex toys including - but not limited to! - an antique vibrator from 1924. And there will be a vibrator raffle and lots of information on masturbation, orgasm and contraception.

Now, the information dissemination is unobjectionable, but the games are quite explicit.

Imagine what it would be like if a male sexuality awareness festival was held with a pornography exhibition and Real Doll samples. What's more, there would be a "stroke the penis to ejaculation" games (a la Gunther's old Ding Dong Song flash game) and there a Fleshlight raffle.

The people in charged would be labelled perverts, and might even be subject to sexual harassment suits (one could argue that penis-shaped dildos/vibrators emasculate and objectify men by reducing them to their phalluses, humiliating and essentialising them blah blah blah).

One could always say that women are entitled to greater license because of a current lack of awareness of sexual issues among them, but information dissemination would be enough (and given that this is a college campus, I'm sure most of them are suitably liberated already).


This follow-up post, where he responds to a sexual harassment complaint, is hilarious.

"In order to file a complaint in the UNC system, the plaintiff must have very strong feelings. Feelings are the basis of every decision in our system. Logic and objectivity are irrelevant and probably sexist, too...

Recently, at “The Vagina Monologues” our campus feminists suggested that it is acceptable to call women “c**ts.” So, of course, had I really called them “whores” that would have been much better than calling them “c**ts” as the feminists would prefer."

"There are times when parenthood seems nothing but feeding the mouth that bites you." - Peter De Vries

***

my defining moment | ricky gervais
My Argument With God
How I went from Jesus-loving Christian to fun-loving infidel...in one afternoon

(OCRed version follows)

(Picture of Gervais)
LOSING MY RELIGION
Gervais went from “God bless” to God-less.

"I loved Jesus. He was my hero. More than pop stars. More than footballers. More than God. God was by definition omnipotent and perfect. Jesus was a man. He had to work at it. He had temptation but defeated sin. He had integrity and courage. But He was my hero because He was kind. And He was kind to everyone. He didn’t bow to peer pressure or tyranny or cruelty. He didn’t care who you were. He loved you. What a guy. I wanted to be just like him.

One day when I was about 8 years old, I was drawing the crucifixion as part of my Bible-studies homework. I loved art too. And nature. I loved how God made all the animals. They were also perfect. Unconditionally beautiful. It was an amazing world.

I lived in a very poor, working-class estate in an urban sprawl called Reading, about 40 miles west of London. My father was a laborer and my mother was a housewife. I was never ashamed of poverty. It was almost noble. Also, everyone I knew was in the same situation, and I had everything I needed. School was free. My clothes were cheap and always clean and ironed. And Mum was always cooking. She was cooking the day I was drawing Jesus on the cross.

I was sitting at the kitchen table when my brother came home. He was 11 years older than me, so he would have been 19. He was as smart as anyone I knew, but he was too cheeky. He would answer back and get into trouble. I was a good boy. I went to church and believed in God—what a relief for a working-class mother. You see, growing up where I did, mums didn’t hope as high as their kids growing up to be doctors; they just hoped their kids didn’t go to jail. So bring them up believing in God and they’ll be good and law-abiding. It’s a perfect system. Well, nearly. Seventy-five percent of Americans are God-

I started thinking about it and asking more questions, and within an hour, I was an atheist.

fearing Christians; 75 percent of prisoners are God-fearing Christians. Ten percent of Americans are atheists; 0.2 percent of prisoners are atheists.

But anyway, there I was, happily drawing my hero when my big brother Bob asked, “Why do you believe in God?” Just a simple question. But my mum panicked. “Bob,” she said, in a tone that I knew meant “shut up.” Why was that a bad thing to ask? If there was a God and my faith was strong, it didn’t matter what people said.

Oh...hang on. There is no God. He knows it, and she knows it deep down. It was as simple as that. I started thinking about it and asking more questions, and within an hour, I was an atheist.

Wow. No God. If Mum had lied to me about God, had she also lied to me about Santa? Yes, of course, but who cares? The gifts kept coming. And so did the gifts of my newfound atheism. The gifts of truth, science, nature. The real beauty of this world. Not a world by design, but one by chance. I learned of evolution—a theory so simple and obvious that only England’s greatest genius could have come up with it. Evolution of plants, animals, and us—with imagination, free will, love, anti humor. I no longer needed a reason for my existence, just a reason to live. And imagination, free will, love, humor, fun, music, sports, beer, and pizza are all good enough reasons for living.

But living an honest life—for that you need the truth. That’s the other thing I learned that day, that the truth, however shocking or uncomfortable, in the end leads to liberation and dignity.

I hope I haven’t offended anyone with this article. Okay, that’s a lie.

Ricky Gervais created the award-winning TV shows The Office and Extras. This fall, he stars in the romantic comedy Ghost Town opposite Tea Leoni.


If only it were that simple (or even worked) for most people. Unfortunately, this article doesn't help us understand why people believe.

I like the line: "Imagination, free will, love, humor, fun, music, sports, beer, and pizza are all good enough reasons for living." And so do others.

"A hypocrite is a person who--but who isn't?" - Don Marquis

***

Most Improved Students - "As a form of motivation and encouragement, the Faculty recognizes students who have improved tremendously in their studies." - Wah, I didn't know this existed. OTOH, the award for the Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher (OUR) Prize "must be used towards participation in related activities/programmes which includes overseas/local conferences/workshop, leadership seminars or any such related activity approved by the Faculty/School that are deemed to add value to a student's education and overall development". Wth.

I was walking around in the Kent Vale (housing for NUS staff) supermarket; 454ml of Taiko Golden Syrup (sugar and water) is $4.20, 375ml of Maple-flavoured syrup is $5.90 and 370ml of Grade A Canadian Maple Syrup is a whopping $16.50. They also sell pure ghee, US Pringles (there were no Malaysian pringles) and there was no palm oil on the shelves (typically, supermarkets have at least 40% of their cooking oil being either pure or blended palm oil); even the suspiciously-labelled 'vegetable oil' turned out to be soybean oil. Expats appreciate quality. Irritatingly, though, few items or shelves had price tags.

I was at an AIESEC talk about overseas internships, and they had lots of cheap tricks, like saying they would change us from Ordinary to Extraordinary, where the 'Extra' was EXchange, TRaining and AIESEC. There was also the usual spiel of young people having a positive impact on society, and we were told that those who go abroad come back and don't recognise themselves (which is not necessarily a good thing - if I splash acid on my face I also won't recognise myself). Perhaps the best bit is that there's a 'reintegration program' for you upon your return. Also, when groups of AIESEC-ers are addressed, the person addressing them goes: 'Hey AIESEC' and the people in the audience (usually SACSALs, from the sound of it that day) go 'What's up?'. All in all, it was like a cross between a Self-Help group, a University Orientation Camp and Scientology.

"Please be reminded it is important and useful for you to classify your modules every semester. Classifying your modules not only allows you to track your progress against your requirements, it will also ensure that you will be considered for the relevant subject prizes." - HAHAHA. They need to come up with better incentives.

The new 25 degree celsius airconditioning rule makes many rooms hot and stuffy. Almost makes me glad to be graduating.

Counselling Centre – Men's Group - "This is a group for men. It seeks to create a supportive environment where men can learn from other men in dealing with many of the issues that confront men in modern urban societies." - Wah.

Her World is in the Singapore-Malaysia Collection. Uhh.

I'm doing my second and third Economics module with readings, and the first two where the readings are essential. Hah.

There is a 'NUS Sado Society'. I want a 'NUS Maso Society' (Yes, I know what Sado is).

Science bazaars have less jewelry and skimpy clothes.

"Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation." - Henry Kissinger

***

Silly pamphlet:




"Steve Jobs - you started in lowly circumstances...a garage in Los Altos, California. You founded Apple Computer and took a bite out of the rest of the industry. You pioneered a whole new way of computing.

Yes, you were ousted, but you went on to form Next Computer.

Then you came roaring back to Apple and became the King of Computer Style.
You co-founded Pixar. You brought us OSX. You invented the iPod, iTunes, and iDon't know what else.

Your critics said you had a Reality Distortion Field, but you created your own reality.

What could possibly come next? Nano-tunes? Ectoplasmic operating systems? Celebrity status on other planets?

Steve, you have done wonders for our Wired life.

But life is more than wires. Silicon can't satisfy the soul. Hi-tech won't heal the heart.

We'd like you to meet someone who is kind of like you. Someone who also started out humbly. Someone who had a good career. Someone who also took a fall and then, kind of like you did, came back to life.

Maybe you know who I'm talking about, Steve - it's Jesus the Messiah. He was born in a donkey's feeding trough, even more humble than a garage.

He was killed, but not in a power coup. He said it was his purpose to die - so that you and I could be made spiritually whole.

(You'll pardon the pun, but when Adam and Eve took a "byte" out of THE "apple," humanity lost something that no GPS system could ever locate.

When he rose from the dead, it wasn't with a new company but with new life for all of us who trust in him.

Steve, you might be able to run circles around circuits. But reality is found in Jesus. iKnow and uShould too, since your life story and his have more than a few things in common.

Besides, you know something about operating systems. Isn't it time you asked God to give you* a new OS?

Now that would be the best NeXTSTEP for you, * Steve."


The pamphlet was by Jews for Jesus. They can go fight it out with Jews for Judaism.

"Liberty without learning is always in peril; learning without liberty is always in vain." - John F. Kennedy

***

Preoccupations: 'I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse' (attributed to Charles V) - "Some commenters deplored the inflectional complexity of the German language. I find the complexity reassuring rather than offputting, because it means that you always know where to find the functional parts of the sentence. The lack of inflectional complexity in English is made up for by its much more complicated structural form. English word order is nuts"

Disable Annoying Vista UAC popups with TweakUAC (free!) - "You keep all the positive effects of UAC, such as Internet Explorer operating in the protected mode, applications starting without the administrative privileges by default, etc. The only thing that gets changed is that you will no longer see the infamous “Windows needs your permission to continue” messages whenever you attempt to make a change to your Vista configuration, or when you run a program that needs administrative rights."

The nasty history of supermarket-bashing - "There is a peculiar paradox that while Nazi Germany is held up as a symbol of evil today, many of the core ideas and beliefs associated with Nazism, such as the mystical worship of nature and hostility towards Enlightenment modernity, are increasingly commonplace amongst today’s radical middle classes. And nowhere is that clearer than in their hang-ups about supermarkets... Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Eton-educated cook and organic farmer-cum-campaigner, alongside numerous broadsheet columnists, argues that the supermarket’s cutting of prices ‘undermines the true value’ and ‘meaning’ of commodities. In truth, it seems that cheaply available goods undermine these campaigners’ own sense of moral worth and social status... The ‘Blood and Soil’ ideas of Walter Darré, for instance, which were hugely influential on Nazi thinking, considered humans to be best suited to a simple existence living close to the land, and argued that urbanisation and industrialisation were so decadent and corrupt that ‘stultifying cities’ would weaken a nations’ ‘racial stock’. Darré’s ideas also influenced the Nazis’ belief in the virtues ofKultur, which embodied the folk traditions and craft skills ‘over the essentially empty products of Western civilisation’. Does this sound familiar? Is it really so very different from the complaints of countless commentators today, about mass-produced commodities, the destruction of nature by greedy mankind, and the emptiness of Western civilisation?"

Biology at Work: Rethinking Sexual Equality - "Does biology help explain why women, on average, earn less money than men? Is there any evolutionary basis for the scarcity of female CEOs in Fortune 500 companies? According to Kingsley Browne, the answer may be yes. Biology at Work brings an evolutionary perspective to bear on issues of women in the workplace: the "glass ceiling," the "gender gap" in pay, sexual harassment, and occupational segregation. While acknowledging the role of discrimination and sexist socialization, Browne suggests that until we factor real biological differences between men and women into the equation, the explanation remains incomplete. Browne looks at behavioral differences between men and women as products of different evolutionary pressures facing them throughout human history. Women's biological investment in their offspring has led them to be on average more nurturing and risk averse, and to value relationships over competition. Men have been biologically rewarded, over human history, for displays of strength and skill, risk taking, and status acquisition. These behavioral differences have numerous workplace consequences. Not surprisingly, sex differences in the drive for status lead to sex differences in the achievement of status."
One comment: "Yes ladies; from the male standpoint, it REALLY is about sex. Really. Women do not have a male sex drive and cannot fathom the lengths that a man will go to just to do...it. So they make up tall tales about men in power seeking to have sex with female subordinates in order to assert male authority."; Amazingly, this review costs more than the book itself!

The Secular Outpost: An empirical test of the existence of sensus divinitatis in atheists -
"But if there is really an innate universal belief in God--or a natural direct perception of God, a sensus divinitatis, a mental faculty that allows direct basic knowledge of God's existence--it seems to me that we should be able to find much stronger empirical evidence of it... Fales presents three arguments based on empirical evidence which cast doubt on the existence of a sensus divinitatis--first, the divergence of claims and beliefs by those who claim to have one (lack of reliability, even within Christian sects). Second, the lack of a demonstrated superior moral life by Christians versus non-Christians (similar comparisons can be drawn between Christians and nontheists). Third, the presence of Bible verses--accepted by most varieties of Christian as authored by men inspired by the Holy Spirit, presumably with their sensus divinitatis functioning properly--in which "God performs, commands, accepts or countenances rape, genocide, human sacrifice, pestilence to punish David for taking a census, killing David's infant to punish him, hatred of family, capital punishment for breaking a monetary promise, and so on"?"
One comment: "BTW, what if you conduct this experiment on adults in societies where children believe in Santa Claus, and it makes adults say that they really still believe in Santa?"

Toddler's Elmo Doll Makes Death Threats, Family Says - "A Lithia family says a cuddly, programmable Elmo doll revealed its dark side yesterday after fresh batteries were installed. Instead of singing songs or reciting the favorite color of its 2-year-old owner, James Bowman, the doll started making death threats, the family says. With a squeeze of its fuzzy belly, the Sesame Street character now says, in a sing-song voice, "Kill James.""

BOILER - "In world culture there exists quite a number of works of art, which if desired (and here we have the desire and time for this) can be attributed to child pornography. In painting, for example, the theme of Venus and Cupid (mother and son) is presented rather ambiguously. The child is either present during his mother’s sexual games, or takes part in them. It is suffice to recollect the well-known masterpiece by Agnelo Bronzino “Venus and Cupid” (1540), in which the son is caressing his mother’s nipple. In Velasquez’s painting “Venus before the mirror” (1648), the child is forced connive at his mother’s exhibitionism. Despite the fact that until the present day the issue of whether children should or should not see their parents naked is still disputed in psychiatric and pedagogical literature. And the idea that parents’ nakedness can shock or confuse a child is very popular in the society. “Cupid” (1602) by Caravaggio does not cause objections among moral advocates, though the nude boy falls under the stereotype of sexual abuse of children. Imagine Cupid without wings and you will receive an example of child pornography in the Internet. NAMBLA activists are brought to trail for such pictures."

Tetrapod Zoology : Traumatic anal intercourse with a pig - "A 62 year old male Bulgarian farmer suffered from abdominal pain, and it was eventually discovered that the cause of the pain was a 0.5 cm ragged tear of the rectal wall. This was repaired and the patient recovered without event. But how exactly had he received this unfortunate injury? Despite early reluctance to discuss it, he later admitted that the injury had been received during sexual intercourse with a boar."

No Surrender Japanese Holdouts After WWII - "World War II did not neatly end with Japan's surrender on September 2, 1945. At its height the Japanese Empire was more than 20 million square miles of land and sea. Soldiers in isolated regions fought on for years after the surrender some unaware the war had ended, other refusing to believe. Some hide in the jungles alone, others fought in groups and continued to make attacks and conduct guerilla warfare. These men were called Japanese Holdouts, or Stragglers and their stories are some of the most fascinating human interest stories of the 20th Century."

Suburban Legend - Weird News Story Archive - "Ohio Rep. James Traficant is worried about the Internet. He is urging Congress to protect kids from sexual content online, and says he now has proof of its dangers: a letter from a constituent who says she got pregnant over the net. “That’s right, pregnant,” he ranted, telling how “Frances” was impregnated via e-mail by a boyfriend 1,500 miles down the wire. “It’s time for Congress to act,” he claimed. “The Internet needs a chastity chip” to protect online users from “immaculate reception.”"

The desecration of Great Art:


'Las Meninas' ('The Maids of Honour'), Diego Velázquez, 1656


'Las Meninas', Pablo Picasso, 1957

"Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism?" - Ayn Rand

***

Facebook | Scholars for Obama!






I got invited to join twice. Bah.

So I went to join:

Facebook | Stop Barack Obama (One Million Strong and Growing)


==============
COMPARE AND JUDGE
==============

PRESIDENT'S JOB: To manage the world's largest economic empire AND give leadership.

TWO RECENTLY GREAT PRESIDENTS and OBAMA:
____________________
BILL CLINTON'S RESUME
____________________

<http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001051/bio>

GOVERNOR OF ARKANSAS: 11 years; 1979-81, 1983-92
ARKANSAS ATTORNEY GENERAL: 2 years; 1976-78
LAW PROFESSOR: 3 years; 1973-76
COLLEGE GRADUATION: Juris Doctor 1973

MANAGEMENT/ LEADERSHIP EXPERIENCE: 11 years

RESULTS: An economic boom, NAFTA, a budget surplus of $122,700,000,000 and a 78% approval rating (Great job Clinton!!)
_______________________
RONALD REAGAN'S RESUME
_______________________

<http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001654/bio>

GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA: 8 years; 1966-74
PRESIDENT OF THE SCREEN ACTORS GUILD: 6 years; 1948-52, 1959-60
MILITARY CAREER (domestic): 8 years; 1937-45
HOLLYWOOD ACTOR: 28 years; 1937-65
CUBS RADIO ANNOUNCER: 5 years; 1932-37
COLLEGE GRADUATION: 1932

MANAGEMENT/LEADERSHIP EXPERIENCE: 20 years

RESULTS: Ended the Cold War with the Soviet Union, put a stop on stagflation, created job growth, stimulated our economy, low inflation, and won the 1984 re-election 525-13. (Amazing Job!! Here's to you Reagan!)
_______________
OBAMA'S RESUME
_______________

*US SENATOR: 2 years; 2005-Present
*STATE SENATOR: 7 years; 1997-2004
COMMUNITY WORKER: 3 years; 1993-1996
COLLEGE GRADUATION: 1991

MANAGEMENT/LEADERSHIP EXPERIENCE: None

RESULTS: Created a bill that congress cannot accept meals bought by corporate lobbyists UNLESS THEY EAT THE ACCEPTED MEAL WHILE STANDING.

*A Senators' job is to persuade and vote, no sole decision power is granted to our Senators neither state nor federal."


Addendum: One might note that when Bush Jr was campaigning he said he'd be a "untier not a divider", was a "compassionate conservative" and have a "strong but humble" foreign policy.

"Men always want to be a woman's first love. Women have a more subtle instinct: What they like is to be a man's last romance." - Oscar Wilde

***

Someone: i cant wait for rampant rabbit to come

arrive i mean

ahhaha
freudian slip


MFS (in America): you love to msg me at 5.45 a.m in the morning to ask me weird ass questions... that's what i notice


Someone: generally you spend more time making sure you don't dirty hte bedsheets

you mean the guys don't worry about whether they can satisfy the girl? oh wait, that's only in the movies... real guys aren't so thoughtful.

Me: pfft
no wonder you turned to women

Someone: hahaha


Someone else: i mean i m not ur gentle kind of gal wat.

actually working with guys are hmmm less politics

i was discussing XXX with my grp mates when this grp of gals beside me was like bitching abt one of their grp mates
how she tinks she is damn zai etc etc

like u noe gals r jus more _____
whereas guys jus, chop chop, get e werk done


Someone: i dont think uni girls look for uni guys
most of the ones i know are not dating guys in uni
most are working guys


Me: anyway nowadays the [Nobel] peace prize is a joke

Someone else: hmm
why do you say so

Me: what does global warming have to do with peace
microfinance
planting trees

Someone else: Yunus did help lift some people out of poverty

Me: what does that have to do with peace

Someone else: I think its not so much peace, as in the no-war sense, but more of improving the human condition
at least, that's the impression I get from what they give out the peace prize for

Me: that's not peace

so the WTO should get a peace prize too
globalisation has lifted millions out of poverty

there've been years when the peace prize was not awarded

Someone else: that's true, but if the WTO did get the prize, there would be mass protests around the world
haha

Me: it's not some catch-all 'good deeds' award


Someone: so you think XXX likes me?

ugh
he can be so manipulative
which confirms what you said about men being manipulative.

that women fall for men who know how to manipulate them


Frigid Girl: stupid gays

it's bad enough women do this shit [evading the qn because your idiocy has been uncovered and you want to avoid confirming the idiocy]
can they not join in the carnage

Me: oh well

what would guys do

Frigid Girl: explain the relevance
and if it still isn't relevant

they'll try to understand
and admit if they're wrong


Female Friend: how do you describe someone who loves me but refuses to get into any relationship

Me: smart.

"Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life." - Herbert Henry Asquith

***

Pictures from Buaya-Buayee, coming more than a week after it ended (see also: "Oh My Love, Ruhan"):


Publicity poster


"My heart wilts like a dying flower without your love"


"*Dagger* I'd DIE for you"


"*Voodoo Doll* My heart bleeds for U. Never again will I look at anyone else but U"


"Please please please please please please. You reject you die"


"*Pig tied up with belt* You can run but u can't hide"


3D poster


"Kenneth is my GOD"
Altar with pig (and knife), jelly, fruit juice, chrysanthemum (?) and flowers


"I died here for Kenneth"


"Brandon ♥ Pussies
Pussies ♥ Brandon"


"I'd dip my stick in you"


"*Hangman* Don't leave me hanging"


MC room door with assorted posters


"Everyone is a blur to me with you around"
I particularly like this


"Kayjal gives me Xtra pleasure" (this is from a publication that I hope to be examining at some time in the near future)
"You are my lollipop lolita"


"I want to see Kayjal Naked"


"Helen doesn't hold a candle to you *ships*"


"I ♥ YI TING
I ♥ YI TENG" (words cannot describe what was done to this, so see the picture)
Recycling is the name of the game. God knows we killed the earth enough


"I ♥ YI FONG SENG BOON
I ♥ YI FONG SENG"




A photo-mosaic - hands-down the most high budget item produced in the 2 weeks


Postits on the MC board


Poor tree


"I'm glad I'm not an asymptote or I'll never get to touch your curves..."
We need some Economics jokes...


Wire figurines


"Natalie, Roses are red
E'clairs are filled with goo
I bet you are yummy
I would eat you"
Damn low-budget


"I give you a ziploc bag
It is as expensive & transparent as our love
Promising durability
A love that lasts
forever..."


And those dedicated to me (aww!):


"a gabriel a day keeps the doctor away~"


"Boobs and long hair... Everything I lust (& love)
The Seven Sins... GSSQ!
G-spot. Anal. Boobs. Role-playing. Incest. Erotic. Lust.
SNIS SEVEN EHT"


"I WANT your undies! GABRIEL SEAH" (I don't wear undies like that)

I know California Girl did the first 3, but I still don't know who did:


"If I debit you my love, would you credit me your heart? I've attached a knife here in case you want to take me up on my offer. (Aren't I thoughtful?)"


"Each time you don't think that Gabriel seah is the hottest thing on earth, Darth Vader kills an innocent bunny. Save the bunnies, spread the Gabriel love today!"


"Father is dear, Mother is dear, but dearest of all is Chairman Seah. Have you bowed to/worshipped the glorious leader today?"
"Save a Horse, ride an iGabriel" (I don't get it)


"10 reasons to ♥ Gabriel Seah
1. Gabriel is sexy
2. Gabriel is sexy
3. Gabriel has fab hair
4. Gabriel is sexy
5. Gabriel is very sexy
6. Gabriel is sexy
7. Gabriel is really sexy
8. Gabriel is sexy
9. Gabriel is sexy
10. Have I forgotten to mention that Gabriel is totally sexy & had great hair?"


Lastly, mine:


"*Mosuqito* Natalie smells so sweet... ASIAN ASIAN ASIAN ASIAN"


"Give me a Bukkake!"
Murali: 'That's damn sick'


"You are my prince"

From soft copy (I didn't take pictures before they got torn down):


"Albert is so MEATY!"


"Eisen gets me WET"


"I wanna PIECE OF YOU"


"Clement makes my day"


"She climbs a tree and scrapes her knee
Her dress has got a tear
She waltzes on her way to Mass
And whistles on the stair
And underneath her wimple
She has curlers in her hair
I even heard her singing in the abbey
She's always late for chapel
But her penitence is real
She's always late for everything
Except for every meal"


"your ass is a beautiful sight
your teeth are pearly white
you're so manly and strong
please write me a song
you one bad mother
come lay me, brother
then take me away your private jet"

"When you encounter seemingly good advice that contradicts other seemingly good advice, ignore them both." - Al Franken

***

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"Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding." - Martin Luther

***

Originally I was going to cook something semi-wholesome for lunch.

But then there's no point spending time in food preparation, cooking, cleaning up and STILL getting yelled at later.

So I'm having junk food instead.

Moral of the story: get a better box

hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

"The trouble with weather forecasting is that it's right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it." - Patrick Young

***

Besides the privileging of animals over plants (to say nothing of insects [pest control is genocide] and cellular organisms) and how being vegetarian kills more animals than eating meat, another problem with one of the common arguments for vegetarianism is that if one treats animals as moral beings equal to humans, we should apply the same standards to them, which is ridiculous - we don't imprison a bear for life for attacking another bear.

If one says that animals are not morally equivalent to humans, but we nonetheless have moral duties to them, the extent of these have to be problematised (hurr hurr). If killing them for food is wrong, what about culling animals in areas around farms with disease outbreaks? Is killing chickens near where there's been a bird flu outbreak genocide? Is sterilising stray cats as bad as eugenics? The example of pest control also comes up.

Meanwhile, one of the justifications for giving animals (unequal) rights but not plants is that animals feel pain. Putting aside the fact that plants can react to stimuli, what, then, of a human whose nerve centres are damaged and can thus feel no more pain? Is he a morally permissible meal? What about animals genetically engineered to feel no pain?

Also, I'm willing to put my money on essentially all vegetarians who invoke that argument supporting a woman's right to abortion, privileging animals above proto-humans, which is bizarre indeed.

(More on the idiocy of biocentrists and ecocentrists may follow in future weeks)

"Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes." - Edgard Varese

***

Some cute pictures from indexed, courtesy of Lynnette:


"bacterial and will destroy you: Necrotizing fasciitis
viral and will destroy you: 2 girls 1cup (sic)"


"Hot sex, great rates, cash transfers: Spam email or Prostitution"


"Lust and Sloth: Quickie
Gluttony and Pride: Fat Men in Speedos
Sloth and Wrath: Passive Aggression"

"Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy." - Nora Ephron

***

Minutes into marriage, bride dies in first dance - "Kim Sjostrom and Teddy Efkarpides had been married for less than an hour on January 19 when the bride crumpled in her husband's arms during a rendition of a Greek song that means simply, "Love Me". At 36, Sjostrom was dead from heart disease."

Horse for dinner? Nay - "Because of a goof at The Saginaw News, a classified ad for her 3-year-old mare, Foxy, ran under the header "Good Things to Eat" instead of the one for horses and stables. DeGroat has fielded dozens of calls over the past two days from unhappy animal lovers... "I had a lady call whose friend was just in tears over this thing," DeGroat said. "It doesn't help that my cell phone number starts with 666.""
This is ridiculous. I bet they all eat meat.

Big City Envy - "The still-unsolved killing of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey was the city’s only murder of 1996. But that high-profile case was just the first of several killings to shake up the relatively small town a half-hour outside Denver... “We’re a vital, growing metropolitan area, and nobody can argue with our violent crime statistics.”"

Briton jailed for four years in Dubai after customs find cannabis weighing less than a grain of sugar under his shoe - "A search by customs officials uncovered a speck of cannabis weighing just 0.003g - so small it would be invisible to the naked eye and weighing less than a grain of sugar - on the tread of one of his shoes... One man has even been jailed for possession of three poppy seeds left over from a bread roll he ate at Heathrow Airport. Painkiller codeine is also banned... Meanwhile a Big Brother TV executive has so far been held without charge for five days after being arrested for possessing the health supplement melatonin."
Zero tolerance works!

Robot Prostitutes as Alternatives to Human Sex Workers - "Recent discussions on roboethics have introduced the subject of sex with robots. The first sexbots are
likely to be operational around the end of the current decade, their development being based on technologies that already exist in different types of commercially available artifact. The very high cost of the early generations of sexually functioning robots will cause the hire of robots for sex, rather than their purchase, to become commonplace. The most often stated motivations for hiring human sex workers are discussed in relation to how these motivations could be satisfied by robots. Five ethical aspects of robot prostitution are introduced and discussed."

Guide to the best euromyths - "Back in the 1980s, the European Commission hatched a plan to re-name the British sausage an "emulsified high-fat offal tube". A government minister successfully repelled the threat and became prime minister thanks to a wave of support for the Great British Banger. His name was Jim Hacker, and this was not the real world, but the television comedy Yes Minister."

Pharyngula: The Courtier's Reply - "There's a common refrain in the criticisms of Dawkins' The God Delusion that I've taken to categorizing with my own private title—it's so common, to the point of near-unanimous universality, that I've decided to share it with you all... I have considered the impudent accusations of Mr Dawkins with exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship. He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor's boots... Dawkins arrogantly ignores all these deep philosophical ponderings to crudely accuse the Emperor of nudity... Until Dawkins has trained in the shops of Paris and Milan, until he has learned to tell the difference between a ruffled flounce and a puffy pantaloon, we should all pretend he has not spoken out against the Emperor's taste. His training in biology may give him the ability to recognize dangling genitalia when he sees it, but it has not taught him the proper appreciation of Imaginary Fabrics."
A pithier summary: You don't need to be an expert at fabrics and clothing to tell that the Emperor is wearing no clothes.

Don’t Ogle the Booble - "Women are paying up to $100 for a bra (I am not even going to go into the added price of the matching panties) to make “the girls” look and feel absolutely perfect. Like they were hand crafted by some Old Italian guy in a leather apron... But you, being a man, are not supposed to look. Looking is fraught with all sorts of perils. She could go all “sexual harassment” on you, go stalker, call you a pervert, give you a nice slap, etc. All for looking at what she has hanging 5” in front of the rest of her body as she walks around... Why do women do this? Are they flat out evil? I think I have seen horns on a couple of them. Somebody hit me with a shovel. Honestly I have no idea... I think my head is going to explode. Who makes this crap up in the Femworld? This makes no flippin sense."
This hews to the 'u r wt u wr' principle.

Which way do you look at Shanghai? - "Western tourists, this person said, when taking photographs instinctively stand with their backs to the river and look at the Bund's colonial buildings. Chinese tourists stand facing the river and look at Pudong's skyscrapers on the other side. The Chinese look to the future, was one message of this, while Westerners look to the past."
Why would anyone want to look at the butt plug?!

Why is fundamental physics so messy? - "It’s as though some software engineer crafted a beautiful, bugless operating system - the laws of physics - and then fed it with random data, the output from a lava lamp, or moths bashing at a window screen. Garbage in, garbage out, generating the weird, starry heap of a universe we call home."
Ah, surely this is proof of God's existence!

Absolute Anime • Princess Princess - "At Fujimori high, they have something known as the "Hime (Princess) System", which they use to enrich the dull lives of the boys at the school. Only beautiful first years may become a princess because their bodies are not fully developed and are easier to dress as girls."
Sounds like a model for Raffles Guys School.

The Music Chamber - "Welcome to the Music Chamber! This site was created so that people could gain an understanding and appreciation for chamber music. You don't have to be able to play an instrument or have a degree in music to enjoy this wonderful art. Inside this site, you will find information on instruments and music theory. We have also compiled material on every major period, composer, and piece--all presented in a relaxed and accessible manner."
Good page.

A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection - "[The restrictions] will serve to make the illegal product the most full featured and least restrictive, and thus the most attractive to the consumer. Add in the expense of buying new equipment to view the legal content (when existing equipment
is perfectly capable) and the performance drain imposed by inline encryption/decryption and they’ve put out the biggest incentive to piracy yet"

Kurogane’s Anime Blog » A cat is fine too… - "Recently, I just discovered a fine cache of Type-Moon doujins and among them were the original “A cat is fine too..” doujin. I must say, it’s one of the funniest doujin I’ve read and I just wanted to share it with those who haven’t seen or read it before. Shiki is awesome!"
I can't summarise this beyond: 'Damn Japs'

"Suppose your neighbor kicks your dog. Then your neighbor has done something wrong. But not to your dog. The wrong that has been done is a wrong to you. After all, it is wrong to upset people, and your neighbor’s kicking your dog upsets you. So you are the one who is wronged, not your dog. Or again: by kicking your dog your neighbor damages your property. And since it is wrong to damage another person’s property, your neighbor has done something wrong - to you, of course, not to your dog. Your neighbor no more wrongs your dog than your car would be wronged if the windshield were smashed. Your neighbor’s duties involving your dog are indirect duties to you. More generally, all of our duties regarding animals are indirect duties to one another - to humanity." --- The Case for Animal Rights / Tom Regan

Just because I am paki does not mean I stink!

Based on an xkcd strip Frigid Girl sent me:


(may take a while to load)

Addendum:

Transcription:
"Wow, you suck at math"
"Wow, girls suck at math"

"I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse." - Charles V

Je parle espagnol à Dieu, italien aux femmes, français aux hommes et allemand à mon cheval.

***

Quotes:

What do you mean she doesn't write like a lesbian? [Student 2: All the lesbians I know write well] That's because you were from XXX. A lot of lesbians I knew couldn't string a sentence together.

I'm thinking of all my ex-boyfriends [Me: How many were there?] Not many. Two.

My friend checked her out. You know women check each other out. She was so angry, the China prostitute. She just turned away.

[On Geylang] You know what's the cheapest? $2. The Bangla woman.

Does she have a boyfriend? [Me: Yah] Before or after exchange? Before or after exchange? Before and after exchange are very different things.

[Me: Who is his Lady Love?] ***. So nice right. I also want. [Me: A Lady Love?]

[On the Christian chain of being and things below animals] Below the line you have things of negative value, like people who don't believe in God.

[On one member of the 3000 member IPCC panel] Insofar as he has anything to do with it, you can call him the first Nobel Prize winner in Singapore.

Eating a sweet wrapper can cause an entire forest to be cut down (sweet)

If we are that bad, if we are the thing causing species to go extinct, maybe it's a good thing if we go extinct.

If we do become exist from our doing (extinct)

[On development vs conservation] If you start to feed the poor people, they're going to demand more and more. You don't want that.

The presentation by XXX would get an A. Not a big A, but not a little A either.

alterations in fore'rer'sers (forests)

This paper is a scientific paper. It had 3000 scientists who likely had nothing better to do.

When you burn your pig swamp (peat)

[On Chinese New Year] In the sort of arm-twisting match this morning, which I lost, we will not have a tutorial next week.

How come people discriminate me? (against me)

Curse of the Golden Lotus (Flower)

[On Jay Chou in 'Curse of the Golden Lotus' (sic)] He acted so well. [Me: *cough*] For a first-timer. And for a costume drama.

If you are a woman of sustance, you will look pretty. You don't need to wear a Chanel.

Q&A, and I asked for the questions beforehand so I can give a satisfied answer (satisfying)

10 years ago, our President, Mr Ong Teng Cheong, who had already passed already (has)

The emergence of Economic man. Or ladies.

There are a lot of im'pee'dee'mernt (impediments)

Full-time wives (housewives)

Someone said she's quite hot. For Econs... [Me: In the land of the blind. What do you think?] No comment. I want to accumulate good Karma in my last semester. [Me: You must say 'Gabriel is nice']

[On tutorials] You can also make nasty questions to your friends. (ask, of)

Our website. Some of your photos are so outdated... Sometimes it would be better not to see your photos. So confusing.

[On combining participation and essay marks] If someone is very disturbing, I sull'tract marks for the essay (disruptive, subtract)

same poo'lease'see prescriptions (policy)

I do not want to impose my view upon you, but I organise the module, so the module is heavily influenced by my views (views, am organising)

[On South Korea in the early 80s] It was prohibited to read Marxian literature. Some students were very curious... They put Marxian literature in the black market... Discussed them in small rooms and restaurants... They were instructed in the view of the government, but many students doubted, so they turned to Marxian literature.

Till the 1970s the North Korean per capita income was actually higher than the South Korean [one]

To be exploited seems to be better than not to be exploited.

[On Xu Rong and the Economics Grad Room] Take out the specs. She looks like those in the other room.

The renowned loo'ver museum (Louvre)

excess sensibility (sensitivity)

Self-control problem. How do you protect yourself from yourself?

[Me: Ethics and the Environment.] That's not an Econs module right. [Me: Where's the ethics in Economics?]

Janice Pear (Peh)

loss adversity (averseness)

[On economics] The moment she starts differentiating, it becomes so difficult. They don't know how to teach differentiation. They should just shut up, and let us go home and figure it out.

[Me: *Expounds theory on frigid girls and chocolate*] What's your major? [Me: Economics] [Student 2: It's a very odd question to ask after that.]

Jackrabbit? That's the one - Alice in Wonderland one.

During exams... We do mindfucking raw. No condoms, baby.

Girls love to go commando. [Student 2: Yes, usually they'll go commando after guys steal their undies]

[On California Girl] It's an ABC Ah Lian accent

Let's play w'year'wolves (werewolves)

Looney New Year eve (Lunar)

When you said 'Sourpuss' I saw this [Sourpuss's] face floating in front of me.

[Me: You orientalise yourself.] I don't. [Someone: You do, dear.] What's wrong with that? I'm Asian. [Me: You're like an Asian in America.]

Gabriel, no one can resist sexually harassing you. [Student 2: For a change.]

Where are you from? Campus Crusade. Are you related to the Priory of Sion?

You know how my parents taught me sex education? 'Here's a book I got you from America'

Long skirts turn on guys. Short skirts turn on guys even more. No skirts turn on all guys. [Female student: Why am I having this conversation with a bunch of guys?] [Student 2: We're in USP. We're having an intellectually stimulating conversation.] [Female student: It's stimulating. I don't know about intellectual.]

[To an Indian:] I always wondered. Is your dick black or white?... [Student 2 on girl behind: Now she knows what guys talk about.]

I have seen many facets of XXX... The block 16 level 2 toilet... [XXX: I've never seen you in my toilet before.] You don't bathe with your glasses, do you? [XXX: Oh shit.]

He said, 'Hi, I'm from Campus Crusade'. I said, 'Hi, I'm from Campus Jihad'. The whole lecture theatre started laughing... A lot of people asked me if they could join.

"The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations." - David Friedman

***

Facebook note: An Increasing Dissent

"I was out with a few friends of mine this Friday to grab a cup of coffee and have a pleasant night out. We got a table by the food court a friend of mine rolled a few cigarettes and we had a decent fun talking.

Being Pakistanis, one of the things that came up in our discussions was Religion. It was brought up by a conservative friend. The discussion started on a perceived failure of an Islamic missionary community operating in NUS usually referred to as the Tablighi Jamaat. The observation of failure is grounded on a seemingly wide spread consumption of alcohol, a lack of discrimination in dietary consumption and a general disregard for religious duties amongst the NUS Pakistani Mulsim community.
What explains this increasing dissent?

The conservative would prefer to blame it on the preaching methods.
My opinion? Rational choice. And I'm not being sarcastic.

Us Pakistanis here truly have a choice unlike back home where such a blatant disregard for 'duties' as consumption of alcohol can often lead to persecution and dangerously ill reputation amongst even family members let alone extended family and the community in general. Given the choice of adhering to a system of life that we've been brought up in for at least the first 20 years of our lives and a lifestyle that we are only gradually becoming familiar with, most of are choosing wisely. We don't have secular preachers, no atheistic missionary groups and people are still moving away from religion. That doesn't simply explain the dissent, it justifies it.

Islam is often referred to as the Deen-e-Fitrat (loosely translated 'The Natural Faith'). A faith that we would almost instinctively and naturally be inclined to. Why, if this were true, would you need to preach it?. I think the failure of the tablighi jamaat in NUS is a clear indicator that for us guys around here in NUS, Islam is not the natural faith, or at least not natural enough to stop us from having a drink now and then."

"I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it." - Thomas Jefferson

***

HWMNBN quotes a conversation:

HWMNBN: have you wonderfed why ther aren't any big female directors?

Someone: sophia coppola ?
there are some who direct chick flicks

HWMNBN: sofia coppola has only got two big ones to her name leh

Someone: lets put it this way la

women have never succeeded much artistically
save for a handful

HWMNBN: women have never succeded much anyway
save for a handful

Someone: errr ...

HWMNBN: it's a history thing lah

Someone: i think artistically speaking ... women are just cold that's why they can't perform with soul

some famous lead guitarist, can't rem the name once said a female lead guitarist is an oxymoron

HWMNBN: i thought women were supposed to be more emo

Someone: in a different way if you know what i mean

HWMNBN: two caveats: i meant that women haven't succeded much because historically they were oppressed:)

[secondly,] an observation: art is a flash abstract thing that transcends. (overgeneralising). women's abstractions are far more micro than macro

i'm not articulating myself very well, but what i'm trying to say is that a woman will scry obscure abstract meaning in interpersonal relations
whereas men prefer to get their obscure abstract meaning in externalities

hence the latter predisposes towards art

i know it's a crude overgeneralisation but that's what i feel


HWMNBN on a feminist: she's from the steinem school right?
dworkin and all the bra burning womyn type

XXX is living proof of one of my favourite aphorisms: "A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again."

Me: haha
you two can go fight it out

HWMNBN: men who go whoring are oppressed as a result of matriarchal domination by guilt that compels them to seek an outlet for their healthy sexual appetites in a stigmatising way.

it is impossible to have a conversation on the - in my opinion - valid psychological and emotional drives that lead men towards prostitutes because her ilk are unprepared to accept that males have deeper psychological and emotional needs beyond beating women up, confining them to the kitchen, and using them as incubators

[bit of education for HWMNBN on third wave feminism and how, though it begs the question, 'patriarchy' oppresses men as well]

HWMNBN: isn't XXX haranguing you about ideological purity here/

your understanding of feminism and criticisms of it are based on flawed ideologial understanding
ie. you lack the "political consciousness" of the oppressive patriarchy by virtue of your gender

because most of the most liberated and empowered women i know have no time for her bullshit

actually i've heard it said - from women out here (more than in sg oddly enough) - that they feel oppressed because the path to success now exists for them as well

but it requires them to behave and conduct themselves in a male-oriented model of behaviour

ie. women can now be successful in the workplace and empowering
but only if they behave like men

i find that not entirely true (especially in private banking and fx sales jobs where THEY'RE ALL WOMEN)

but even that can be construed as opporessive (ie the women succeed becuase they use ku niang wiles to flog their shit - which is a further indictment of the patriarchal society where women are supposed to pander to male desires)

*shrugS* i tend to view this oppression mor from an economic stand point rather than a "gender" / "patriarchal" perspective - ie. we are all, men and women alike, enslaved to an economic system tha encourages an erosion of ethics and a focus on rent-seeking and information asymmetries and system-gaming

Me: yeah
that's part of third wave feminism

well successful blacks are accused of 'acting white'

so we can see that they are part of an oppressive social structure where success is defined in ethnocentric terms where blacks can only succeed by eschewing blackness

so we need alternative modes of success [Addendum: Examples might include having a lot of bling, using ebonics, wearing FUBU apparel and slapping your bitch]
same with women

HWMNBN: exactly
you can

you can also blame it on the illuminati
or the jews

any dialogue bemoaning the current ills of society is, by definitoin, chopped up into :"us vs them"

you just pick which us you see yourself as on and which them you wan tto overtrhow/liberate/emasculate/etc

Me: there's a reason my lecturer called marxism conspiracy theories

third wave feminism: we are oppressed in subtle and insidious ways. women are oppressed by the mere existence of slimming ads and pornography!

post feminism: we are now liberated. for all intents and purposes, women aren't discriminated against purely because they are female. stop whining and start doing real work

HWMNBN: what about out here in the east?

gender values and roles could - and arguably so - d with some updating out here
frnakly that should be the focus of their fight

Me: yeah in the east there's more that can be said about what remains to be done

I'm talking about the West in general

HWMNBN: *drawls* of course to draw a line between occident and orient is simply reflective of false colonial consciousness where the superior moral values of an enlightened orient must be imposed - through economic tariffs and cultural annexation rather than armed force - on a supine and primitive East
hahahahhaa

Me: yeah
this is where they get all angsty
because claims of ethnocentrism get levelled

then you have the intersections of gender, race, postcolonialism and all that
and it gets very messy
and I'm not sure whether it remainscoherent

HWMNBN: this is why i marginally prefer finance
at least for allthe complications and circumlocutions, there' s an objective wya of keeping score
as an intellectual study that is

i'm not sure which is worse, the brute anti-intellectualism of modern society, or the arcane jargon-filled semantic legerdermain of people like XXX

incidentally you should ask her to parse this litle conversation i had with you a day or so ago which i thought was indicative of postfeminist gender attribute blurring and the essentialist error of a universal female experience of oppression

me: "Is this a good time to call?"
Gabriel: "No. my hair is wet."

Taxi Driver Ghost Story

A taxi driver picks up a young girl in white from outside Lucky Plaza one night.

She asks to be taken to Chua Chu Kang and the driver drives off. As the taxi nears Chua Chu Kang it passes the cemetery and the driver decides to ask for more directions "Where shall I drop you?" and he looks in the rear view mirror.

To his horror the back seat is empty. He's shaken and believes he just sent a ghost to her home in the cemetery. He makes his way to a nearby 24hr coffee shop and tells his fellow taxi drivers the horrible experience over a shaky cup of coffee.

One of the other taxi drivers laughs at the story then finishes his coffee and gets into his taxi and drives off to town to look for fares.

It happens that he's also at Lucky Plaza and gets flagged down by a girl in white. She gets in the taxi and tells him to take her to Chua Chu Kang and they drive off.

As they near Chua Chu Kang and approach the cemetery he remembers the horror story told by the other taxi driver. He sneaks a peek at the rear view mirror and to his horror the back seat is empty.

He jams the brakes on and the taxi comes to a screeching halt. Then shivering in fear he slowly turns around and rising from the floor of the taxi he sees a white face with blood smeared around the mouth. So he does the reasonable thing, he screams and gets out of the taxi and runs off into the night.

After some panic striken time later. He comes to his senses and decides to go to the police station to report the incident and hopefully get an escort to retrieve his taxi.

He enters the Chua Chu Kang Police post and then freezes in horror. The bloodly mouthed ghost is standing in the police station waiting for him. The ghost slowly turns to him and then raises her arm to point at him with one finger and then opens her bloody mouth and says...

"What's wrong with the taxi drivers in Singapore? The first one drove off before I even got into the taxi and the other one brakes when I bend down to put on my lipstick and I get the whole tube on my face and then he doesn't even apologize, he just runs off screaming and leaves me sitting there!"

"You can't find any true closeness in Hollywood, because everybody does the fake closeness so well." - Carrie Fisher

***

"Reverse discrimination is as ill-advised a course of action as any undertaken by this country in at least a century. It cannot be justified by its social benefits, since experience suggests that the consequences of this policy are proving disastrous) It cannot be justified as giving particular members of the chosen group what they would have gotten if they had not been discriminated against, since by stipulation “affirmative action” goes beyond such an appeal to ordinary ideas of justice and compensation. It penalizes a group of present-day whites — those who are at least as well qualified but passed over — without proof that they have discriminated or directly benefited from discrimination; whites no more responsible for past discrimination than anyone else...

The only possible defense of reverse discrimination represents it as an attempt to rectify the consequences of past racial discrimination. But why has society selected one kind of wrong — discrimination as particularly deserving or demanding rectification? Other past wrongs have left their traces — acts of theft, despoliation, fraud, anti-Semitism — yet society has no organized policy of rectifying those wrongs... acts of racial discrimination have no morally special status...

Consider: Mr. X, a black of today, is supposedly owed special treatment. But surely if you owe Mr. X special treatment because his ancestors were the target of one wrong — discrimination — it would seem you owe Mr. Y special treatment if his ancestors were the target of some other wrong — theft, say. Racial discrimination is not the only wrong that can be committed against someone, and indeed it is far from the worst. I would rather be denied a job because I am Jewish than be murdered. My murderer violates my rights and handicaps my children much more seriously than someone who keeps me out of medical school. So the question is: if I owe Mr. X a job because his ancestors were discriminated against, don't I owe Mr Y the same if his ancestors were defrauded? I believe the answer must be yes: there is nothing special about acts of discrimination... Indeed, a quarter-century’s preoccupation with race has created a sense that racial prejudice is not just a wrong but a sin, an inexpungeable blot on the soul. Whether this attitude is rational is an issue worth considering.

Let me start with a truism. Discrimination deserves to be halted where it exists, and redressed where it can be, because it is wrong. Discrimination is worth doing something about because wrongs are worth doing something about and discrimination is wrong. Once we grant this, we start to see that there is nothing sui generis about discrimination. It competes with other wrongs for righting. And I take it as obvious that some wrongs demand righting more urgently than others...

It is frequently but mistakenly claimed that racial discrimination is special because it involves a group... [it] is not the only kind of act that is thus group-related. Many wrongs having nothing to do with race are discriminatory in the precise sense that they base the treatment of an individual on membership in a morally irrelevant group. Nepotism is discrimination against nonrelatives. When I make my lazy nephew district manager, I am disqualifying more able competitors because they belong to a group — nonfamily — membership in which should not count in the matter at hand. Discrimination need not be racial: any time you make a moral distinction on morally irrelevant grounds, you discriminate invidiously. In a society in which racial discrimination was unknown but capricious nepotism was the norm, denial of due process on grounds of family would provoke as much indignation as racial discrimination does now.

It would be sheer confusion to argue that acts of racial discrimination are special because they insult a whole race as well as wrong an individual. When I assault you, I assault no one else — and when I discriminate against you, I discriminate against no one else... If I bypass Mr. X because he is black, only Mr. X and his dependents suffer thereby. Perhaps because color is so salient a trait, we tend in uncritical moments to think of the black race as an entity existing in and of itself, above and beyond the particular blacks who make it up. Philosophers call this “reification”. We then think that an insult to this reified race is particularly malign, either in itself or because this entity somehow transmits to all blacks the harm done by single acts of discrimination. Some such reasoning must underlie the oft-heard ideas that the harm done to a single black man “hurts blacks everywhere” and that the appointment of a black to the Supreme Court is “a victory for blacks everywhere”, remarks which make no literal sense... A racial grouping no more deserves reification than does the class of people whose ancestors were defrauded...

(Some slight sense can be made of “injury to a group”, as when we say that a traitor endangers the security of a nation. But even here the harm done is to individuals, the particular citizens. The traitor deserves punishment because of the harm he has done to each citizen, not to “the nation” as a thing apart.)

Perhaps the main reason for thinking of acts of racial discrimination as morally distinctive is that each is an instance of a pattern. My discriminating against Mr. X is part of a self-sustaining pattern of wrongs. And, indeed, we do find wrong acts that together form a pattern more disturbing than each wrong act taken singly: Jack the Ripper’s legacy is more appalling than eleven isolated murders... this intuition must be carefully assessed. A single wrong act cannot be made more wrong because there is some other wrong act which it resembles. If I discriminate against you, my act has a certain amount of wrongness. If I then discriminate against someone else, my previous act against you does not take on more wrongness...

Two factors account for our feeling that patterned wrongs are worse than isolated ones. The first is that the perpetrator of a patterned wrong is worse. Jack the Ripper is worse than a man who kills once from passion. But this does not mean that what he did, in each case, is worse than a single act of murder. Similarly, the most we can say of bigotry is that a habitual bigot is worse than a one-shot bigot, not that an act of bigotry is in itself worse than an act of caprice. The second reason patterned wrongs seem especially malign is that they create anxiety through their promise of repetition. Jack the Ripper’s actions create more anxiety than eleven unconnected murders because we believe he will strike again. But this shows only that it is especially important to halt patterns, be they of murder or discrimination. It does not mean that a particular act in a discriminatory pattern is worse than it would have been in isolation. And it is worth repeating that antidiscrimination laws without benefit of affirmative action suffice to halt patterns of discrimination.

Granted, racial wrongs have gone beyond discrimination in hiring or the use of public facilities, extending all the way to lynching. But to acknowledge this is to bring racial wrongs under independent headings — denial of due process, assault, murder. Lynching Emmet Till was wrong not because Emmet Till was black, but because lynching is murder... State sanction in itself can make no difference. Even if “the state” is an entity over and above its citizens and their legal relations, the wrongness of an act (although not the blameworthiness of an agent) is independent of who performs it. So if discriminating is wrong, it is wrong, and to the same extent, no matter who performs it. Therefore, state-sanctioned past discrimination is no stronger a candidate for rectification than any other discrimination. In any case, even if we did consider state sanction to be morally significant, to be consistent we would have to apply this to all other state-sanctioned wrongs. We would have to say, for example, that we ought to give special treatment now to descendants of people who were harmed under the terms of a statute repealed decades ago. But I take it that no one would support affirmative action for th grandchildren of brewmasters bankrupted by the Volstead Act.

Finally, it has been suggested that grave discriminatory wrongs, such as the lynching of Negroes, were special because done with the intention of intimidating the other members of the terrorized group. Quite so: but again this makes my very point. To call an act of lynching wrong for this reason is to bring it under the umbrella of intimidation: a precisely parallel nonracial act of intimidation is just as wrong (although we might have reason to think the perpetrator is not as vicious). Many years ago, unions were in the habit of wrecking restaurants that refused to be unionized as a warning to other restaurants. Even today, Mob enforcers will kill an informer, or a retailer who refuses to pay protection, in order to intimidate other potential informers or defaulters. So if we treat Blacks as special because they belong to a class other members of which were terrorized, so must we treat restauranteurs as special, and indeed all small businessmen in businesses once victimized by the protection racket. And I take it that no one would suggest affirmative action for restauranteurs. Nor will it do to sy that this is because today no restauranteur is in danger from union or Mob goons. In fact, a restauranteur is in considerably more danger than a Black. The last lynching occured in 1954, while union vandalism and criminal extortion are the stuff of today’s sensational press...

It is impossible to rectify the consequences of all past wrongs. Consider how we might decide on compensatory payments. We trace the world back to the moment at which the wrong was done, suppose the wrong not done, and hypothetically trace forward the history of the world. Where I end up under this hypothetical reconstruction is where I deserve to be. I am owed the net difference between where I am now and where I would have been had the wrong not been done. But for most wrongs, it would take omniscience to say how the world would have turned out had the wrong not been done. If you wanted to make up to me for the theft of my grandfather’s watch in 1900, how on Earth do you propose to reckon the position I would have been in had my grandfather’s watch not been stolen? I might have been richer by a watch. I might have been poorer — since, being in fact deprived of a watch, I have worked harder than I otherwise would have. I might not have existed — if my grandfather met my grandmother while hunting or his stolen watch. Indeed, if you suppose yourself under a general ameliorative obligation, you will have to calculate simultaneously how well off each and every one of us would have been had all past wrongs not occurred...

Take Mr. X, an American black, who we think is worse off than he would have been had there been no slavery. Yet he may now be better off than he would have been had his African ancestors not conquered a neighboring tribe that was then raided by slave traders; had his ancestors respected territorial boundaries, Mr. X might now be a sickly native of Uganda. So unless we quite arbitrarily decide to rectify only some wrongs, we are undertaking a quite impossible task. What about limiting ourselves to rectifying wrongs we know about? But then we should surely try as hard as possible to find out about other wrongs, and trace their consequences. Once again, if we set out on that path, we will find ourselves with obligations that cannot be discharged. And an undischargeable obligation is no obligation at all. Indeed, it is far from obvious that the consequences of discrimination are easier to trace than those of other wrongs. I know victims of theft who have nothing to show for it. Why not benefit them? It is clearer that they are worse off from a past wrong than that an arbitrarily chosen black is...

Who knows but that all of us are in this room because of some dirty Hellenic trick on the plains of Marathon. Perhaps we should award Western Civilization to the descendants of Xerxes, or give them its dollar equivalent! Each of us lies on a “competition curve”, which graphs jobs against our chances of getting them. These curves are connected: I can’t move to a better one without bumping someone else down to a worse. If we try to put each person on the curve he would have occupied had there been no relevant wrongdoing, we will be raising and lowering everybody, sometimes at the same time, with no end in sight. Perhaps God is sufficiently powerful, well-intentioned, and well-informed to put each of us on his proper curve. But no lesser power — not ITT and not HEW — can undertake the task without absurdity."

--- Is Racial Discrimination Special? / Michael E. Livin, Journal of Value Inquiry (1981)

"We're not lost. We're locationally challenged." - John M. Ford

***

Someone: Regarding girls, beyond the usual discourse we have about girls being evil or silly, I think that finding the correct girl is like finding the right wand in Harry Potter; the wand chooses you as much as you choose the wand. The concept of gestalt also applies; that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Think of it as the Senagal football team: individually, each player is not outstanding, but the team as a whole is surely superior than England, which has the opposite phenomenon.

Me: not everyone has a wand for them - there're muggles and squibs also


Someone else: yeah ive been trying to find pple to add
so sad i only have 60+ friends only

Me: haha
don't worry. it'll grow in time

you can import your address book

Someone else: i noe, i did it accidentally
i hope the invites went into my profs' junk folders


Someone on another person's comment on Brown Sugar: think most of your friends are fuckers aren't they
i'm the only one who isn't :)

Me: hahahahahahahaha you wish

maybe most of them are not and you are ;)

Someone: no i meant literally
hahah

Me: ....


Someone else: i think girls who want to get married so they can have a romantic photoshoot and white fluffy things

should just pay $1000 for a photoshoot and not get married


MFTTW: NUS engin vs NTU engin
that's like comparing rotten apple vs rotten banana


Someone on HCAP: anw, u missed the women's panel man

it's so boring
too pc

panel on women/gender equality stuffs

Me: hahahahaha
I'll get thrown out of harvard man

Someone: hahah.. yeah.. like summers

but still, it's boring
):


Someone else: [harpists are all girls] because guys think harps are gay?
HAHA

i dunno, i mean shouldnt u know better as a guy
do you think playing the harp is gay
would you play?

haha i know what u mean la
i played the bass guitar & all the guys got freaked out
they were like WHY IS A GIRL PLAYING BASS

there are girl drummers more than girl bassists even i think
i think most guitars are girls cuz they're curvy (:

my friend sleeps with it hahaa


Someone: hahaha
you la

took her shoes and put it on a pillar some more

Me: she was acting cute
so I act cute also lor

Someone: haha that is not the way to score marks with a girl

i think "cute" is something defined by girls
hurhur

Me: haha
I'm not tryig to chase her so it's ok

Someone: haha yeah i was about to add that


Someone else: my boob popped and *** told me it was "awesome" the first time we met
damn lame

aiyah a gal knows perfectly well the "effects" of wearing a dress
consequential or not
or direct

hahaha


LDPVTP: do you study irrational agents in general?

Me: yes, I study women

LDPVTP: i knew something like that was coming even before i began this conv. :P thus, no count.


JB: just very annoyed at *** in general
they're so brainless

like the people in my class. don't get how they can be so intelligent and brainless at the same time

also i don't understand how so many philo teachers in my school can be religious

Me: well you have to understand that people don't believe in religion because of logic and reason
but despite it

JB: but they're philo teachers!
surely there's something wrong there

Me: let me dig up something from the god delusion:

"The saddest example I know is that of the American geologist Kurt Wise, who now directs the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College, Dayton, Tennessee... Wise could have fulfilled his boyhood ambition to become a professor of geology at a real university, a university whose motto might have been "Think critically" rather than the oxymoronic one displayed on the Bryan website: "Think critically and biblically." Indeed, he obtained a real degree in geology at the University of Chicago, followed by two higher degrees in geology and paleontology at Harvard (no less) where he studied under Stephen Jay Gould (no less). He was a highly qualified and genuinely promising young scientist, well on his way to achieving his dream of teaching science and doing research at a proper university.

Then tragedy struck. It came, not from outside but from within his own mind, a mind fatally subverted and weakened by a fundamentalist religious upbringing that required him to believe that the Earth--the subject of his Chicago and Harvard geological education--was less than ten thousand years old. He was too intelligent not to recognize the head-on collision between his religion and his science, and the conflict in his mind made him increasingly uneasy. One day, he could hear the strain no more, and he clinched the matter with a pair of scissors. He took a bible and went right through it, literally cutting out every verse that would have to go if the scientific world-view were true. At the end of this ruthlessly honest labor-intensive exercise, there was so little left of his bible that

try as I might, and even with the benefit of intact margins throughout the pages of Scripture, I found it impossible pick up the Bible without it being rent in two. I had to make a decision between evolution and Scripture. Either the Scripture was true and evolution was wrong or evolution was true and I must toss out the Bible . . . It was there that night that I accepted the Word of God and rejected all that would ever counter it, including evolution. With that, in great sorrow, I tossed into the fire all my dreams and hopes in science.

"


Postscript: A friend of mine is right - it’s more useful to understand the psychology of the religious than to convince them using reason.

But then, to try to save people’s souls through more subtle (insidious, even) methods smacks of the dishonest way religion expands its mindshare in the first place.

Which means this is a classic Catch-22 situation, full of contradictions and paradoxes, just like the human condition.

"Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer." - Charles Caleb Colton

***

"A former colleague of mine, a professor of Finance, prides himself on being a thoroughly rational man. Long ago he adopted a clever strategy to deal with life's misfortunes. At the beginning of each year he establishes a target donation to the local United Way charity. Then, if anything untoward happens to him during the year, for example an undeserved speeding ticket, he simply deducts this loss from the United Way account. He thinks of it as an insurance policy against small annoyances.*

* This strategy need not reduce his annual contribution to the United Way. If he makes his intended contribution too low he risks having `uninsured' losses. So far he has not been `charitable' enough to have this fund cover large losses, such as when a hurricane blew the roof off his beach house...

A friend of mine was once shopping for a quilted bedspread. She went to a department store and was pleased to find a model she liked on sale. The spreads came in three sizes: double, queen and king. The usual prices for these quilts were $200, $250 and $300 respectively, but during the sale they were all priced at only $150. My friend bought the king-size quilt and was quite pleased with her purchase, though the quilt did hang a bit over the sides of her double bed...

The following example illustrates that mental accounting is topical:

Imagine that you are about to purchase a jacket for ($125)[$15] and a calculator for ($15)[$125]. The calculator salesman informs you that the calculator you wish to buy is on sale for ($10)[$120] at the other branch of the store, located 20 minutes drive away.Would you make the trip to the other store? (Tversky and Kahneman, 1981, p. 459)

When two versions of this problem are given (one with the figures in parentheses, the other with the figures in brackets), most people say that they will travel to save the $5 when the item costs $15 but not when it costs $125. If people were using a minimal account frame they would be just asking themselves whether they are willing to drive 20 minutes to save $5, and would give the same answer in either version...

The following example ( from Thaler, 1985) illustrates the role of transaction utility.

You are lying on the beach on a hot day. All you have to drink is ice water. For the last hour you have been thinking about how much you would enjoy a nice cold bottle of your favorite brand of beer. A companion gets up to go make a phone call and offers to bring back a beer from the only nearby place where beer is sold (a fancy resort hotel) [a small, run-down grocery store]. He says that the beer might be expensive and so asks how much you are willing to pay for the beer. He says that he will buy the beer if it costs as much or less than the price you state. But if it costs more than the price you state he will not buy it. You trust your friend, and there is no possibility of bargaining with the (bartender) [store owner]. What price do you tell him?

Two versions of the question were administered, one using the phrases in parentheses, the other the phrases in brackets. The median responses for the two versions were $2.65 (resort) and $1.50 [store] in 1984 dollars. People are willing to pay more for the beer from the resort because the reference price in that context is higher. Note that this effect cannot be accommodated in a standard economic model because the consumption experience is the same in either case; the place of purchase should be irrelevant.

The addition of transaction utility to the purchase calculus leads to two kinds of effects in the marketplace. First, some goods are purchased primarily because they are especially good deals. Most of us have some rarely worn items in our closets that are testimony to this phenomenon. Sellers make use of this penchant by emphasizing the savings relative to the regular retail price (which serves as the suggested reference price). In contrast, some purchases that would seemingly make the consumer better off may be avoided because of substantial negative transaction utility. The thirsty beer drinker who would pay $4 for a beer from a resort but only $2 from a grocery store will miss out on some pleasant drinking when faced with a grocery store charging $2.50...

Although sunk costs influence subsequent decisions, they do not linger indefinitely. A thought experiment illustrates this point nicely. Suppose you buy a pair of shoes. They feel perfectly comfortable in the store, but the first day you wear them they hurt. A few days later you try them again, but they hurt even more than the first time. What happens now? My predictions are:

(1) The more you paid for the shoes, the more times you will try to wear them. (This choice may be rational, especially if they have to be replaced with another expensive pair.)
(2) Eventually you stop wearing the shoes, but you do not throw them away. The more you paid for the shoes, the longer they sit in the back of your closet before you throw them away. (This behavior cannot be rational unless expensive shoes take up less space.)
(3) At some point, you throw the shoes away, regardless of what they cost, the payment having been fully 'depreciated'.

Evidence about the persistence of sunk costs effects is reported by Arkes and Blumer (1985). They ran an experiment in which people who were ready to buy season tickets to a campus theater group were randomly placed into three groups: one group paid full price, one group got a small (13%) discount, and one group received a large (47%) discount. The experimenters then monitored how often the subjects attended plays during the season. In the first half of the season, those who paid full price attended significantly more plays than those who received discounts, but in the second half of the season there was no difference among the groups. People do ignore sunk costs, eventually.

The gradual reduction in the relevance of prior expenditures is dubbed 'payment depreciation' by Gourville and Soman (1998) who have conducted a clever field experiment to illustrate the idea. They obtained usage data from the members of a health club that charges the dues to its members twice a year. Gourville and Soman find that attendance at the health club is highest in the month in which the dues are paid and then declines over the next five months, only to jump again when the next bill comes out.

Similar issues are involved in the mental accounting of wine collectors who often buy wine with the intention of storing it for ten years or more while it matures. When a bottle is later consumed, what happens? Eldar Shafir and I (1998) have investigated this pressing issue by surveying the subscribers to a wine newsletter aimed at serious wine consumers/collectors. We asked the following question:

Suppose you bought a case of a good 1982 Bordeaux in the futures market for $20 a bottle. The wine now sells at auction for about $75 a bottle. You have decided to drink a bottle. Which of the following best captures your feeling of the cost to you of drinking this bottle?

We gave the respondents five answers to choose from: $0, $20, $20 plus interest, $75, and -$55 (`I drink a $75 bottle for which I paid only $20'). The percentages of respondents choosing each answer were 30, 18, 7, 20 and 25. Most of the respondents who selected the economically correct answer ($75) were in fact economists. (The newsletter, Liquid Assets, is published by economist Orley Ashenfelter and has many economist subscribers). More than half the respondents report that drinking the bottle either costs nothing or actually saves them money!

... the typical wine connoisseur thinks of his initial purchase as an investment and later thinks of the wine as free when he drinks it. We have therefore titled our paper 'Invest Now, Drink Later, Spend Never'. Note that this mental accounting transforms a very expensive hobby into one that is 'free'. The same mental accounting applies to time-share vacation properties. The initial purchase of a week every year at some resort feels like an investment, and the subsequent visits feel free...

More generally, consumers don't like the experience of `having the meter running'. This contributes to what has been called the 'flat rate bias' in telecommunications. Most telephone customers elect a flat rate service even though paying by the call would cost them less. [Ed: You can also explain this by risk aversion]

... Perhaps the best decoupling device is the credit card. We know that credit cards facilitate spending simply by the fact that stores are willing to pay 3% or more of their revenues to the card companies... A credit card decouples the purchase from the payment in several ways. First, it postpones the payment by a few weeks... (a) the payment is later than the purchase; (b) the payment is separated from the purchase... the simple separation of purchase and payment appears to make the payment less salient. Along these lines, Soman (1997) finds that students leaving the campus bookstore were much more accurate in remembering the amount of their purchases if they paid by cash rather than by credit card. As he says, `Payment by credit card thus reduces the salience and vividness of the outflows, making them harder to recall than payments by cash or check which leave a stronger memory trace' (p. 9)...

In many situations sellers and fund raisers elect to frame an annual fee as 'pennies-a-day'. Thus a $100 membership for the local public radio station might be described as a `mere 27 cents a day'. Given the convex shape of the loss function, why should this strategy be effective? One possibility is that 27 cents is clearly in the petty cash category, so when the expense is framed this way it tends to be compared to other items that are not booked. In contrast, a $100 membership is large enough that it will surely be booked and posted, possibly running into binding budget constraints in the charitable giving category. The same idea works in the opposite direction. A firm that markets a drug to help people quit smoking urges smokers to aggregate their annual smoking expenditures and think of the vacation they could take with these funds. Again, $2 a day might be ignored but $730 pays for a nice getaway.

Whenever budgets are not fungible their existence can influence consumption in various ways... Heath and Soll (1996) provide several experiments to illustrate this effect. In a typical study two groups of subjects were asked whether they would be willing to buy a ticket to a play. One group was told that they had spent $50 earlier in the week going to a basketball game (same budget); the other group was told that they had received a $50 parking ticket (different budget) earlier in the week. Those who had already gone to the basketball game were significantly less likely to go to the play than those who had gotten the parking ticket.*

* One might think this result could be attributed to satiation (one night out is enough in a week). However, another group was asked their willingness to buy the theater ticket after going to the basketball game for free, and they showed no effect.

... Another violation of fungibility introduced by the budgeting system occurs because some budgets are intentionally set 'too low' in order to help deal with particularly insidious self-control problems... the usual economic advice (which says that a gift in kind can be at best as good as a gift of cash, and then only if it were something that the recipient would have bought anyway). Instead the mental accounting analysis suggests that the best gifts are somewhat more luxurious than the recipient normally buys, consistent with the conventional advice (of non-economists), which is to buy people something they wouldn't buy for themselves.

The idea that luxurious gifts can be better than cash is well known to those who design sales compensation schemes. When sales contests are run, the prize is typically a trip or luxury durable rather than cash. Perhaps the most vivid example of this practice is the experience of the National Football League in getting players to show up at the annual Pro Bowl. This all-star game is held the week after the Super Bowl and for years the league had trouble getting all of the superstar players to come. Monetary incentives were little inducement to players with seven-figure salaries. This problem was largely solved by moving the game to Hawaii and including two first-class tickets (one for the player's wife or girlfriend) and accommodations for all the players.

... For other tempting products, consumers may regulate their consumption in part by buying small quantities at a time, thus keeping inventories low. This practice creates the odd situation wherein consumers may be willing to pay a premium for a smaller quantity... [Wertenbroch's] one-sentence abstract succinctly sums up his paper: 'To control their consumption, consumers pay more for less of what they like too much'...

Another example of income non-fungibility is provided by Kooreman (1997). He studies the spending behavior of families that receive child allowance payments from the Dutch government. He finds that spending on children's clothing is much more sensitive to changes in the designated child allowance than to other income sources...

The choice of how to bracket the gambles influences the attractiveness of the individual bets. An illustration is provided by a famous problem first posed by Paul Samuelson. Samuelson, it seems, was having lunch with an economist colleague and offered his colleague an attractive bet. They would flip a coin, and if the colleague won he would get $200; if he lost he would have to pay only $100. The colleague turned this bet down, but said that if Samuelson would be willing to play the bet 100 times he would be game. Samuelson (1963) declined to offer this parlay, but went home and proved that this pair of choices is irrational. [Ed: ... economists]

The diversification bias is not limited to young people choosing among snacks. Benartzi and I (1998) have found evidence of the same phenomenon by studying how people allocate their retirement funds across various investment vehicles. In particular, we find some evidence for an extreme version of this bias that we call the 1/n heuristic. The idea is that when an employee is offered n funds to choose from in her retirement plan, she divides the money evenly among the funds offered... We find evidence supporting just this behavior. In a sample of pension plans we regress the percentage of the plan assets in stocks on the percentage of the funds that are stock funds and find a very strong relationship...

A question that has not received much attention is whether mental accounting is good for us... It is not possible to say that the system is flawed without knowing how to fix it. Given that optimization is not feasible (too costly) repairing one problem may create another. For example, if we teach people to ignore sunk costs, do they stop abiding by the principle: 'waste not, want not'? If we stop being lured by good deals, do we stop paying attention to price altogether? There are no easy answers."

--- Mental Accounting Matters / Richard H. Thaler, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making (1999)

"Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight." - Phyllis Diller

***

"The problem, in essence, is one of bringing nonmusical, extra-aesthetic considerations to bear on an issue that is generally supposed to be purely aesthetic, namely, the selection of works for a concert program...

To these arguments the supporters would reply that there are many Jewhaters among composers, writers, and artists and that we would impoverish our spiritual life immensely if we would boycott all art created by anti- Semites. They would add that since Wagner died six years before Hitler was born, any attempt to link the two directly falsifies history. They would even question the opponents' claim that Wagner's works were the most frequently played music in concentration camps because, according to reliable reports, melodies by other composers were more often heard than music by Wagner. Finally, they might suggest that the association between Wagner and the camps is perhaps much stronger in the victims' imagination than it was in their persecutors' minds.

A very important point in the supporters' rebuttal is the assertion that banning art for nonaesthetic reasons would reduce us to the level of our worst enemies, for the Nazi ideology "distinguished" itself by boycotting art and burning books for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality and subjects of these works. These supporters would add that having achieved independence and statehood, we should finally be ready to rise above persecution complexes and narrow-mindedness and select the goals for and content of our cultural and spiritual life exclusively on the basis of objective, inherent merit and quality...

We should not allow ourselves to become slaves to symbols. If we did, then tomorrow we might subscribe to the idea that Richard Strauss is also a symbol for cooperation with the Nazis and that his music should therefore not be played. Likewise, Bach's "Matthauspassion" and Leonardo's Last Supper would become liable to being viewed as symbols for anti-Jewish motives in the story of Jesus Christ's suffering and for the persecution of the Jews by the Church for nearly twenty centuries.

The subject of symbols and the avoidance of objectionable symbols is problematic and fraught with dangers. It can lead to absurd situations, like the effort made at one time by religious schools in Israel to introduce a new plus sign, a "half-cross" sign, in arithmetic lessons because the internationally accepted sign (+) reminded the proponents of this change of the cross and persecution.

Perhaps another observation might be added. It is a well-known fact that Wagner's Ring was hardly ever performed during World War 11. On 8 May 1945, the day of Germany's surrender to the Allied Forces, the radio station of the new German government accompanied its news broadcast of the total collapse of Hitler's Reich with music from the Gotterdammerung. It may be suggested that perhaps for the Nazis, but more obviously for their immediate successor, Wagner's music-at least the Ring of the Nibelung-had already become a symbol not of supremacy and triumph but of pessimism, despair, the end of the world, and the "Twilight of the Gods.""

--- Wagner in Israel: A Conflict among Aesthetic, Historical, Psychological, and Social Considerations / Hanan Bruen, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 27, No. 1. (Spring, 1993)

New blog picture:


I'll be a monkey's uncle!

"In Mexico we have a word for sushi: Bait." - Jose Simon

***

An infamous article:

Transmission of gonorrhoea through an inflatable doll
Genitourin Med. 1993 Aug;69(4):322

Nonsexual transmission of gonorrhoea seems to be extremely rare. Only one case of nonsexual transmisaion of genital Neisseria gonorrhoeae is documented in adults, involving two patients in a military hospital who shared a urinal. N gonorrhoeae has been shown to survive in infected secretions on towels and handkerchiefs for 20 and 24 hours, respectively. Cultures from toilet seats in public restrooms and venereal disease clinics have failed to yield N gonorrhoeae.

The skipper from a trawler, who had been 3 months at sea, sought advice for urethral discharge. His symptoms had lasted for two weeks. A urethral smear showed typical intracellular gram-negative diplococci, and a culture was positive for N gonorrhoeae. There had been no woman onboard the trawler; he denied homosexual contacts; and there was no doubt that the onset of the symptoms was more than two months after leaving the port.

With some hesitation, he told the story. A few days brfore onset of his symptoms, he had roused the engineer in his cabin during the night because of engine trouble. After the engineer had left his cabin, the skipper found an inflatable doll with artificial vagina in his bed, and he was tempted to have ‘intercourse” with the doll. His complaints started a few days after this episode.

The engineer was examined, and was found to have gonorrhoea. He had observed a mild urethral discharge since they left port, but he had not been treated with antibiotics. He admitted to having ejaculated into the “vagina” of the doll just before the skipper called him, without washing the doll afterwards. He also admitted intercourse with a girl in another town some days before going to sea. This girl was traced, but the result of her examination is not known. To the best of our knowledge, no case of gonococcal transmission through an inflatable doll has been reported before.

E KLEIST, H MOI
(Some hospitals), Greenland

"roses are vile,
violets are rude.
flowers are sinful,
so are you (chocolate)."

- Friend's nick

***

Some lesser-known events from The GP Tutor: Info-pack on Censorship, which has been greatly updated since I last saw it (rearranged in chronological order):

1959: Shortly after PAP takeover, pinball machines and jukeboxes are banned in the crackdown on "yellow culture", the decadent culture of Western imperialists. Jukeboxes are only officially legalised again in 1991. See here.

1968: The Equator Art Society opens an exhibition of paintings portraying Americans as morally degraded figures; this is interpreted as being a socialist protest against Singapore's endorsement of America in the Vietnam War. The exhibition is closed within a day of opening and the President of the Society is detained; members do not submit their names of board members to the Registrar of Societies in the following years, and the Society is forced to dissolve in 1974.

1973: Despite the dwindling of the Singapore film industry following separation from Malaysia, Tony Yeow and James Sebastian direct Ring of Fury, a gripping kung fu action tale set in Singapore. The film is banned locally for its depiction of a gangsterism in Singapore, but gets screenings in Australia, Hong Kong and even Africa. Its first public screening in Singapore is in 2005. See here.
No wonder our film scene went to hell

1976: Theatre director Kuo Pao Kun is stripped of his citizenship and detained without trial for alleged Communist activities in a sweeping anti-leftist purge. Over his 4 1/2 years of incarceration, Kuo studies Malay and reads Shakespeare. He is released in 1980 and re-emerges as a powerful force in Singapore drama, winning the Cultural Medallion in 1990.

1984: Japanese New Age musician Kitaro is barred from entry to Changi Airport because of his long hair; officials insist that in order to perform, he must first cut his hair (in keeping with a Singapore campaign from the 70s against long hair in men). Kitaro refuses and cancels his concert in Singapore.

1986: Authorities close the Rainbow Lounge at Ming Arcade, Singapore’s first disco and live music venue, on the grounds that a member of the house band, Speedway, had made a risqué remark in Hokkien while onstage. The founder, Dr Goh Poh Seng, goes into self-exile in Canada, “disillusioned and hounded by authorities” for his efforts to push the boundaries of culture in conservative society. He does not visit Singapore again until Writers Festival 2007, where he is lauded for his legacy as the creator of Singapore’s first English-language novel. (See The Sunday Times, December 16, 2007, L6.)

1992: Four plays for Theatreworks's Theatre Carnival On The Hill are censored: Desmond Sim's Blood and Snow has 14 pages cut; Theresa [last name not given]'s Bra Sizes has all references to "breasts" cut; Robin Loon's Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder has its few "fucks" cut. Gung Ho Theatre's "Too Glam One", a commentary on the 1992 survey on morals, is banned for "crude and vulgar language". The Censorship Review Committee publishes a report on 18 October stating that plays need not be vetted if they are by "established" theatre groups. R(A) ratings for plays are also instituted, allowing for greater freedom of drama in front of a mature audience. During this period, Tan Tarn How's political satire The Lady of Soul and the Ultimate S-Machine is a subject of contention between Theatreworks and MITA/PELU - these government bodies object to the reference to Asian dragons in the prologue, the notion that Singapore is a nation without a soul, the apparent promotion of sex and Communism, the mockery of past committees as inefficient, the unfavourable portrayal of ministers and civil servants and their overseas trips, and the idea that politicians are more interested in winning votes than delivering on their promises. Approximately 1/20th of the plays is scheduled to be cut. However, on review by the Censorship Appeals Committee, the play is ultimately passed in its entirety.

1993: Shortly before staging, the Ministry of Health withdraws its funding from Off Centre, a play by The Necessary Stage on mental illness. MOH claims that the play misrepresents the insane. TNS stages the play with its own funding, to critical acclaim. The play is now recognised as a landmark play in Singapore theatre and will be an O-level literature text from 2007 onwards.

1998: Hong Kong artist Zunzi Wang's artwork, a political cartoon featuring caricatures of then-SM Lee and PM Goh, is removed by officials from the Singapore Art Museum and destroyed just prior to the opening of ARX5. The artist is not informed until the opening.

"I am certain there is too much certainty in the world." - Michael Crichton

***

In JC we had the Angel-Mortal game. Now, we have "Buaya-Buayee", for everyone to "live out your perverse stalker fantasies".

Photos of the better acts will be up eventually, but in the meantime, the following is worth losing some sleep over:


"Title: Oh My Love, Ruhan
Artist: Air Supply
Album: Unreleased tracks
Genre: Meditative
Comment: Buaya Loves you"

"As I think of you day and night - and it is only proper that I should do so - my anxieties are concentrated upon the risks of mortal life, the uncertainties of health, the failness of mankind. Our country should be immortal; and I am so unhappy that its future should depend on the breath of a single man.

It is for you and only you, Ruhan, to revive all you see lying in ruins around you, inevitably shattered and overthrown by your rejection.

The next song will be dedicated to: Ruhan"

(after Cicero: in support of Marcus Claudius Marcellus, to which I was unable to find the original Latin)

"Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Give a fish a man, and he'll eat for weeks!" - Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata, Animal Crossing: Wild World, 2005

***

Biofuels Deemed a Greenhouse Threat - "Almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of producing these “green” fuels are taken into account, two studies being published Thursday have concluded... These studies for the first time take a detailed, comprehensive look at the emissions effects of the huge amount of natural land that is being converted to cropland globally to support biofuels development... Industry groups, like the Renewable Fuels Association, immediately attacked the new studies as “simplistic,” failing “to put the issue into context.” “While it is important to analyze the climate change consequences of differing energy strategies, we must all remember where we are today, how world demand for liquid fuels is growing, and what the realistic alternatives are to meet those growing demands”"
Translation: If we throw irrelevant nonsense at you long enough, you'll believe us when we say they're 'simplistic'

Birth defects warning sparks row - "A minister who warned about birth defects among children of first cousin marriages in Britain's Asian community has sparked anger among critics... The claims infuriated the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC) which called on the prime minister to "sack him". MPAC spokesman Asghar Bukhari said Mr Woolas' comments "verged on Islamophobia"... The former race relations minister told the Sunday Times: "If you have a child with your cousin the likelihood is there'll be a genetic problem. "The issue we need to debate is first cousin marriages, whereby a lot of arranged marriages are with first cousins, and that produces lots of genetic problems in terms of disability [in children]."... Research for BBC2's Newsnight in November 2005 showed British Pakistanis accounted for 3.4% of all births but have 30% of all British children with "recessive disorders"."
Indeed. Denouncing honour killings is also Islamophobia, since women who have brought disgrace to their family must have their sins cleansed to clear the family name. [Person who sent me the article: "I can imagine though, that if they don't do something about this first marriage issue, 50 years from now, there will be a class action lawsuit against the government for not protecting them from inbreeding"]

Chumble Spuzz! - "A colleague of ours found this set of building blocks to help children learn English... Now, I don’t mind the fact that the peacock is a turkey, and the rooster/hen confusion happens to plenty of people. King of Beasts is an honorific, a darning needle is a beautiful description of a dragonfly, and a mouse looking for a hand-out for his family could just as easily be considered in the plural. From what I’ve read “bear-cat” is the literal translation of panda in Chinese, so, while I think it is absurd that the kids aren’t taught the English word in an English block set, I can understand. BUT, crustacea?!? For a ladybug?!?"

The Republican Reformation - "The failure of conservative voters to fall in line behind Mr. Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, among others, reflects a deeper problem for the movement’s leadership. With their inflexibility, grudge-holding and eagerness to evict heretics rather than seek converts, too many of conservatism’s leaders sound like the custodians of a dwindling religious denomination or a politically correct English department at a fading liberal-arts college. Or like yesterday’s Democratic Party. The tribunes of the American right have fallen into the same bad habits that doomed their liberal rivals to years of political failure. In spite of his record as a maverick, John McCain has become the presumptive nominee by running a classic Republican campaign, emphasizing strength abroad and limited government at home, with nods to his pro-life record. His opponents in the conservative movement, by contrast, have behaved like caricatures of liberals, emphasizing a host of small-bore litmus tests that matter more to Beltway insiders than to the right-winger on the street... in their zeal to read both candidates out of the conservative movement, often on the flimsiest of pretexts, the movement’s leaders raised a standard of ideological purity that not even Ronald Reagan could have lived up to."
I don't think it's just fading liberal-arts colleges...

On Cooling the Mark Out: Some Aspects of Adaptation to Failure, Erving Goffman - "A con man is someone who accepts a social role in the underworld community; he is part of a brotherhood whose members make no pretense to one another of being "legit." A white‑collar criminal, on the other hand, has no colleagues, al­though he may have an associate with whom he plans his crime and a wife to whom he confesses it. The con is said to be a good racket in the United States only because most Americans are willing, nay eager, to make easy money, and will engage in action that is less than legal in order to do so... After the blowoff has occurred, one of the operators stays with the mark and makes an effort to keep the anger of the mark within manageable and sensible proportions. The operator stays behind his team‑mates in the capacity of what might be called a cooler and exercises upon the mark the art of consolation. An attempt is made to define the situation for the mark in a way that makes it easy for him to accept the inevitable and quietly go home. The mark is given instruction in the philosophy of taking a loss... Cooling the mark out is one theme in a very basic social story."

Human rights watchdog: Islamophobia on the rise in Holland, Muslims stigmatized, attacked - "In a harshly worded report, the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance said even Dutch politicians have resorted to derogatory remarks about Muslims in recent years, and that racist discourse has remained “as a rule” unchallenged by mainstream political parties... Along with concerns about Islamophobia, the commission’s report on the Netherlands said anti-Semitic insults and Holocaust denial are growing more widespread. “As an illustration, the word “Jew” is reported to be increasingly used as an insult and different aspects of the Holocaust are reportedly questioned in everyday situations, such as in schools,” the commission said... 'The report fails to point out the corrolation between the growing presence of Muslims (both by immigration and via a high birth-rate) and the growth of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denials.'"

'Jesus' cosmetic row in Singapore - "A leading retailer in Singapore has withdrawn a cosmetics range with a Jesus theme after complaints from local Roman Catholics, local media report. The range, named Lookin' Good for Jesus, was on sale at three Topshop outlets in the Asian city state. Catholics complained the cosmetics' marketing was disrespectful, full of sexual innuendo and trivialised Christianity."
Ridiculous as this is, it would unfortunately happen in more well-adjusted democracies. At least no one made a police report (at least that we know of).

u r wt u wr:

- 'Miss you'
- 'Your lips look so [something]. Would you like to [something] *picture of lips*' (I didn't see the whole thing)
- 'Prague. Czech me out'
- 'Sweet baby'
- 'Style secretor' (This sounds like some alien lifeform)
- 'Come sit on Santa's lap. Mmm.'
- 'Everyone makes mistakes'
- 'Do I make you look fat?' (It should've read, 'Do I make you look pretty?')
- 'Protect me from what I want. By Gutsy'
- 'Visit Kazakhstan. Why not? It's good... I like!'
- 'Two of a kind' (above breasts) (Contributed)
- 'Fruits of summer' (above breasts) (Contributed)
- 'Da daddy's little girl ain't so little no more'
- 'Finding somebody'
- 'Sun shine'
- 'Lips like sugar'
- 'Born with style'
- 'Ceu love this pet' (The words were in a strawberry)
- 'I'll be your future, you'll be my past'

"Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden"

"No matter what side of the argument you are on, you always find people on your side that you wish were on the other." - Jascha Heifetz

***

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2008 — WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?

"TIMOTHY TAYLOR
Archaeologist, University of Bradford; Author, The Buried Soul

Relativism

Where once I would have striven to see Incan child sacrifice in their terms', I am increasingly committed to seeing it in ours. Where once I would have directed attention to understanding a past cosmology of equal validity to my own, I now feel the urgency to go beyond a culturally-attuned explanation and reveal cold sadism, deployed as a means of social control by a burgeoning imperial power.

In Cambridge at the end of the 70s, I began to be inculcated with the idea that understanding the internal logic and value system of a past culture was the best way to do archaeology and anthropology. The challenge was to achieve this through sensitivity to context, classification and symbolism. A pot was no longer just a pot, but a polyvalent signifier, with a range of case-sensitive meanings. A rubbish pit was no longer an unproblematic heap of trash, but a semiotic entity embodying concepts of contagion and purity, sacred and profane. A ritual killing was not to be judged bad, but as having validity within a different worldview.

Using such 'contextual' thinking, a lump of slag found in a 5000 BC female grave in Serbia was no longer seen as chance contaminant — bi-product garbage from making copper jewelry. Rather it was a kind of poetic statement bearing on the relationship between biological and cultural reproduction. Just as births in the Vinca culture were attended by midwives who also delivered the warm but useless slab of afterbirth, so Vinca culture ore was heated in a clay furnace that gave birth to metal. From the furnace — known from many ethnographies to have projecting clay breasts and a graphically vulvic stoking opening — the smelters delivered technology's baby. With it came a warm but useless lump of slag. Thus the slag in a Vinca woman's grave, far from being accidental trash, hinted at a complex symbolism of gender, death and rebirth.

So far, so good: relativism worked as a way towards understanding that our industrial waste was not theirs, and their idea of how a woman should be appropriately buried not ours. But what happens when relativism says that our concepts of right and wrong, good and evil, kindness and cruelty, are inherently inapplicable? Relativism self-consciously divests itself of a series of anthropocentric and anachronistic skins — modern, white, western, male-focused, individualist, scientific (or 'scientistic') — to say that the recognition of such value-concepts is radically unstable, the 'objective' outsider opinion a worthless myth.

My colleague Andy Wilson and our team have recently examined the hair of sacrificed children found on some of the high peaks of the Andes. Contrary to historic chronicles that claim that being ritually killed to join the mountain gods was an honour that the Incan rulers accorded only to their own privileged offspring, diachronic isotopic analyses along the scalp hairs of victims indicate that it was peasant children, who, twelve months before death, were given the outward trappings of high status and a much improved diet to make them acceptable offerings. Thus we see past the self-serving accounts of those of the indigenous elite who survived on into Spanish rule. We now understand that the central command in Cuzco engineered the high-visibility sacrifice of children drawn from newly subject populations. And we can guess that this was a means to social control during the massive, 'shock & awe' style imperial expansion southwards into what became Argentina.

But the relativists demur from this understanding, and have painted us as culturally insensitive, ignorant scientists (the last label a clear pejorative). For them, our isotope work is informative only as it reveals 'the inner fantasy life of, mostly, Euro-American archaeologists, who can't possibly access the inner cognitive/cultural life of those Others.' The capital 'O' is significant. Here we have what the journalist Julie Burchill mordantly unpacked as 'the ever-estimable Other' — the albatross that post-Enlightenment and, more importantly, post-colonial scholarship must wear round its neck as a sign of penance.

We need relativism as an aid to understanding past cultural logic, but it does not free us from a duty to discriminate morally and to understand that there are regularities in the negatives of human behaviour as well as in its positives. In this case, it seeks to ignore what Victor Nell has described as 'the historical and cross-cultural stability of the uses of cruelty for punishment, amusement, and social control.' By denying the basis for a consistent underlying algebra of positive and negative, yet consistently claiming the necessary rightness of the internal cultural conduct of 'the Other', relativism steps away from logic into incoherence."

"A fellow who is always declaring he's no fool usually has his suspicions." - Wilson Mizner

***

"Popular culture texts that discuss rape in the context of feminism claim there is a “murkiness” surrounding rape, and they blame that murkiness (at least in part) on feminism. For example, while Ellen Goodman(1991) and Naomi Wolf(1991a, 1991b) both take feminist perspectives in their articles, each depicts contemporary US. culture as confused about rape, in part as a result of feminism. Drawing on two conflicting versions of feminism—one that encourages women to be free to express their sexuality and another that warns women to protect themselves from sexual violence—Goodman writes that as a result of social changes surrounding sexuality, “cultural cues are no longer universal and the likelihood that two people who meet will share the same assumptions isn’t as high as it once was.” Furthermore, she suggests that supposedly new definitions of sexual assault and consent, again implicitly available because of feminist activism, “lead to enormous confusion around the words that infiltrate [women’s] single lives with less terror than the word rape: words like sexuality, sexiness and the nature of ’consensual sex.’ It is as if a huge gray spot has covered these topics too, making it hard to see clearly.”... Goodman uses the gray spot as a metaphor for what feminist activism against rape has done to all (hetero)sexuality: made it hard to see clearly. While Goodman, unlike Barbara Amid (1994), holds men (not women) responsible for sexual assault throughout her article, she nonetheless implicitly suggests that the way feminism has been incorporated into women’s lives (she reports on several interviews with “young women” in the article) has led to the blurry “postfeminist images” of both rape and sexuality... While Wolf articulates the feminist position that “consenting to sex with one or more men in the past does not indicate consent for all future time to anyone who demands it” (274), she also suggests that the confusion around sexuality and rape is caused by the contradiction between a pro-sex feminism and news coverage and court practices that depend on women’s asexuality to ensure credibility. Thus, (her version of) feminism, which introduces women’s active sexuality into the mix, is at least partially responsible for that confusion.

For antifeminist feminist postfeminist Katie Roiphe (1993, 1994), the confusion around rape is produced entirely by that all-powerful postfemmist-defined feminism that supposedly controls college campuses and makes women’s lives miserable. Drawing heavily on Neil Gilbert in her book The Morning After, Roiphe argues that the “rape epidemic” is an exaggeration, produced simply by a change in perspective, “a way of interpreting” (53) that feminists use to “sequester feminism in the teary province of trauma and crisis” (56). Furthermore, like Wolf, she aims to reclaim sexuality for women, holding feminists’ “interpretation” of rape responsible for a “denial of female sexual agency that threatens to propel us backwards” (84)... both Wolf and Roiphe argue against a “victim feminism” and for a pro-sex feminism. Roiphe makes this typical postfeminist argument by rejecting women’s claims of rape1 and Wolf makes this same argument by criticizing rape culture and legal practices. Despite their differences, however, both Wolf and Roiphe say that rape is confusing and that feminism (at least in part) produces that confusion...

With this brief discussion of the representation of rape in the popular press, I hope to begin to illustrate the way these representations intersect with postfeminism, particularly antifeminist feminist postfeminism, backlash postfeminism, and pro-sex postfeminisrn. In the process, particular versions of feminism emerge in relation to rape. For antifeminist postfeminists such as Roiphe and Amid, feminism sees women as victims; paradoxically, feminism is also powerful enough to confuse people about what rape is. For profeminist postfeminists such as Goodman and Wolf, feminism demands women’s “equal” access to sexual expression and behavior, as well as their right to “choose” to say no, no matter how many times they may have said yes in the past. From both perspectives, however, it is the changes feminism has wrought that lead to confusion around rape and sexuality...

I argue that some aspects of feminism have been absorbed into popular culture so fully that they have become truisms that help redefine rape in particularly narrow ways. Furthermore. I argue that rape narratives depend on a postfeminist assumption that feminism has been successful. Paradoxically, such narratives hold women responsible for using the (now improved) law to end rape and view men, who know more about the new laws, as better feminists than women. Overall, this chapter argues that many post- 1980 rape narratives in film and television draw on and contribute to a cultural concept of post-feminism in a multitude of ways that collectively suggest there is no need for continued feminist activism, even against rape...

Paradoxically, even texts that explicitly articulate an antirape perspective can also inadvertently contribute to these backlash representations. For example, perhaps the most well-known self-defined antirape mainstream film, The Accused, includes a graphic rape scene (through a witness’s flashback) at the end of the film. The culmination of courtroom testimony, this scene emphasizes the horror of rape and illustrates the idea that even if a woman dresses and dances provocatively in a public bar, she is not responsible if a gang rape follows. But, the graphic representation is also explicit in its visual and aural depiction of sexual violence toward women, thus increasing the amount of violence against women that exists in popular culture representations. Thus, in this film the graphic rape scene functions, paradoxically, both to challenge rape myths from a feminist perspective and to contribute to the existence of violence against women in media

This paradox of discursively increasing (and potentially eliciting pleasure in) the very thing a text is working against is not unique to the representation of rape. The same argument can be made about representations of graphic war scenes in antiwar films, or of explicit racism in antiracist films, for example. [Ed: Once again, talking about the problem is a problem, even if not the problem.]

... Despite the potential backlash against women and feminism in any representation of rape, most 1980s and 1990s rape narratives intersect with aspects of postfeminism that seek to absorb and transform (rather than violently expel) feminism. As I discuss in chapter 1, rape narratives historically often linked rape to women’s independence, depicting a two-way causality in which rape illustrated that women needed to be more independent and less vulnerable, or in which independent behavior led to rape. Not surprisingly—given that women’s relationship to independence is a central concern of postfeminism—these narrative structures continue throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In the context of a postfeminist tension between independence and family, these narratives often use rape to help bring these two aspects of women’s lives together, linking women’s independent behavior to rape in the service of protecting the family. In these texts, experiencing rape helps women “have it all” (independence and family).

For example, thrillers or horror films that incorporate rape or the threat of rape specifically in order to produce spectatorial anxiety often resolve that anxiety through an independent woman character who triumphs in the end. Furthermore, these texts define this postfeminist New Woman’s independence through her capacity to overcome victimization in order to protect herself and her family... In the film Trial by Jury (1994)... At the trial, she stares blankly ahead, twisting her hair and looking incapable of making an argument (let alone a decision) for either guilt or innocence... he goes to her apartment and rapes her, making good his verbal threats through a physical assault. This rape transforms Valerie from a frightened and confused woman into one who is powerful and in control, a role naturalized by the initial portrayal of her character as independent.

After the rape Valerie takes over the narrative in an effort to save her son and prevent further assaults on herself. No longer twirling her hair in the jury box and waiting to see what Rusty will do, she persuades three other members of the jury that Rusty’s constitutional rights have been violated. leading to the hung jury that Rusty demanded of her as prevention against further assaults. Furthermore, she begins to stand up to the jury foreman in a way that emphasizes her independence as a woman, telling him, for example, that her name is not “Mrs. Alsion.” Thus, the film explicitly links her newfound post-rape persona to feminism."

--- Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture / Sarah Projansky


God. 'Antifeminist feminist postfeminist' is such an awful term.

"The teary province of trauma and crisis" is a good characterisation of the "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" mentality; the Revolution(s) will never be over, safe or finished, nor will the Nation ever be complete or safe.

A Feminist Overview of Pornography, Ending In a Defense Thereof

""Pornography benefits women, both personally and politically." This sentence opens my book XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography, and it constitutes a more extreme defense of pornography than most feminists are comfortable with. I arrive at this position after years of interviewing hundreds of sex workers...

Gender feminism looks at history and sees an uninterrupted oppression of women by men than spans cultural barriers. To them, the only feasible explanation is that men and women are separate and antagonistic classes, whose interests necessarily conflict. Male interests are expressed through and maintained by a capitalistic structure known as 'patriarchy'.

The root of the antagonism is so deep that it lies in male biology itself. For example, in the watershed book Against Our Will, Susan Brownmiller traces the inevitability of rape back to Neanderthal times when men began to use their penises as weapons. Brownmiller writes: "From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." [Emphasis in original.] How she acquired this knowledge of prehistoric sex is not known...

The assumed degradation is often linked to the 'objectification' of women: that is, porn converts them into sexual objects. What does this mean? If taken literally, it means nothing because objects don't have sexuality; only beings do. But to say that porn portrays women as 'sexual beings' makes for poor rhetoric. Usually, the term 'sex objects' means showing women as 'body parts', reducing them to physical objects. What is wrong with this? Women are as much their bodies as they are their minds or souls. No one gets upset if you present women as 'brains' or as 'spiritual beings'. If I concentrated on a woman's sense of humor to the exclusion of her other characteristics, is this degrading? Why is it degrading to focus on her sexuality?...

Other studies, such as the one prepared by feminist Thelma McCormick (1983) for the Metropolitan Toronto Task Force on Violence Against Women, find no pattern to connect porn and sex crimes. Incredibly, the Task Force suppressed the study and reassigned the project to a pro-censorship male, who returned the 'correct' results. His study was published.

What of real world feedback? In Japan, where pornography depicting graphic and brutal violence is widely available, rape is much lower per capita than in the United States, where violence in porn is severely restricted...

Pornography strips away the emotional confusion that so often surrounds real world sex. Pornography allows women to enjoy scenes and situations that would be anathema to them in real life. Take, for example, one of the most common fantasies reported by women -- the fantasy of 'being taken', of being raped.The first thing to understand is that a rape fantasy does not represent a desire for the real thing. It is a fantasy. The woman is in control of the smallest detail of every act.

Why would a healthy woman daydream about being raped?

There are dozens of reasons. Perhaps by losing control, she also sheds all sense of responsibility for and guilt over sex. Perhaps it is the exact opposite of the polite, gentle sex she has now. Perhaps it is flattering to imagine a particular man being so overwhelmed by her that he must have her. Perhaps she is curious. Perhaps she has some masochistic feelings that are vented through the fantasy. Is it better to bottle them up?"

***

Feminism and Free speech: Pornography

"3. MEN WATCH PORNOGRAPHY AND COPY IT OR FORCE WOMEN TO DO WHAT THEY SEE

· Violence and intimidation existed for thousands of years before commercial pornography, and countries today with no pornography, like Saudi Arabia and Iran, do not boast strong women's rights records. Men have forced women to do things -- sexual and nonsexual -- for centuries. The problem is not sex, it's force.

· People do not mimic what they read or view in knee-jerk fashion. If they did, the feminist books of the last 25 years would have transformed this into a perfect feminist world. If they did, advertisers could run an ad and consumers would obey. Instead, businesses spend millions of dollars and still, the strongest motive for purchases is price. People juggle words and images -- good and bad -- with all the others that they have seen or heard, and with all their real life experiences. It is experience that is the strongest teacher.

· Men do not learn coercion from pictures of sex. They learn it from the violence and contempt for women in their families and communities where each generation passes down what sorts of force are acceptable, even "manly."

· Copycat theories are "porn made me do it" excuses for rapists and batterers. They relieve criminals of responsibility for their acts...

5. PORNOGRAPHY IS ONLY FOR MEN

· Half the adult videos in the U.S. are bought or rented by women alone or women in couples.

· Sexual health professionals recommend pornography as entertainment and information for women and men. It may enhance failing marriages and help couples talk about and experiment with sex. "

"It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to be obscene, they could never have dared to be great." - Havelock Ellis

***

The base rate fallacy (in evaluating an individual, ignoring the distribution of the underlying population and relying overly on information about the individual in particular) is interesting, because it would seem to be what PC people advocate doing (judging people purely upon their individual qualities and ignoring the categories they belong to). Of course, anyone pointing this out is liable to be labelled as a hate-monger.

Another contradiction in feminism is the claim that women dress up for themselves. This taking of sartorial choice at face value is most curious, given that the ideology sees hidden (or not-so-hidden) structures and motives everywhere else.


One reason why I am not so hot about most opera is that drama and showiness are emphasised, sometimes at the expense of the music. Incidentally, this applies to many Romantic pieces as well. Another reason includes the almost continuous vibrato that the singers use, which intensifies the ugliness of the chicken-stuffed-down-throat phenomenon.

With all the complaints by Upper-Middle/Upper Class people about how the cost of living in Singapore is so high, it is sobering to know (even if it does not put a stop to the bitching) that in a Golden Village (GV) ad I saw, they were hiring people to clean the cinemas for $750/month (excluding OT) and projectionists for $950/month (also excluding OT).

Hurr Hurr was asking me to explain why men like used female underwear (in relation to 'Pam'). I first explained that it was due to proximity to objects of desire - the gonads, but she invoked the 5 second rule (fresh is good, stale is disgusting). In the end I gave up and extended the rule of understanding feminine irrationality to male kinkyness - don't try to understand it, since even the people involved don't, and just accept it (this lets us make sense of 2girls1cup as well).

There's a business selling 'C-cup' cupcakes. Uhh.

MFM says from personal experience (both firsthand and thirdhand) that Macs are bad at picking up wireless networks.

During Prohibition, did they cook with alcohol?

'Coffeeshop' was the name of a porn magazine in Hong Kong in the 60s.
[Addendum: Someone: 'interestingly enough, my lecturer explained that in the 17th to around the 19th century, coffeeshops (in addition to taverns, bars, etc) were places were men conducted sexual liaisons
so maybe the 60s porn magazine's title wasn't too strange']

"Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate." - Thomas Jones

***

"Misconceptions of chance are not limited to naive subjects. A study of the statistical intuitions of experienced research psychologists (5) revealed a lingering belief in what may be called the ‘law of small numbers,’ according to which even small samples are highly representative of the populations from which they are drawn. The responses of these investigators reflected the expectation that a valid hypothesis about a population will be represented by a statistically significant result in a sample---with little regard for its size. As a consequence, the researchers put too much faith in the results of small samples and grossly overestimated the replicability of such results...

The failure to recognize the import of regression can have pernicious consequences, as illustrated by the following obsercation (1). In a discussion of flight training, experienced instructors noted that praise for an exceptionally smooth landing is typically followed by a poorer landing on the next try, while harsh criticism after a rough landing is usually followed by an improvement on the next try. The instructors concluded that verbal rewards are detrimental to learning, while verbal punishments are beneficial, contrary to accepted psychological doctrine. This conclusion is unwarranted because of the presence of regression toward the mean. As in other cases of repeated examination, an improvement will usually follow a poor performance and a deterioration will usually follow an outstanding performance, even if the instructor does not respond to the trainee’s achievement on the first attempt. Because the instructors had praised their trainees after good landings and admonished them after poor ones, they reached the erroneous and potentially harmful conclusion that punishment is more effective than reward.

Thus, the failure to understand the effect of regression leads one to overestimate the effectiveness of punishment and to underestimate the effectiveness of reward. In social interaction, as well as in training, rewards are typically adniinistered when performance is good, and punishmenis are typically ad ministered when performance is poor. By regression alone, therefore, behavior is most likely to improve after punishment and most likely to deteriorate after reward. Consequently, the human condition is such that, by chance alone, one is most often rewarded for punishing others and most often punished for rewarding them. People are generally not aware of this contingency. In fact, the elusive role of regression in determining the apparent consequences of reward and punishment seems to have escaped the notice of students of this area...

In addition to familiarity, there are other factors, such as salience, which affect the retrievability of instances. For example, the impact of seeing a house burning on the subjective probability of such accidents is probably greater than the impact of reading about a fire in the local paper. Furthermore, recent occurrences are likely to be relatively more available than earlier occurrences. It is a common experience that the subjective probability of traffic accidents rises temporarily when one sees a car overturned by the side of the road...

Illusory correlation. Chapman and Chapman (8) have described an interesting bias in the judgment of the freq iency with which two events co-occur. They presented naive judges with information concerning several hypothetical mental patients. The data for each patient consisted of a clinical diagnosis and a drawing of a person made by the patient. Later the judges estimated the frequency with which each diagnosis (such as paranoia or suspiciousness) had been accompanied by various features of the drawing (such as peculiar eyes). The subjects markedly overestimated the frequency of co-occurrence of natural associates, such as suspiciousness and peculiar eyes. This effect was labeled illusory correlation. In their erroneous judgments of the data to which they had been exposed, naive subjects “rediscovered” much of the common, but unfounded, clinical lore concerning the interpretation of the draw-a-person test. The ilusory correlation effect was extremely resistant to contradictory data. It persisted even when the correlation between symptom and diagnosis was actually negative, and it prevented the judges from detecting relationships that were in fact present."

(emphasis mine)


I am amused that they used the phrase: 'the human condition'.

I should start my 'Misery of the Human Condition' series but - oh well.

One of the rare good Garfield strips:



Jon: Guess what? Liz is coming over on Valentine's Day! She's renting a chick flick on the way over...

Jon: I'll make hot cocoa, and we'll watch it here on the couch...

Jon: And share a tub of ice cream and a box of tissues together. *beams*

Garfield: *waves*

Jon: What are you doing?

Garfield: Waving bye-bye to your manhood.


Of course, though, if you laugh at this, you must be a misogynist.

"When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion." - C. P. Snow

***

Most of the stuff I made while home alone over CNY:



Raw Fried Dough. This was actually my second batch, made with baking powder. My first batch was made with yeast, and since the milk was cold, I thought: why not help my yeast do the job, and popped the dough into the microwave on full power, promptly nuking them.


I see the advantages of using a wok instead of a flat-bottomed pot to deep-fry.


Unfortunately my camera sucks at close range, but in short turned out alright.

The clincher:


REAL maple syrup. I hadn't had real maple syrup for more than 2.5 years (basically since the maple syrup from Vermont ran out). Real maple syrup is light, delicate and not overly sweet, unlike the maple-flavoured crap you always get in Singapore (even when they proclaim 'maple syrup'), but then again I don't blame them - it was $10.40 for 250ml at NTUC.


Fried Dough with maple syrup. I ended up consuming maybe $0.50 worth. I should make pancakes for the remaining 2.


Crumb



Miso-stewed pork, based on this, but with chicken stock powder, onions, carrot, courgette, shitake mushrooms and a dash of sesame oil thrown in. The last time I didn't realise the recipe didn't scale down properly, and ended up with a dry pot and cremated pork, half of which had to be thrown away, but I was more circumspect this time round.


Currywurst, with fresh bratwurst from Giant and curry-ketchup from the German Supermarket at Bukit Timah. They didn't have the right taste and texture, but oh well. I also didn't bother parboiling them, so they're quite dark on the outside.


Something I whipped up when MFM came over. Unfortunately it was below my standards. Perhaps the MSG in chicken stock powder goes well with Chinese food, but not Western food. And that salad doesn't need that much dressing.


Fresh garlic and herb and BBQ cocktail sausages from Giant that I bothered to parboil before grilling. They look much nicer.

"Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity." - Albert Camus

***

The Straight Dope: Do mice fear the scent of a cat? Do mice really love cheese? Why isn't there mouse flavor cat food? - "Another exception that proves the rule is the case of the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, discussed here a couple years back when the topic was a possible link between cat poop and schizophrenia. A quick recap: T. gondii infects a variety of mammals, including rats, but can reproduce only when the host animal is a cat; one of its evolutionary tricks is to make infected rats act weird, improving their odds of being caught by cats and thereby allowing the parasite to spread. A key form of said weird behavior: T. gondii-infected rats not only fear cat odor less, they're actually drawn to it... Which isn't to say there aren't plenty of people who can tell us what mouse tastes like. In his Never Cry Wolf (1963), Canadian naturalist Farley Mowat writes of eating mice, calling the flavor "pleasing, if rather bland." Vermont biology professor Bernd Heinrich, who apparently acquired a taste for mouse as a child in postwar Germany, has described treating his students to breaded mice braised in olive oil"

Lack of findings for the association between obesity risk and usual sugar-sweetened beverage consumption in adults - "The relationship between obesity risk and sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) consumption was examined together with multiple lifestyle factors... Analytical results indicate that obesity risk was significantly and positively associated with gender, age, daily TV/screen watching hours and dietary fat content, and negatively associated with smoking habit, education and physical activity; obesity risk was not significantly associated with SSB consumption pattern, dietary saturated fat content and total calorie intake. No elevated BMI values or increased obesity rates were observed in populations frequently consuming SSB compared to populations infrequently consuming SSB... Conclusion: multiple lifestyle factors and higher dietary fat intake were significantly associated with obesity risk. Populations who frequently consumed SSB, primarily HFCS sweetened beverages, did not have a higher obesity rate or increased obesity risk than that of populations which consumed SSB infrequently. "

High heels 'may improve sex life' - "An Italian urologist and self-professed lover of the sexy shoe set out to prove that high heels were not as bad for women's health as some suggest... She said her study of 66 women under 50 found that those who held their foot at a 15 degree angle to the ground - the equivalent of a two inch heel - had as good posture as those who wore flat shoes, and crucially showed less electrical activity in their pelvic muscles."

Muslim doctors refuse to 'scrub up' in U.K hospitals - "Muslim women training in several hospitals in England, have objected to removing their arm coverings in theatre and to rolling up their sleeves when washing their hands, because it is regarded as immodest in Islam... According to a report in The Telegraph, the measure has been deemed necessary to stop the spread of infections such as MRSA and Clostridium difficile, which have killed hundreds... the Islamic Medical Association insisted that covering all the body in public, except the face and hands, was a basic tenet of Islam. Dr Majid Katme, the association spokesman, said exposed arms could also pick up germs. He said there was evidence to suggest skin is safer to the patient if covered."
I'm sure the Jehovah's Witnesses Medical Association has a lot of information on the peril of receiving blood infusions.

Catholic nuns and monks decline - "Newly published statistics showed that the number of men and women belonging to religious orders fell by 10% to just under a million between 2005 and 2006... Of the total, 753,400 members were women, while 191,810 were men, including 136,171 priests and 532 permanent deacons."
The gender imbalance is no surprise, given the female gender defects.

John Conroy, Excerpt from Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) - "Psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latane wondered if Genovese might have fared better had there been fewer onlookers. The two psychologists then designed a series of experiments to test the hypothesis that the greater the number of people who witness an emergency, the less likely it is that anyone will do anything about it... Darley and Latane's theory about bystanders proved to be correct... Surprisingly, Darley and Latane did not find that the subjects who stayed in their seats were apathetic or unconcerned; in fact, those who did not respond to the emergency seemed more upset than those who did, often asking the experimenter who entered their rooms if the victim was all right... Darley and Latane concluded by saying that individuals are not "non-interveners" because of some flaw in their personality, but rather because responsibility is diffused. As in the murder of Kitty Genovese, isolated individuals, knowing that others were also aware of the emergency but not knowing how those others were responding, did not attempt to intervene because they did not feel personally responsible."
I remember someone criticised the Kitty Genovese example, but this study seems to show that the 'bystander effect' holds.

Wikipedia Islam Entry Is Criticized - "An article about the Prophet Muhammad in the English-language Wikipedia has become the subject of an online protest in the last few weeks because of its representations of Muhammad, taken from medieval manuscripts... Paul M. Cobb, who teaches Islamic history at Notre Dame, said, “Islamic teaching has traditionally discouraged representation of humans, particularly Muhammad, but that doesn’t mean it’s nonexistent.” He added, “Some of the most beautiful images in Islamic art are manuscript images of Muhammad.” The idea of imposing a ban on all depictions of people, particularly Muhammad, dates to the 20th century, he said. With the Wikipedia entry, he added, “what you are dealing with is not medieval illustrations, you are dealing with modern media and getting a modern response.”"

YouTube - Hawaii Chair Infomercial

A Penis-shortening Device Described by the 13th Century Poet Rumi - "With great interest, I read Kompanje’s (2006) clinical case report about a remarkable penis-shortening device invented in 1593 by the surgeon Hildanus. With this letter, I want to point your readers to an even older description of a similar device—not by a medical scholar, but by the great Persian humanist, philosopher, and poet Jalal-ud-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207–1273). In his poem, “The Importance of Gourdcrafting,” Rumi vividly describes the sexual interactions between a women and a donkey."

The Nazis Invented the Sex Doll - "Hitler's war machine created the world's first sex doll: Borghild. The "field-hygienic project" was an initiative of Himmler, who regarded the doll as a "counterbalance" to the sexual drive of his storm troopers. In one of his letters, he mentions the "unnecessary losses" the Wehrmacht had suffered in France, inflicted by street prostitutes. "The greatest danger in Paris are the wide-spread and uncontrolled whores, picking up clients in bars, dance halls and other places. It is our duty to prevent soldiers from risking their health, just for the sake of a quick adventure". One assumes Himmler also wanted to stop any racial dilution of the great German army."

My Life as a Real Doll - "Chicago artist Amber Hawk Swanson explores the relationship of marriage and gender inequality through video and photographic performance with a life-size Real Doll made in her own image."
'She's doing something that if a guy did, would be seen as kinda skeezy, but because she's a woman, she's taking charge of it, and just kinda owning it for herself'... 'She may continue to be more popular than me'

Wanton women cry that men jerk their shot and miss the real target - "Japan is in dire straits. The population is declining, people are marrying later, having fewer children, if any at all. And Spa! (1/29) says one of the major reasons for the dilemma is that as many as 70 percent of younger men are unable to achieve vaginal ejaculation... a soapland brothel worker the magazine gives as its source says over her many years of servicing male clients, it would have to be around 70 percent. "Young guys in particular. I'd say for every 10 guys, only about three come inside," the woman says. "There has definitely been an increase in the number of guys who'll finish themselves by hand, guys who leave without coming and guys who only want to talk."... Pshrink Katsumi Harima agrees with Nagao that mental issues are involved with the onset of vaginal ejaculation disorder. "Sex is too accessible for young people nowadays, what with adult movies and Internet porn," Harima tells Spa! "They're too used to the virtual world, which means when they find things like a woman who doesn't have porn star looks, is sweaty, or doesn't moan as loud as they're expecting, they become unable to ejaculate.""
'have you seen the culture and society section in mainchi news? just about every article is about some form of sex or the other'

"Late to bed and late to wake will keep you long on money and short on mistakes." - Aaron McGruder

***

Some of you may be familiar with the "Where the Hell is Matt?" around-the-world dancing videos:



Well, today (Saturday) he did some filming in Singapore, and invited everyone on his mailing list to join in. In his words:

The last video was about places. This one is about people. LOTS of people.

I forwarded the email to a bunch of people, but only 2 turned up (Enming and My No 1 Fan). 2 more asked who Matt was (I should've mentioned YouTube; I was at Asian Dog aka California Girl's house and when I mentioned YouTube a few knew who I was talking about, and also attached a URL - oh well), one of whom (Law Girl) asked "I dunno how to dance BADLY, so unless Matt is cute, no. :p"

I was half-expecting the ISD to show up and haul us all away for illegal assembly (they were probably posing as PRC tourists with their video cameras), but it all went well:


He got 20-25 RSVPs, and just under 20 showed up, which was a very good turnout (even taking into account non-RSVP-ed arrivals).


I thought half would be expats. About a third were. There was one guy who did the same thing with him in Sydney 2 weeks back.


Matt


Reviewing the footage


People cramming around to view it


If you can't see anything, it's okay - neither could we (pretty much)


Me and My No 1 Fan with my (I don't know about her) first internet celebrity in the flesh!

[Addendum:


Off-camera dancing]




My No 1 Fan


The turnout was much better in other countries - 60 in South Korea, ~100 in Vancouver and more than 60 in Tokyo. In Hong Kong he went to the Peak, which was a bad idea since it was foggy, as usual.

Matt's comments on Singapore:

"The distinction between Singapore and its airport is a minor one. The entire country feels like one very large departure lounge; spotlessly clean, no distinct smells, climate-controlled, no one is poor, lots of shopping, no real culture, pleasant enough for the moment, but not a place you want to stay very long.

This makes sense. The city was founded to be a gateway. It is between places, and somehow immune to the realities of true placehood."

And more:

"The designers of this city knew exactly what they were doing. It's freakishly safe and efficient. It's what Guliani would've done with New York if he could've gotten rid of all the New Yorkers... it all works. The only other place I've seen that vaguely resembles this is the Microsoft campus...

I went into a country music bar where all the men were white and all the women were either Thai or Vietnamese. After about the fifth girl telling me I was handsome and asking me where I was staying, I finally caught on that they were all hookers."

Lastly (and randomly), a Jap told him: "We are a strange people". Good to know a native thinks so.


More pictures (albeit small tiny) and commentary from My No 1 Fan.

"Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian; wine and tarragon make it French. Sour cream makes it Russian; lemon and cinnamon make it Greek. Soy sauce makes it Chinese; garlic makes it good." - Alice May Brock

***

What I've been doing instead of blogging:













And most importantly:

"I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability." - Oscar Wilde

***

Courtesy of MFM:

Psychology Today: Love's Loopy Logic

"A date makes us both spectator and performer at a two-ring circus: We troll for wit, kindness, curiosity, and "chemistry," hoping that we radiate these same attributes in the right amounts. From strategic winks and blinks to elaborate grooming to gifts of gorgeous baubles, men and women employ an arsenal of tricks in their romantic lives, all in the service of a demanding master at the far reaches of conscious awareness. Eons of evolution have honed our behavior to aid and abet a reproductive payoff. The sum of the stratagems we employ, and the wisdom of nature in crafting them without our explicit awareness, are now the subject of intense study by evolutionary psychologists...

Women, for their part, are biased right back. They skittishly insist that men are more keen on no-strings-attached sex than is the case. This "men are pigs" bias pits suspicious women against oversolicitous men in what Geoffrey Miller, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico, labels a "never-ending arms race of romantic skepticism and excess."...

Glenn Geher, an associate professor of psychology at SUNY at New Paltz, who, with Miller, edited a forthcoming volume on mating intelligence, is developing a mathematical model to demonstrate what many a grandmother has long cautioned: Women who are de facto skeptical of a man's intentions are almost always better off than women who spend hours deconstructing the first date. ("He gave me his home number, he asked about my family, he mentioned a concert this spring—he must be into me!") Geher found that if a woman cannot accurately judge a man's romantic designs at least 90 percent of the time, she's better off being biased. "Women using a 'men are always pigs' decision-making rule may be more likely to actually end up with honest, committed, and long-term-seeking males," insists Geher...

Men are excellent judges of what women want in a long-term partner, exhibiting keen mind reading abilities on limited display in other areas of their lives. A guy who is clueless about his friends' opinions of him and oblivious to his wife's sulking can still craft a potent profile on Match.com...

Faby Gagné, a research consultant and visiting scholar at Wellesley College, found that 95 percent of people think their paramour is above average in appearance, intelligence, warmth, and sense of humor. There's deep wisdom in these sunny views: People who believe they've struck romantic gold are more satisfied with their relationship and more committed to their mate.

Romantic illusions are so critical that they may actually balloon during key decision-making phases of a relationship, such as whether to get married, or when to have children. That's because, says Gagné, biases can buffer us against the angst of dicey deliberations...

Self-deception softens the conjugally unpalatable and pushes the envelope on what constitutes an intelligent strategy. When it comes to defending a relationship to ourselves, we're like lawyers who routinely manipulate—but outright lie when the need arises...

Self-deception is an equal opportunity bias. It's a core feature of mating intelligence both for males and females. But women display more self-serving beliefs about their own behavior in relationships. When Maureen O'Sullivan, a professor of psychology at the University of San Francisco, queried college students about their lies to the opposite sex, she found that women assert that they themselves lie less than do other women. Men have no corresponding illusions about their mendacity relative to other guys. O'Sullivan sees the gap between women's self-reported lies versus their beliefs about other women's lies as evidence of internal sophistry. Self-deception makes sense for a woman who needs male resources, even if the guy himself isn't optimally committed. "Women have to put more of their central processing units into maintaining a relationship," says O'Sullivan. "It's easier to do that emotional work if you have a certain amount of self-deception." For some women, the skepticism that comes so naturally during courtship switches off once a commitment's been made, and they may overestimate a man's investment in the relationship or the odds that he's being faithful.

Battered women may be an extreme example of self-deception, points out O'Sullivan. Women who remain convinced of an abusive partner's devotion are arguably lying to themselves with an intensity that can appear delusional. But such women may be acting on a runaway impulse to ignore objectionable male behavior, an impulse that in effect prevents them from leaving when it's clearly to their advantage...

Peer judgments may be supremely influential in today's world. Traditionally, teens mixed more with adults and extended family, so they received feedback on their mate value from their clan as much as from their clique. But today teens are schooled and socialized in lockstep, creating an unprecedented separation from adults that Miller argues may warp accurate self-appraisal. A 17-year-old girl, he contends, compares herself mercilessly to her equally nubile peers; she doesn't mingle with adults enough to realize that she and her friends are all in the top-10 percent of women, reproductively speaking. "Forty years ago," says Miller, "a girl might have entered the workforce at age 18 and gotten a lot of attention in the office relative to the 28-year old 'spinster.' " Today, she'll enter college, still socializing and competing with a gaggle of equally young, pretty girls...

Glenn Geher argues that health class would do well to teach the rudiments of opposite-sex mind reading and mate preferences, not just opposite-sex plumbing. Miller agrees: "It would help enormously if boys were told, 'your sense of humor and ability to be interesting matter.' It would help if girls heard, 'No, you don't have to be ultrathin. If you're best friends with a guy, he might make a good boyfriend.' There's so much misunderstanding between the sexes, and adults seem unwilling to take a stand."...

Highly creative men are more attractive—Nettle's colleague Helen Clegg found that artists who amassed the most gallery exhibitions also racked up the most sexual partners"


I tried to find O'Sullivan's original paper on the emphasised bit, but couldn't, so I will take it as supporting my contention that women lie to themselves (ie they lie without knowing they're lying).

Great, to think that only last week I found evidence that women are more risk-averse (the corollary of which is that they're more paranoid)!

Something from Frigid Girl:

"Scena da Manuale d'amore 2



Credo ke forse sia questa la parte più erotica e passionata in un film? Monica Bellucci e Riccardo Scamarcio sarebbero una bella coppia..."


Amazing! A sex scene without nudity! Gotta love these Europeans.

This is not quite "fetish wheelchair girls stuck in mud", but it's the closest I've seen to it.


Addendum: "After sex, he was cured. Hallelujah... The wheelchair was just a ploy. I'm handicapped. Fuck me."

"Don't watch handicapped sex, it's gross. Can we watch normal people having sex?... If you really need to watch sex, watch normal people"

"I don't need to watch porn. I need to read my readings... 'Porn, readings, it's so hard to decide. I'll go for readings. Join - University Scholars Programme'"

Watching sex : how men really respond to pornography / David Loftus


"The Public Debate: What Did Everyone Get Wrong About Pornography?

Objectification
Alan Soble, a professor of philosophy, notes that eye contact between the model and the viewer is often staged in photos and videos, which is a kind of communicaion— the expression and recognition of intentions.” He describes the interchange thus:

'The model who poses and licks her lips knows how the photographs are to be used, and she acts in that way in order to arouse the viewer. The viewer, in turn, knows that the model is acting in order to arouse, recognizes her intention to arouse, and is aroused by recognizing her intention to arouse. Despite the time and space between the two people, the model also appreciates that the viewer’s recognition of her intention to arouse will contribute to his arousal, and she knows this while she is acting so as to arouse.'...

When Dworkin asserts that “Objectification, in fact and in consequence, is never trivial,” she is simply wrong. If objectification is a process that occurs in our heads when we look at someone (or a picture of someone)—seeing and making a snap judgment about that person without complete information about his or her nature—then we objectify other people many times a day. When we accord automatic respect to someone in a white lab coat or someone who steps up to a lectern, we have objectified that person. When we shy away from an unkempt character on the street, this is an act of objectification. On further investigation, the person in the white coat may be an actor or an escapee from a mental institution, and the street person is actually Howard Hughes or the Messiah; the point is that our initial act of objectification does not freeze the person in stone now and forever—we can respond to further input and continuously modify our judgments.

Soble observes that people regularly “dehumanize” one another for casual sex in a one-night stand, but it is a mutual transaction, so some forms of dehumanization must be, in his words, “morally permissible” I do nothing wrong, he suggests, if I fail to smile or say anything to a ticket-taker at the theater—and thereby treat the person like a ticket - taking machine—but there are limits: I cannot therefore step on her foot or cough in his face.

Antiporn analyses also neglect the issue of context. This means that, and only that, their arguments run. Nudity means loss of power (rather than an attempt to impress and evoke awe), the male gaze can only be degrading and acquisitive (rather than admiring and respectful), and women who enjoy performing fellatio and being squirted with ejaculate (let alone simply posing naked for men) must be deluded, brainwashed, and coerced...

“Until the day women’s bodies are no, used to sell cars, cosmetics are not a necessity to the success of a woman’s image, and we are not humiliated and tortured for men’s pleasure, women will have no rights,” MacKinnon declares. The idea that women have no rights is hyperbole, of course, as is the implication that women are routinely coerced into dressing provocatively. Note how casually MacKinnon equates having to wear cosmetics with being tortured. This statement appears in a book whose cover photograph shows the author wearing earrings. Is this a demonstration that even MacKinnon cannot escape the tyranny of social objectification of women? (One also wonders whether the healthy glow of her skin was enhanced by makeup: Did MacKinnon choose this herself, was she merely encouraged to look more attractive, or did Harvard University Press coerce her into donning rouge by threatening to hold up publication of her book if she didn’t?)...

As Ann Snitow remarks, 'Not even in my most utopian dreams can I imagine a state in which one recognizes all others as fully as one recognizes oneself (if one can even claim to recognize oneself, roundly, fully, without fragmentation). . . . the antipornography campaign introduces misleading goals into our struggle when it intimates that in a feminist world we will never objectify anyone, never take the part for the whole. . .'

Subordination
Exhibit One for the antipornography activists is Linda Lovelace, the star of the top-grossing pornographic film of all time, Deep Throat... In fact, as some commentators have noted, Lovelace states in her book that working on Deep Throat provided some of the first happy and relaxed moments of her marriage. “Something was happening to me, something strange,” Lovelace writes of the first day of filming. “It had to do with the fact that no one was treating me like garbage. And maybe it was just the chemistry of being part of a group. For the first time in many months, I was thrown in with other people, other people who weren’t perverted and threatening.” (Remember, these are porn actors end filmmakers she is referring to here.)

Although no one came to her aid when her husband beat her up, and i hey continued to make use of her performance for the movie, she could tell even at the time that no one approved of his treatment of her. Her book strongly suggests that if she had not appeared in Deep Throat and thereby become a minor celebrity known to many other people, she would have remained an unknown, abused wife and perhaps never gotten away from Traynor alive. Pornography did not put her in that mess; it helped her to get out of it, and may have saved her life...

MacKinnon complains that the film “is protected speech” even though Ordeal “makes clear that thi film documents crimes, acts that violate laws in all fifty states.” Perhaps it does, but the video of the Rodney King beating and the Fox network cop shows depict actual crimes too, and we do not prosecute the people who made or broadcast them. MacKinnon tries to pretend that the ordeal of Linda Lovelace is somehow every woman’s story: “It is what men experience as our sexuality. What connects Linda’s ordeal and the success of Deep Throat with the situation of all women is the force they are based on.” Somehow I doubt MacKinnon means to imply her life has been one of unmitigated humiliation and coercion.

There are several basic problems with the subordination argument. or one thing, women in pornography are often assertive and sexually agressive. Sex appears to be their idea: They tug at men’s clothing, move into position, and initiate various sex acts. Rarely does anyone have to tell them what to do. These women are not acting the way opponents of pornography say they do, nor are they acting like women often do in public life...

The truth of the matter is, when you are in the submissive role, things are “done to” you; you get to lie back and concentrate on the sen sations rather than have to run the show. When you are in the sub missive position, the other person is taking more responsibility lot the success or failure of the sex; whatever “doesn’t work” is not your fault. Even what does work is not your fault, which is a convenient excuse if you have mixed feelings about it. This has been suggested as the reason behind women’s historic rape fantasies. In the fantasy of being taken by someone who is so overpowered by desire for you, because of his lust or your beauty (preferably both), you make him responsible for whatever happens—for good or ill. It’s not your fault if anyone gets hurt, or (god forbid) you actually enjoy yourself...

Sex workers and therapists know the truth of the matter. “In general I’d say it’s nine to one that men want to be dominated,” says Barbara, an escort worker in Britain:

'When you think, “What is the ideal girl that the client wants?” you mighi think: someone who is pretty, sweet, and submissive. And yet in actual fact, if you play that role with clients, nine times out of ten you wont see them again. Clients genuinely don’t like submissive women. They want women who have spunk and who have a sense of humour. They don’t just want you to roll over and put your legs up in the air. They want that spark. to get the repartee going. They really like it when you criticize them.'...

I think most people intuitively understand [that porn eroticises male fears], even if they don’t realize it. Women who have no interest in porn or actively dislike it tend to regard men who use it as pathetic. Why would they do this if porn depicts “the reality of male power and privilege”? If pornography really expressed the power and privilege of its viewers, most women would be clamoring to see porn with naked men in it, because then the women would be in the power position. Yet when women do see nude males, they often feel silly or embarrassed. Far from expressing the power and privilege most men “actually” possess in society, porn more likely expresses what the viewer feels he lacks or is missing out on . . . and that’s why even ignorant and unsympathetic women regard masculine interest in porn as pathetic rather than a threat.

What sort of man most routinely shows disrespect toward women, and speaks of women coarsely, and draws pictures of female privates on bathroom walls? Usually a young, unformed male—one who does not enjoy great knowledge of women or power in the social or business world. Laura Kipnis theorizes that pornography is about transgression:
mapping the borders of culture’s decorum and stepping over them. Naturally, teens who are searching for identity—straining at adulthood—try to locate and sometimes transgress those boundaries, whether it’s through smoking cigarettes, sneaking alcohol, learning to drive as soon as possible, or looking at pornography (as well as experimenting with sex itself). This is not a reflection of their personal power, but their relative powerlessness. Says Camille Paglia:

'The dominance of woman’s image in pornography is not about the sub ordination of women—it’s the opposite. It’s about male anxiety. It’s about the male mind trying to confront and take control of this enormous, mys terious power of female sexuality.'

A man longs to know what a woman looks like when she is willing, when she wants to do everything he desires, because too often he does not have that experience in real life. This is no dillerent from the long. ing that drives women to romance novels, where the heroes are unreal (or at least atypical) mirrors of feminine desires.

Degradation
Most men in my survey would object to someone treating a woman as sexually dirty or inferior, too... Women in pornography don’t often take orders from men, because they understand them completely, know what they want, do what they want, and themselves want what men want. That this is unrealistic - a fantasy - is precisely the point...

Susan Cole is a surprising exception when she faults Canadian law for its presumption on [facials]: 'But ejavulating onto a woman's body does not have to be degrading. It could also be a method of birth control.'...

Perhaps to read facial cum shots as inherently degrading may be unfair to male experience. It imposes women’s feelings on men. In the typical “facial cum shot,” the woman is rarely coerced or restrained. In fact, she rushes to position eagerly; she invites the event. She almost never looks as if she is suffering or upset by the result; often, she smiles approvingly or continues to make orgasmic sounds as if getting semen on her face is a thrilling experience. She savors the semen, lets it run out of her mouth, down her chin, and over her chest. She may look up gratefully into the man’s face, or smile at the viewer. She may take the slowly deflating penis in her mouth again, and smear the semen all over it with her lips. If degradation and humiliation were the viewer’s goal, ouldn’t his pleasure be heightened by expressions of fear, disgust, and distaste on the woman’s face, resistance on her part, and the necessity of holding her down? If pornography is an expression of raw male power md violence, how come there is so little evidence of it in these “disgusting” tableaux?...

I would suggest that “facials” in pornography are one of the ultimate expressions of a woman’s acceptance—her celebration—of male sexuality and orgasm... when a woman smiles and invites the explosion on her face— the part of her that gets the most public attention, the portion she assiduously washes and paints for presentation to the world—it may he the ultimate “I love you,” or at least “you’re okay, fella,” for the man who has had to hide, clean up, and dispose of his semen most of his life...

Friday... concludes about men who look at nude women:

'Seeing only degradation in the eyes of men who masturbate while looking at women’s bare breasts and genitals, angry feminists miss the point altogether. “The uninitiated think that men look at naked ladies to disparage them, or that the women hate the men and only do it to make a buck,” says [Friday’s psychologist friend] Richard Robertiello, who used to frequent burlesque theaters. “But it’s a love fest. We men worship. These women see the adoration in the guys’ eyes. The men think the women are goddesses for letting them look. Their wives don’t care enough to show them their bodies. These women live out the guy’s suppressed dreams of exhibitionism.”

“No catcalls?” I asked him.

“The few times that happened, the men were so disapproved of by the rest of the audience, they were thrown out of the theater. The stripper/audience relationship is a love affair, maybe even more important than a sex affair.”'

Hatred of Women
None of this sounds like hatred. Anxiety, sometimes. And fear—of women, of failure at sex, of not knowing what to do—perhaps. When they feel these feelings, men may go to pornography not to stoke them, not to build up hatred, but to allay them. To feel good about women To worship their beauty. To imagine what it’s like to have one want you To pretend that sex is not so mysterious and complicated after all."

Towards a New Theory of Men and Pornography

"Appreciation of Women's Beauty
It may be some part of a woman's physical being that attracts a man's eye: the way she has done her hair or the way it falls and bounces; the way she has chosen her clothing to present herself, the way it falls lazily across the contours of her body or grips her curves; the lines of her torso, the length and smoothness of her legs, the delicate purity and wistfulness of the nape ofher neck, the beguiling shape and bounce of her breasts, the equally heart-stopping globes of her derrière and its rolling grind as she walks. Each of these pieces forms a portion of a woman's entire physical presence, but any one of them alone can be beautiful.

A woman's beauty also lies in how she carries herself and the way she walks... Men's appreciation of women's beauty in all its variety carries over, to some extent, to pornography... Some of pornography's biggest stars don't conform to the stereotypes...

Neither Nina Hartley nor Ginger Lynn, two of the most popular performers in pornographic videos, was surpassingly gorgeous in her prime... the fact that the women acted as if they truly enjoyed sex and the company of men played a major role in their popularity...

[Men] say, in effect, Thank you for allowing me this look at your nude body... if she looks like she's enjoying herself, she doesn't necessarily have to resemble the models in Vogue and Cosmopolitan (who are only a little less naked, after all)...

*Very emotive experience*

Until Andrea Dworkin Or Catharine MacKinnon can account for an experience like this and incorporate it into their theories about what “does” to men, they will remain hopelessly ignorant about men and what pornography means to us. When men who look at pornography feel tenderness, vulnerability, affection, and gratitude (as well as I’desire and lust), to be told that what they feel is only a desire for power and the need to humiliate and degrade women is inaccurate and insulting. No wonder we have been loathe to speak up: What men have to say seems utterly and literally incomprehensible when put next to much of what has been said tip to now."

"You've got to take the bitter with the sour." - Samuel Goldwyn

***


Google cockup: "Your search... did not match any documents... In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 0 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."


Somehow I was amused by this Bak Kwa ad on a taxi.



Barracks restaurant in Dempsey Road must spend a lot on air-conditioning. No wonder the prices are so high for the portions you get. Well, at least there's the kumquat (complete with leaves).


Monolingual SBS MRT sign. I wonder if anyone's written in to complain about their lack of commitment to racial harmony.


I know this list in Wakafu was very funny, but this picture can't be read. Acidflask has a hi-res copy of the picture but I haven't gotten it from him yet.


NTUC: "F/TH CHK BLESS B-HAL"
The chicken is blessed indeed!


"Property of Changing Appetites. Do not remove from premises. Offenders will be handed over to police!" (or words to that effect)
I can't believe this happens often enough to need this warning (as with the Khong Guan biscuit tins and passing off)?!


"Tuition !!!!!!!!!...
Qualified and experience tutor teaching maths and science for primary and secondary school... Please contact... lousyman*@hotmail.com"
I sure wouldn't hire a tutor with that email address


Burger King (Singapore): "What your ingredients say about you. Turkey Bacon: You are willing to betray whatever residual culinary standards fast food had and put ersatz crap in your menu in order to earn more money."



The only interesting thing at the USC bazaar (at Science - they're ALWAYS at Science): T-shirts in braille


NUS - where we chain the furniture in the corridor so no one steals it


Science - where people need directions to the vending machine


Apparently you're supposed to take a leap of faith out of this door


Guess what's inside these things. Answer: pineapple (highlight for answer)
K Gourmet - the masters of making savory stuff that looks sweet (people think their buns filled with chicken feather sausage or otar are custard buns) and sweet stuff that looks savory (eg tao sar puff)


"NUSSU Tokok campaign: Q: Are girls in NUS overdressed? A: Ho-ho. Helloooo.... under-dressed is the correct word <:)"
Another interesting one was: "Q: There are too many 'Little Miss' in NUS. A: Give them growth hormones"
The person who designed these forms should be fired. The background at the place where you're supposed to write your comments makes it almost impossible to read what's written. I looked at a few, then gave up squinting - after 3 years you've heard almost everything that can be said, anyway.


Attempts at Valentine's Day emotional blackmail:


"You can give without loving, but you can never LOVE without GIVING. (Sociology Society)" (apparently they don't practise what they preach)


"Friendship stalk
Puppy Love (1 stalk)
Blooming Love (3 stalks)
True Love (6 stalks)
Passionate Love (9 stalks)
Eternal Love (12 stalks)"



"'Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.' - God
catholic awareness week 2007"

Besides arguably violating the 4th Commandment (YHWH and all that), there is something very wrong with this, as this line refers to the prophet Jeremiah (cue the calls about context, which are curiously absent whenever Christians talk about abortion).

Now, suppose we grant that this applies to everyone, and not just a prophet (or all prophets, even).

Since God knows us before forming us in the womb, he knows us before the moment of conception, when a sperm and an egg meet. Thus, to prevent the union of a sperm and an egg is murder. Contraception, naturally, is then out, being a murderous act. Yet preventing the events that would lead to the union of a sperm and an egg is similarly haram.

Even abstinence, then, could be murder.


Infusion (international) bazaar:


"Stand a chance to win a Free plane ticket to PHUCKET"


"Do you want to pay your respects to the late President Soeharto?"
Err, no, but there's something else I want to do...


Other nations had food samples, but Scotland was conspicuous by its lack of any. Yet, notice what seems to be a food warmer. They probably figured no one wanted to eat haggis anyway (cue Mike Myers on Scottish food).

There was a costume dressup booth with the most horrific essentialisation (when I use the word, you know something's up):


'Chinese Minority' was bad enough...


... but 'Afican' (sic) took the cake, condensing the entire continent of Africa into a single costume. I wanted to show up in a loincloth, and maybe with a blowpipe too - that's African as well.


'Arabian Belly Dancer' - sans veil?!

Watching sex : how men really respond to pornography / David Loftus


The Public Debate: What Did Everyone Get Wrong About Men Who Use Pornography? (Continued)

"Porn Causes Men to be Violent

A more serious charge than the notion that pornography portrays violence is that it causes violence in the real world. Declares Dworkin, 'men believe . . . that they have the right to rape' and 'men really believe they have the right to hit and to hurt.' Not some men, not men who are addicted to pornography—just men, period. And in case you thought Dworkin was being careless, she writes elsewhere: “Pacifist males are only apparent exceptions; repelled by some forms of violence as nearly all men are, they remain impervious to sexual violence as nearly all men do.”...

The argument rests partly upon laboratory studies that suggest a connection between the consumption of pornography and increased callousness toward women, greater propensity to rape or to discount the seriousness of rape, and a taste for increasing violence. Second, opponents of porn list real-life examples in which pornography played an apparent role in a particular man’s violence against women—a serial killer, usually—as well as a few studies that suggest ordinary men have “gotten ideas” from pornographic material and forced their partners to participate.

The primary lab research to which critics of pornography refer has been conducted by Edward Donnerstein, Neil Malamuth, Dolf Zillon, Daniel Linz, and others. This is not the place to discuss the weaknesses of these studies at length, particularly when they have already been extensively critiqued by others. (See, for example, Bill Thompson’s Soft Core and Alison King’s essay, “Mystery and Imagination: the case of pornography effects studies,” in Assiter and Carol’s Bad Girls and Dirty Books.)

Suffice it to say that most studies have used college students, who were handy for researchers but might not accurately represent the pop ulation at large. Young adults in their late teens and early twenties tend to be sexually and romantically inexperienced. They probably have unclear ideas about what they might or might not do, and what is and is not acceptable behavior. Critics of pornography usually fail to note that female college students in these surveys sometimes show as much heightened aggression, arousal, and callousness as males...

To accept the antiporn case, one must presume that the “propaganda” of pornography was somehow more influential in these [male serial killers' lives than the violence and humiliation they suffered at the hands of real people. “Our research has shown that virtually all serial killers inc from dysfunctional backgrounds of sexual or physical abuse, drugs or alcoholism,” says the FBI’s John Douglas. “I’m not going to tell you that pornography fuels the desires of someone who wasn’t already thinking in that direction.”

Plus, as Alison King points out, “the fairly strong consensus among researchers is that sex offenders invariably had less exposure to pornography than the average male—a point accepted even by the Meese Commission.” This seems counter to common sense, but a study by Kant and Goldstein showed that sex offenders tended to grow up in households where there was almost no discussion of sexuality, and the values were traditional and conservative...

Furthermore, focusing on isolated killers ignores the hundreds of thousands—even millions—of men who look at pornography and never abuse their partners and acquaintances—men similar to most of the males in my survey. It is easy to say killers like Bundy and Bernardo were fans of pornography and leave it at that; few acknowledge that men like theologian Paul Tillich, jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong, and symphony conductor Eugene Goossens were, too...

Ann Rule, who knew Bundy personally and wrote a biography of him, is convinced he was merely spinning another tale with his eleventh-hour confession” about pornography:

'I wish that I could believe his motives were altruistic. But all I can see in that Dobson tape is another Ted Bundy manipulation of our minds. The effect of the tape is to place, once again, the onus of his crimes—not on himself—but on us. I don’t think pornography caused Ted Bundy to kill thirty-six or one hundred or three hundred women. . . . The blunt fact is that Ted Bundy was a liar. He lied most of his life, and I think he lied at the end.'...

When MacKinnon writes that “sooner or later, all men want to do what they see in pornography,” if she means they want to try some of the sex acts with a consenting partner, and see ecstasy on a woman’s face, then the men in my survey would agree. But just before that sentence MacKinnon refers to “murdering a young woman. . . raping her, having vaginal and anal intercourse with her corpse, and chewing on several parts of her body”; and I cannot say a single man in my survey mentioned this as a cherished fantasy...

The 1992 University of Chicago Sex in America survey indicated that between 1942 and 1992 the number of men and women who reached the age of twenty and were still virgins had risen steadily, with the proportion of men outpacing that of women. Clearly pornography is not doing the job its opponents claim...

As Jen Durbin has observed:

'It’s too easy to get a skewed impression of porn if you only read about it. Students who read Andrea Dworkin become convinced that pornography equals pictures of dead Asian women hanging from trees, smiling buxom women meeting a gruesome fate in a meat grinder, ecstatic women fellating revolvers, etc. Students who read Nina Hartley become convinced that pornography is a form of self-actualization for uninhibited feminists.'...

To open an essay called “Pornography and Rape: A Causal Model,” for instance,
Russell quotes a man from Shere Rite’s survey on why he wants to rape women and what he fantasizes about when he thinks of doing it. But the man never said that he did rape anyone, he was just describing his thoughts...

Men’s “propensity to rape,” as Russell terms it, may be no more prevalent than women’s propensity to strike their children—that is, often considered, seldom performed.

Russell properly concludes that “having a desire to behave in a certain way is not the same as actually behaving in that way, . . . [but] it is helpful to have this kind of baseline information on the desires and predispositions of males, who are, after all, the chief consumers of pornography.” Unfortunately for her case, nowhere does Russell show that the 46 to 52 percent of the males in Hite’s survey who occasionally “thought of rape” were the males who looked at pornography the most, or that they had a record of mistreating women or a likelihood of actually raping anyone...

Ziliman and Bryant noted that differences in the way males and females responded to the materials were “trivial statistically.” This means that males and females were aroused in much the same way (something Russell and many other antiporn activists rarely bother to report) and that “massive prior exposure [to pornography] reduced aggressiveness sharply” in both sexes. Although the researchers were puzzled that after massive exposure to pornography, the research subjects were more likely to recommend shorter terms of imprisonment in a hypothetical rape trial—”rape is apparently considered a lesser offense” after exposure to porn—they added that in this too, “effects of massive exposure applied to males and females equally. The females’ dispositions toward rape and its punishment were apparently just as much influenced as those of males.”

Senn is one of the few enemies of porn who acknowledges that “studies of sexual arousal using both men and women have shown that sex differences in arousal to sexually explicit materials (no violent content) do not exist.” Several studies, she admits, suggest “women are as aroused as men to pictures and written depictions of sex whether the content is affectional and romantic or not.” In her own research, women’s levels of anger and confusion dropped considerably on successive viewings of a slide show of violent and nonviolent pornography.

Senn calls this “affective desensitization” and worries that “lessened anger might reduce the chance of social responses.” But why presume that the initial response is the more “true” one? A simpler explanation would be that the shock value dissipated, the women got used to the unfamiliar material, and they felt less personally threatened and could evaluate it more objectively. Their initial response could be likened to the fear and anxiety we feel toward the unknown—strangers from the other side of the globe, for instance—and what Senn calls “affective desensitization” could he more accurately termed “increased understanding and comfort” such as we experience once we have met and talked with strangers from China or the Congo. How many of us reacted with puzzlement and unease—even fear—the first time we heard about sex itself?

Rather than read too much into gender roles or pornography’s influence, I would suggest that the ready response of males and females to pornography in these studies is yet another confirmation that college students may be more suggestible—because they are less sexually experienced and mature—than older people.

Despite the holes in their logic, the opponents of pornography often admit that their minds are simply made up. Kathleen Barry writes: “I submit that the causal connections between pornography and sexual violence are perfectly evident. We do not need to follow individual men out of specific pornographic theaters and witness them raping the first woman they see to realize as women what impact pornography has on our lives. We need only appeal to our common sense.” Ray Wyre, who treats child sex abusers, says simply, “I don’t know how many men actually have fantasies and don’t put them into practice. But I don’t care about that [emphasis added]. What I do know is the more they masturbate to pornography, the more likely they will be to put their fantasy into practice.” With that reasoning, one should lobby to have all the fans of murder mysteries and true crime stories locked away before they are inspired to do some harm based on all the fantasy homicides and historic mayhem they read about. The most laughable analogies are fostered by MacKinnon: in at least two of her books, she suggests showing pornography to a man is like “saying ‘kill’ to a trained attack dog.

The theory that “porn causes people to be violent” is pretty suspect, Kathleen Barry’s notion of common sense notwithstanding. If it were true that the more pornography a man sees, the more likely he is to commit violence, then older men would be more violent: Like radiation poisoning, the cumulative effect of repeated exposures to pornography eventually would kick in as their lives continued. But according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, the largest concentration of men arrested for forcible rape is between the ages of 16 and 24. Sixty-one percent of the offenders are under the age of 25."

I was with My Toy, Acidflask and some others, and decided to enjoy a bukkake (my first, in fact). He has higher-res pictures, but I haven't gotten them yet:


Wakafu Bukkake (Udon): fish flakes, seaweed, egg, sweet beancurd, fishcake, tempura crumbs, crabstick (bah, they said crab), spring onion and coriander, with a bowl of dipping sauce at the side. Delicious.


From Democratic ImPossibilities Potluck after Christmas:


My focaccia. Not brown enough, and oddly shaped. And it wasn't herbal enough (too bad I'd made the next batch of flour by that time)


Jap seal meat curry


Fishing for seal meat


2nd batch of focaccia (several days later) - I baked for a bit longer at a higher temperature, and also brushed the tops with olive oil, so they look better (even those without cheese):





Curry Cream Chicken. This was for Hurr Hurr. Someone labelled it: "Gabriel's Ominous Meat" but it was the most popular item, if I do say so myself.

Original recipe; instead of microwaving I stir fried to brown the onions and apples, as well as the chicken, then baked the mixture. I left out the mushrooms though. The cream and cream of mushroom soup (this seems to be a common shortcut) were a bit less than required though.


After the addition of more curry and a bit more baking



'Okonomiyaki' which looks like cai tao kuay bad cai tao kuay (caked together), brought to you by the same people who gave us equally disgusting Chicken Ham Takoyaki. Today, about a week and a half later, they came back as part of NUSSU's food fiesta bazaar (where there was massive racial disparity in vendors, and 3/4 the stalls could be found at normal bazaars anyway). Uhh.


Ichiban Boshi (Esplanade): 'Our premium dishes are carved with sincerity & only the freshest ingredients are used'. Presumably their normal dishes are cooked without sincerity and don't use the freshest ingredients. They also, like a few other places, have 2 tiers of ice cream: Haagen Dazs and an unnamed, cheaper brand.

2girls1cup - California Girl and Lynnette

I'm so touched!

Watching sex : how men really respond to pornography / David Loftus


The Public Debate: What Did Everyone Get Wrong About Men Who Use Pornography? (Continued)

"Pornography Shows What Men Want

'Pornographers... know what to make, and the distributors know what sell,' Susan Cole declares, as if the mere fact that something is on market is proof that the consumers want it and would not choose something else were it available. Are Pintos, Edsels, red dye #2, and thalidomide what consumers wanted? They were on the market and people bought them, so they must have been...

Many of the men in my survey did not often get what they wanted from pornography...

MacKinnon claims that pornography “eroticizes the despised, the demeaned, the accessible, the there-to-be-used, the servile, the child-like, the passive, and the animal.” That does not sound like many of the women I have seen in pornography, or the ones the men in my survey said they liked most. MacKinnon wants to pretend that “women feel compelled to preserve the appearance—which, acted upon, becomes
the reality—of male direction of sexual expression, as if male initiative itself were what we [women] want, as if it were what turns us on. Men enforce this. It is much of what men want in women.”

Everyone would like to be served at times, everyone wants to be desired—which requires assertiveness and initiative on the part of someone else. Women whose sexual relationships with men are fulfilling have their needs served by their male partner. If men wanted only power in sex, they wouldn’t experience performance anxiety, impotence, or premature ejaculation (or feel guilty when they do, because these are symptoms of not being able to satisfy one’s partner— or the fear of it. If domination and power were all that mattered to men, they would care only for their orgasm, and not their partner’s. The fact is, many men do care very much about women’s pleasure, both in life and in pornography, where it is the focus of so much attention...

Pornography Teaches Men About Sex
As Laura Kipnis dryly observes, 'The argument that pornography causes violent behavior in male consumers relies on a theory of the porn consumer as devoid of rationality, contemplation, or intelligence, prone instead to witless brainwashing, to monkey-see/monkey-do reenactments of the pornographic scene.”...

Pornography is Addictive
One can sense the same murky insinuations in Peter Baker’s worried declaration that the combined monthly sales of all Britain’s pornographic magazines—from Penthouse and Mayfair to Knave, Fiesta, and
Club International—is 2.25 million. Apparently the reader is meant to assume each sale represents a different man, rather than the possibility that a smaller number of men buy multiple magazines. And what if there were 2.25 million buyers 0f pornography in Britain: Could they all be addicts and nascent sex killers? One does not get that impression from the Englishmen in my survey...

Porn Consumers Inevitably Turn to More Violent and Kinky Material
Porn critics positively savor the gruesome details they say are typical of the genre. Women are 'hung by their breasts from meat hooks,' Catherine Itzin assures us. They are 'fucked, tied up, spread-eagled, having ejaculate sprayed over their faces and bodies,' Diana Russell thunders, and 'No one knows what percentage of them are also being beaten up, tortured, rpaed or even killed.' MacKinnon says, 'Electrodes [are] being applied to the genitals of women being called 'cunt' in photography studios in Los Angeles and the results mass-marketed.' Cole assures us that 'men shove bamboo up women's vaginas,' one finds 'a meathook in a woman's vagina,' and women are 'branded with hot irons or gang-raped...' As always, Andrea Dworkin weighs in: 'A woman, nearly naked, in a cell, chained, flesh ripped up from the whip, breasts mutilated by a knife: she is entertainment, the boy-next-door's favorite fantasy, every man's precious right, every woman's potential fate.'

... When critics of pornography actually try to measure the violent content, the results are weak, to say the least. Catherine Itzin approvingly charts the findings of a study of the images on the covers of porn magazines on the east coast of the United States at the time of the Meese Commission. Although intriguing items such as fisting, leg irons, forcible rape, and corpses leap off her chart, their actual incidence in the pornography studied by researchers P.E. Dietz, Paul Elliott, and Alan Sears was negligible. The above items appeared in one percent or less of the material. In contrast, a subsequent study by Dietz of detective magazine covers found that 76 percent involved domination of some kind and 38 percent depicted bondage.

Opponents of pornography also casually assert that violence in pornography is on the rise. MacKinnon writes, “More and more pornography is more and more violent, and arousing,” but she provides no evidence. Russell and Karen Trocki are more sly: in 1993 they wrote, “Pornographic materials and mainstream depictions of women have become increasingly violent in the past two decades,”... Using such a skewed sample to characterize all pornography as violent is as accurate as saying statistics indicate that all Americans may be homosexual.

Palys’s examination of videos between 1979 and 1983 found that XXX videos with explicit sex were far less violent than R-rated ones with nudity and simulated sex. Examples of male domination and graphic aggression were higher in the R-rated videos, but they did not increase over time, and the number of violent scenes in XXX actually fell.

Thompson goes on to cite several studies that suggest MacKinnon, Russell, and anyone else who claims violence has risen in pornography are simply wrong. J.E. Scott and S.J. Cuvelier’s 1987 study of Playboy and Penthouse, covering the years 1954 to 1983, found a “violent” image on one page in 3,000, and four out of every 1,000 pictures, respectively. The rate dropped after 1977. A study by researchers at Reading Uniersity of European pornographic magazines (supposedly “harder” than American or British) up to 1990, found that “violent imagery” declined 42 percent from 1972 to 1979, and a little further by 1983. “Non-violent but demeaning” imagery climbed 23 percent from 1972 to 1979, then declined 19 percent through 1983.

What makes the debate about violence in pornography so tricky is that 'violence' is open to interpretation. What looks like violence to one person may be play to another. When MacKinnon infers a connection between “sadomasochistic pornography and lynching,” it is clear she knows nothing about consensual bondage and S/M, safe words, and the world of people who play at restraint and pain...

“Many women recoil at S/M because it seems to reflect what history teaches them men want most: to inflict sadistic pain on them,” writes James Ridgeway, a journalist and author of Red Light: Inside the Sex Industry. “But the surprise of the commercial S/M scene is that it most often finds men on their knees, abject slaves of their steely dominatrixes. Often cross-dressed in women’s clothing, they clank around in medieval chains, their cocks and balls ingeniously tied up, their bare asses lashed by whips, as they perform housewifely chores.”

In discussing a porn novel called Whip Chick, Dworkin wrote: “The portrayal of men as sexual victims is distinctly unreal, ludicrous in part because it scarcely has an analogue in the real world.” In other words, Dworkin argues that most porn is real to its viewers, but this porn is not...

The late John Preston, a popular author of gay pornographic stories, interviewed “Mistress Holly,” the owner/manager of an expensive brothel near Sunset and Vine in Hollywood, and reported:

'Holly speculated that only 15 percent of the male clients of the House of O were dominant in their sexual desires... They are men who are usually in charge all the time. They are the type who lord it over their wives, play the father role to the hilt with their children, and are probably giving the orders at work, too. They just can’t hold up to that pressure. So they come here and they hand over all their power and all their decision making to the domme.”'...

As a woman once wrote, when she was a child she “liked the sex-and-dominance games, which could be overtly sadomasochistic, because I liked the risk and the intensity. . . .“ Whether she suffered lasting harm because of such play is anybody’s guess: Her name is Andrea Dworkin.

The most extreme form of pornography, and therefore the handiest weapon in the “porn-is-violence” debate, is the “snuff” film, in which a woman is tortured and actually killed on camera for the sexual pleasure of the viewer...

When Snuff surfaced in 1976, feminist protests shut it down in some cities. The film helped to galvanize the antipornography movement into the 1980s. The only problem was that it was a hoax: an old-fashioned horror/slasher flick with some nudity thrown in. When Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau investigated, he discovered Snuff was really a 1971 Argentine movie called Slaughter, to which some extra scenes had been spliced. A story in the New York Times noted that the 'victim' was interviewed by a policewoman, and the authorities concluded, “The actress is alive and well.”...

Given that isolated psychopaths record their crimes in the privacy of their lair for their own pleasure, one cannot assert that such material is manufactured for the purpose of public sale to Dworkin’s “boy-next-door” —who wouldn’t want it in any case. Based on that slim but crucial misconception, however, one finds references to snuff in nearly every book and essay by opponents of pornography, often with no citation of an authoritative source at all...

If snuff films were really on the market, feminists would have hunted them down and held them up for gruesome display. Law enforcement agencies would be jumping for joy to possess the most perfect homicide evidence one could ever hope to put before a judge or jury. Why hasn’t this happened?

As a professor of law who must live or die by her citations, MacKinnon has worked the hardest to provide backup for such claims... Apart from quoting Senator Arlen Specter’s remarks in the Congressional Record as an authority, in several of her books MacKinnon cites a single Orange County, California municipal court case in which a man was convicted of murdering two young girls in the process of making a film. She invariably buries this information in an end note-perhaps because, as she admits, “the film was never found.” But somehow this enables her to insist of snuff films that “They exist,” and 'The intended consumer has a sexual experience watching [them]' (apparently “intended” consumers are as good as real ones)...

Less scrupulous commentators than MacKinnon assert that there are snuff films “priced to make [them] available to Everyman,” and increasingly popular as videos in the American home”[!]...

In 1997, journalist and former Israeli soldier and police detective Yaron Svoray published Gods of Death, the remarkable account of his search for a genuine snuff Film. The trail took him to Thailand, Germany, Miami, Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam, and the war zones of Bosnia... A career FBI agent told him, “As far as anyone in the bureau knows, there has never been a legitimate snuff movie ever found.” An officer in the New York Police Department’s child crimes unit said, “I’ve never seen one and I hope I never do.” A 29-year veteran of the Dutch police assured Svoray there was no such thing.

Yet Svoray managed to view a snuff film in a wealthy man’s Connecticut home, and in Bosnia he found brutal video footage of sex slayings by soldiers. I believe he saw what he says he saw. But he clearly shows that such movies are closely guarded by their (probably criminal) owners, not sold to the public, and that the Bosnian footage of rape- killings of women—like the movie made by MacKinnon’s Orange County killers—was incidental to the actual carnage... Yet I suspect that MacKinnon will cite Svoray in her sub sequent books as proof that snuff exists and men want it."

(Continued in next post)

"The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

***

Watching sex : how men really respond to pornography / David Loftus


The 75% Problem: Child Sex Abuse and the Porn Industry

'Feminist critics of porography assert that as many as 75 percent of the women who are filmed or pictured in pornography have been victims of child sexual abuse or incest, and conclude that the purchase of porn supports and encourages an industry that thrives on the sexual abuse of women and children'...

A 25-year-old software engineer wrote:

'My first response is that when I was a women’s studies minor at college, I did a lot of checking up on feminist statistics when studying for class or working on reports. I found that an alarming percentage of them were totally wrong, and most of the rest were deceptive. So when I see “as many as 75%” were “victims of child sexual abuse or incest,” I read that “as few as 5% saw a copy of Playboy before they were 18” and ignore it. Feminist statistics have lost all credibility with me.'...

A 35-year-old bisexual, married two years and working on a masters, said it was “An impossible observation to comment on without sort of contexting, some sort of comparative curve. I’d be interested to know what the sample group is and how it might compare to, say, fast-food workers as a control.”...

“Conservative estimates currently state that three out of four women—across societal stratification—have been sexually abused at one or more periods in their life. Given this, the statistical correlate between women being survivors of sexual abuse and pornograhy is ludicrous.”...

“I see no causal relationship,” wrote an assistant professor of computer science:

'I’m not sure it even makes sense on some level. Does the recycling industry thrive on waste? Yes, but does the recycling industry cause the waste? No. The people employed by the porn industry should be informed con senting adults. It is not the business of the pornographers to examine the past life and childhood of their employees.'...

'The industry may attract abused women. Other industries probably do also. I would expect that the women who work in rape help lines, psychology, social work, and the police all have disproportionately high numbers of women who have been abused. Do these industries “thrive” on the abuse of women? I think not. Everyone has a cross they bear. For some it is child sexual abuse. Our crosses lead each of us in various directions in efforts to solve the issue involved. The differences are only in the details.'...

A chemistry teacher offered another analogy: 'By the logic of Dworkin and MacKinnon, people who watch Richard Pryor movies and listen to his tapes are encouraging the racism that gave rise to his anger, and, by extension, his comedy. By their logic, the cure for racism in America would be to no longer watch Richard Pryor.'...

The sex publishing employee also suggested that far from being only an isolated option for downtrodden women, sex work might be a way they find their way back to self-confidence and a feeling of self-worth and attractiveness (to say nothing of economic independence)...

Candida Royalle, a former porn actress who became a director and producer with Femme Productions, a woman-owned company that makes couples-oriented pornographic films, recalls an incident that supports this theory:

'Three Daughters, for example, became a very cathartic experience for the actress, Siobhan Hunter. She was one of the Mayflower Madam girls, who had worked as an escort to put herself through medical school. The scene we were shooting was supposed to be a very tender portrayal of her first time and we were shooting in a green room, and the actor had a moustache. All of a sudden, Siobhan started freaking out. She said, “This is reminding me of my actual first sexual experience. It was a green room, with a man with a moustache, and it was a horrendous experience, and I’m starting to freak.” So I sat her down and I talked to her, and I told her that my first experience was done with someone I loved, but that it was also a dreadful experience. I told her that I use the movies as a form of catharsis—as a way of redoing it, in a way, and making it better. I thought she could try to use this the same way. The man she was working with had so much genuine feeling for her, that is exactly what happened. They did the scene together and at the very end, while the cameras were still rolling, she sat up, they were hugging, and she started crying. If you see the scene, you’ll see tears on her face. It was such a release for her.'...

'Actors and actresses in pornography are adults who are fully able to give or refuse consent. They are responsible for themselves and their actions. It seems curious to me that feminists are claiming that the actresses in pornography are poor helpless weaklings who are unable to speak for themselves. This is exactly the kind of patriarchalism they pretend to detest.'...

As the man who made the marijuana harvesting and analogy put it:

'I think the best solution, for someone who truly wants to eliminate victim’ from any line of work, is to insure that any line of work in which women (and children and men) are employed is made completely legal, with thy responsibilities and rights thereunto, and held in the public’s mind being as honorable as any other.'...

“Many great artists were dysfunctional and they have created great beauty.” Whether
anything in pornography could be called “great beauty” is certainly open to dispute, but this man’s reference to Van Gogh implied that if we accept the feminist reasoning with regard to abused women in porn, we should forgo the purchase, enjoyment, and reproduction of the work of individual such as Van Gogh or Dostoevsky...

*Explanation of how Dworkin distorted a study by the Delancey Street Foundation in San Francisco which found that 73% of SF street prostitutes had been raped, with nearly a quarter of rapists making reference to porn, where the conclusion was 'It is very difficult to establish conclusively the causal relationship between pornography and sexual abuse of women'*

Dworkin not only exaggerated the numbers in the study but asserted that they proved something its own authors would not claim. She seems to care less about truth than stirring her listeners to action, even if that means unleashing unproven claims supported by slipshod methodology It is not hard to see what prompted the more
vitriolic and contemptuous remarks that some men in my survey directed toward feminist arguments and their use of statistics."


The Public Debate: What Did Everyone Get Wrong About Men Who Use Pornography?

"Men Cannot Separate Fact from Fantasy
Several commentators have tried to argue that enjoyment of pornography is somehow different from pleasure with any other form of entertainment. Susan Cole writes, “there are real women in the pictures, and . . . an erection, any way you look at it, is not a fantasy.” Well, no, it is not. An erection is a physical response to a fantasy, like sweaty palms and a racing pulse during a horror movie. When we perspire and our heartbeat accelerates, an observer might say that physically we are on the verge of fight or flight, but this is not what we intend or actually do when we watch a movie like Psycho. MacKinnon argues that the physical response of an erection means that pornography an incitement to act, like racist literature or telling a trained attack dog to “kill”; but if she knew how many erections the average man has in his lifetime and never acts on (morning erections, hard-ons at the movies or when a woman smiles and pays one a compliment at work, or those embarrassing and unbidden erections in adolescence due to fluctuating testosterone), she would admit how ridiculous her attack dog analogy is.

Diana Russell is certain that “the argument that consumers of pornography realize that such portrayals [of rape myths] are false is totally unconvincing.” As proof, she cites three books or articles by women (including herself), as well as studies of college and high school students that suggested they were more inclined to believe rape myths after watching erotica. Of course, no one talked to men who customarily use pornography; no one consulted older, mature men for their perspective; and no one seems to have addressed the role of “experimenter bias” in these studies—the extent to which students might have guessed what the researchers expected to hear.

Taking sides appears to be more valuable to some theorists than obtaining hard, fair, and objective evidence. MacKinnon approvingly quotes researcher Edward Donnerstein’s reputed comment that “We just quantify the obvious”—a disturbing admission of bias—while Russell castigates him for “copping out” because he objected to the way work had been used by antiporn feminists.

In Susan Griffin’s formulation, “the pornographer. . . never admits to his hatred and fear of eros. . . . The traces of the chauvinist’s feelings come to us, therefore, oniy by inference and allegory.” In other words, it would do no good to ask men about pornography, because they can’t be honest. So Griffin accords greater weight to her own fantasies about what goes on in men’s minds than to whatever men might have to say for themselves. She smoothly concludes that “the pornographic mind is identical both in form and in ultimate content to the Nazi mind,” whatever that means...

This tension or interplay between realism and fantasy hardly sets pornography and its users apart from other forms of entertainment. Readers of romance novels want lovely plots and perfect bodies, but enough humanity and not too much perfection that the story becomes totally unbelievable. Action movies feature “real” heroes who have personal problems and make mistakes within the “perfection” of split-timed capers and escapes. “Realistic” stories by Dostoevsky or Hemingway still depend on rare events in people’s lives (like war or murder), helpful coincidences, heroes and heroines of uncommon virtue and vice, to hold our interest. Green, red, and yellow kryptonite hments of reality that kept the stories of otherwise invincible Superman interesting... Are we attracted by the realism or the fantasy? The answer, of course, is both...

To Men, Women in Pornography Represent All Women
Since some women are already on record to say they aren’t humiliated by such depictions, the situation obviously is more complicated than MacKinnon, Cole, and Griffin believe. The truth is, men know only too well that not all women are like the ones in pornography. That is one of the things that makes it appealing: that the women in porn do not behave like most of the women the viewer knows. As Nancy Friday explains... 'A fantasy woman does not reproach her man for letting other men peep at her, for wanting to ‘lie her with another guy, for dreaming of her having sex with a dildo or a dog. Fantasy gives men the love of women they want, with none of the inhibiting feminine rules they hate.'

What Friday also found was that male fantasies tended to be built on reality, not vice versa. They were not divorced from real life like the faceless males who ravished women in the fantasies they recounted to Friday. 'Most of the fantasies in this book are built upon memories of real women'... Friday recognizes what this suggests about men’s interest in pornography. Whereas women told her they fantasized about a demon lover who “is never seen with photographic clarity,” men reacted in the opposite way: “hence the great popularity of the nude in girlie magazines. The more a man can see, the closer the dream is to reality, the more specific, the more real the woman—the more exciting.”

In other words, the male viewer is not using pornography to create reality; it’s the other way around. He loves pornography for how closely it emulates reality at its best—although it obviously is not real... That is the great secret Nancy Friday discovered when she quizzed men about their sexual fantasies—the great secret that has thoroughly eluded all the antiporn commentators—and this is why she titled her book about male sexual fantasies Men in Love.

“In pornographic books, magazines, and films, women are represented as passive and slavishly dependent upon men,” declares Helen Longino, thereby demonstrating her ignorance of the common pornographic scenario where women take initiative and control. The threat from “mysterious female sexuality and capability” means that “pornography asserts that women have neither, that women are (often literally) castrated, helpless, incapable,” Susan Lurie assures us. She is clearly unaware that pornography celebrates women’s pleasure, and that the S/M sub-genre often depicts a female punishing a man, binding him, or whipping him for being “bad”—perhaps for not satisfying her, or for having lustful thoughts in the first place. (Lurie also does not explain what “literal” castration of a woman might be, or whether anyone’s seen it in pornography.)

You would think if there were nothing but humiliation, degradation, and violence in pornography, no self-respecting woman would have any thing to do with it. Yet critics of pornography paradoxically complain that self-respecting women routinely force themselves to resemble the models in porn.

“Ordinary women wear makeup,” Griffin observes. “Ordinary women attempt to change our bodies to resemble a pornographic ideal.” But Griffin compares these ordinary women to... mainstream cultural ideals, not specifically pornographic ones. Griffin also does not explain why the use of cosmetics predates the widespread availability of pornography by centuries. She does not explain how pornography could play a greater role in women’s lives than the magazines they buy for themselves—Vogue, Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan... Cosmo “teaches women, step-by-step, how to become sex objects,” Lisa Steele observes, and 'Vogue and Bazaar... offer in-depth instruction in the narcissistic pastime of turning oneself into a living sculpture. . .'

... “No one has shamed my body like women have,” a woman told Naomi Wolf. Another
recalled her teen classmates saying “I was on the Itty-bitty Titty Committee” and teasing her with “You’re a sailor’s dream: a sunken chest.” She concluded, “Boys would never say that. Just girls.”

... Where women’s attitudes and self-image are concerned, research seems to implicate women’s fashion magazines more than pornography. Alison King reports a study by C.L. Krafka that suggested that female subjects who viewed pornography the researchers thought dehumanizing and degrading did not report greater sex-role stereotyping, lower self-esteem, or inferiority about their looks. A study led by T.F. Cash. however, found “women had lower self-esteem after viewing models in mainstream magazine advertisements.”

This should not be surprising, since the variety of women’s sizes, shapes, and ages in women’s fashion magazines may arguably be far more limited than in pornography. A commentator who has only seen a few copies of Playboy or Penthouse would not know this, but Laura Kipnis, who surveyed some of the less well-known publications, describes them in her book, Bound and Gagged. Dimensions is a magazine for “fat admirers,” and features “quite fat lingeried models... Full nudity is not a factor, but the magazine’s transgressive quality may be read from the fact that, according to Kipnis, it can be found oniy in hard-core porn stores. Over 50 offers “vistas of antediluvian flesh.” With the advent of amateur sex videos, a greater variety of ages and forms have naturally become available in action, as well.

As they so often do, women presume to speak for men in this area; “Readers feel short-changed when a woman does not look and act the part of the Playboy model. It is an insult to their masculine capacity to get what they want,” declares Judith Bat-Ada, although she doesn’t say how she knows this. She contends that this process leads to child molesting: “It makes him hate her. And it makes him turn to the younger female daughters in the family.” Perhaps it might in those rare cases where it happens, but can we impute this process to all users of pornography? What inspired men to molest their daughters before there was Playboy?...

(This chapter continued in a following post)

Watching sex : how men really respond to pornography / David Loftus


Pornography and Violence

"Antipornography activists routinely link pornography with violence. Porn depicts violence against women, they assert, and it inevitably leads to violence against real women. How do men who like pornography respond to these assertions?

'What violent acts?' asked a 32-year-old. “The producers of porn magazines and videos are careful not to depict anything that a crime victim might say in a lawsuit might have inspired a violent crime. I have never seen violence against women depicted in an adult video, or in magazines. Even men-on-men violence is very rare.” He noted that to listen to antiporn activists, “you would think that most pornography was about violence, rape, and molesting children. Anyone familiar with porn knows this is completely false.” Stories written mostly by amateurs,
posted to the Internet, and therefore not purchased or sold for commercial gain, were a different matter: 'There are stories about rape and sexual torture to be found, and they arc very much a turnoff for me.'

A 41-year-old computer programmer noted that violence of any kind was rare in hard-core porn, somewhat more common in soft-core, but still light in comparison with the violence in mainstream films and literature:

'There is very little violence in visually oriented hard-core pornography. I have personally seen one bondage-S&M video which had very mild violence. I’d give it a PG for the violent content: It had nudity but no sex. The rest of the hard-core videos that I’ve seen had absolutely no violence, just sex and nudity. There is of course some violent hard-core pornographic literature—see some of the writings of the Marquis De Sade for examples These are not readily available; you usually have to special order them. None of the adult book shops that I’ve been to carry this kind of stuff. (My copy of De Sade’s Juliette was special ordered from Barnes & Noble—not an adult book outlet!) Once in a while I will get aroused while reading a violent passage in Juliette; there was a sadistic passage or two in Anne Rice vampire novels that gave me an erection, as well. Usually I prefer hardcore sex and nudity to this sort of tripe. While violence in hard-core pornography is rare, this is not the case in soft-core pornography. The Anne Rice vampire books that I’ve mentioned several times are an extreme. Even the much milder violence in Bret Ellis’s American Psycho is quite extreme for soft-core. More typical for soft-core pornography is a level of violence comparable to the movie The Maltese Falcon, i.e., a PG-13 level of violence. The emphasis is still on sex and nudity.'...

'There is a “lot” of pornography out there, and I suspect if it really did cause people to become more violent, we’d have considerably more violence than we do now.'...

'It's more likely that feminists themselves provoke men to acts of violence!' another man joked. “Seriously, car chases, gunplay, fisticuffs and so forth are way more prevalent [in regular movies], and there’s no movement to ban them.”...

A 20-year-old Canadian student interested in a career in sex counseling challenged the link on the same grounds: “Just because there is a correlation between two factors, like pornography use and violence, does not mean that one causes the other. Feminists want prove that pornography causes harm towards women and when you want to find a certain result, you’ll interpret the data to give that result.

One man said even if a link could be shown, it wouldn’t matter: “People having cars increases the chance of car accidents. Does this mean that when 99.9% of people can drive their car for a year without killing anyone, we should ban cars because of the .1% of people who are incompetent or unlucky? Of course not. It means we should deal with the .1%.”...

“Repression breeds violence. The more sexually liberated countries of Europe have far less rape.” A 33-year old software support specialist, married eight years to his only sex partner, agreed that “pornography can act as a cathartic experience and reduce one’s propensity for violence.” He then added: “One wonders why Andrea Dworkin doesn’t go around killing and raping, since she spends so much time reading/watching and then writing about that devil porn.”...

A 26-year-old writer and administrative employee said: “I’ve seen football players and other athletes bully people and beat them up. So why don’t feminists attack the multibillion-dollar sports industry? Surely there’s a more direct connection in people who beat people up professionally becoming violent than people having sex on film.”...

More than one man recalled reports that pornography drove men such as Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy to their crimes...

A divorced, 32-year-old computer consultant discounted Bundy as an example of any link between pornography and violence. “Curiously enough, while many use Ted Bundy as a case in which pornograph ‘forced’ him to do his vile deeds, it should be noted that Ted Bundy once claimed Satan himself compelled him to his atrocities. Moreover, when police searched Mr. Bundy’s car, they didn’t find pornography in it, they found cheerleader magazines.” His conclusion? “In my view, people who ‘blame’ pornography for their actions are only seeking to avoid personal responsibility for their actions.”...

Perhaps the firmest dismissal of the porn-causes-violence thesis came from an Englishman, a software engineer with five children:

'I reject the implication that there is some sort of “argument” about pornography put out by feminists. I do not grant them even that minimal level of intellectual honesty or respectability. The “arguments” I have read are a palpable tissue of lies, distortions, non sequiturs, special pleadings, and outright gender-biased hate speech. I don’t believe even those making them actually believe them. To me, they are simply another example of the “Big Lie” technique of the late unlamented Herr Goebbels—that if you yell it loudly enough, and phrase it extremely enough, somebody will believe it. On the other hand, I have read both the report of the (British) Royal Commission on Pornography, and a condensed version of the U.S. report (by Ed Meese, wasn’t it?). These were two serious, detailed, and meticulous studies, and they both concluded what in both cases the majority of the investigators did not want to conclude: that there is no evidence whatsoever that the consumption of pornography is harmful; that there is no good social grounds for regulating it; and that the harm that is sometimes caused by its production or distribution is a direct consequence of its marglnalisation by society. I will not accept, now or ever, the right of any other person, especially women, and especially feminist women, to define or control my sexuality. There is nothing to debate: my body; my self.'...

'I’ve had several partners, including my feminist wife, who enjoyed light bondage and simulated rape. Depictions of those definitely are a turn-on. My experience is that the strongest women are most stimulated by being dominated.'

A 36-year-old male pointed out that much of what appears violent in pornography is actually a very controlled form of fantasy play:

'I get turned on by pictures of classic role-playing such as “bondage,”“S&M,” including people being whipped, etc., and forced” although it Is really fake and they are playing; it is consensual in nature. It even feels good in real life to play around with this type of stuff a bit. This is not wh,it I’d call “violence.”'

Wrote a 23-year-old bisexual who preferred women:

'Violence can be erotic, but I think it’s important to distinguish between consensual and non-consensual. I know I like some violent things to be done to me that turn me on. So, as far as porn goes, there are violent scenes that turn me on because I have a fascination in the physical sensation of pain—I find the tension between pain and pleasure very erotic. But it all has to be in the context of consent. If I see a rape scene where the victim is saying “no, don’t do this,” I don’t like it and it doesn’t turn me on. But most of the “rape” scenes in porn have the victim excited and asking for more. If the acting job or picture is convincing, then it’s a turn-on because I really believe that the person does want that to happen to them.'...

Closely related to the idea of the consensual use of force was the appeal of being the object of such force focusing on the person who chooses to be the “victim,” rather than upon the person who “imposes” the violence. The key word here is “submission”; some men said the 'submissiveness' of one of the performers fired their libido, rather than the violence per se...

The question of consent has been a thorny one for feminists who oppose pornography. Because the activities that occur in pornographic films—let alone in such jobs as nude dancing and prostitution—seem unimaginable to many commentators, feminist criticism has taken some odd twists in order to “prove” that women cannot actually consent to such acts. For instance, it has been argued that limited professional and financial options drive women to this kind of work to such an extent that they do not have free choice. [Ed: Similarly, criminals are driven to commit crimes. Therefore they are not responsible.]...

'Let’s put this in perspective. You’re in a lot more danger of coming to actual harm playing football or other violent contact sports.'...

Some feminists have gone so far as to suggest that to stare at a woman in public is a violent act (or an aggressive and invasive one, at least)...

“In my experience, an erotic thriller means two mm utes of nudity and 60 minutes of violence. I have never been aroused by scenes of violence in pornography, and I doubt I ever will.”...

If there was stress or violence in their lives, a few men said, it could not be blamed on their use of pornography. A divorced public administrator, 48, declared, “There was no violence in my relationship(s). Arguments, tension, misunderstandings, god yes, but to blame this on pornography (which generally depicts pleasure/enjoyment?) is rather farfetched. ‘Sorry we had the wretched misunderstanding yesterday, darling. It’s the pornography,”“Work,” a 26-year-old administrative employee observed dryly, “is a much more direct cause of emotional and physical violence.”...

'The only semi-violent aspect in pornography which is somewhat arousing is when an attractive, strong guy is with a woman who is reluctant to have sex, kind of forces himself on her (not violently, but clearly coercively) and she is overwhelmed by attraction, arousal (of course she was always fight ing this), gives in, and enjoys it. Again, this is not so much violence as coercion. I do not do this myself, because I do believe it is not only un-PC, but not right. No means no means no. Now, occasionally I may have tried to seduce my partner when she has expressed lack of interest, but again, even tually no means no, and I have never been violent or physically coercive.'

If anything in this man’s description of an arousing situation seems improper or brutish, let alone “un-PC,” we might remind ourselves that it describes the sort of encounters that routinely take place in romance novels written for, purchased by, and read by women in the millions, and apparently regarded as “highly romantic.”"

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." - John Lennon

***

Periodic Table Printmaking Project - "Ninety-six printmakers of all experience levels, have joined together to produce 118 prints in any medium; woodcut, linocut, monotype, etching, lithograph, silkscreen, or any combination. The end result is a periodic table of elements intended to promote both science and the arts."

Singapore stops foreigners from singing complaints - "A choir that planned to sing a list of complaints about life in Singapore cancelled its performances after the city-state banned its foreign members from singing, organizers said on Saturday. The 60-member "complaints choir", a concept that originated from two Finnish artists, was scheduled to perform at a weekend festival but authorities granted a performance license on the condition that the foreigners would not participate."
WELL DONE. Youtube, Lyrics

Local Police Seize Human Rights Torch 'For Investigation' - "Shortly after the HRTR activities ended at Singapore's landmark hill and frequent tourist spot, Mount Faber, six police officers, tagged by a cameraman, seized two Human Rights Torches and two HRTR banners from CIPFG members. Categorizing the event as "illegal assembly", the investigation officer said the torches and banners were needed to facilitate their "investigation", and repeatedly demanded HRTR event participants to reveal their names and personal particulars, on the pretext of returning the props to the rightful owner after their investigation."

What I have against City Harvest Church - "I know it’s meant to be like us supporting her endeavours and stuff, but I found it incredibly inappropriate to expoit the church-goers (who will inevitably buy a few copies to show support) to boost album sales. A girl from my cell group at that time actually went to buy 20 and distributed it among us. It wasn’t as if all proceeds were going to some charity… sigh. (My info on this may be wrong, but even if there was a charity involved, no mention of the name of the charity nor it’s purpose was described at all.)"
More religious hate...

Prohibited Degrees of Relationship - Okay, so in Singapore a guy cannot marry his Wife's father's mother, Son's son's wife or Sister's daughter. Right.

Women want sex on the spot - "Sandy, 35, who also slept with a stripper on her hen night has no struggle with her conscience. "Do you think your husband-to-be wouldn't do something like that on his stag night?" she told Her World... According to male strippers Her World interviewed, these women go as far as to supply them oral sex and even full-on sexual intercourse. And in full view of the rest of the party too!"

Land of Milk and Honey - "Letter from Hong Kong... At the McDonald’s outlet that I turn to for a bite on the go, there’s a cheery young girl at the counter. Her distinctive name elevates her beyond the McJob nature of her work. She’s called, somewhat appropriately, Milk Fat, and she displays her name on her chest as if it’s a war-trophy!... my life has been enriched by an office secretary in a consulting firm called Nausea Yip and a travel agent named Honey Chan. Among other honourable mentions: Sincerely Hu, Busy Wong, Destiny Chu. But the winners by a long mile are sisters Chlorophyll Yip and Photosynthesis Yip."

One Chance in a Million: An Equilibrium Analysis of Stem Cell Donation - “A third source for stem cell transplants is umbilical cord blood, collected from newborn infants and stored at extremely low temperatures until it may be needed. This procedure has the advantage of being painless to the donor.”
GAH

Asia Sentinel - Singapore's Two-Faced Judiciary - "Corruption oftentimes takes many forms and disguises: paying obscenely high salaries and bonuses to judges is one, for they inevitably assume the gratifying form of monthly retainers by the government for loyal services rendered or to be rendered... In an attempt to win their case at all costs, they not only suppressed important evidence advantageous to Tang but concealed it from the presiding judge, Justice Chao Hick Tin. Nor did they take any steps to correct the judge’s misconception of the facts at the subsequent judgmental hearing, consequently ensuring that the damages awarded against Tang would be humongous: thus perpetrating a travesty of justice by their studied silence. A classic case of the legal maxim, suppressio veri suggestio falsi—suppression of the truth is suggestion of the false... The very fact that the judge felt obliged to descend into the obvious speaks volumes for the sorry state of a judiciary in bondage. It requires no special lexicon to interpret this well-known Shakespearean dictum: methinks the judge doth protest too much. With the best will in the world, is it really conceivable for any judge in Singapore to decide a case against Harry Lee Kuan Yew and his PAP cohorts?"
Given that this is in the NUS library's normal collection, and not the Confidential Books or even Banned Books collection, I assume it is not sufficiently seditious.

Msia scraps plan to export pesky monkeys - "MALAYSIA has dropped a plan to round up nuisance monkeys from its cities and sell them abroad as exotic meat or for medical research, after discovering that most of the animals are too ill to be exported... A recent study found 80 per cent of urban macaques carried diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, hepatitis and Aids, he said. 'Only 20 per cent were healthy and, of this, only half the number were suitable for export,' he added."
Malaysia Boleh!

Take off and strip off - "Nudism (or "Free Body Culture" as the Germans like to refer to it) has deep roots in Germany. As early as the 1890s, the world-renowned "father of nudism" sociologist Heinrich Pudor was writing about stripping off and getting back to nature. Nudist colonies have existed in Germany for more than a century. Later, behind the Berlin Wall, in East Germany, nudism was an expression of freedom, a very personal protest against the confines of the communist state. Taking all your clothes off became so popular, there were even pop songs written about the subject."

Which of these men did the photographer think was a hero? - "This morning is the fortieth anniversary of one of the iconic images of the Vietnam War. It was taken on 1 February 1968, with the Tet offensive in its early stages. It pictures General Nguyan Ngoc Loan executing a Vietcong prisoner... Here's what Eddie Adams had to say about General Loan: 'The guy was a hero... The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?'"

"Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better." - George Santayana

***

When I showcased Episode 1 of Luther/Lutc/Lut's popular game, Darkness, almost 4 (!) years ago, I noted that the programmer proclaimed that "his is the first game in the world to ever feature a girl in the RGS pinafore isn't it? There... meeting all your fetish needs *bleah*"


RGS Girl Girl in the RGS pinafore (and tie?!) looking at herself in the mirror


Watching a videotape of her watching the videotape


Endgame - creeping through the "Darkness" with a candle

In Episode 2 (my teaser hardly revealed anything), the girl's candle was blown out by a draft, and after she scented antiseptics, she found herself in:


A bloodied operating theatre! And worse, a CHIJ pinafore.


Walking through the corridor of the hospital


Running from the "Darkness"


Jarred by the spookiness of the surroundings

The latest episode (Episode 3) came out a while ago (after 3 1/2 years), with the announcement: "The third episode of the horrifying Darkness point-and-click adventure series is finally here! This time you find yourself in a subway train. Use your mouse and your wits to escape! Be sure to turn up the speakers and turn down the lights for maximum effect and enjoyment."

In it, she comes to in an MRT train, feeling like she's slept for 2 (gah) years. Yet she is still haunted by "Darkness".


Horror of horrors - she is now an SCGS girl!


Besides hot pink socks, she also has an overly-short skirt


Unfortuately she hasn't mastered the art of squatting properly.


Running - again!

The addition of some tasks with a time limit and the cranking up of the spookiness make this the most nerve-wracking instalment of the series (whether it is the most fun, I leave it up to you to decide!) Plus, the multiple endings (? - I didn't bother checking them out) give it some extra replay value!


There is something very wrong with the sprite, though, but I won't reveal it here.

"How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct." - Benjamin Disraeli

***

Watching sex : how men really respond to pornography / David Loftus


Public Policy: Should Society Control the Use Of Pornography?

"I think it’s basically benign,” wrote a 29-year-old technical writer. “I don't think it warps people’s brains any more than commercial advertising, religion, or any other contact with society does. The people who say 'Pornography Made Me Do It' are the same people who would be manipulated by the most basic propaganda in our society.”...

'I don’t see porn as intrinsically harmful, even within a relationship (although I am dubious in the latter case). I don’t think the debate whether porn encourages sexual deviancy is worth arguing about. Some people with dangerous sexual interests use porn, and in some cases such use probably acts like a safety valve, in other cases it probably encourages the problem. However, the underlying problem is that people have not learned to resist their sexual urges, not that they can get their hands on porn. I believe that the demonization of porn does far more to encourage such dangerous behavior than porn itself. And I believe this extreme rejection of porn arises only because of a more general problem people have dealing with their own sexuality and sexual urges.'...

Several men who thought pornography was harmful also implicated the larger culture. “I think what has a much more degrading effect are magazine ads which are much more pervasive and much more dishonest, than actual porn where you are using it purely for a sexual purpose, argued a 31-year-old literature professor...

“I’ve heard women claim that is harmful,” said one [gay]. “But then I have heard some women claim gay porn is harmful to women too—because there are no women in it.”
A 33-year-old said: “I think it is really just a vocal group’s vision of what they see as sexually acceptable—and they’re trying to tell us all what types of sex and sources of arousal are appropriate. I think many women simply don’t understand men’s interest in porn, so it is written off as dirty, unacceptable—something watched by people who have sexual or personality deficiency.”...

'I think [porn is] harmful only to the extent that people allow themselves to be harmed.” Just as alcohol, chocolate, guns, and many other obsessions become harmful only when misused. Men who misread the messages of pornography, who take its conventions seriously, are most likely maladjusted in other ways, and pornography is not to be blamed for the misbehavior of such men. Any thoughtful guy can see how pornography is not like life; if he pays more attention to the lessons of the former, then he’s just stupid.'

In discussing the pornography industry and whether or not it exploits women, quite a few men suggested that performers were not being exploited if they received payment. “The women who work in pornography are paid for their work, just like any other job,” one said; “A woman who trades on her appearance or her sexual talent is not being ‘exploited’ any more than a woman who trades on her brains.”...

One man who said he had carefully studied the arguments about pornography’s harmful effects in the feminist press said, “I have consistently found these arguments to be lacking in analysis, lacking in evidence, and lacking in even basic reality testing. They seem to me to verge on dogma, and to be entirely disconnected from the reality of’ pornography and human sexuality.” For example, “opponents of pornography believe that the producers effectively decide that women wiii model, and then impose that decision by force.” On the contrary, he argued, “the pornography industry is mediated by money, not force. And that means that each model decides, for herself, on the day of the shoot, that she’s willing to model in exchange for the money that she’s being paid.”...

A 22- year-old single Canadian remarked. “I know that many porno actresses are really desperate, runaways, uneducated, who would rather be doing something else,” said another man, “Yet I’m glad that at least they can make some money off this huge industry taking advantage of our silly male weakness.”...

One suggested, performers may be vulnerable to abuse because they get caught in a crossfire between the legal marginality of industry, the firm social disapproval of it, and the market demand...

Several men believed the growth of amateur porn was proof against the claim that women would never perform sexually for a camera if they had sufficient economic alternatives and were not forced. “I know from the amateurs I know who produce their own porn that they get off on being exhibitionists, and weren’t pressured into it,” said a married 43- year-old accountant. The symphonic musician agreed:

'There are thousands of these amateur tapes! How is it possible for all those women—people like those who live next door, video-ing their own sexual behavior for anyone to see—to feel degraded? Many of them must feel turned on by acting out in front of the camera.'...

'Some people find it easier to take on a multi- billion dollar industry than to accept women as sexual beings.'...

If anyone is exploited, it’s men,” claimed a p.r. man, “but whether they are stuffing their wages into G-strings just to get a pretty girl to smile at them, or they are authorizing $4-per-minute charges to their phone in exchange for dirty talk, they are doing it willingly.” The Canadian professor who avoided porn felt the same: 'I think it’s more harmful to men than to many women. We’re the ones who waste our time and money on it. Who is harmed by heroin—the poppy growers or the junkies?'

About a fifth of the men in the survey took the trouble to suggest how the possible harms inherent in pornography might be alleviated. Their recommendations can be summed up as: better quality and improved social attitudes. “once people learn that it’s OK to consume porn, market demand for ‘good’ porn will help quell ‘bad’ porn,” wrote a chemical engineer. A 22-year-old who believed porn was often degrading to women also felt pornography could be employed to “remove sexist ideas from people’s heads, if more sexually explicit material picturing women as equals to men were released and made publicly available.”...

Several men called on the makers of porn to do more: “Making the industry more respectable would give the performers more rights,” said a married professor...

A 21-year-old gay student made an even stronger statement:

'American society as a whole is screwed up about lots of things and one of them is porn. We’re so bombarded with messages about what’s wrong and morally disgusting, and I think it’s a load of crap. We’re too uptight about little things that wouldn’t be problems if we didn’t make them problems. The only worry I have about the availability of porn is that someday the radicals are going to get it banned and it won’t be available.'...

'People who are already unstable or inclined to rape are going to consume porn in unhealthy amounts.

My take on these concerns is that rape comes out of some other sick need,
and has much more to do with violence than sex—so porn has little to do with it. One testimonial I recall hearing was from someone who got off on the thought of drowning someone. He loved seeing scenes of people on TV who were drowning (movies that depict it, etc.). This really got him off. We could eliminate all the porn in the world, and this guy would still have something to get off on.'...

Remarked a 42-year-old professor:

'I feel that the right to read/think/watch what you want is pretty much paramount and should come before the tenuous links between what someone reads and their behavior—or soon Marx will be banned (as would the Bible—some of the stuff people do in the Bible is nasty).'

A 41-year-old man in education administration defended the right to view porn despite his own addictive experiences: “I am a recovering alcoholic—if it were up to me I would ban alcohol and drugs. But that would only benefit me and deprive others for whom pleasure is derived from those substances. I can’t hold the liquor companies and drug deal ers responsible for my disease and the effect of alcohol and drugs on my life. The same would go for pornography.”...

A couple of men simply noted the distinction in the way erotica and pornography are treated by society... “Erotica, I notice, is something publishers call a book when they want to get it into a table bookstore.” Another man complained of a double standard in the U.S. with regard to graphic material: “National Geographic magazine can show naked children, some with small breasts, and get by with it, but let someone else do it and they are in the slammer.”

... A graduate student in mathematics cut to the chase: “The people who try to differentiate between erotica and pornogniphy are usually just censors.”

Quite a few men remarked on the class aspect. “Erotica is for intellectual, cultured, rich people,” a biochemistry graduate student remarked, “Sort of like the difference between being crazy and being eccentric. Depends on how much money you’ve got or which social circles you run in.”...

A 43-year-old married man offered an analogy:

'Erotica is coffee-table book porn. A pretty cover on the same thing. Maria Maples marries Donald Trump, an obvious jerk; a girl on E. Colfax sucks a cock for $15. Maria Maples is to erotica as the girl on Colfax is to pornography. A poor pervert is a pervert, a rich pervert is eccentric, and so on. Bottom line: same content, different marketing and packaging. If it makes your dick hard, it makes your dick hard.'

“Erotica’ is what you call pornography if you want to hang it in a gallery, isn’t it?” a law student asked rhetorically...

The best illustration of the semantic and subjective confusion over sexual imagery was offered by Steve, the 49-year-old British male who had little interest in pornography but saw no harm in it:

'No, I see no distinction, not even an aesthetic one. The only difference is in the speaker’s mind: “pornography” is a “boo word” and “erotica” is a “rah word.” To give a concrete example: During a debate on pornographic images, the proponent of censorship gave as an example of the utterly obscene, indefensible, and unacceptable, “pictures of women having sex with animals.” As it happens, I own a reproduction of such a picture. The original is in the Spiridon Collection in Rome, and is entitled “Leda and the Swan.” The pervert who painted it was Leonardo da Vinci.'...

A professor in France described the issues in Europe:

'Nobody should care about erotica as a problem. Advertising is erotica (at least in France). As far as pornography is concerned, there are laws; some are OK, some are hypocritical. In France you may not represent a membei of the church in porn movies. And this is a true problem, as for instance watching nuns making love is the Italians’ kick. It is lawful [apparently he meant available] in Italy, where pornography is curiously prohibited (but sold publicly), but unlawful in France, where pornography is permitted. Now on the other hand, European laws should nowadays be the same all over Europe. So what is the next step? French freedom of lovemaking, but with no priests involved, or Italian abstinence, with nuns banging themselves all over the place? Ask a lawyer!'...

Several men suggested that age restrictions on pornography could be eased if there were better and more widespread sex education. “I think that sexuality should be encouraged at an early age, but it should not come without some sort of contextualization, some sort of education as to its function and role(s),” remarked a married bisexual male. “Without context, many pornographic images are degrading, violent, at least confusing. I think that age has something to do with wisdom, but I also think that education should be encouraged at an earlier age—not just the birds and bees, but how sexual relations affect people, what such relations mean, etc.”...

A 56-year-old married professor said, “I have some concerns about kiddie porn, bestiality, and torture, but it is much better to view these things than to do them. If porn can act as a substitute for the real thing, then it should be allowed.”...

“Even age requirements seem silly to me. What exactly do we gain by prohibiting little Johnny from reading 'Busty Babes in Bondage'? A lot of prudery and superstition has given classier names and just sticks around in disguise.” A 21-year-old computer consultant, heterosexual but “bi-curious,” felt the tension and secrecy sparked an interest that just wouldn’t be there if were out in the open: “Even with children, do you think if pornographic magazines were not hidden off in the back shelves, a child would ever attempt to ‘get away’ with looking at them? How many children, if shown Debbie Does Dallas as well as The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, would choose to watch Debbie a second time?”"

"The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness." - Eric Hoffer

***

Quotes:

[California Girl:] I don't have an accent

[On an Arts module] The best students in all of my modules are from the Science and Engineering [faculties], which doesn't say much about the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Tell me what you think Philosophy is. [Student: A bunch of opinions] One 'opinion' is that philosophy is a bunch of 'opinions'... I'm just trying to have some fun here.

In this particular module - I know we're trying to save the environment, put the aircon on high - this is too warm, don't you think? (a high temperature)

[On admin] I belong to 4 or 5 different c