Meme - "Yesterday I had a breakdown and decided to go to Paris so now. Im at Disneyland"
"when i have a breakdown i open the fridge"
Understanding the Increase in Moral Acceptability of Polygamy - "the proportion of Americans who find the death penalty morally acceptable, now 54%, is the lowest in our history of asking that question. Another important trend has been the increase in the moral acceptability of gay and lesbian relations, now 66%, up from as low as 38% (in 2002). And it's important to note that "married men and women having an affair" has essentially held its positioning as a lasting taboo in American society; the 9% who today say having an affair is morally acceptable is just a few points higher than when we first asked about it almost 20 years ago. But what fascinates me as much as anything else is the trend on polygamy. When Gallup first included polygamy on the list in 2003, 7% of Americans said it was morally acceptable, and that fell to 5% in 2006. But over the past decade, this percentage has gradually increased -- moving into double digits in 2011, reaching 16% in 2015, and this year, at 20%, the highest in our history. In short, there has been a fourfold increase in the American public's acceptance of polygamy in about a decade and a half... Although the acceptability of polygamy has risen significantly, its relative position near the bottom of the list of moral behaviors hasn't changed a great deal. Polygamy is now fourth from the bottom on the list of 21 behaviors, above married men and women having an affair, cloning humans, and suicide... it is part of a general trend of increased liberalism on moral issues... Most other issues have become at least somewhat more acceptable over time, with the exceptions of medical testing of animals, the death penalty and wearing animal fur -- the only issues seen as less acceptable now than they were a decade and a half ago. Another quite interesting explanation for Americans' increased acceptance of polygamy is a more frequent portrayal of polygamous households in the mass media"
The "myth" of the slippery slope strikes again. I remember when only paranoid Christian conservatives were "deluded" enough to believe that after gay marriage, polygamy was in the pipeline
The End of Manual Transmission - The Atlantic - "The manual transmission, however marginal it has become during the smartphone age, remains a vestige of direct, mechanical control"
The scapegoating of Alex Jones - "we need to talk about the cultural elite’s projections on to the trial. Their treatment of this defamation suit as a reckoning not just with one man’s lies, but with the pox of ‘fake news’ more broadly. It is these opportunistic extrapolations that could set a dangerous precedent – for free critical thought, not just unhinged conspiracism. What has become clear is that the elites view Jones as the principal threat to reason in America. He has ‘poisoned US politics’, says the Washington Post. This echoes CNN’s headline claim that ‘Alex Jones is a threat to democracy’. A writer for the Guardian says the truth has finally caught up with Jones, and with all the ‘scammers, bullshitters, fanatics and demagogues’ who are doing grave harm to ‘truth’... the court case in Texas was about more than Infowars and Sandy Hook – it was a showdown between us mainstream liberals who defend democracy and those foul web people who ‘poison’ it. This is unconvincing. First, it is arguable that the so-called liberal ‘tribe’ has spread misinformation that has proven to be far more destructive than Jones’ misinformation. Whether it’s their WMD myths – how many people died over those lies? – or their promotion of the Russia conspiracy theory in relation to Donald Trump’s presidential victory, the Jones-hating elites do disinformation too, and, in my view, it has hurt life, limb and democracy more than the output of Infowars has... Secondly, treating Jones as a singular pox on reason overlooks the fact that conspiratorial thinking is now completely mainstream. It has been for decades... Consider some of the unhinged claims he’s best known for. A 2018 profile of Jones in the New York Times summed up his worldview as follows – ‘that the government and other big institutions are out to get [people], [and] that some form of apocalypse is frighteningly close’. Doesn’t the liberal elite believe something very similar? Just last month the NYT itself published a piece titled ‘Another Step Toward Climate Apocalypse’. One of the most viral clips of Jones shows him describing how he will eat his neighbours in the event of a post-Covid apocalypse. It is very much like the ramblings of one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion, who says climate apocalypse will lead to ‘a gang of boys [breaking] into your house… They will see your mother, your sister, your girlfriend, and they will gang rape her on the kitchen table. They will force you to watch… [Then] they’ll take a cigarette and burn out your eyes with it.’ And yet XR’s apocalypse porn is lapped up by the elites, while Jones’ apocalypse fears are denounced. Then there’s paedophiles... Who can forget the ‘Satanic ritual abuse’ panic of the 1980s, which was promoted by cultural luminaries like Oprah Winfrey and by radical feminists in the UK? That was also a fact-lite theory about powerful networks of Satanists corrupting society. Jones would have been about 12 when it was at its height. Members of Britain’s ‘tribe’ of reasoned liberals also promote paedo conspiracy theories. LBC’s James O’Brien helped to platform deranged lies about a powerful network of paedophiles in Westminster. Did that ‘poison’ democracy, too?... From the Oxbridge elites who claim Putin puppeteered Brexit to those Ivy League Democrats who think Moscow put Trump in the White House, conspiracism is rife even in the establishment. Jones is rightly slammed for his anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. There are some ‘really evil, wicked Jews… out there’, he says. Even this bile is no longer uncommon – witness the ravings of the Corbynista left on the ‘Zionist lobby’ that took down their man. It is 60 years since Richard Hofstadter wrote his seminal essay, ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, which explored conspiratorial thinking through the ages, from the anti-Catholic movement of the 1830s to anti-Communism in the 1950s. Since then, conspiracism has moved from the fringes into the heart of public life. No longer just ‘marginal beliefs’, conspiracy theories have become the means through which significant numbers of Americans try to understand ‘how the world works’, argues Robert Goldberg. This isn’t down to Jones’ supposed allure. Rather, it reflects a crisis of authority in modern society, where there has been a hollowing out of trust, reason and the very idea of truth, leading people to search for meaning elsewhere. Often in the shadows. One of the key contributors to the fall of epistemic authority has been postmodernism... the more that history, knowledge and the idea of universal truth have been dismantled, dismissed as white-supremacist impositions on society, the more people feel compelled to doubt everything they are told and to invent their own narratives about why things happen. Alex Jones is not some all-powerful conspiracist leading the charge against truth and reason – he is an opportunist making money in the rubble of truth and reason left behind by Anglo-American society’s turn against Enlightenment values. He is postmodernism’s crybaby, the monetiser of the West’s abandonment of truth. In a dark irony, Jones-bashing has become its own conspiracy theory, with this one loudmouth being talked about as the poison in the political well, the enemy within that we must take extreme measures to counter. This is why the ‘relish’ of the elites in the face of Jones’ troubles is a problem: because it is about seeking a censorious quick fix for the problem of paranoid thinking rather than asking what birthed this paranoia and why it is so widespread. Shutting people down, even people like Alex Jones, is always a poor substitute for thinking critically about what the hell is going on."
Meme - "Did they stop eating dates and meat?"
Hameed Rampure @hameedrampure: "Thos days Arabian's main food was dates and meat which is rich & healthy. Most people would reach adultery early. Girls of age 9 were similar to today's ladies of 25 age. Hence marrying girls 6 years of age was very common, accepted and non objectionable."
Presumably on Aisha and Muhammed
The Twisted Logic of "Buy Local" - "There are a number of problems with buy‐localism that I won’t discuss in detail here, such as the following:
That not all goods can be produced locally at low‐enough cost for a given quality to be affordable for very many: coffee in North America or Europe is a good example.
That if you make an exception for coffee, who makes these decisions and on the basis of what criteria?
That few businesses can support themselves with only local demand using only locally produced tools and other materials they need to produce and sell locally.
That since the people in another locality use the sales revenue they earn when we buy from them to then buy things from us, then buying exclusively local, if that were even possible, would mean fewer sales to them and so they will not be able to buy as much from us. In other words, buying local also reduces our exports.
That any definition of “local” is arbitrary. In New York City, for example, does local mean the neighborhood of Red Hook (pop. 37,000) or all of Brooklyn (pop. 2.5 million) or the City of New York (pop. 8.4 million), or the entire Metro area (20.3 million)? Where do you make the cut‐off without being completely arbitrary?
That if the focus is on local vendors (who may get their wares from outside the community) and not on promoting local production of goods (although advocates don’t make this distinction), then it’s hard to see how this differs from merely saying “Buy where it’s most convenient for you.” Clearly, that hardly gets to the virtue that Buy Local is apparently aiming for...
1) Does “buy local” mean “sell local,” that local sellers should only sell to local buyers?...
2) One implication of this is that if we travel outside our own community, we’d better be prepared to buy locally and take with us everything we expect to consume on the road, including food and housing, if we don’t want to violate “buy local.”...
3) What about the bucolic images shown in buy local campaigns of city folks stopping on the roadside stocking up at a local farmers’ market? Forget it! Or ruralites coming into our cities for an evening’s entertainment? Go entertain yourself in your own towns (presumably by watching your locally produced plays, music, and television programs)! And if you’re communing from, say, Manhattan to work in Brooklyn? No way you’re taking jobs away from us! Go back where you came from!"
Former NEJM editors on the corruption of American medicine (NY Times) - "Marcia Angell MD is a well-known, respected physician, long-time editor of NEJM... 'It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.'...
It echoed Richard Smith, 25 year editor of another top-tier journal (the British Medical Journal), in the first issue of our Journal of Participatory Medicine: 'most of what appears in peer-reviewed journals is scientifically weak.'"
Trust the science!
Weird, Parents, Dad jokes and Intimacy: Roll with it - FML - "Today, another of my dad's blind dates went bad, so I took him out for a beer. I went to the bathroom to freshen up, and when I came back, two guys were congratulating my dad on scoring such a hot piece of ass, and said the sex must be awesome. My dad played along with it. FML"
Anthony Oliveira on Twitter - "when i bought my giant crystal ball the lady looked me in the eye and said "whatever you do, never EVER leave it uncovered when youre not home" and i said "oh wow because of spirits?" and she said "what? no bc if the sun hits it weird it'll burn down your house" important lesson"
Meme - "MR. CHASE: Hi reader! You look great today!
THE COURT: What?
MR. CHASE: I'm breaking the Fourth Wall and speaking to whoever reads this Court Transcript.
THE COURT: Sir, you are being charged for possession of child porn"
Meme - "i'm your femboy maid. I am completely at your mercy, master. I'll do whatever you want."
"Good. clean up my house."
Is the U.S. Really Less Corrupt Than China — and How About Russia? (Update) - Freakonomics - "ANG: Both China and Russia are highly corrupt countries, with China being slightly less corrupt... In particular, Russia has higher levels of grand theft than China. Examples include embezzlement — stealing large amounts of money out of public treasuries into private accounts. Russia also has higher levels of speed money than China, paying small bribes to overcome red tape and harassment. One of my vignettes is: “police officers release drivers who are stopped for speeding once a bribe is paid on the spot.” For China, the score is 2.7. For Russia, it’s 4.5...
And as bad as income inequality can be in China — as well as the U.S., of course — it doesn’t compare to Russia.
ANG: So there are some reports that the 100 richest people in Russia account for 35 percent of all wealth. Whereas in China, that equivalent number is about eight percent...
China is in a very difficult, I would say, impossible position because ideologically, driven by anti-Americanism and the perception of American threats, China under Xi wants to ally with Russia, even though it does not explicitly say so. But on the other hand, the Chinese leadership knows that the Chinese economy is so deeply integrated with the global capitalist economy that it cannot afford to isolate itself. So ideologically, China and Russia may appear to be on the same page, but their fundamental interests are actually different."
Delta passengers offered $10,000 to take a later flight - "Delta Air Lines passengers boarding a flight on Monday morning were amazed to be offered $10,000 (£8,210) to give up their seats. Boarding had already begun for the flight - from Grand Rapids, Michigan to Minneapolis, Minnesota -when Delta staff announced that the flight was overbooked... In 2017, a British family of three was awarded £8,866 for giving up their seats on an overbooked Delta flight from New York to Florida."
Ristorante: Italy's most popular pizza manufactured in Lancashire by Dr. Oetker - " Dr Oetker's thin-crust Ristorante pizzas, made on an industrial estate just off the M6 in Leyland, is now the best-selling ready-made brand in Italy, it has emerged. And to add insult to the wounded pride of the famously food-loving country, Dr Oetker is a German-owned company, while its next nearest rival in Italy is Buitoni Bella Napoli pizza, owned by the Swiss conglomerate Nestle... Ristorante is the UK’s leading thin and crispy frozen pizza brand with a £40m turnover and out-sells any other shop-bought pizza in Italy and in 33 other countries."
People were mocking Domino's for failing in Italy. Ironic
Meme - "Can't afford private investigator? Just use door dash!!"
"Hi I -just placed the deck taco order. I don't want this actually delivered. There's a $10 tip built in and keep the queso. My husband is supposed to be home alone while I'm visiting family. I just need to know what cars are in the driveway. Yes I know I sound crazy. For the love of god please don't actually deliver this."
"So just to clarify, you don't want me to deliver the food, you just want me to drive by the house at the address you gave and let you know what cars are in the driveway?"
"Yes! Keep the food. And I added a $10 tip when I placed the order"
"Alright then, I'm in line at the del taco rn but I'll let you know once I go by"
"Thank you!"
Meme - "I need to walk into town and find a bathroom. I'm dying for a shit"
"take my keys and go in the van"
*shits in van*
Meme - "Faking a major event would require thousands of people. Try managing a project. Getting twelve people to do what they are supposed to, on time, without blabbing early, is nearly impossible."
Merlin Mann @hotdogsladies: "My gut is that most conspiracy theorists have never been project managers. Their optimism is adorable."
Meme - "I'm done with video games, drinking, porn, and finally ready to settle with a nice lady and start a family." *receding hairline*
Meme - "TRUTH ABOUT THE BIRDS AND THE BEES"
David Juurlink on Twitter - "Pharmacists who recommend homeopathy should be willing to accept as payment envelopes that once contained money"
50% of Doctors Prescribe Placebos - "More than half of doctors offer fake prescriptions to make patients feel better -- and that's OK, most doctors say. The findings come from a survey of 679 internists and rheumatologists. Doctors in these specialties often see patients with chronic illnesses or chronic pains that are difficult, if not impossible, to cure. Sometimes fake medicine -- placebos -- make such patients feel better."
University under fire after student publishes PhD about masturbating to comics of 'young boys' - "The University of Manchester has come under fire after a student published a "PhD in masturbation" which documented his experiences of sexually pleasuring himself while looking at comics featuring drawings of "young boys". Karl Andersson was researching the “shota” genre of Japanese anime which centres around prepubescent or pubescent male characters depicted in a “suggestive or erotic” manner. The Sweden student's PhD, which was first published by the University of Manchester in April, involved three months of masturbating to the comic books and making notes on each session for "research". He said he used dōjinshi and commercial volumes that he had bought or been given during fieldwork in Japan. In the 4,000 word essay, which Mr Andersson says was funded by the university’s School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, he gives graphic accounts of his sexual habits... “It was necessary to be diligent enough to abstain from the ‘milk and muesli’ of porn during this experiment, in order to see what happened to my body on a long diet of ‘fish and miso soup’. “I happened to live alone during this experiment, and I had newly become single after a long relationship - these factors probably contributed to my willingness and eagerness to explore this method.” His paper was published in the Journal of Qualitative Research under the title: "I am not alone – we are all alone: Using masturbation as an ethnographic method in research on shota subculture in Japan"... Conservative MP Neil O’Brien asked: “Why should hard-working taxpayers in my constituency have to pay for an academic to write about his experiences masturbating to Japanese porn? “The non-STEM side of higher education is just much too big, producing too much that is not socially useful.”"
The perils of autoethnography
Conservatives just hate learning and research!
Did a turkish man invent a steam engine 200 years before the industrial revolution and only made it to spin doner kebab? - "Skewers
Taqiyaddin (d. 1585) also describes the two types of mechanised skewers most common in his time, one of which is turned by steam and the other by hot air. The description of the second device resembles a turnspit-construction sketched by Leonardo da Vinci which was also intended to be powered by hot air. The third one was built according to the principle of transferring a relatively low power through gearwheels which are put in motion through a hand crank"
Validity of Self-Report Data (or “But everyone lied on the survey...”) - "Questioning the validity of survey data is often one of the first reactions when survey results are shared. It is important first to recognize this response for what it may be: an immediate reaction to information challenging someone’s existing beliefs... Self-report data are a critical component of all social science. Consequently, the validity of self-report data has been studied extensively... while self-report data is often questioned by the public when results are shared, the validity of self-report survey data is backed by extensive scientific research and statistical analysis"
People always get very upset when self-reported data doesn't support their prejudices, but they're just revealing their ignorance of the literature
Meme - Sean Ono Lennon @seanonolennon: "When was young the most interesting people were left wing intellectuals. Believe it or not."
Eidur A. Moller @edsonedge: "... they are church ladies"
Sean Ono Lennon @seanonolennon: "Exactly. We're offended by science and comedy. It's embarrassing."
Meme - "hats: on
dicks: out
sunlight: photosynthesized"
Meme - "At this point, every round mammal is a hamster to me."
"coconut"
"l think we both have different definitions of what mammal is but I can't say I dísagree with you."
"has hair. give milk"
Meme - "When a good man becomes tired of being mistreated, thats when society should fear. Because he will make a post with a picture of Joker and go back to his normal routine."
Meme - "Waikato District Council *no cars*
IF IT ISNT TOO MUCH TO ASK COULD YOU PLEASE NOT DRIVE ON THE BEACH. ITS JUST THAT WE HAVE YOUR SAFETY FOREMOST IN OUR MINDS BECAUSE IF YOU DO DRIVE ON THE BEACH YOU WEL PROBABLY GET STUCK THEN WE HAVE TO GET A TOW TRUCK & HE MAY GET STUCK THEN WE NEED A BIG HOLE TO PUSH YOU IN FOR BEING SUCH A WANKER TO BEGIN WITH. AND THEN THERES THE DOWNTIME IT COSTS COS WE'LL ALL STAND ROUND THE HOLE LAUGHING SO MUCH WE'LL END UP PISSING ON YOU & THEN SOME POOR PRICK TRYING TO BACK HIS TRAILER IN WILL LOOSE HIS F--ING BOAT IN THE HOLE AS WELL ALL BECAUSE YOURE A WANKER. BUT OTHER THAN THAT THE BEACH IS HERE FOR YOUR ENJOYMENT SO PLEASE DO WHAT YOU WANT"
UN Deletes Article Titled ‘The Benefits of World Hunger.’ Was It Real or Satire? - "UN Chronicle, the official magazine of the United Nations, recently deleted a 2008 article titled “The Benefits of World Hunger.” The article, which now leads to an “error page,” was written by George Kent, a now retired University of Hawaii political science professor. In the article, Kent argued that hunger is “fundamental to the working of the world’s economy.” “Much of the hunger literature talks about how it is important to assure that people are well fed so that they can be more productive,” Kent wrote. “That is nonsense. No one works harder than hungry people. Yes, people who are well nourished have greater capacity for productive physical activity, but well-nourished people are far less willing to do that work.” UN Chronicle deleted the article after it began to cause a stir on social media. The magazine said Kent’s article should not be taken literally, contending that it was a work of parody... Kent himself denies the article was intended as a form of satire... The “market-led solutions” that Kent has disparaged have worked wonders for hunger alleviation. The same cannot be said for initiatives hatched by the central planners at the United Nations, the organization that published Kent’s controversial article on hunger."
Woman says sending meme response to job rejection email got her an interview - "A woman revealed how she landed a job interview by sending a meme to the hiring manager, who had initially rejected her from the position. In a clip posted to TikTok, @swedishswan detailed how she’s been applying to various jobs lately and had just received a rejection letter. After sharing how much she had wanted the job, she said that she “took a lesson from Gen Z” and decided to follow-up with the employer by sending a popular meme. The meme she chose featured a painting of Pope Leo X by Fernando Botero from 1964, with the phrase “y tho” written in white letters."
Meme - "In art this is known as the Golden Ratio of Fibonacci... perfect proportions of harmony and beauty. You may not like it, but this is what the perfect male body looks like. Via Brian Kilburn *fat man*"
Meme - Veronica Nixon "One day. I honestly have the sickest violent fantasies about dismantling that boy like a cheap toaster. Screws and wires everywhere covered in blood and viscera. A mangled torso, tourniquet on all exposed spots where limbs used to be. I start smoking again only to put out all 20 cigarettes in his eyes and stuff the butts in his orifices. Tired I drag what's left of him (still alive) to a fire-ant hill. I leave now, as he is a wretched beast and should spend his last moment alone. Then I realize, I should use the bathroom before I go. A lonely death can wait a minute or 2. *Kyle Rittenhouse*"
What can men do against such reckless hate?
In liberal eyes, you're presumed guilty even if you've been proven innocent
Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes - "Jared Mauch, the Michigan man who built a fiber-to-the-home Internet provider because he couldn't get good broadband service from AT&T or Comcast, is expanding with the help of $2.6 million in government money. When we wrote about Mauch in January 2021, he was providing service to about 30 rural homes including his own with his ISP, Washtenaw Fiber Properties LLC. Mauch now has about 70 customers and will extend his network to nearly 600 more properties with money from the American Rescue Plan's Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds... Under the contract terms, Mauch will provide 100Mbps symmetrical Internet with unlimited data for $55 a month and 1Gbps with unlimited data for $79 a month. Mauch said his installation fees are typically $199. Unlike many larger ISPs, Mauch provides simple bills that contain a single line item for Internet service and no extra fees... Operating an ISP isn't Mauch's primary job, as he is still a network architect at Akamai. He started planning to build his own network about five years ago after being unable to get modern service from any of the major ISPs. As we wrote last year, AT&T only offers DSL with download speeds up to 1.5Mbps at his home. He said Comcast once told him it would charge $50,000 to extend its cable network to his house—and that he would have gone with Comcast if they only wanted $10,000. Comcast demands those up-front fees for line extensions when customers are outside its network area, even if the rest of the neighborhood already has Comcast service."
Why Everyone Fell for the Viral Space Chorizo - The Atlantic - "a French physicist posted a picture online that he described as simply remarkable. The image, Étienne Klein said, was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, the world's newest and most powerful space observatory. It showed Proxima Centauri, a star about 4.2 light-years from us, our sun’s closest neighbor, Klein explained in his tweet. “This level of detail,” he said, the awe evident. “A new world is revealed day after day.”... The reality is that a lot of things in space actually resemble cured meats from afar."
Meme - "This man was found by the Police in a dangerous area, heavy with drug trafficking. Upon personal search the police found in him huge amounts of cash. He said the money was "to buy bread". The police, aiming to protect the citizen from criminals, escorted him to a bakery. The look of grattitude on his face is priceless."
Meme - "Authentic cat excrement candy 猫屎糖"
Meme - "I love that Harry and Hermione didn't end up together. I think it's amazing that we see this completely platonic love, and how it shows children and adults alike that you can love your best friend unconditionally no matter their gender." - Amanda Westbrook"
Meme - "*Hawaiian pizza* Che schifo, ma come si fa a mettere la frutta su un piatto salato? Con il prosciutto pure, che vergogna...
*Parma ham and melon* SPETTACOLO!!!"