Wednesday, December 08, 2021

Links - 8th December 2021 (2)

Meme - "Action heroes In the 80’s *Muscular*
Action heroes in 2019 : *scrawny, MCU actors*"

GOTTI FAN PAGE! on Twitter - "Niggas that care about you not fun to date unless you tryna get married"

Gung-Ho Geeks - Posts | Facebook - *Human female centaur but with a female lower body*
"I have the weirdest boner rn..."

redheadhatchet: bananonbinary: one of the... - worth a wound - "one of the hardest things to learn as a depressed former Gifted Kid™ is that half-assed is better than nothing. take the 50%, 40%, even 20% job. scrubbing your face is better than not taking a shower at all. picking up your clothes is better than never cleaning. nibbling on some bread is better than starving.  DO THINGS HALFWAY. NOW YOU’RE 100% BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE BEFORE."
"One of my college professors used to say “anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.”  I didn’t understand that for years because I didn’t do anything poorly, I couldn’t do anything poorly, I had to Do Everything Perfectly.  But brushing your teeth for 30 seconds is better than not brushing them at all when that 2 minutes seems exhausting.  Doing ten minutes of yoga is better than 10 minutes of sitting when 30 minutes of cardio sounds impossible.  Changing my clothes is good when a whole shower is impossible.  Standing on the porch for a few minutes is worth it after being in the house for three straight days because I don’t have the energy to go anywhere.  Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly… because doing it poorly is better than not doing it."

Meme - "hate people like this. if i ain’t answering leave me the fuck alone"
"Or you could grow the fuck up and just say you don't wanna go"

Is eye of newt a real thing? - "Both the English major and the frustrated high school student are likely familiar with this passage during the Witches scene from Shakespeare's "Macbeth": "Fillet of a fenny snake, In the cauldron boil and bake; Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting, Lizard's leg and owlet's wing, For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble."...
All of the ingredients in the witches brew are simply ancient terms for herbs, flowers and plants. Some say witches gave these flora gross and disturbing names to deter other people from practicing witchcraft. Here's the translated plant list of what's really in Shakespeare's cauldron...
Eye of newt - mustard seed
Toe of frog - buttercup
Wool of bat - holly leaves
Tongue of dog - houndstongue
Adders fork - adders tongue
Blind-worm - okay, a blindworm is a real thing; a tiny snake thought to be venomous"

XIRAN *Preorder Iron Widow! on Twitter - "I love how you can tell if a C-drama is supposed to be serious historical fiction or idol romance by how hot the emperor is"

Meme - ">on her deathbed
>instead of thinking about her children and husband of 70 years she thinks of some homeless dude who fucked her in a boat trip for 2 days
>millions of women consider this a great love story
Why are women like this?
Titanic is just an old woman telling a story about some good dick she got on a cruise"

Meme - "“Please trust me, I grew up in a Communist nation and escaped it as an adult, it was Hell, everyone suffered, their promises were empty, you don’t want it here”
Millenial Westerners: “Okay boomer""

Not Will Ferrell on Twitter - "Rearrange these words: 1) PNEIS 2) HTIELR 3) NGGERI 4) BUTTSXE... Did you get: Spine, lither, ginger and subtext? Tsk tsk."

How Extremists Like The Proud Boys Weaponize Irony And Memes To Spread Hate : NPR
When authoritarians crack down on humour, they just look stupid. Which is why humour is an effective tool to resist repressive regimes

Facebook - "Leftists - “We should strive for equity, not equality.”
The electoral college - “Ok”"
*CA, MI vs WY*

Meme - "As a Palestinian, I admire both Hitler and Stalin in a nuanced way because I'm an adult who doesn't treat WWII like a religion. These men both came from humble origins, they were both able to become the proud ruler of their people, and rose up from the ashes of WWI"

‘It Just Isn’t Working’: PISA Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Efforts - The New York Times - "The performance of American teenagers in reading and math has been stagnant since 2000, according to the latest results of a rigorous international exam, despite a decades-long effort to raise standards and help students compete with peers across the globe.  And the achievement gap in reading between high and low performers is widening. Although the top quarter of American students have improved their performance on the exam since 2012, the bottom 10th percentile lost ground, according to an analysis by the National Center for Education Statistics, a federal agency... Mr. Schleicher, of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said it was a common misconception that socioeconomic achievement gaps in the United States were much larger than those in the rest of the world... Mr. Schleicher said that differences in school quality affected the performance of American students less than it affected the performance of students in many other nations — meaning that in the United States, there is more achievement diversity within schools than across schools.
Damn maths as a tool of white supremacy! Damn schools for gifted kids! Time to double down on tearing everyone down for the sake of "equity". Time to bitch more about how funding means poor schools are disadvantages

Beef Taquitos on Twitter - *Corporate foot stepping on snake*
"At least its not the goberment"

islamweb.net/emerath/index.php?page=articles&id=29120 - "Prophet Muhammad (PBÜH) said, "The Last Hour will not come until some groups of my nation worship idols" and Abu Hurayrah (RA) reported that he said "The Last Hour will not come until women from the Daws tribe wiggle their buttocks (as they circumambulate) around the temple of the idol al-Khalasha.""
Is this twerking?

Facebook - "Always amusing to see leftists Who are essentially doctrinaire in most ways, but then deviate from the norm in one or two areas and feel the full force of the mob upon them for their heresy.  Suddenly they start talking about the importance of free speech, free debate, and reason.  But then when others still deviate from the parts of their theology they still hold to as doctrine, the very things they newly hold onto to protect their own form of heresy are once again thrown out the window, mocked, and ridiculed.  Whether you think Tara Reeade’s claims should be considered with the appropriate amount of skepticism, or you can see examples about how sexual biology might indeed impact the lived experiences of people, but otherwise hold onto the rest of the theology and mock those who would use the same tools to criticize it, hopefully we can understand why “cafeteria liberalism“ is not an option.  "
Facebook - ""Anyone who says that the GOP is the party of rich white people clearly hasn’t heard of the Democratic Socialists of America"  - Yazeed A. Bunyan -"

Why Hamilton Is the Most Right-Wing Musical on Broadway – Left Voice
That was fast

Facebook - ""Anti-imperialism is mostly just a euphemism for Anti-Americanism. - Jonah Gold -"
So much for the myth that liberals hate their countries

Facebook - "A cheery exchange with someone who I knew in the Harvard physics department who went on to become an academic historian.
Him - "Foucault never said that.
Me - "Really?  Here's a full, verbatim, unchanged quote from Foucault."
Him - "That's out of context."
Me - "How so?"
Him - "You're a white supremacist."
Just like a religious apologist.
But I repeat myself."

Facebook - "There's a popular misconception that swords were historically too heavy for women or small men to lift. Thus this comparison chart was created based on the actual weight of historical swords in the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds, UK. If you're strong enough to pick up a baby, you're strong enough to lift and to wield the heaviest sword.

Facebook - "Interested to learn about #Islam? This poster tells you everything you need to know. The men are dynamic human beings with faces…the gender segregated women are inhuman, faceless things."

Adam Conover on Twitter - "My former employer CollegeHumor did this. In order to beat YouTube, Facebook faked incredible viewership numbers, so CH pivoted to FB. So did Funny or Die, many others. The result: A once-thriving online comedy industry was decimated. A $40m fine is laughable; shut Facebook down.
A little more context: when I joined CH, fans watched videos on OUR SITE. That meant that we sold the ads & controlled the metrics. We had a killer ad sales team, and made custom videos for major brands. YouTube was mosty just to drive traffic to the site. It was a real business!
We posted links to FB, of course, but the links led to our site! I specifically remember the fateful day someone said “You have to see the numbers native videos get on Facebook. They’re INSANE.” Too good to pass up! So we started posting videos natively to Facebook instead.
The problem: no way to monetize. In fact, instead of viewers coming to OUR site & seeing ads, Facebook’s model is to CHARGE YOU for access to your fans. Site traffic plummeted. So did ad rates, and thus video budgets. Our FB views were awesome!! But we now know those were a lie.
The result: the beautiful constellation of independent comedy sites that represented a new emerging middle class of content creation shrunk and in many places collapsed. All because of Facebook’s falsified viewer data (oh, and all the other shady shit they did)"

Rita Panahi: For intolerance, remember to take a Left turn | Herald Sun - "The notion that the ugly hostility of our polarised political climate, one that sees people defriended, deplatformed and disavowed for their beliefs, is a “both sides” problem is a falsehood. Pretending that both the Left and the Right are equally culpable is not a nuanced view, it is demonstrably false.  When author and sex therapist Bettina Arndt gave a speech at La Trobe University last year, “howling mobs” attempted to drown her out. At Sydney University the riot police had to be called. Yet vice-chancellor Michael Spence attempted a pathetic “both sides” defence to explain the rising tide of “self-censorship”... When is the last time a Leftist speaker was shouted down or their audience needed police protection to enter a venue? It’s simply not an issue. The Left doesn’t require riot squads to control conservative protesters and are not presented with bills from police for being victims of violent activists. Mainstream conservatives are subjected to activists who feel entitled to bully and intimidate not only them but their audience.  Andrew Bolt is Australia’s most-read columnist but his book launch in Melbourne had to be cancelled due to the threat posed by Leftist protesters.  When was the last time someone from the Left had to cancel their event because of credible fears of violence from conservatives?... On radio we have talkback callers who say politics has damaged family relationships, particularly with the young who think if you don’t share their catastrophic view of climate change, border protection or Australia Day, you must be an awful person.  We’ve seen the same phenomenon in the UK with the Brexit and Remain camps and in the US with not only Republicans and Democrats but also pro and anti-Trump voters... DeGeneres leans heavily Left and has been active in promoting Democrats but even that did not save her from the feral lynch mob. It’s instructive that Bush faced no similar hate for being friendly with an ideological opponent. There were no conservative columns decrying Bush’s betrayal for “normalising” DeGeneres and her politics... Actors Mark Ruffalo and Susan Sarandon and comedian David Cross were among those who continued their criticism, along with writers and academics, including Preston Mitchum, who wrote of DeGeneres: “One day y’all will believe me when I say the greatest threat to the United States are white women who believe they’re ‘good’.”"

Meme - "Women get mostly infertile at 40, but luve ti be 80. Without a family, what are you going to do with those 40 long long years?"
Shantelle :"Travel and shop and adopt pets and be happy in my childless life"
Shantelle: "I tweet about having depression, loving the Seahawks, and hating Trump."

Meme - "WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR CHRISTMAS PEPPA?"
"I WANT TO HELP POOR HUNGRY FAMILIES IN THE PHILIPPINES MUM!"
*CHRISTMAS DAY*
"MERRY CHRISTMAS! *roast pig*"

Siraj Hashmi on Twitter - "Someone in New Hampshire detonated 80 POUNDS of explosives as part of a gender-reveal party. It has left cracks in the foundations of nearby homes."
Pakistani-American: "my culture is not your GODDAMN gender reveal party"

Dreadful Exmile on Twitter - "That whole penguin "long neck" thing just got me thinkin', you know? *Penguin skeleton and reconstruction vs Brontosaurus skeleton and reconstruction*"

These weird, unsettling photos show that AI is getting smarter | MIT Technology Review - "The researchers have developed a new text-and-image model, otherwise known as a visual-language model, that can generate images given a caption."

How I explained the 8 schools of magic to my players : DnD - "Illusion: You make someone look like a frog.
Transmutation: You turn someone into a frog.
Enchantment: You make someone think they're a frog.
Conjuration: You make a frog appear.
Abjuration: You protect the frog.
Evocation: You kill the frog.
Necromancy: You revive the dead frog.
Divination: You know that it was actually a toad and not a frog the whole time."

McHimbo™️ on Twitter - "Hey, remember when the Panama Papers were released and they showed how basically every wealthy person on the planet was avoiding taxes by offshoring their money and nothing was done about it except the reporter who broke the story was murdered with a car bomb?"

Unseen Japan on Twitter - ""My son, who loves YouTube, seems to think that 'please subscribe to my channel' is a parting phrase. When he leaves kindergarten or his grandma he says 'Please subscribe to my channel', which puts off everyone around him.""

Michael Malice on Twitter - "Extremists only defend free speech when it's in their personal interest to do so. But they will seize any opportunity to legislate against anything that offends them.  This may come off hypocritical, but I also believe extremists should be forced to live by their own rules."
"“When I am weaker than you, I ask you for Freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your Freedom because that is according to my principles.” ― Frank Herbert"

Despite being a small country with limited resources, why are Singaporeans so nice and helpful? They are helping the migrant workers so much in this Covid 19 situation whereas the apparently richer Arab countries are deporting them in such crisis? - Quora
Singaporean Activists are going to be upset

Liechtenstein is utterly ridiculous - but that’s a big part of its appeal | The Spectator - "Squeezed into half a valley, between Austria and Switzerland, its monarchy is Austrian and its currency is Swiss. It only granted women the vote in 1984, the last European country to do so. Its national football stadium, the Rheinpark Stadion, holds just 6,127 spectators – less than Torquay United. Its national anthem shares the same tune as 'God Save The Queen'. A tax haven with more registered companies than people, its entire population is about the same as Milton Keynes. A railway runs through it, but it has no train station. It’s the world’s biggest manufacturer of false teethIts capital, Vaduz, has a mere 5000 inhabitants. Yet this sleepy town is home to Liechtenstein’s splendid Kunstmuseum, a striking avant-garde building with a superb array of contemporary art... Liechtenstein has no army, but when Hitler marched into Austria, Liechtenstein’s Prince Franz Joseph II went to see the fuhrer in Berlin and somehow secured his country’s neutrality. At the end of the Second World War, when 500 White Russians sought sanctuary here, he heroically refused to hand them over to Stalin. The last time Liechtenstein saw military action was in 1866, during the Austro-Prussian War, when they sent 80 troops to guard the Tyrolean border. They returned home with 81 men, having suffered no casualties and gained a new recruit en route... Franz Joseph’s son, His Serene Highness Prince Hans Adam II, is Liechtenstein’s current ruler. He’s Europe’s richest monarch, worth about $5 billion. He has one of the world’s finest art collections, with the largest private haul of Rubens, and the only Leonardo da Vinci in private hands. Some of this priceless booty is now on public show, but you won’t find any of it here in Liechtenstein. Absurdly - and therefore fittingly - you’ll have to travel to Vienna to see it. Maybe when his amazing artworks return to Liechtenstein, this quiet backwater will attract a few more visitors. Until then, enjoy the elbow room. Truly, this is the land that time (and the EU) forgot."

Thijs Porck on Twitter: -  "And the award for silliest medieval coat of arms goes to... this pair of underpants, belonging to Lord Jan van Abbenbroeck in the Beyeren Armorial (1405)!"

Am I wasting my time organizing email? - "People who create complex folders indeed rely on these for retrieval, but these preparatory behaviors are inefficient and do not improve retrieval success. In contrast, both search and threading promote more effective finding"
Don't waste time filing email

Did a Man Twice Land a Plane on a New York Street on a Bar Bet? - "Thomas Fitzpatrick, 26, was drinking at a Washington Heights ginmill after a bachelor party when he suddenly got the urge to fly. Fitzpatrick drove to the Teterboro Airport in New Jersey where he “borrowed” a Cessa 140 two-seater plane — he apparently knew one of the owners — and then flew it back to Manhattan, where he landed on a narrow street.   Fitzpatrick originally explained his actions by telling police that he was forced to land on the street due to engine trouble. Police were skeptical of this story, however, and suspected that this late-night, booze-inspired flight may have actually started with a bet... Fitzpatrick’s story is certainly a bit unbelievable. So much so that one bar patron was skeptical of the tale when Fitzpatrick recounted his adventure a few years later. In order to prove to his drinking buddy that he was telling the truth, Fitzpatrick once again drove to the Teterboro Airport to “borrow” a plane and then flew it back to the bar."

Prosymnus - Wikipedia - "When the wine god Dionysus went to Hades to rescue his mother Semele, Prosymnus guided him to the entrance by rowing him to the middle of the lake. The reward demanded by Prosymnus for this service was the right to make love to Dionysus. However, when Dionysus returned to earth by a different route, he found that Prosymnus had meanwhile died. Dionysus kept his promise by carving a piece of fig wood into the shape of a phallus and used it to ritually fulfill his promise to Prosymnus, while seated on his tomb... This story is not told in full by any of the usual sources of Greek mythological tales, though several of them hint at it. It is reconstructed on the basis of statements by Christian authors; these have to be treated with reserve because their aim is to discredit pagan mythology"

Gif
Cat drinking from a bottle then being squirted in the face

John B. Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia Experiment and Reflections on the Welfare State - "Because of the externally provided abundance of water and food, combined with zero threats from any predators, the mice never had to acquire resources on their own. The young mice never observed such actions and never learned them. The life skills necessary for survival faded away...        The “behavioral sink” of self-destructive conduct in Calhoun’s experiment (which he replicated on numerous subsequent occasions) has since been mostly interpreted as resulting from crowded conditions. Demographers warn that humans might succumb to similar aberrations if world population should ever exceed some imaginary, optimal “maximum.” Others like Kubań point out that the mice utopia fell apart well before the mouse enclosure was full. Even at the peak of the population, some 20 percent of nesting beds were unoccupied.  My instincts tell me that Kubań is correct in suggesting that a more likely culprit in the mice demise was this: the lack of a healthy challenge. Take away the motivation to overcome obstacles—notably, the challenge of providing for oneself and family—and you deprive individuals of an important stimulus that would otherwise encourage learning what works and what doesn’t, and possibly even pride in accomplishment (if mice are even capable of such a sentiment). Maybe, just maybe, personal growth in each mouse was inhibited by the welfare-state conditions in which they lived. Calhoun himself suggested a parallel to humanity... By relieving individuals of challenges, which then deprives them of purpose, the welfare state is an utterly unnatural and anti-social contrivance. In the mouse experiment, the individuals ultimately lost interest in the things that perpetuate the species. They self-isolated, over-indulged themselves, or turned to violence.  Does that ring a bell? Read Charles Murray’s 1984 book, Losing Ground, or George Gilder’s earlier work, Wealth and Poverty, and I guarantee that you will hear that bell...   I can think of one big difference between Calhoun’s mouse utopia and the human welfare state, and it does not weigh in humanity’s favor. For the mice, everything truly was “free.” No mouse was taxed so another mouse could benefit. In the human welfare state, however, one human’s benefit is a cost to another (or to many)—a fact that rarely acts as an incentive for work, savings, investment, or other positive behaviors. That suggests that a human welfare state with its seductive subsidies for some and punishing taxes for others delivers a double blow not present in mouse welfarism... “The welfare state shields people from the consequences of their own mistakes, allowing irresponsibility to continue and to flourish among ever wider circles of people.”"

'Germany is not an open society': Chinese artist Ai Weiwei on leaving Berlin - "“Germany is not an open society. It is a society that wants to be open, but above all it protects itself. German culture is so strong that it doesn't really accept other ideas and arguments.”  Ai, 61, added that there is “hardly any room for open debate”.  The artist, who is an outspoken critic of China's government, moved to Berlin in July 2015 after spending four years under house arrest in China. The artist said he had reported experiences of discrimination to authorities while living in Berlin, such as being thrown out of taxis. However, the office investigating them had come to the conclusion the incidents involved “cultural differences” rather than discriminatory offences, he said... Ai had spoken out about feeling less secure in Germany.  He said he was “fighting battles” wherever he went “including with German people who say I should be grateful to them because I am a refugee, and they paid for my life”.  In the interview with the Guardian at the end of last year he added: “This is the mood in Germany right now, the posters I see in the streets saying: ‘We can make our own babies, we don’t need foreigners.’ It’s the mood in much of Europe, including the UK. It’s very scary because this kind of moment is a reflection of the 1930s.”"
Alarmism is so classy

Ai Weiwei on his new life in Britain: 'People are at least polite. In Germany, they weren't' - "While Ai insists he has no illusions about Britain, he still thinks it will be better for his family. “In Britain they are colonial. They are polite at least. But in Germany, they don’t have this politeness. They would say in Germany you have to speak German. They have been very rude in daily situations. They deeply don’t like foreigners.” If Britain does let him down, he assures me he’ll let us all know... “Germany is a very precise society. Its people love the comfort of being oppressed. In China, too, you see that. Once you’re used to it, it can be very enjoyable. And you can see the efficiency, the show, the sense of their power being extended through the connected-mind condition.” You mean there is no room for individuality? “Yes. They have a different kind of suit: it doesn’t look like what they wore in the 1930s, but it still has the same kind of function. They identify with the cult of that authoritarian mindset.”... Is he comparing today’s Germany with Nazi Germany? “Fascism is to think one ideology is higher than others and to try to purify that ideology by dismissing other types of thinking. That’s Nazism. And that Nazism perfectly exists in German daily life today.”"
And yet he quickly went to Portugal
Presumably liberal intolerance isn't Nazism, since those are the Right views

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