Just an angry bi guy

I'm bi, white, an atheist, chronically ill/disabled. I am a cis man. I'm sort of a geek. Skeptic/Rationalist/LWer. I used blog a lot about social justice, but have become very critical of the dominant rhetoric.

[anarchyandacupofcoffee]

OK Highway Patrol Captain George Brown says the best “tip” for women to not get raped by a cop is to “follow the law in the first place so you don’t get pulled over.” http://youtu.be/BO8g8akPWcY (Last third of the video).

Three serial rapists in 3 weeks arrested in Oklahoma, all cops.

Follow for Anarchy | Follow for Feminism

[popping-smoke-deactivated201503]

Pro tip: if you’re signaled to pull over (whether you’re male or female) and you’re in a place that has no witnesses, turn your hazard lights on to acknowledge the officer’s siren, and drive to the nearest gas station or populated area. This is accepted protocol by every agency. You are not obligated pull over until you can do so safely. This includes personal safety. Understand your rights, brothers and sisters. There are disgusting examples of authority in this world.

[datiek]

HAZARD LIGHTS ARE NOT AN ACCEPTABLE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT. IT IS NOT ACCEPTED PROTOCOL BY EVERY AGENCY. DO NOT JUST CONTINUE DRIVING WITH YOUR HAZARD LIGHTS IN CASE THE COP MIGHT THINK IT’S A LOW-SPEED CHASE.

I know that sounds dumb, but hear me out. My mother is a dispatcher for the local police station. I asked her about how to pull over for a cop and even brought up the use of hazard lights, and she told me that it is not always accepted. This is what she told me you can do in order to feel safe when pulling over:

Call the police. No, really. Call and tell the dispatcher where you are and that there is a cop behind you demanding you pull over. The dispatcher can and will stay on the line with you while they look up the area you’re in to see if it’s one of their station’s cops. Then, once the cop comes to your window, you can crack it open (it only has to be an inch!) while still on the phone with the dispatcher. This is definitely, 100% accepted protocol.

The dispatcher will verify that it is their own, real cop, and they will gladly stay on the line with you throughout your interaction with the officer. And God forbid this ever happens to any of you, but if something were to happen to you during this time, you’ve already contacted 911 and given your location to the dispatcher.

Please keep this in mind if you are ever requested to pull over and do not feel safe. The dispatcher will understand. Do not, however, continue to drive, because there might be the off-chance an officer will think you’re flat-out refusing to pull over (a well-lit, populated area might be a ways away).

Stay safe.

[tallulah99]

Signal boost.

Because I personally know some creepy ass mother fuckers who became cops because they’re demented psychopaths and they get off on having control over people.

[inksharktrash]

In light of current bullshit, this might be a good idea for a LOT of people, not just women. Marginalized minorities of all stripes, take note. I hate taking up an emergency dispatcher’s resources, but i also hate seeing yet another fucked up news story about police harming citizens.

[isaacsapphire]

There have also been a decent number of cases of non-police pretending to be police and pulling people over, and those guys (I’ve never heard of a woman doing that, although it’s hypothetically possible) are even more reliably unhinged and rapey than cops.

You know, in case you need a better sounding reason to tell the dispatcher or something.

[aellagirl]

Why I Can’t Say Yes To Sex

[mitigatedchaos]

<aellagirl post>

Now consider the consequences if this is relatively common - or at least if men believe it is relatively common.

Would male gender norms, with all their fear of deviation, and desire to be high-status and dominant and on top of a hierarchy of masculinity, look like they do today?  Would the norms be seemingly stubbornly resistant to change in ways that can’t be adequately explained by Feminist theories about gender?

I’m not sure how to untangle it, and how much is cultural vs deeper human psychology.

[the-grey-tribe]

I

A point I make here repreatedly, because it is worth repeating: Straight women have a somewhat good grasp on the dating/mating behaviour and revealed preferences of straight men, but only get second hand information on the dating behaviour or revealed of other women. Men might already have a better grasp of what women (often/commonly/on average) want, because women tell each other all the gory details of their boyfriends’ sexual quirks, but paint a really rosy picture of themselves (Am I griping? Yes I am. I was informed of such gossip. It sucks).

II

From Aella’s post:

(When I talk about hotness, I mean a vague ‘attractive to me,’ which includes things like 'very intelligent’ and 'interesting,’ which is also things that other people tend to find attractive. I am not as original as I like to think I am.)

But anyway, this means that when I say yes to Chad McMooscles, I’m telling him that he is the hottest/smartest/most intriguing man who’s paid attention to me. I am admitting he’s the best I can get.

This is toxic (To be clear, I support Aella sleeping with who she wants to, but the framing she uses, her writing and rationalising this framing, and the prevalence of this attitude, is toxic).

When a man finds a woman sexually attractive, he finds her sexually attractive. That’s it. It does not mean that she is a bad person. Maybe it’s because of the big tits. A bad person can have good tits. Men may exhibit an unconscious bias, but on an intellectual level, we cam compartmentalise.

When a woman finds a man sexually attractive, she bases that judgment on his whole personality, accomplishments, abilities, social status, bank account, resume. In this view, a man is attractive as a whole. A good person is attractive. This sentiment is prevalent among the straight women I talked to. and women have explained it to me like this: “Dick pics don’t do anything for me. I don’t even like dicks per se. I only like dicks as a part of a whole package, as an integral part of a manly man with a house, a nice car, charitable donations and a law degree.“

III

After I wrote that post on expectations for first dates (the gist was: You should expect to have a good time. Do not expect to get together, because you might find out you are incompatible. That is what the date is for), I talked about this IRL, and women told me that they don’t frame it like that. They frame it not as looking for a good match, but looking for a good man.

When they rationalise their reasons for rejecting men, they construct a narrative of there being something wrong with the man. I know I’m not being terribly original here, and this sounds like a MRA talking point about how women never get called creepy because of small tits. Maybe this is the halo effect, or an internalised result of social pressures with respect to female sexual agency, and women are really as “shallow” as men, but pressured into denial.

But when women reject men, it really does feel like a wholesale indictment of their character. And women want it to be that. If I had the choice between being objectified and being judged, I would choose objectification in a heartbeat.

[angrybisexual]

I’m gonna branch off from II here. Those descriptions of straight female desire for men are remarkably similar of how I feel about men. In contrast, when it comes to girls I’m pretty similar to most straight men. 

[argumate]

problematic tropes are only problematic due to their prevalence, not bad in and of themselves; they are bad on a statistical level.

this complicates the discourse significantly as it means any individual application of a terrible trope is not very terrible at all, a subtlety that is hard to express and which most people don’t seem to get.

[anarcha-transfeminism-blog]

Community ownership is good

We have the resources, we have the arable land, we have the ability to put every person in the country in a house, with their own little farm, and we can help them be self-sufficient! Why hasn’t this happened yet?

[argumate]

we did, and they were like “fuck this” and went to live in the cities to do things that weren’t farming, like making iPhones

[drethelin]

“Subsistence Farming Sucks” is like, an eternal fact of the world that idealists don’t want to recognize.

[argumate]

revealed preferences agree

[discoursedrome]

So this is me a day late and a dollar short on this, because it took me a while to think it over and I kept getting distracted by video game fanart.

I think “subsistence farming sucks” is kind of an oversimplification. It was always very doable if you had a large family and decent land, and it’s very very doable nowadays with modern tools. Of course “absolutely everyone does autarkic subsistence farming” is never going to be a thing – never has been a thing, really – but it wouldn’t be that hard to do “any family, group or community who wants to go off and do farming mostly for their own use is given the land and capital necessary to do so well,” and the people who took that route could live pretty comfortably assuming we’re talking about families or communes as labour units, and not Some Lady With Potatoes. It has problems, but we could make this option a lot more available than it is, since it’s mainly capitalist rent-extraction preventing it.

The problem isn’t so much that subsistence farming is inherently terrible under modern circumstances – it’s rough, I’d infarct my flimsy ass, but it’s no worse than lots of things people do in the city. The problem you run into is basically the same problem we have with wage work: even if everyone starts out even, some people will work harder, because they have a bigger healthier family or better luck or are joyless Protestant workhorses or whatever, and they’ll generate compounding surpluses, which either leads to them gradually assuming control over everyone else, or (more commonly) raises the bar of what everyone else is required to do until it hits the point of “as much as is possible for a regular person without having a complete meltdown.”

Generally this happens via the more productive farmers driving up the price of things that have to be obtained on the open market, but even if you go for complete autarky, it still happens via taxation/tribute, because whoever you’re paying that to is going to decide how much wheat they want based on how much a maximally productive farm produces. And you can’t get rid of that because in the last analysis the state is just whoever is best at killing people who don’t pay them, and a bunch of subsistence farmers are generally going to lose out to some other community that emphasizes killing over farming. The only way that ever seems to work in real life is if you’re in some really shitty highland areas that nobody else can be bothered with.

In other words, at this point – and honestly, I think back a fair ways – subsistence farming is shitty mainly because it’s more profitable for it to be shitty, and if we could fix that problem we could also just do our current jobs except with half as many working hours. But having said all that, I’m cautiously in favour of subsidizing individual small-scale subsistence farming in some capacity for people who want it, or at least diminishing the number of barriers that modern property law throws up against it. It’s not going to take us anyplace we haven’t been before, but then, what will?

[angrybisexual]

Subsistence farming is really inefficient as compared to commercial farming. If large amounts of people adopted subsistence farming, that would be an environmental disaster. World population is expected to plateau at 11 billion, we need to be able to efficiently produce food.

[sinesalvatorem]

moderate social competency alison: any thoughts on what to do when a person is low key crossing your social boundaries by repeatedly asking for intimacy (they asked, so it's not like they didn't give me the choice, but they keep asking, with a different request each time - can i kiss/snuggle/hold you etc) and coming to you for comfort, when you barely know them? i don't want to seem cold but being a hug generator for anyone who wants it regardless of relationship makes me uncomfortable

I’m sorry you’re in this situation, anon. I know this feel really hard.

So, the most obvious and effective method is to sit them down and give them the harsh, straight talk. Similar to how you put it in this anon. “Please stop asking me for intimacy, I don’t actually feel comfortable with that and would prefer if you didn’t ask.”

Of course, potential fallout would probably involve making the person upset and could possibly involve fucking with your relationship with them. Which is why guess culture exists: So you can tell people to quit it without exposing yourself to side effects quite that strong. However, guess culture is ambiguous by nature so, if you want a complete guarantee of getting your point across, the ruthlessly direct approach is the way to go.

But, if you don’t want to go that way, then I assume what you’re looking for is ways to avoid triggering a feeling of hurt and rejection in the other person. In that case, you want a plausible excuse for why you don’t want to kiss/snuggle/hold them that doesn’t sound personal.

The go to response, of course, is “I have a boyfriend/girlfriend”. Since monogamous partners have an implicit monopoly on each other’s intimacy, you can’t be socially pressured into giving that intimacy to anyone else, unless the person doing the pressuring is not just bad at boundaries but actually a jerk.

Buuuuut, that assumes you’re monogamous. Since this is the universally-applied and near-foolproof hack mono people use, I assume you’re not in a monogamous relationship, since you’re not already using it? In that case, if poly, might I suggest the Fake Monogamy Hack™? Like the regular old Monogamy Hack described above, this relies on implicit monopoly powers.

In this case, you pretend that your relationship is such that 1) you can only be intimate with established partners, or 2) you can only be intimate with people your current partners have pre-approved. And, for whatever reason, this acquaintance isn’t on the list. Sorry! Nothing personal! Those are just the rules of my relationship!

(Admittedly, if you’re a straight woman and the other person is a woman, it might be harder to avoid hugs this way. But, like, I’m sure you could manage it by saying your partner(s) take(s) a gender neutral perspective on intimate relations.)

Things are trickier if you’re single. You could lie and claim you have a partner, though. Alternatively, you could still use “I’m sorry, I only do that with boyfriends/girlfriends” on them, with the implication being “that’s why I’m not kissing anyone”. It is generally not considered unusual for people to only kiss their romantic partners, after all. Thus, the fact that you’re currently not kissing/snuggling/holding anyone!…

…Unless you are doing that with people. Or if it’s publicly known that you’re in a poly relationship that doesn’t have rules like the ones I suggested faking. In that case, uhhh, I’m really not sure what to say.

In my culture, we’d make up a Suspiciously Specific religious prohibition, along the lines of “my religion says I shouldn’t hug anyone of the opposite gender who it more than four years older than me and eats pork”, or something. Because, like, religions tell you to do weird shit all the time man, so who are you to judge?

For (presumably) secular (presumably) Americans… I have no idea. Make up an extremely narrow reason why you can’t hug this particular person? However, at this point, it probably doesn’t even come with advantages over directness. So, if you’ve followed the flowchart far enough to get here, maybe you should just drop some truth bombs, tbh.

I hope something here works! If you don’t mind, please write back to tell me how it goes! Good luck!

[happinessisnotalwaysfun-blog]

Anon - the other thing is… …don’t assume this person is just a bit bad at reading your signals. I’ve met people like this, and in my experience they know ~exactly~ what they are about. The goal is to wear you down into saying yes. The aim is to put you in a sexual or quasi sexual relationship, where you are the problem for being too prudey to participate. (“What’s your problem, we’re all friends here…”) I wouldn’t rely on “I’m seeing someone” either. I once tried that with a friend who asked to rub my feet; but she would still attempt to hand-feed me, and make with the snuggles. And some poly people straight up pretend they don’t understand how monogamy works; “oh you said no foot rubs but how was I meant to know you don’t want people to kneel and feed you by hand?? How can you even know what mono people mean by that?”. Like they can’t even predict. Like they’ve assumed everything is on the table and you have to say no to everything individually, instead of the normal approach for people you are not dating where everything is no, period, until your general status changes. So my working assumption would be this. Your friend wants more intimacy with you, and is relying on your absence of a clear no to get away with it. When I say “absence of a clear no”, I see you’re saying no to things on a case by case basis which is really cool. But in your position, I’d find the repeated requests really violating, like I was being deliberately worn down. And like I was in a social context with expectations that didn’t work for me. Even though each request isn’t pressurey, the overall situation IS. So my script would be: “No thank you. You’ve asked me a couple of times for things recently, and i wanted to let you know that I’m generally not very comfortable with hugs or touching or anything like that. I’d prefer it if you stopped asking. I will let you know in future if I change my mind, but please wait and let me initiate it” And if they kick up a stink then, bye Felicia. Because the way someone reacts when you start giving them nos, tells you a lot. Any bullshit at all, this person is not your friend. Sorry for my paranoid thoughts, but I’ve never been in a situation like this which ended well…

[nuclearspaceheater]

In the ~228 years that the office of President of the United States has existed, it has had 4 work-related fatalities (counting assassination as an occupational hazard for a politician), giving it a fatality rate of 1,754.4 per 100,000 workers per year.

For reference, the fatality rate per 100,000 of active duty US military personnel due to either accidents or enemy action in 2010 was 52.3, [X] while fatalities per 100,000 full-time equivalent logging workers of the same year was 59. [X]

[yteicosanievilew]

hey can we please stop citing the aclu as a like, a good organization 

[fuckthroatkitchen]

Okay both if these sites give examples of things that happened in the late 70s? Is there anything suggesting they still hold these views? Or are you guys making bullshit reaches that could affect donation rates to a vital part of the resistance?

[solvola]

except the first link is on the ACLU website itself which has me assume they still agree with that text (otherwise they’d have removed or updated on it), and the second one was in context of the ACLU standing up for the KKK in 2012, and despite what Tumblr likes to whine about, that’s not all that long ago, and it’s certainly not from the late 70s. and frankly given the magnitude of this kind of Moderate Liberal “we are all the same” way of thinking, I’m gonna need some actual recent statement of substance indicating that they’ve done away with these views before I can feel like I can trust them. this isn’t something you just grow out of in even 5 years (or less, I doubt that KKK link is the last example of this happening) when you’re that deep into clueless moderate politics

[jiskblr]

“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”

They defended them and they did the right thing by doing it.

[toolusingmammalgirl]

They defend free-speech-the-legal-principle, not free-speech-the-civic-virtue, and God bless them for it.

[shieldfoss]

^^^^ This is a healthy part of why I so despise modern SJ discourse.

“Let’s tear down probably the single most important non-government organization in all of America because Copenhagen Ethics has made it slightly impure.”

OP: No, we will not stop citing the, not just “good,” but in fact best, organization just because you don’t understand what they’re here for. The only reason you’re even allowed to post that OP is because the ACLU spilled money like it was water to make sure you’ve kept that right - every time they came to steal it from you.

[oktavia-von-gwwcendorff-deactiv]

Even if one thinks that people generally shouldn’t give nazis and the KKK a platform… (that is, that it would be not only morally permissible but actually virtuous to ban them from one’s own property/website)

…defending state intrusions to freedom of speech still makes one an authoritarian scumbag ///

[intentionalperson]

Just read the article

What happens when the plant you grow for a living triples in price due to trendy market demand?      A) You become poorer, because people wanting to buy what you sell is a              problem.

     B) You become wealthier because people wanting to buy what you sell is              exactly why you grew it in the first place.

The answer may surprise you!

[the--quote--notebook]

Icarus. The original myth had two parts, Daedalus said to his son, “I fashioned these wings for you. Two rules. Don’t fly too high, or the sun will melt the wax. But, more important, son, don’t fly too low. Because if you fly too low, the water and the waves will surely weigh down the wings, and you will die.” We’ve left out the second part of the myth. We don’t say to people anymore, “Don’t fly too low.” All we do from the time they are four years old is warn them against hubris. We have created this industrially led structure that says: How dare you.

Seth Godin (via the–quote–notebook)

[suspected-spinozist]

It is not 1933

I think it’s important that we get one thing absolutely clear: Trump is not a fascist. Steve Bannon is not a fascist. Neither of their ideologies resemble fascism more than superficially. Richard Spencer may very well be an actually fascist, which makes it all the more important that we reserve the word for cases where it actually applies, and anyway we should stop giving him free publicity. 

Fascist ideology calls for the end of liberal democracy, permanent militarization, and the mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state. Fascism has taken many different forms in different countries and time periods, but it is always accompanied by a recognizable set of political and aesthetic ideals, especially the aestheticization and glorification of violence and military power. Trump is anti-war! It’s a fairly major part of his platform! (Again, the hard alt-right may actually be fascist, but they’re a relatively tiny sliver of Trump’s base). “Fascist” is not a generic substitute for “racist” or “scary” or even “authoritarian.” Nobody says that Stalin or Pol Pot were fascists, even though both were totalitarian leaders who committed genocide against their own people. 

None of this is meant as a defense of Trump, who I think is terrible in almost every possible way. Saying that someone is not a fascist does not mean that they are not dangerous (again, see Pol Pot), it just means that they are not dangerous because of their adherence to one specific ideology, among the many utterly awful ideologies that exist. I’m somewhat dubious that Trump has anything that could be termed an ideology, but that’s by the by. 

I do think there’s a lot we can and should learn from responses to fascist movements in Europe in the ‘20s and ‘30s - not because we’re dealing with exactly the same thing, but because there are excellent lessons about how to respond to rising authoritarianism and right-wing populism. And one of the most critical of those lessons is that we must, always, protect the precision and accuracy of our language. Authoritarians of all stripes want to obfuscate. They benefit when language becomes fuzzy and emotionally charged and disconnected from reality, because it makes their claims seem as reasonable as anyone else’s. A Trump supporter will laugh - correctly! - when they hear him called a fascist, and then think the true accusation that he’s an incompetent narcissist with dangerously bigoted advisors is just as absurd. 

There are real fascist movements in the world today, but they’re not a major player in American politics. Accusing everyone we don’t like of fascism - and we’ve been doing it since the 1940s - is a failure of the political imaginary. The next major threat to democracy won’t look like Germany in the 1930s, it will look like something else. It is, currently, looking like something else. And it’s absolutely critical that we preserve the ability to understand and fight it on its own terms. 

[nostalgebraist]

I happened upon a lecture by a mathematician named Cédric Villani on YouTube, and then I saw there were a bunch of other videos of him, some of them aimed at getting the general populace excited about math and stuff like that.  It turns out he is sort of a math celebrity, better known in France – The New Yorker calls him “the Lady Gaga of French mathematics,” whatever that means.

It’s cool because he has a Fields medal!  He’s not just qualified to speak about math but unusually so, which is rarely the case for “science presenter” type people

[endecision-deactivated20221216]

He looks like a Harry Potter character.

[femmenietzsche]

The most erotic of the logical fallacies

[injygo]

Gotta be “argument from authority” right?

[femmenietzsche]

I didn’t have a particular one in mind, but that’s hard to beat.

[wariowaretrans]

Cmon, yall. Masked-man fallacy.

[femmenietzsche]

abstractagamid said: illicit minor

(Dang)

abstractagamid said: special pleading?

abstractagamid said: moving the goalposts

All strong contenders, but argument from authority is still on top IMO.

[theaudientvoid]

You’d think the left would realize at some point that spreading outrageous stories about Trump demonstrably doesn’t have any real effect on his popularity. The Italian political establishment spent over a decade trying and failing to defeat Berlusconi by turning him into a laughing stock, because he already was a laughing stock, and being a grotesque caricature was already a core part of his political brand. Now the American left is making the same mistake with Trump. Remember that old line from Krusty the Clown? The pie gag only works if the schlub has dignity. Treating Trump like a bad joke only makes him stronger.

[slatestarscratchpad]

You wake up on the morning on the 20th of January to find that you are now Donald Trump, on the day of your inauguration as president. (Investigation reveals there is another you still practising medicine in Michigan as normal fwiw.) As president, what do you do with the powers available to you? How do Congress, the media, and the public respond? How do you respond back?

My cabinet/related picks:

Attorney General: Preet BhararaCommerce: Peter ThielDefense: James MattisState: Tulsi GabbardHousing & Urban Development: Matt YglesiasHomeland Security: Anonymous MugwumpHealth & Human Services: Julia WiseTransportation/Energy: Elon MuskTreasury: Satoshi NakamotoEducation: Eva MoskowitzVeterans Affairs: David PetraeusAgriculture: Buck ShlegerisLabor: Bernie Sanders

Head of NIH: Stephen HsuSurgeon General: Dr. Chris BallasHead of FDA: Alex TabarrokWelfare Czar: Charles MurrayChair of Federal Reserve: Scott SumnerBudget Director: Holden KarnofskyHead of CIA: Philip Tetlock

Everything else can be filled by randomly selected black women so that I can brag about how diverse I am.

First order of business: in addition to being my Secretary of Labor, Bernie Sanders is now vice president. I don’t care what he does with the position, it’s just so that the Republican Congress knows that if they impeach me, they’re getting a pacifist Jewish socialist as the leader of the free-world.

Second order of business is to get Robin Hanson to set up a national prediction market to help me figure out all my other policies. All other orders of business conditional on approval from national prediction market and from new CIA head Philip Tetlock. Then:

- Legalize marijuana and hallucinogens, lessen penalties for other drugs. Replace prison sentences for nonviolent crimes with corporal punishment.

- Build Trump’s wall, because it’s a meaningless symbol that will change nothing, but it’ll make Republicans like me, and it will make Democrats focus all their energy on criticizing that instead of anything substantive I do.

- If Tabarrok hasn’t already solved everything about prescription medication by this point, do it myself.

- If Yglesias hasn’t already solved everything about urban housing by this point, do it myself.

- Tax the rich. Maybe a Georgist land tax?

- Get rid of most occupational licensing restrictions. I’m probably too chicken to get rid of medical licensing entirely, but make it way easier to become a nurse-practitioner, and vastly expand the amount of stuff nurse practitioners can do. Allow psychologists to prescribe most psychiatric medication.

- Declare War On College. Forgive all existing student loans, then refuse to give out any new ones. Prohibit the government from asking about college degree when hiring new employees, and put pressure on private industry to follow suit for any position less absolutely-requiring-of-specialized-knowledge than doctor or engineer. Increase government loans to boot camps, online courses, et cetera.

- Carbon tax, with the money going into massive investment into ways to sequester atmospheric carbon.

- Basic income guarantee if possible, otherwise just sneakily increase income tax credits and stuff so that nobody notices.

- Tell Russia that if they can defeat ISIS, they can have as much of Syria as they want, and if they can do it while getting rid of Assad we’ll let them have Alaska back too.

- Agree with Russia and Ukraine to partition Ukraine into Pro-Russia Ukraine and Pro-West Ukraine. This would also work with Moldova.

- Put various EA figures in charge of Africa policy. Also, recognize Somaliland.

- Tell Saudi Arabia that we’re sorry for sending mixed messages by allying with them, and actually they are total scum and we hate everything about them. Ally with Iran, who are actually really great aside from the whole Islamic theocracy thing. Get Iran to grudgingly tolerate Israel the same way we got Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, etc to grudgingly tolerate Israel, which I assume involves massive amounts of bribery. Form coalition for progress and moderation vs. extremist Sunni Islam throughout Middle East. Nothing can possibly go wrong.

- Tell China that their artificial islands in the South China Sea are stupid and if they don’t stop, then we’ll show them what real artificial islands look like. If they call our bluff, send Patri Friedman over with ten billion dollars in state funding to create seasteads in whichever spots are most inconvenient for China.

- Eliminate the penny.

- Probably other things, I would have to think.

[the-grey-tribe]

Disturbingly low conviction rates have many explanations, but one contributing factor is the ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ standard of evidence employed in criminal cases. This standard requires that the jury not have any reasonable doubts about the defendant’s guilt in order to convict. Doubts they have that are frivolous or hypothetical should be put aside. Unfortunately, this standard contributes to a low conviction rate in cases of sexual assault, which is often physically indistinguishable from consensual sex.

[angrybisexual]

Why rape cases should not be subject to reasonable doubt | Aeon Ideas (via the-grey-tribe)

As The Guardian columnist Julia Bindel puts it, ‘rape might as well be legal’.

seriously

(via argumate)

>now listen to the opinions of Julia Bindel, famous political lesbian and male concentration camp advocate

Prominent scholars in the Sovereign Citizenship movement point out that…

Just let the “physocally indistinguishable from consensual sex” part stand for itself. The article is too subtle to be a Godfrey Elfwick, but it’s argued so badly you start to wonder.

(via the-grey-tribe)

If you’re accused of raping someone you will be prosecuted under the exact same standard as if you were accused of murdering someone..... therefore rape is practically legal.

Some people could really benefit from acquainting themselves with the concept of a trade-off.

[na--ta]

Friendship kiss between Russian and US soldier during WW2

Нравится мужик - целуешь мужика. Все. Сурово и без разговоров.

[hpslutcraft]

Just guys bein dudes

[institute-for-thermal-research]

It’s a Russian taunt

[the-grey-tribe]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_God,_Help_Me_to_Survive_This_Deadly_Love#/media/File:Bundesarchiv_B_145_Bild-F088809-0038,_Berlin,_East_Side_Gallery.jpg Just guys bein dudes

[the-grey-tribe]

How to Jezebel

Make your own troll feminist women’s magazine in 3 easy steps:

Women’s Magazine Stuff, but “Feminist”

Write about dresses, purses, fashion in general, celebrity gossip, fad diets, mean-spirited celebrity gossip, superfoods, home decoration, make-up, purely speculative celebrity gossip, arts and crafts, fancy seasonal cooking recipes and candid celebrity photos! Include a tenuous connection to feminist/SJ topics as a fig leaf!

Examples:

$ACTRESS gained weight and we photographed her in street clothes. Time to revisit her world hunger activism!

20 make-up trends for smashing the patriarchy in style this spring

Are $CELEBRITY_COUPLE breaking up? We don’t know, but maybe she’ll come out as lesbian, which is great for LGBT representation.

The Femen diet

Woman wants to be on magazine cover un-photoshopped, which is so brave because she is kind of really fat

Sexist Clickbait

Write something unkind, uncharitable or just man-hating! Frame it as a gender-equality issue! Laugh at a man’s misery! Humble-brag about being a trophy wife! Wait for men to hate-share your pieces!

Examples:

Woman takes over semolina cocaine cartel, reaching more and more female customers

Is discrimination to blame for lack of female bank robbers?

Hilarious: Activist sets man’s penis on fire

Abortions are great, you should get one too

Recession in lumber industry narrows pay gap

They said I should become a model, but I chose to defy stereotypes

The Counter-Intuitive Shuffle

There are three categories of activities that you need to mix up: Empowering, degrading and mundane. You need to stump your readers. Every time something is obviously one thing and common knowledge and socially agreed upon to be this thing, you can offer an unconventional take. The secondary purpose here is to keep people on their toes. They can never be too sure about what is and isn’t feminist right now. They don’t know what to do. They have to read your site every day to find out. Be unpredictable!

Examples:

Bra burning: Everybody does it (Empowering -> Mundane)

The sexist origins of breakfast cereal (Mundane -> Degrading)

Blow jobs: The power to bite (Degrading -> Empowering)

Paternal leave makes maternal leave look like a good idea

Telecommuting is making women invisible in the workplace

Don’t leave child rearing to fathers, raise your daughters to become feminists!

And above all: Don’t solve issues, exploit them for clicks!

[angrybisexual]

Wouldn’t a recession in the lumber industry *increase* the pay gap? You know, with uneducated men formerly earning low wages now not being counted in the statistics?