Tuesday, September 13, 2016
"It's also a fight between comedians and feminists, which are natural enemies." - Louis CK
"I've been called a rape apologist because I said 'hi' to a guy who everybody was mad at."
"For me, any joke about anything bad is great. That's how I feel. Rape, the Holocaust... The Mets... any joke about something bad is a positive."
“The artificial weeping in this country... is embarrassing and unnecessary, and it just shows how emotionally immature the American people are.”
Carlin, from beyond the grave, still speaks wise. Fifteen years after 9/11, we can hear the only bit George Carlin ever cut for taste - The Washington Post: "I spoke to Carlin only once, in 1999, and pressed him on a school shooting bit, which he did the night of the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colo.
“How can you still do that joke?” I asked.
“Boy, you need that joke more than ever now,” he said. “The artificial weeping in this country, this nationwide mourning for dead people is just embarrassing, and these ribbons and these teddy bears and these little places where they put notes to dead people and all this s---. This is embarrassing and unnecessary, and it just shows how immature, how emotionally immature the American people as a class are.”"
"Toward the end of the album, Carlin implicates the audience more clearly in his death obsession. “I know some people think these kind of thoughts are ghoulish and demented and sick, but I know they’re not,” he says. “I know these things are normal and quite common. . . . Society has told you that nice people don’t take pleasure in mass death. But you’re wrong, because I think mass death is terrific, and I’m a really nice fucking guy.” Speaking in a menacing, devilish growl, Carlin gives voice to a dark part of us that eagerly, and at times almost giddily, consumes the wall-to-wall media coverage that certain kinds of mass-death events generate. “The only thing I care about is fun. That’s all. Entertainment,” he says. He explains the excitement he feels when watching fatal disasters as a visceral, animal response. The appeal he is making to members of the crowd, as he is getting them to laugh, is to consider this almost reflexive fascination, and to deny even a germ of it in themselves."
I do love a good conspiracy theory. #HillarysHealth
The realpolitik/persuasion/optics angle - Deplorable Pneumonia | Scott Adams' Blog: "Clinton collapsed with some sort of health problem – perhaps pneumonia – at the 9-11 anniversary event. The optics of a potential commander-in-chief collapsing at that holy place, and on an important anniversary, rendered her unelectable in my opinion. I base that prediction on how people will associate her health issues with the need to have a reliable commander-in-chief. Persuasion-wise, that’s a hole you don’t get out of."
And interesting timeline of the most provocative theory here - Complete Timeline of Hillary’s Health
"'I just wanted you to know that I made up the entire thing simply because I was upset with Jovon at the time.'"
Female Student Admits to Incredible Lie That Got Auburn Football Player Kicked Off Team - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "Auburn University dismissed running back Jovon Robinson—formerly the No. 1 junior college player in the country—after a female student accused him of assaulting her.
"He did not meet my expectations of what it takes to be an Auburn Tiger football player," said head coach Gus Malzahn, according to al.com.
But Robinson never assaulted anyone. His purported victim made it up entirely. The woman now readily admits to fabricating the allegation out of spite—she was angry at Robinson for making her leave his room.
It's an astonishing, malicious lie... It's also a powerful repudiation of the leftist-feminist idea that victims of assault and sexual assault deserve to be automatically believed...
He forwarded the email to Auburn's Title IX coordinator, Kelley Taylor, noting that it was the first time he had heard "of any incident regarding Jovon and any female." Taylor contacted the woman later that same morning, letting her know that Malzahn wanted to "take some precautionary steps" but that the university couldn't do anything until Taylor had spoken with her. Taylor asked for pictures of her injuries as well. "Me knowing that it wasn't true, I never did [send Taylor pictures]," said the woman in an interview with al.com.Indeed, the woman soon confessed to Taylor that she had made up the story. Interestingly enough, according to the woman, Taylor seemed interested in proceeding anyway: (Taylor) really wanted to make it a big deal, after I told her basically that I lied," the accuser told AL.com. "I can see her calling me one time after I said it, but two times and then a week later? That kind of made me wonder, why was she trying to do that?"
Keep in mind that the woman is an admitted liar—it's certainly possible she's lying about Taylor's statements here, too. After Robinson was dismissed from the team, the woman seems to have felt some remorse for him. She emailed Malzahn to make sure he knew she had lied: "I'm not sure if your decision today had anything to do with my situation a few weeks ago, but I just wanted you to know that I made up the entire thing simply because I was upset with Jovon at the time," the accuser wrote to Malzahn. "I haven't had any contact with him in the past few weeks but I do not think my lie should have costed him his spot on the team. Please consider changing your mind because I would really hate to see a person with so much potential lose his opportunity because of my silly fib. Jovon didn't do anything to me that night but ask me to leave his room and I was upset about that.""
“It turns out hard things are fun, and easy things aren’t.”
Life’s Work: An Interview with Penn Jillette: "Tell me a little more about your creative process. How do you and Teller develop your act?
Every Tuesday we get together, usually at a coffee shop, and we sit with our computers in front of us and knock around ideas. We are not in any way supportive. As soon as the germ of an idea comes up, the other person tries to crush it. But we are brutal because if there’s something bad about an idea, we want to find out as soon as we can. It has to survive that process. That doesn’t mean the idea won’t come up another hundred times, but it will come up differently. We never, ever compromise, because that can only lead to mediocrity.
If one of us doesn’t like something, we try to come up with another idea we both do like. We almost always start with a pretentious intellectual thought—for example, what do we have to say about the TSA and freedom? Then we add a trick, and the very last thing we add is jokes. "
On weight loss: when people say, “Boy, I can’t imagine how hard it was to lose that weight,” I say, “It turns out hard things are fun, and easy things aren’t.” I’m proud."
Science, often isn't. Never was.
& government makes it worse. Fat Head » A Sweet Deal For Harvard Scientists Helped Spark The Low-Fat Diet Craze: "The internal sugar industry documents, recently discovered by a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, suggest that five decades of research into the role of nutrition and heart disease, including many of today’s dietary recommendations, may have been largely shaped by the sugar industry.
The documents show that a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, known today as the Sugar Association, paid three Harvard scientists the equivalent of about $50,000 in today’s dollars to publish a 1967 review of research on sugar, fat and heart disease. The studies used in the review were handpicked by the sugar group, and the article, which was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, minimized the link between sugar and heart health and cast aspersions on the role of saturated fat...
The Harvard scientists were not only whores, they were cheap whores. The equivalent of $50,000 in today’s dollars to steer the blame for heart disease from sugar to fat? Man, you got taken. Think of all those Snackwell’s sold in the ‘80s – fat-free, so they’re guilt-free! Think of all the sugary products (Cocoa Puffs come to mind) that sported the American Heart Association seal of approval because they were low in fat. You morons should have demanded at least $10 million each."
"...the FBI became a major distributor of child pornography to catch people who look at it, thereby committing a more serious crime than the people it arrested."
Bureaucratic, legalistic, government, law-enforcement logic. The FBI Distributes Child Pornography to Catch People Who Look at It - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "The FBI used the website to run "a sting and computer-hacking operation of unparalleled scope that has thus far led to criminal charges against 186 people," mostly for receiving or possessing child pornography. In other words, the FBI became a major distributor of child pornography to catch people who look at it, thereby committing a more serious crime than the people it arrested.
Operation Pacifier is reminiscent of reverse drug stings in which cops pose as dealers to catch retail buyers, except that in this case the FBI actually disseminated contraband. It did not merely pose as a distributor of child pornography; it was a distributor of child pornography.
During the two weeks the FBI was running The Playpen, about 100,000 people visited the site, accessing at least 48,000 photos, 200 videos, and 13,000 links. In fact, the FBI seems to have made The Playpen a lot more popular by making it faster and more accessible. The FBI's version attracted some 50,000 visitors per week, up from 11,000 before the government takeover.
As attorneys representing the people busted by the FBI have pointed out, those actions are deeply problematic in light of the government's position that children are revictimized every time images of their sexual abuse are viewed or transferred. That argument is one of the main rationales for punishing mere possession of child pornography, which under federal law and the laws of some states can be treated more harshly than violent crimes—more harshly even than actual abuse of children. That penalty structure is obviously irrational unless you believe that serious harm is inflicted every time someone looks at the image of a child's sexual abuse. In that case, a large enough collection of images could equal or even surpass the harm done by a single child rape, so that it could make sense to impose a life sentence on someone who has done nothing but look at pictures.
Yeah, I don't buy that either. But federal prosecutors supposedly do, and here they are bringing cases that, by their own lights, required the FBI to victimize children thousands of times."
Trump - "Is he a racist or a con man?"
The map is not the territory. Reality tunnels abound. Con Man or Hitler? | Scott Adams' Blog: "Now things get interesting, because…
The anti-Trumpers have two conflicting mental models of Trump now. Is he a racist or a con man?
If Trump is a racist, then his opponents have to explain why being kind to immigrants in this country (his new softened stance), along with his outreach to African-Americans, fits the racist model. If they try to make the new facts fit the old model, they look ridiculous. And that’s what several of the pundits did. They went straight to ridiculous and discredited themselves.
The alternative to maintaining the view that Trump is a racist is the idea that he has been conning the public since the start. Under that mental model, Trump has never been a racist, but he played one on TV to win votes in the GOP primaries. Now his true character is coming out.
But wait…that’s a problem.
If he’s really just a con man after all – and not a racist – the left loses its best scare-persuasion. Racists are scary, but con men are not. We’re all conning each other all the time – also known as branding, selling, and negotiating – so conning doesn’t sound so scary. It sounds somewhat normal, especially for a politician.
You say Trump lied to get some votes in the primaries? Snore. They all lied. He just did it better."
Beauty, still not in the eye of the beholder.
Swiftian title aside, interesting stuff. Maybe it’s because white people are more beautiful?: "When Russian and Hong Kong coders, supported by Microsoft and Nvidia held a beauty contest judged entirely by an algorithm, 600 000 people from around the world sent in selfies and waited for judgement day. Oh boy. It did not go quite as planned...
Both MotherBoard and the Guardian are scrambling to explain how this might have happened, arguing that even though people did send in selfies from Africa, India, China and all over the US, the sample sizes skewed white, and because the AI was using a deep learning technique, this affected the outcomes. Another term for deep learning is reinforcement learning, so this explanation does kind of make sense. If the largest set of base images the algorithm is using features white faces, then whiteness will become a criteria for ‘beauty’, in addition to things like facial symmetry and skin wrinkling. When you consider a totally separate study that showed a machine learning to associate Black sounding names (Jamal, Ebony) with unpleasantness and white sounding names (Matt, Emily) with pleasantry, the case seems quite solid that seemingly neutral machines do indeed pick up and replicate our prejudices...
Is the Golden Ratio racist? If it’s a universal expression of beauty, how can it be? Consider, too, that markers of youth and fertility, such as blushing or lip color are easier to detect the lighter the skin. Beauty is a rough synonym for fertility and health. The desire for health and fertility is hardly unique to any one race. These may be uncomfortable conversations to have, precisely because we do indeed live in a world where many Black people are treated unfairly and discriminated against because they are Black. Racism is a thing, but that doesn’t mean everything is racist. It might be superficially satisfying to scream racism when algorithms prefer white names and white faces, but the issues are far more complex than that and quite frankly, interesting. Truth must always be our guide. If we stop caring about, seeking out and valuing truth above all else, we cannot progress.
Personally, I would rather live in a world where people feel uncomfortable handling truth but still do it, and I’ll spend my time advocating that we pay attention to truths that cast our own groups in poor light, and not just others. Sure, ‘white’ features might be more beautiful, but why are our kids so dumb compared to Asians? Why are Black people so astonishingly innovative in music? And given that musical ability is so strongly correlated with mathematical ability, why aren’t the majority of PhD holders in mathematics and Field’s Medal winners Black? These are interesting questions, worth exploring."
Pic via
Pic via
Don't be fat.
More nails in the coffin of the 'health at any size' lie. Obesity Is Linked to at Least 13 Types of Cancer - The New York Times: "A review of more than a thousand studies has found solid evidence that being overweight or obese increases the risk for at least 13 types of cancer. The study was conducted by a working group of the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization.
Strong evidence was already available to link five cancers to being overweight or obese: adenocarcinoma of the esophagus; colorectal cancer; breast cancer in postmenopausal women; and uterine and kidney cancers.
This new review, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, links an additional eight cancers to excess fat: gastric cardia, a cancer of the part of the stomach closest to the esophagus; liver cancer; gallbladder cancer; pancreatic cancer; thyroid cancer; ovarian cancer; meningioma, a usually benign type of brain tumor; and multiple myeloma, a blood cancer.
According to the chairman of the working group, Dr. Graham Colditz, a professor of medicine and surgery at Washington University in St. Louis, these 13 cancers together account for 42 percent of all new cancer diagnoses."
More and more women are now dying in childbirth, but only in America - Vox: "Thirty years ago, women died in the delivery room because of hemorrhages and pregnancy-induced blood pressure spikes. Now they are much more likely to die because of preexisting chronic conditions like heart disease or diabetes. "We’ve seen a big bump in cardiovascular disease and chronic disease contributing to maternal deaths," said Dr. William Callaghan, chief of maternal and infant health at the CDC. "Underlying heart disease is common, diabetes is common. We now have a group of women bringing with them into pregnancy their entire health history."
Part of the uptick in cardiovascular-related deaths is because more pregnant women in the US have chronic health conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, and obesity, all of which put them at a much greater risk for pregnancy complications. "It’s a larger problem than just dealing with women during pregnancy, it’s the health of our society," said Callaghan. "Imagine a [pregnant] woman comes in with BMI of 40, and she’s 24 years old — that didn’t happen in the past year, it happened in the past 24 years.""
"In America you can say just about any offensive thing imaginable, directed at just about any group or person imaginable, and you’ll be okay."
The Coming Free Speech Apocalypse: "Americans generally do not appreciate the United States’ astonishing free speech regime, particularly compared to the historical bastions of political liberalism in Western Europe.
The French penal code criminalizes “defamation” of people based on “their membership or non-membership, real or supposed, of an ethnic group, nation, race or religion;” in Britain the police can investigate you for criticizing Muslims; in Ireland they have something called the “Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act,” which prohibits “inciting” “hatred” against anyone based on, among other factors, “membership [in] the travelling community” and “sexual orientation” (Ireland also forbids speech that “undermine[s] public order or morality or the authority of the State”). Even our neighbor to the north, Canada, forbids people from “incit[ing] hatred against any identifiable group.”
America is not like that: in the United States, you can incite hatred against a gay gypsy Muslim bureaucrat, even specifically because he is a gay gypsy Muslim bureaucrat, and you will not be thrown in jail. In America you can say just about any offensive thing imaginable, directed at just about any group or person imaginable, and you’ll be okay. Add to that the strong protections for political speech that statute and Supreme Court precedent have established, and America is almost unique among the nations of the world in terms of freedom of expression. We have it good.
But that might not always be the case. In fact in the very near future American free speech may be sharply curtailed...
Some poll numbers suggest as much: two-thirds of Americans, for instance, think people who engage in “hate speech” are “more dangerous” than the people who would censor it. Among younger Americans—millennials—the polls indicate a staggering opposition to freedom of speech: out of 800 students polled at colleges across the country, more than a third believed the First Amendment does not protect “hate speech,” with a third also claiming the First Amendment is “outdated;” more than half believe colleges should have speech codes to police the speech of students and professors. Forty percent of millennials, meanwhile, think government should be able to censor “offensive statements about minorities.” Indeed, millennials appear to be the most censorious generation alive. As older generations die off or become less politically active, we can assume that more and more anti-free speech millennials will make up a larger and larger share of the electorate. All of which is to say: if we are worried about the anti-free speech ambitions of our two presidential candidates and the parties they represent, we should also be concerned about the American body politic, a substantial percentage of which is greatly inclined to censor “offensive” speech. A generation so inclined to muzzle its fellow Americans could pose an existential threat to the First Amendment."
"Anyone else find it weird how many complaints about cultural appropriation are made in English, by people without British ancestry?"
"It's only appropriation if you have privilege. Because Marxism."
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