Thursday Link Encyclopedia and Self-Promotion

~ Clarissa

If you like cats, you will love this invention. Or so I think but I don’t have cats, so what do I know?

It’s kind of embarrassing to see people so in the grip of the Electra complex: “As filmmaker, Jen Senko, tries to understand the transformation of her father from a mild mannered life-long Democrat to an angry, Right-Wing fanatic, she uncovers the forces behind the media that changed him completely.”

Russian authorities are considering a bill that mandates fingerprinting of all HIV-positive people, including tourists. Words fail me to describe this egregious policy.

I usually read posts on Shakesville for their humorous potential but sometimes they are so offensive that my blood boils. This is an example of a post that turns the expression “rape culture” into a joke, and that’s very hateful.

And this is why, as much as I love stand-up comedy, I avoid listening to female comedians.

“Publishing has been historically and still is one of the most hidebound, exploitative, decrepit businesses in the world, right behind the clowns at (and members of) the RIAA and MPAA.” Hear, hear! And the worst are academic textbook publishers.

How can I not admire somebody who came up with the phrase “I really feel like beating a pillow into stuffinglessness”?

An interesting approach to to-do lists.

Why I would never want to teach high school.

I would totally use this phenomenal service on my trips.

A blogger ridicules the privilege check-list we discussed on the blog last week. Read the post, it’s very funny: “Not just anyone can use prescription drugs recreationally. Many there are who have to settle for such indignities as sniffing glue. This seems like an as-yet-unexplored vista of privilege, whereby those to whom the greatest advantages of self-destruction have accrued must ask themselves searching questions about how they attained their current misery and how they can redistribute it to others.”

In Spanish: An intelligent discussion of why García Márquez sucks.

NPR is bent on being stupid and “reporting” on things its stupid journalists know nothing about: “Most Ukrainians are primarily Orthodox Christians, and Easter is the most important religious holiday of the year.” And there is more idiocy from the same article: “I’m Rachel Martin. Ukraine celebrates Easter today as a divided country.” Ukraine is an invaded country, you fool. Has it ever occurred to you to wonder why no such division was in evidence even two days before the invasion by Russia?

A great idea: memorial library books. Absolutely brilliant. But only if there are still libraries with actual books in the future.

This kind of thing was super fashionable among us, poor industrial ghetto kids, back in the 1990s in Ukraine. It’s kind of shocking to see it touted as high fashion in today’s US.

“What say you, blogosphere? Is it hopelessly shallow to want to move for the weather and because you just don’t feel love for your place of employment?” No, it’s absolutely not shallow. The climate where I live is killing me, and I’m not being overly dramatic. So I’m extremely sympathetic to what this blogger experiences.

What kind of a hopeless Grinch could possibly hate Mrs. Doubtfire? Well, this one! It must be a painful burden to be so patently lacking in humor.

The new SATs substitute vocabulary with linear equations. And gives even few choice on the multiple choice. I say, why not just give one correct choice and assign high marks for those who manage to underline it without falling off their chairs?

There is A LOT of social mobility in this country: “It turns out that 12 percent of the population will find themselves in the top 1 percent of the income distribution for at least one year. What’s more, 39 percent of Americans will spend a year in the top 5 percent of the income distribution, 56 percent will find themselves in the top 10 percent, and a whopping 73 percent will spend a year in the top 20 percent of the income distribution.“

Published by Clarissa

33 thoughts on “Thursday Link Encyclopedia and Self-Promotion”

  1. Why Electra complex? If her father changed and she honestly thinks media did this (whether it’s true or not), attempting to analyze what process a few people undergo seems normal.

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    1. People over the age of 8 are supposed to know that their parents are separate human beings, entitled to their own views, opinions, lives and experiences.

      How would you feel about a documentary filmed by a father about his adult daughter and how bad Liberal media spoiled her? Would that seem very healthy or kind of icky?

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  2. I share the idea that anyone who gets upset about Mrs Doubtfire is profoundly unhinged or damaged or weird, I also share the idea that a sequel is completely unneeded by anyone in the universe.

    What gets me about the achesville is how anything but raw, unexamined feelings are discouraged as threatening or whatever. This is of course going straight back to the most patriarchical idea of all – that women are silly emotional creatures immune to logic or rational examination of anything (and far too delicate psychologically to be exposed to the brutish world of work and politics).

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    1. Acheville is a brilliant play on words. 🙂 I also hate their terminology. All of this “fat hatred, slut-shaming, victim-blaming and, the absolute worst, rapey and rapey culturey” is like a line of defence against any thinking or analysis. They are repeated so many times and without any attempt at analysis that they lose all meaning. And “rapey” is also extraordinarily offensive, in my opinion.

      I think that whenever you start using a term too often, it’s time to stop and try to say what you mean using different words. This is a great way to see whether the word still has any substance for you.

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      1. If we’re hating on ‘feminist’ blogs, then what’s up with feministing? They collected a bunch o’ money to ‘relaunch’ and….. nothin’.

        I have my suspicions about where that money went (or is going), but I’ll keep them to myself for now.

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        1. I didn’t make you for such a passionate feminist. But I guess after Mad Men I should have known. 🙂

          Feminist inch does publish posts. I have them in my feed. Not that they have been hugely impressive. I’m convinced that the best feminist blog of all is unquestionably mine.

          I also had no idea they were collecting money.

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    2. I actually hate Mrs. Doubtfire. Not for any political reason. But Robin Williams gives me the squicks. I can’t watch anything he is in. Watching him for a sustained amount of time is torture to me. To be honest, I haven’t even sat through Mrs. Doubtfire: 15 minutes is about all I have managed. So perhaps I’m a hopeless Grinch too. 😉 😉

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      2. Oh everything. The way he talks; the way he delivers lines; his humorless jokes when he does standup; his stupid impressions; the way he moves; the way he clearly assumes that he’s funny even though he’s not funny. Everything. I feel the same way about Jim Carrey. I can’t watch either of them.

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        2. With Mrs Doubtfire, though, it’s such a culturally familiar family structure that it’s one of very few American movies that I actually get. That’s why I like it.

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      3. There’s nothing wrong with not liking the movie (I have a very low Williams tolerance as well).

        But you’re not trying to justify your dislike of it for political reasons (to make yourself look good in your own eyes) or trying to attone for liking it earlier because it’s no longer ideologically acceptable to certain people.

        It’s the weird poltiical agenda around not liking it for reasons of ideological purity that’s creepy about the post in question. Normal human being questions of differing taste.

        full disclosure: I enjoyed it it at the time (probably more than anything else he’s done) and really don’t think a sequel makes any sense whatsoever.

        as for Carrey, I enjoyed him on ‘In Living Color’ (another tv show that could never be made now) and can very much leave him alone in movies (sole exception: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I loved)

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  3. Oversized sweaters have come and gone as fashion fads here too.

    I noticed that the “article” about income mobility had no methodology and the links were also free of methodology and show-all-work statistics. In the absence of such, I tend to treat articles like that as being pulled out of the reporter’s backside.

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  5. With regard to the woman producing a film on her father, I would say that not everything is necessarily an electra complex, although in some cases it might be. In my case, however, my father moved very much into my own psychological space and kept conducting raids on it. Consequently, he was very much in my space through much of my early adult life and in terms of the legacy he left even later. So I wrote about it. Clearly, he had not received enough nurturing from his mother in his early years for him to maintain a separate identity of his own when under stress. So I felt incredibly emotionally blackmailed to be his mother, and tried to deal with that as best I could. I would think it rather sad if people labeled my own state as pathological, just because I was dealing with extremely difficult circumstances at the time. Traditional wisdom is that if someone thinks they are drowning and grabs onto you, you should slap them hard to restore them to their senses, otherwise both of you will drown toegether. That can be very difficult to do.

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    1. If a person is an artist and a thinker, they can explore any subject in any format. But some childish “Fox News ate my good Daddy” flick is just not the same.

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      1. Yes, perhaps so. I will write a bit later about the shamanic void and how that affects people — because I think really, really truthful writing is in a way helpless writing, showing how little of reality we actually control. Of course most people try to defensively stage manage their lives….which is an attempt to ward off the shamanic void.

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  6. Now I remember why I gave up reading Shakesville.
    I, like Nancy P, have doubts about the article on income mobility. I can think of a number of ways they could manipulate the data to get different results.

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      1. Because I am trained in science and in statistics, and also “common sense”. Details matter enormously in the interpretation of such statements. What’s the denominator? Entire U.S. population, including children and retirees? When in the lifespan do these income peaks occur, and how long are the peaks? Someone who has been in the age-adjusted top 5% for twenty years and finally reaches a salary plus investment income level in the top 1% for the last two years of their working life will be in an entirely different category than someone who is in the third or fourth quintile for their entire working life, but happens to get an inheritance that puts them in the top 1% for one year.

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  7. “I didn’t make you for such a passionate feminist”

    Well I’m not a supporter or follower of much of any overt ideology that calls itself feminist now, though way back in the stone age I read and liked a fair amount of feminist stuff. I’m not that sure how it went so far off the rails….

    “Feminist inch does publish posts. I have them in my feed. Not that they have been hugely impressive …. I also had no idea they were collecting money”

    They had some kickstarter thing several months ago that was supposed to relaunch the site or something but since then not a word and it limps on in its eminently mockable and pathetic way (I read it for schadenfreude). Like I said, I have a suspicion or two about what happened to the money but no one else seems to be asking about it.

    “I’m convinced that the best feminist blog of all is unquestionably mine”

    I don’t think of you as a “feminist” (I mean that in a good way).

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    1. Just two minutes ago I read a post on Feministing suggesting a revival of the Wages for Housework movement. Among the really offensive ideas, this one is pretty close to the top. What jerks.

      The world has conspired to annoy me.

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  13. Remembered you writing about a veiled student in class:

    A court in Bavaria has banned a school pupil from wearing a face veil during lessons, rejecting her argument that she had a constitutional right to do so
    […]
    The Bavarian administrative court rejected her complaint in a ruling on April 22nd, on the basis that the school’s demand to remove the veil for lessons did not represent an illegal restriction of her rights.

    The wearing of the face-covering veil during teaching periods, the court wrote in a statement published on Friday, prevented essential non-verbal communication between teachers and pupils.

    Judges found that the right of the state to educate took priority over the pupil’s right to religious expression.
    http://www.thelocal.de/20140428/court-muslim-pupil-school-niqab-face-veil

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  14. I read a comment and wanted to ask your opinion. Can it be right or is it an utterly crazy idea?

    THE COMMENT:

    Having studied the neo-cons for a very long time now, what a heck of a lot of people don;t get that the EU is just a big a target for them as Russian, China, et al. Anything that weakens it is also considered a good outcome (“no peer competitors” and all that).
    Yes there is a contradiction there since they also want NATO as US ‘private army’, but no one has ever accused the neo-cons of intelligence or logic (empire that creates it’s own reality…..and so on).

    So getting the EU to cut gas imports from Russia is a major policy aim for them as they see it as a win-win (for them that is), economically hurts Russia and does the same to the EU. Perfect. And hammering the City of London is again seen as a win-win, since it aids Wall Street.

    So you will see (with far more undercover) tremendous pressure on their UK/EU satraps to self destruct (take one for the gipper and all that). Of course their own economic elites are not so happy about that idea, so there is going to be a lot of manoeuvring behind the scenes in the UK, Germany, etc. Could even lead to an EU leader or two being thrown under the bus. I mean can Cameron shaft the City of London without him getting the boot? Can Merkel sacrifice German manufacturing?

    And I always say: watch the ‘dogs that don’t bark’, where are France and Israel (both smallish but still significant players) in all this?

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