I’ve always wondered why there is no promotion of me in my self-promotion encyclopedias, so this time I’m including a picture of me, looking shocked that yet again I have no online access at home and have to come to the office to work.
Here is more proof why Ian Welsh and other idiot pro-Putin Lefties are total losers: “While the European Union has joined Washington in denouncing Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the chaos stirred by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, Europe’s right-wing populists have been gripped by a contrarian fever of enthusiasm for Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin.“Russian influence in the affairs of the far right is a phenomenon seen all over Europe,” said a study by the Political Capital Institute, a Hungarian research group.” Yes, Neo-Nazis are such a great company for a deluded Leftie to keep.
“It is worth remembering that Peggy has very capably mimicked the “unladylike” behavior of Don when it comes to, for example, verbally abusing her underlings and then napping. And yet she cannot feign his supreme confidence.” Of course, everybody is entitled to his or her own reading, but I have no idea how anybody could see Don Draper as a “supremely confident” character. A “confident alcoholic” is an oxymoron if there ever was one, since alcoholism and drug addiction are coping mechanism for people with abysmally poor self-esteem and zero confidence.
A classic case of confusing one of the symptoms with a cause: “A laundry list of problems can come from obsessing over one’s appearance: eating disorders, depression, low self-worth.” This is like saying, ‘I’m coughing, this must be because I have a fever’ instead of saying, “I’m coughing and have a fever, these are symptoms of a sickness.”
A growing trend in dining that is conquering even tiny towns, let alone huge cities: “Hospitality takes a holiday at establishments that don’t book. In effect, these restaurants are saying, “It’s more important for us to fill every seat than to treat diners like guests.” Think about it. Who invites people to dinner and then makes them wait until the cook is good and ready to let you in, much less eat? By not guaranteeing tables, restaurants dismiss whole groups of would-be patrons.” Still, the trend is not going away and the foodie culture is booming.
The top 3 weirdest things people believe about the Middle Ages.
A really great post from a male feminist.
“All they had to do was help the homeowners. It wasn’t even a zero sum game. They could have helped homeowners and saved the banksters. They just didn’t want to.” Sure enough, given that the banksters are pretty much the only homeowners in this country.
And what did I just predict for the future of US politics? “Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is set to appear on Duck Dynasty when the reality show returns to TV next month for its sixth season. Jindal, a potential 2016 presidential candidate, defended family patriarch Phil Robertson’s right to free speech last year when he was briefly suspended by A&E for making anti-gay comments in a magazine interview.” I expected for the “Presidential Election Reality TV Show” to become reality in a few years, but here it is already.
“Apartments make up nearly 40 percent of new homes developers are building today — the highest share in 40 years, according to a new Census Bureau report released Friday. The share of apartments in all new residential construction has increased most dramatically since 2009, with home builders betting that people are more keen on renting apartments than buying stand-alone houses.” How come I never manage to saddle any trend?
Mozilla is dead: “Mozilla breaks our hearts, adds DRM to Firefox.”
These life-hacking guides disturb me because they remind me too much of life in the USSR.
And the post of the week: a very accessible and crucial explanation of the difference between sex and gender. As we all discovered recently, there are still many intellectual invalids who are unaware of this distinction.
Clarissa's Blog 
For Clarissa, Stringer Bell and anybody else interested in the topic:
LINK 1
A courageous and painful exchange (of letters) between Abu Sitta, a refugee who “devoted his life to the plight of the Palestinian refugees and is, perhaps, the world’s foremost expert on the Naqba,” AND Uri Avnery, who participated in the War of Independence, was an Israeli politician and for many years a member of the far-Left in Israel.
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1400258684/
Would love to hear everybody’s opinions.
LINK 2 – reading recommendation
“A Tale of Love and Darkness” is an autobiographical novel by Israeli author Amos Oz, first published in Hebrew in 2002. Oz chronicles his childhood in Jerusalem at the end of the British Mandate for Palestine and the early years of the State of Israel, and his teenage years on Kibbutz Hulda.
I believe that if people think of themselves as interested or are invested, getting the history of both sides is necessary. Besides, Clarissa read an excerpt from the novel and loved it, so she can probably second my recommendation. 🙂
At the book’s Amazon page are an excerpt from the novel and an article from “The Washington Post”, which are also interesting:
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My previous, long comment is awaiting moderation.
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// home builders betting that people are more keen on renting apartments than buying stand-alone houses,
As an Israeli, where most live in apartments and young people hope about being able to buy one someday, the juxtaposition between renting an apartment vs buying home sounds weird. What about people, who hope to buy an apartment? Isn’t it supposed to cost less than a house?
Have you heard about Lugansk? My mother watched news (we have only Russian channels) and all men from 18 to 60 are ordered to join the new “Republic’s” army, while Ukrainian army shoots at them from helicopters? What is really going on there?
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“As an Israeli, where most live in apartments and young people hope about being able to buy one someday, the juxtaposition between renting an apartment vs buying home sounds weird. What about people, who hope to buy an apartment? Isn’t it supposed to cost less than a house?”
– You can buy a condo in the US, but that’s only in big cities, where fewer and fewer people live these days. This country wasn’t called “Одноэтажная Америка” for nothing. Condos don’t cost in the least less than houses. A friend bought a tiny hole in the wall place in Manhattan for $1,200,000. And another friend bought a very small and cramped apartment on the far outskirts of Montreal for $360,000. I could buy a palace here in IL for $360,000.
” My mother watched news (we have only Russian channels) and all men from 18 to 60 are ordered to join the new “Republic’s” army, while Ukrainian army shoots at them from helicopters? What is really going on there?”
– That’s precisely what’s happening. “The People’s Republic” doesn’t have enough supporters, so now it’s forcing all men to fight for it. On the positive note, our petition to get the US to declare Russia a terrorist state has gathered enough signatures to be passed on to Obama. There’s nothing else we can do, unfortunately.
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// now it’s forcing all men to fight for it
And they go to fight for the abonimation they don’t want? How does it work?
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For now, the terrorists have managed to force a couple of hundred people to sign up. These are peaceful people who don’t know how to respond to terrorists who are armed to their teeth and who appear on their doorstep with Kalashnikovs.
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I really loved the article by the male feminist. Thanks for linking to it! (By the way, that’s a great picture of you. You look so pretty!)
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Thank you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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You look nothing like this in real life! Can I take a proper picture of you next time I visit? 🙂
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That’s how I see myself. Don’t argue with the artist’s vision. 🙂
The photo is actually from a video lecture I just filmed for my students.
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Heh, I’ve seen the life hack thing going around. I wonder how getting pancake mix in a ketchup bottle can be considered a mess-free experience. But yeah, stuff like the soaps stuck together survived in Romania until the mid-90s at least.
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The sex vs gender thing seems pretty close to my understanding.
Sex – a biological category, the vast majority of people fall into one of two discrete classes, with a very small minority that’s more difficult to classify (within that minority various divisions can also be made)
Gender is a particular society’s idea about behavior appropriate for a particular sex. This is a lot more flexible than most people realize though not infinitely malleable.
It seems very, very, very far away from mainstream current feminist understanding, which are very gender essentialist (and which elevate transitory subjective feelings above biological considerations).
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“Sex – a biological category, the vast majority of people fall into one of two discrete classes, with a very small minority that’s more difficult to classify (within that minority various divisions can also be made). Gender is a particular society’s idea about behavior appropriate for a particular sex. This is a lot more flexible than most people realize though not infinitely malleable.”
– This is the core of feminist philosophy. Irrespective of what the whiny Shakesvilles and Feministings might say.
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In general, too, the more you divide the world into explanatory categories of gender, the less you can come to grips with its complexities. For instance, one might notice a difficult person or a difficult text and then immediately resort to a platitude about gender. For instance if and when I express the view that if people do not like something, they should take the time to ask a question and/or give a considered response, some people imply that I am only saying that because of my gender. That is like saying that only women ask for intellectual complexity and engagement, actually, although at the level of petty minds and petty interpretations, to request anything more than one has already been given is deemed to be “whining”.
So eventually it becomes even impossible to say anything intelligible to those whose primarily mode of thinking concerns gender.
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And that’s precisely why I banned them all from the blog outright. They can contribute no value, they barely have any thinking capacity, so what’s the point?
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People who don’t want to develop themselves often have a cache of methods to get others to pay attention to them. These often appeal to our instincts to ‘mother’ or tend to something weak and pathetic. Sadly, one is never repaid for one’s efforts, as the uneducated do not SEE THEMSELVES as pathetic but as those entitled to attention and a pat on the head.
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And then they throw tantrums when denied attention. Some freak tried getting on the blog repeatedly by changing his IP addresses and making moany noises about freedom of speech. Such losers.
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Some freak suggested to me that if I didn’t spend every moment of my day educating the unwashed, I could be hanged from the nearest tree.
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On erroneous assumptions in some psychoanalysis on gender:
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That article about restaurant waits was so whiny! Jeez.
“This is a lot more flexible than most people realize though not infinitely malleable.”
Why not infinitely malleable? Most people who agree that gender is a construct always insist on ending with a caveat like this that betrays their true feelings about sex/gender.
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“Why not infinitely malleable?”
Because all the available evidence is that it’s not infinitely malleable?
Gender roles (like evolution) apply to populations, not individuals. Individual behavior is not the same thing as a socially constructed role.
So if I say that as far as I know no society has ever made its military (or equivalent) entirely or primarily female that’s a statement about a (contingent) universal in social gender roles. It doesn’t change the fact that many, many women are far more suited to the military than I am.
At the level of individuals there is vanishingly little non-physiological difference between men and women in terms of behavior. The percentages differ significantly though and whether this is a result of social pressure or the manifestation of different physiological averages is more or less open (I’d assume it’s roughly 50/50).
In other words gender roles are part of culture (again a concept that can only be applied to groups of people). Within any culture that’s large enough (let’s arbitrarily say a million or more) you’ll find the entire range of human behavior and values. But the percentages of people holding particular values or acting in certain ways differs across cultures.
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It’s a ,kind of idiocy to presume that people are, or are not suited to the military primarily on the basis of gender. Anyone can be brought up to be suited to the military. You just need to ignore their finer feelings, roughen them up and tell them to get on with the job. And you need to impose this attitude on them from a VERY EARLY age, like two or three. If you do that, they will be suited to the military, it doesn’t matter what their gender is. They may not be able to carry around heavy artillery, but their minds will be perfectly formed for obedience to war.
But modern people are very naive about what it takes and tend to essentialize things.
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So people TEND to be malleable, but you have to catch them at an early enough age. Not everybody can be molded into receptivitity to certain formats, even then, but some, I presume would be more open or susceptible to it than others, depending on genetic make-up.
I actually don’t see how a military state of mind could be reduced to gender. In my view, it involves being able to take in life in much greater extremes without reacting to the provocations of what one is taking in. If one’s own reactions and emotions are not attended to directly, but one learns to accommodate them and resolve them on one’s own, that is already a large way toward the development of a military mind.
I really don’ t see how this fundamental feature can be reduced down to a question of masculinity or femininity. You might think so — but I am of the view that those gender identifications tend to occur much later in life, long after the military mind has a chance, or loses its chance, to develop.
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I’m not judging anything, I’m making an observation that in no human society that I know of are women in charge of armed defense (or armed predations against neighbors for that matter) and I think it’s a fairly safe bet that there are no counter examples.
That’s a completely separate issue as to whether some women are more suited to military life (including violent armed aggression) than some men (of course they are).
The question might arise why no society (that I know of) prioritize the participation of biological females in violent conflict where the survival of the group is at stake. And those tend to lead to observations about greater average physical strength (of the kind needed in armed conflict) among men than women and the greater reproductive value of young women over that of young men (many of whom can be disposed of with no great impact on the survival of the group).
England weathered a huge gender imbalance after a large majority of young English men were killed in WWI and eventually recovered. I don’t think a society could weather a similar die off (or kill off) of young women (or the population would contract a great deal for a lot longer).
Technologically, humans might well reach a place where men and women are as interchangeable in combat as they are in office work but we’re not there yet.
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“Technologically, humans might well reach a place where men and women are as interchangeable in combat as they are in office work but we’re not there yet.”
It doesn’t bother me as I am out of step and now even one might say middle-aged, so I have no stake in what present societies have already decided about gender roles. I would care even less for anything more symbolically representative about these.
The point is, since I am one imbued with ONE of the most fundamental elements of fighting capacity (I don’t assert that I have all of the elements or that I am superlative in the military mindset), I do get to use it, informally and whenever I like. I also seek avenues to express it more fully.
The issue of recognition does become more trivial as time presses on the stakes are somewhat different.
I don’t really care if a society relegates me to a definitively feminine role, which is what it has tried to do for the first part of my life. But I do take pleasure in making it pay.
It’s not for any reason, really, just that I have a military instinct, and I like to bring it out to play. 🙂
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