Turds In The Punchbowl

Or: why I refrain from commenting ... more often than not.

Reviewing Losers

Hi
xojane is for my tastes the most interesting, well written and topical editorial tour de force I've come across in a long time. So good in fact that I've been seriously obsessing: hoovering 188 posts in the last four days. It's either the commanding headlines, my self diagnosed OCD, or just some horny-old-guy research into chatting up smart (ie: hot) young women with big wits. (W i t s.)

OK, all of the above.

The warmth and generosity, the sensitivity and intelligence of "The Boss Lady" comes through every post. You are very much loved and deservedly so.

Thanks, Jane & Cheers!

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Vanessa-> Reviewing Losers

"Horny old guy research into chatting up smart (i.e. hot) young women with big wits.)" Ew. Really? You had to say that? Read what you like but realise that this isn't your 'research' site and we're not hot young women here for your education. Gross.

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peachgrenade-> Vanessa

And it was such a nice message aside from that. EW is right.

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Reviewing Losers ->  peachgrenade

(&-> Vanessa) You're right. My bad. It was a misguided (and clearly unsuccessful) attempt at "clever honesty." I not only appreciate, but also understand how the comment could be off-putting and inappropriate in this venue ... if I had been completely SERIOUS. The joke's not funny if you have to explain it, so here goes.

Feminist T(s) No. One

http://ocd.xojane.seduction.net Dude-Bro Cycle

I'm not sure if it's a hat tip, an assist, or an exprobation that Ms Filopovic gets here, but ...

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Dude or dude-bro: ten ways to tell by Jill Filipovic [The Guardian]

Best Of The Worst Of Online Dating Pickup Artists In The Wild [buzzfeed]

A(n)nals of Online Dating

I Am Going to Dropkick the Next Dudebro Who Tells Me Coercive Sex is Consensual Sex [xoJane]

Apocalypse When?

Detroiters often react testily to this kind of attention (as I do), even when it is done skillfully and with good intentions, as much of it is. Some of the criticism of negative publicity is just boosterism, as when the City Council denounced the producers of the ABC crime drama Detroit 187 for peddling the idea that there are criminals in Detroit. Others, weary of condescending criticism from outsiders, will defend Detroit’s reputation, or at least their privileged right to defame it, something like defending a bad parent: I can say anything I want about the old man, but don’t you dare. Ruin photography, in particular, has been criticized for its “pornographic” sensationalism, and my bookseller friend won’t sell much of it for that reason. And others roll their eyes at all the positive attention heaped on the young, mostly white “creatives,” which glosses over the city’s deep structural problems and the diversity of ideas to help fix them. So much ruin photography and ruin film aestheticizes poverty without inquiring of its origins, dramatizes spaces but never seeks out the people that inhabit and transform them, and romanticizes isolated acts of resistance without acknowledging the massive political and social forces aligned against the real transformation, and not just stubborn survival, of the city. And to see oneself portrayed in this way, as a curiosity to be lamented or studied, is jarring for any Detroiter, who is of course also an American, with all the sense of self-confidence and native-born privilege that we’re taught to associate with the United States.

Detroitism by John Patrick Leary @ Guernica

h/t Erik Loomis @ Lawyers, Guns & Money

Signal To Noise At Home (Box Office)

The nature and structure of belief systems is important from the perspective of an informational theorist because beliefs are thought to provide the cognitive foundation of an attitude. In order to change an attitude, then, it is presumably necessary to modify the information on which that attitude rests. It is generally necessary, therefore, to change a person's beliefs, eliminate old beliefs or introduce new beliefs.

Attitudes And Persuasion - Richard Petty and John Cacioppo

Like the novels it adapts, Game of Thrones has a sprawling ensemble cast, which George R.R. Martin estimated to be the largest on television.^[6] During the production of the third season, 257 cast names were recorded.^[7] The following overview reduces the list of characters in Game of Thrones to those played by the actors credited as part of the main cast.

Sean Bean is Lord Eddard "Ned" Stark, head of the Stark family whose members are involved in most of the series's intertwined plot lines. He and his wife Catelyn (Michelle Fairley) have five children: the eldest, Robb (Richard Madden), the dainty Sansa (Sophie Turner), the tomboy Arya (Maisie Williams), the adventurous Bran (Isaac Hempstead-Wright) and the toddler Rickon (Art Parkinson). The family's outsiders are Ned's bastard son Jon Snow (Kit Harington), and Ned's hostage and ward Theon Greyjoy (Alfie Allen).

Ned's old friend King Robert Baratheon (Mark Addy) shares a loveless marriage with Queen Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey). In defiance of her father, the fabulously wealthy Lord Tywin Lannister (Charles Dance), Cersei has taken her twin, the "Kingslayer" Ser Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) as her secret lover. She loathes her younger brother, the clever dwarf Tyrion (Peter Dinklage), who is attended by his mistress Shae (Sibel Kekilli) and the sellsword Bronn (Jerome Flynn). Cersei's oldest child is Prince Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson), who is guarded by the scarfaced warrior Sandor "the Hound" Clegane (Rory McCann). The king's "Small Council" of advisors includes the crafty Lord Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish (Aidan Gillen) and the eunuch spymaster Varys (Conleth Hill).

Signal To Noise At The BBC

Perhaps this explains why American television is constantly ramming British affectations down our ...er um ... throats. [ie: Piers ... and Simon ... and Stuart ... unbelievable]

And so you open Pandora’s box to find the seedy ingredients of British populism. It’s not just names, or performers and acts, it’s an ethos. Why is British light entertainment so often based on the sexualisation of people too young to cope? And why is it that we have a press so keen to feed off it? Is it to cover the fact, via some kind of willed outrage, that the culture itself is largely paedophile in its commercial and entertainment excitements? Milly Dowler’s phone was hacked by journalists cynically feeding the ravenous appetites of three million people who love that stuff, and that’s just the ones who actually bought the News of the World. When Leveson’s findings are duly buried, will we realise that it was the nation’s populist appetites that were on trial all along?

Original Noise

Lincoln, Lincoln bo Bincoln Bonana fanna fo Fincoln

Fee fy mo Mincoln, Lincoln!

Let’s Get Small

The word politico originated in the seventeenth century as a term of moral derision, and furnished the title of Matthew Josephson’s 1938 study of the graft-riddled Congresses of the Gilded Age. For VandeHei and his cofounding editor John Harris, however, the moniker was a conceptual upgrade: they originally planned to launch their Capitol Hill tip sheet under the plain-vanilla name “Capitol Leader” but evidently settled on the epithet as a better summation of their journalistic ambition. In terms of strict diction, you can’t fault their decision. In debuting a minute-by-minute chronicle of the permanent campaign by, for, and about terminal Hill insiders, VandeHei and Harris went all in on the enabling fiction that the seamiest features of human nature—which would find full expression in Politico’s quest to discredit rivals, to distort simple political aims and ideas with drive-by caricatures, and to float personality-based digital memes across the gossip-driven agoras of social media—were themselves somehow news, and therefore newsworthy. In the bald effort to define (and, of course, to win) a whole new race to a whole new journalistic bottom, the faux-statesmanlike overtones that came with a name like “Capitol Leader” simply weren’t going to cut it.

Come On, Feel the Buzz by Alex Pareene @ The Baffler

h/t karoli @ Crooks and Liars

If I was looking for a reason...

It might be something like this:

It is not fear. It is simple, compelling logic. We have two major political parties. Until that great gettin'-up morning, when purists on both sides of the ideological ditch manage to create workable third parties that look like something more substantial than organized unicorn hunts — which won't happen until we have proportional voting, and I wish you as much luck with that as Lani Guinier had — we always will have two major political parties. One of them is inexcusably timid and tied in inexcusably tight with the big corporate money. The other one is demented.

How Do You Know When You've Joined A Cult?

2. You’ve lost it

Yes, I realise that’s going to sound harsh. But there’s no point in sugaring the pill.

I’ll be specific: for most of our relationship, there were two things I could rely on from Apple. The first was that your products would work far better than PCs. Windows PCs would get viruses, they would be difficult to fix, they would break down and leave you tearing your hair out. The second thing is that although you weren’t necessarily the most innovative company out there, you would just do it right. You weren’t the first company to make a smartphone (Nokia Communicator, anyone?) but you were the first to do it well. The same goes for mp3 players, for tablet computers, for family photo software, for media management (for the first half of iTunes’s life). You were never about innovation, but you were damn good at execution and flair.

Not any more. This is going to sound awful, but I can’t think of any big product you’ve re-imagined well since the iPad, and that was almost three years ago. iCloud? Not as good as dropbox, and actually more confusing. FaceTime? Slick, but still pales in comparison with Skype. iMessages? Mostly annoying, particularly when it sends messages twice. Siri? See the previous point. Safari? Not as good as Chrome or Firefox. Safari’s Reader function? Not as good as Instapaper. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

Plus, my Mac simply doesn’t work that well any more. The contacts on my iPhone don’t seem to sync very well with my laptop. Aperture is extraordinarily slow and buggy, Pages and Numbers are a bit of a nonsense. It just feels like you don’t make the best software anymore. And it doesn’t fit together as seamlessly as in the past.

DEAR APPLE: I'm Leaving You by Ed Conway @ Business Insider

h/t The Audit @ Columbia Journalism Review

Superimposition

h/t Mish
 

h/t Scott Lemieux @ Lawyers, Guns & Money

Really? That's The Image You Want to Go With, Huh?

If there was any discussion, it might have gone something like this:

Are you sure this is the look you want for your training program? I realize that the on-line market for students is - well ... distinct from shall we say traditional avenues of appeal, but --

No, no. I don't mean to suggest that there's anything necessarily wrong with this young woman's appearance ... it's just ... the leopard print seems a bit suggestive ... on at least a few levels. Along with the hoop earrings and the general exotic and fairly erotic over-the-shoulder come-hither ...

Yes, of course I realize advertising is all about seduction but ... my problem?

Well, sir. I'm not sure if we're targeting young, middle-eastern women or sexually adventurous western males ... no. Of course there's no reason we can't market to a variety of potential demographics at the same time. I see your point, sir. Yes. Of course.

We'll have it on-line in our next ad-buy. Thank you, sir.

The Under-handed Matter

“We can’t possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us,” a senior administration official said. “It’s a necessary part of what we do. . . . We’re not going to wind up in 10 years in a world of everybody holding hands and saying, ‘We love America.’ ”

That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism. Targeting lists that were regarded as finite emergency measures after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are now fixtures of the national security apparatus. The rosters expand and contract with the pace of drone strikes but never go to zero.

Meanwhile, a significant milestone looms: The number of militants and civilians killed in the drone campaign over the past 10 years will soon exceed 3,000 by certain estimates, surpassing the number of people al-Qaeda killed in the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Obama administration has touted its successes against the terrorist network, including the death of Osama bin Laden, as signature achievements that argue for President Obama’s reelection. The administration has taken tentative steps toward greater transparency, formally acknowledging for the first time the United States’ use of armed drones.

Less visible is the extent to which Obama has institutionalized the highly classified practice of targeted killing, transforming ad-hoc elements into a counterterrorism infrastructure capable of sustaining a seemingly permanent war. Spokesmen for the White House, the National Counterterrorism Center, the CIA and other agencies declined to comment on the matrix or other counterterrorism programs.

Plan for hunting terrorists signals U.S. intends to keep adding names to kill lists By Greg Miller @ Washington Post

emphasis is mine
h/t sosadmin @ PRIVACYSOS via Falguni A. Sheth @ Translation Exercises

Facts of the Matter at Hand

"You Don't Own Me" PSA from You Don't Own Me on Vimeo.

h/t Juan @ Informed Comment

“Piercing” Objectivity

What about the other others? What about the poor people who dove under their beds, or hid behind the goat cart, or just ran until their hearts burst when they heard the detonation? What about the people hiding behind rocks that, to them, are substantially less solid and real than the blind explosive death from the sky? What about the other others tomorrow, as they walk to work, cutting their eyes toward the clouds, jumping every time an old car backfires? How can a society — even an impoverished one — hold itself together full in the knowledge that life and death is at the whim of someone at a distant targeting station, even more remote from the actual war he's fighting than the gods on Olympus were removed from Troy, since they occasionally at least visited the battlefield?

The Lethal Presidency Has Become an Everyday War by Charles P. Pierce

Social (Media) Disease

Wow. Really, just ... wow.

The Violentacrez clan seems to have walked out of a Todd Solondz movie, and a significant part of Violentacrez's mythos on Reddit comes from the details he's shared about his family. In 2010, Violentacrez hosted a legendary "Ask Me Anything" thread"—the same Q & A feature Barack Obama took part in last month. He was asked what was the creepiest thing he'd done "IRL" and delighted readers with a tale ripped out of Penthouse letters. "That'd be a tough call," Violentacrez wrote, "Perhaps oral sex with my 19-year-old stepdaughter." It was completely consensual, he claimed in the post, and went on to brag about how awesome it had been in graphic detail.

This happened over ten years ago, Violentacrez claimed. When his then-wife, the girl's mother, found out, she "got mad, then got over it," Violentacrez wrote. He says they were married for ten more years.

His current wife is similarly accepting of Brutsch's unsavory side, according to Brutsch. She is not only aware of his online habits, she's also a prolific Redditor under the handle not_so_violentacrez. She is a founder of the Fibromyalgia subreddit. She has diabetes and plays the online game Kingdom of Camelot. Violentacrez said that at home, the two would lie in bed together with their laptops, both on Reddit, him posting his porn, she posting cute animal videos and pictures of dolphins.

Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrez, The Biggest Troll on the Web by Adrian Chen @ Gawker

h/t Jill @ Feministe

The Only Man Harsher Than Moi

...Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the ‘bankstatocracy’ that has led to what the mainstream financial media calls an ‘unintended’ wealth gap in the consumer sector – between those who recovered from the recession, and those still struggling. Any suggestions that this wealth gap might be intentional is ‘suspicious’ behavior, according to the US government.

«Λ»unctuating Hedges' The World As It Is

003	Sheldon Wolin - Democracy Incorporated Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted... Politics and Vision Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought Tocqueville between Two Worlds The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life
014	John Ralston Saul - Voltaire's Bastards
020	Naomi Klein - No Logo 10th Anniversary Edition
023	Daniel J. Boorstin - The Image A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America
029	Stuart Ewen - Captains Of Consciousness Advertising And The Social Roots Of The Consumer... Pr! A Social History Of Spin
047	Houston A. Baker - Betrayal How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil ...
050	Angela Davis | Dick Gregory | Ishmael Reed | James Hal Cone | Yusef Komunyakaa
050	Thulani Davis

Political Speech Recognition

That makes the entire Inside Baseball discourse a giant time sink, a cancer, an exercise in “Look! Over there!” After all, when everybody’s talking about how Eastwood hosed the Romney campaign because he misused a prime time slot, nobody’s talking about Gitmo, Afghanistan, or 23 million unemployed, are they? (There are entire lists of what we’re not talking about.)

And wasn’t that the real story? That, for one brief moment, a speaker turned human asked some questions that both candidates, and both parties, find very unpleasant?

Two Cheers For Clint Eastwood - Lambert Strether - 09/02/2012

Unimpeachable Perspective

Any questions?