Link round-up for 27 April 2014
Do concealed-carry laws cover this?
Here are a few more progressive moments from Frozen.
WTF, Evolution? is a tumblr that chides nature itself for bizarre animals (found via Mendip).
I'm not sure what kind of message God was trying to send here.
New York's first cat café is opening up (don't worry, the cats aren't on the menu). And hopefully we'll soon get one of these.
People actually fell for these end-of-the-world predictions.
Dog experts -- any idea what's going on here?
UPS and FedEx can't be compared to the Postal Service.
If you don't vote, consider this.
Here's a person calling PZ Myers a racist -- and a Buddhist who wants to nuke the whole world.
On job creation, numbers don't lie.
Zosimus the Heathen, a regular commenter here, has a compelling life story.
These people exist. Never forget that they exist.
Fred Phelps still has an admirer.
Salon needs to stop publishing complete crap.
A lesbian police chief's firing in South Carolina draws a heartening response.
Frank Moraes looks at the worst anti-tax analogy ever.
Driftglass looks at the mentality of the sincerely-moronic right wing (found via Mock Paper Scissors) -- and while you're in the neighborhood, check out this dissection of Andrew Sullivan.
Common Core is just the beginning of getting US education up to world standards.
Rightists talk hypocrisy about freedom.
Donald Sterling is getting some blowback for his anti-black remarks.
E-books are still a bad deal compared to real books.
Catholic leaders speak out on mental illness, but miss a lot.
Just two causes of death dwarf all others.
In this video interview, Elizabeth Warren explains how the country went off track under Reagan, how the 2008 meltdown happened, and what we need to do now (found via Ranch Chimp).
An open letter to the Pope reveals the stark horror that flows from traditional moral values.
Damn racists ruin everything, even an Easter egg hunt.
Squatlo Rant wants to know how the rightists keep finding crazies to idolize (love the cartoon at the top, too).
Lady Atheist reviews How Jesus Became God.
The Republican party suffers a power struggle between rich and rural, while Douthat frets that it will fail to take the Senate. In the long run, the party will survive but conservatism won't.
Being a cop can be tough, damagingly so.
The Christian Right doesn't dare use honest language to describe itself -- and its use of language against gays is downright poisonous (found via Republic of Gilead).
Oklahoma Republicans discourage residents from installing their own solar panels (found via Progressive Eruptions).
The "rape culture" concept does serious harm.
Whose side is Scott Walker on?
Religionists in Virginia go on a hunger strike against gay marriage.
Cliven Bundy and his supporters never exactly hid the fact that they're nuts, and it's dangerous to pretend they're not. Try as they may, the rightists can't disown them now. But you can celebrate Bundy's quasi-anarchism here. Brains and Eggs blog has a Bundy round-up.
The US is unique in how class influences attitudes about government.
A long list of prominent Brits (including Tim Minchin) lambaste Prime Minister Cameron's claim that Britain is "a Christian country".
England saw a dramatic drop in violent crime last year, probably due to a decline in heavy drinking.
In polls for the upcoming EU Parliament election, Britain's nationalist UKIP is ahead of the mainstream parties.
The G-7 tightens the screws on Russia.
Kaveh Mousavi explains seven ways Westerners can help ex-Muslims -- a must-read for all those on the left who are squeamish about criticism of Islam.
The nuclear deal with Iran is working.
Tehran is more fun that you think -- for some people.
Worms made the world what it is, and they confuse creationists too.
posted by Infidel753 at 1:48 AM
6 Comments:
The Atlantic piece was a painful but important read. Police officers are exposed to regular psychological trauma, and their bodies and minds pay the price for it. The trade-off for a safe, orderly society is that a segment of the population pays a steep psychological cost. Yet another reminder that our society needs to take trauma and mental health struggles seriously.
The Junior at Cornell needs to refrain from writing about rape culture until he actually knows what it is. For a start he needs to understand the Milgram Experiment, the Standford Prison Study, and the work of Philip Zimbardo.
Thanx for the link's read Infidel ....
I assume the "Loaded Revolver In Her Vagina" had the safety on.
Thanks for the link to that piece of mine - I certainly wasn't expecting to see it! Glad to hear you found my life story interesting.
Lots of other good links here too. The one on end-of-the-world predictions reminded me of one that didn't make the list: some run-of-the-mill prediction that the world was going to end, back in 1988. I didn't even know about that one until my maths teacher at the time joked that, according to the nutter who'd made the aforementioned prediction, the world was going to end during his class, so we could all spend the final moments of our lives doing maths problems!
Unfortunately, I took this sort of rubbish seriously for a long time (mainly because of irresponsible, fear-mongering books and television shows), especially the predictions about the world ending in 1999. Thankfully, I ended up largely forgetting about these during the '90s (mainly because, by then, I'd come to learn that prophets of doom are invariably remembered more for the one or two predictions they got right than the hundreds, if not thousands, they didn't), though found myself having a bit of a panicky moment when the war in Kosovo in 1999 looked briefly like escalating into something a lot more serious than what it ended up being. Had Nostradamus been right after all? Still, once that year had passed without incident, I found that I'd become well-and-truly inoculated against this sort of nonsense, and paid no more heed to any of it.
Ahab: I'm glad we're at least starting to recognize those psychological costs. The police need to have access to all the psychological tools we have available to help people deal with such damage.
Uzza: Any mentality which undermines the presumption of innocence for people accused of serious crimes has to be resisted.
Ranch: Thanks for stopping by.....
Blurber: One would certainly hope so.
Zosimus: It was a very interesting read, and a window onto some experiences rather different from mine.
The end-of-the-world nutters will always find something to point to. If it's not "signs" of the End Times, it'll be the Mayan calendar or something else. Meanwhile, they ignore real existential threats like global warming.
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