Link round-up for 20 March 2022
o o o o o
JOMO is my lifestyle.
Kink and aliens go together.
Rather bumpy flight, but the view was spectacular.
Our world has a new major military power -- some guy named Igor (and his pals).
Watch a series of tiresome events.
Labels can actually be useful sometimes.
It's a very useful gadget.
No man should settle for a mere suit and tie when outfits like this are available.
Genuine Christians draw strength from being of service to others.
Faces, faces everywhere!
This might actually improve their fighting ability.
When is a sacrifice not a sacrifice?
See a pompous ass get hilariously deflated.
Geography is weird.
Make sure your plane flight doesn't pass over any wedding parties in whatever country this is.
The harmless option is the most popular (there are way more people in the pink area than in the other two combined).
This romance novel exists.
Satan spiffs up his prison cell in this 1907 short by George Méliès.
Nice performance by Lindsey Stirling here.
Martha at Plowing through Life returns with some amusing images.
French cartoonists react to the Ukraine war.
Blogger Daal prepares to greet the new year 1401, plus a guest post on memoir-writing.
Unusual buildings here.
Here's how the Thermians in Galaxy Quest became so cool.
A horror artist goes to town on a Frozen coloring book. Be aware, this guy is good -- some of it gets pretty creepy.
Great minds often have something in common.
These stories are just silly.
Here are 23 women achievers in science and mathematics (found via Hackwhackers).
The Millau viaduct is a striking and elegant feat of modern engineering.
Evolvability -- the propensity to evolve -- is itself a trait which evolves.
See the ruins of a vast and sophisticated city which was built by non-human creatures.
Beware of these nine self-destructive thought patterns.
Don't listen to those whose goal is to harass under the guise of self-righteousness.
Some of these Russians are just bullshitting us at this point.
Being gay was part of this blogger's escape route from Christianity.
He robbed the wrong store.
Russian propagandists are circulating fake videos online.
Interpreting the Bible is pretty simple.
Stop being shitty to people for drinking soda.
The profile tells the story.
Christianity is a death cult.
Annie Asks You wants to stop Putin's war, but how?
Read experiences from customer service jobs. I don't understand how they put up with this shit without killing somebody.
Americans generally prefer to live in areas where their own political orientation is dominant, but there's a curious exception -- educated Republicans prefer blue cities in red states.
Don't fall for debt collectors' bullshit.
From Washington to Moscow, right-wingnuts flounder as their sad delusions collide with reality.
When Helena started to "transition" with hormones at 18, no one in the medical profession raised questions -- but when she realized that it had been a mistake, she faced strong pressure to stay in the cult.
Refugees arriving in Poland are being hassled by American religious nuts. Welcome to the West.
A cashless society would be an Orwellian horror.
This is not freedom of choice.
Every one of these assholes should be kicked out of Yale, since they have no idea what a university is even for.
Here is one of the smears Republicans plan to use against Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Fundamentalism demands uniformity of opinion, but it would be absurd for atheism to do so.
The stigmatization of sex work is stupid and harmful (found via Lo Imprescindible).
Should we expropriate the excess wealth of these oligarchs?
Groups that have betrayed their founding principles should at least have the guts to admit it.
Even aside from being spyware, Windows 10 is just awful.
"Diversity training doesn't extinguish prejudice. It promotes it" -- inevitably, since it promotes thinking of people as mere members of categories rather than as individuals.
The stupidity of these turdules wiped out a vast amount of evidence about Russian war crimes.
Here's a sensible program for the post-covid-19 world that nobody in power in the US will ever listen to.
A higher minimum wage doesn't kill jobs. Stupid spending priorities do.
These unspeakably filthy vile disgusting assholes exist.
Four of the words in the first sentence of this news item are lies. As you read the story, it won't be hard to guess.
Work-from-home jobs are getting seven times as many applicants as in-office jobs.
As Christianity made life worse and worse, it needed to make Hell worse and worse too.
Wingnuts are churning out a gusher of bullshit about gasoline.
What will happen in US politics as more and more women feel driven away from both the left and the right?
We can restore strict separation of church and state without interfering with Christians' freedom of expression.
Hey, American narcissists, the Ukraine war isn't about us.
This proposed Tennessee abortion law would enable lurid nightmares of horror.
The head of the Oregon Republican party has resigned, citing "evil" and "toxicity" within the party.
Trans ideology is just an abstraction to most people, but to gays and especially lesbians, it's a much more concrete issue.
The US faces a growing terrorism threat from "incels" -- guys who can't get girlfriends. Seriously.
A proposed wingnut law in Missouri would specifically ban abortion of ectopic pregnancies, which are by definition not viable and seriously threaten the life of the woman.
This is what leadership -- and a growing grassroots movement -- look like. The UK's mainstream parties will face the wrath of those they've betrayed.
At a march protesting male violence against women, several women were violently attacked by a man. Way to make their point, asshole.
UK health service policy led to the rape of a hospital patient -- who was then instructed that it never happened.
People in Scotland support protecting single-sex spaces by 61% to 10%.
Scientists in New Zealand are being harassed and investigated because they object to teaching religious superstition in science classes.
"No woman left behind" unless you know what one is (found via Dead Wild Roses).
Casualties in the Ukraine war have reached utterly disastrous levels for Russia. Civilians from Donbas are now being pressganged (a sign of a manpower shortage), and there are even reports of Russia using mobile cremation units to dispose of corpses. The Russian army is now trying to destroy Ukraine because they're too incompetent to conquer it.
Direct NATO involvement in the war would probably save Putin, not damage him.
Was this a technical glitch or hacking?
Putin is starting to cannibalize his own regime.
Tech-savvy younger Russians are breaking through censorship and accessing real news about the war, leading to conflicts with some older people who rely on state media.
It's time for a close global alliance of democracies against the gangster-states (found via Hackwhackers). India is the key.
More links at Fair and Unbalanced, The Honest Courtesan, and Miss Cellania.
o o o o o
My own posts this week: some Lone Animator videos, why Russia isn't really a superpower, and a new installment of improving words.
posted by Infidel753 at 12:13 AM
15 Comments:
One of the things that really grabbed my attention very early on The Republic of Gilead abolishes cash. So I wouldn't call a cash-less society "Orwellian" as much as "Attwoodian".
Thank you for including my post! Lots of great links to laugh with here...and some to groan at! The most disturbing link is the one about banning abortions even for ectopic pregnancies. That is absolutely horrifying.
I had no idea tires fell off that often. / I hope no ants were harmed to create that video. / Going cashless sounds pretty scary. / "The Trump Party". Good one! / Those "Welcome Back to Work" signs were not thought out. / The Wingnuts are taking this country back to the dark ages.
Thank you for including one of my posts.
There are so many romance readers that really would volunteer to be alien mates because of the alien mate romance books we read. LOL You know the kind of books I read. I found that hilarious.
Infidel, just a little bit of feedback on an article you included- the one attacking Windows 10. I spend a good part of my days at work in a relatively high end computer task- 3D visualization for the motion picture business. I have used Windows 10 since it came out. None of the other commenters indicated that they were involved in any computer-intensive tasks. I have found that Windows computers easily outperform far more expensive Apple ones. When I mentioned my experience, the writers simply deleted my remark. That is a sure sign that they know that their opinions arise from psychological issues, and not from any real concern for the abilities of their computers.
Infidel, sorry to harp on this, and you certainly do not need to post this, but I left a second comment about my experience doing 3D visualization with Windows and Mac equipment, and that was deleted too. People like this are not interested in the truth, any more than the dead-enders that can't admit the truth about Trump after all that has happened, and (in my opinion) they are not worth your attention.
thank you for including me - happy nowrooz :-)
Quilette might not necessarily generally be your thing Infidel but I think this might interest you:
https://quillette.com/2022/03/19/putins-russian-and-pushkins-russia/
NickM: I'm sure many authors of dystopian fiction (a genre I'm not generally a fan of) have thought of the possibilities of abolishing cash. But "Orwellian" is our best-established and most easily recognizable fiction-based short term for totalitarianism.
Martha: That's what happens when medical policy is dictated by religious cranks who have no knowledge of the subject and are guided only by their taboos.
Ricko: There are a lot of videos like that one YouTube, usually casting ant colonies with molten aluminum to create abstract "art" (of course those are nothing like that huge). They always make me uncomfortable since, obviously, the ants are all killed in the process. Obviously individual ants are mindless, but given how sophisticated these nests are and the way ants in a colony communicate with chemical signals a bit like the way individual cells in our brains communicate with electrical signals, I do wonder if the whole colony is a more sophisticated "organism". We might be killing entities more self-aware than we realize, just because their intelligence is so different from ours that we don't perceive it.
Those "back to the office" signs just manifest the management instinct for assholery. It's in their genes or something. They don't realize how it comes across to normal people.
Mary K: It was a good song, thanks for posting.
I know some people are pretty kinky, but their enthusiasm might not extend to dating some of the more plausible ideas of what aliens would actually be like.
Green: Interesting. I'm not really familiar with Windows 10; the only computer I've ever used that had it was a work computer, and the company IT people took care of updates, maintenance, security, etc. Most people who use it routinely on their own computers seem to agree that it's far inferior to Windows 7 (I know nothing at all about non-Windows systems and can only compare Windows 10 to Windows 7). My own objection to Windows 10 is mainly to do with the spyware aspect. I once had a chat with the company internet security person and asked her how easy it is to disable those features, and she showed no surprise or disagreement at my description of Windows 10 as being spyware. My impression is that that's simply common knowledge among people in the field.
That's strange about deleting the comments. Two on a Rant isn't a blog I'm all that familiar with, but I'll keep that in mind if I have the impulse to comment there in the future.
Daal: Thanks for the post!
NickM: Quillette sometimes has good stuff. I'll check out the link.
Infidel,
I'm runnin Win 10 on this machine. It requires a lot of whipping into shape but once tamed it is rather good. Except - One Drive - the cloud storage app that cannot be removed (though it can be disabled). It is a law unto itself. I spent a large chunk of the weekend fighting it and I'm now going to run back-ups old-skool. I've actually, just next to me got a stack of blank DVDs. It is not the back-up utility it once puported to be but according to MS it is now the default prime location for all the user's files. MS are increasingly treating computers as glorified access points to their "services". They are not alone but that doesn't make me any less mad at them. Yes, there are massive security implications here but also ones of convenience. To say I'm really fucked off with those wankers in Seattle would be putting it mildly.
It took me 2 days to get through all of these, but it was wall worth it! Thanks!
NickM: My impression of "the cloud" is that if you keep anything sensitive there, you might as well just post it publicly. Once anything is being done remotely instead of purely on one's own machine, the risks of security breakdowns and general glitches increase dramatically. I keep anything sensitive, and my back-ups, on flash drives locked in a safe. Let's see some hacker get into that.
Shaw: Thanks! Glad to have provided some diversion.
Still working my way through the links. It's like a box of chocolates, I work my way through it as the week goes by. Perhaps not a good analogy as I don't actually eat a box of chocolates a week, but offhand I can't think of a better one :)
I like to think my links, at least, aren't too calorific.....:)
But they are a treat :) I think that's where I was going with the chocolates!
Post a Comment
<< Home