Link round-up for 9 October 2022
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Here are some dragons with jobs.
Get off the road, you big dumbass.
Looks rather uncomfortable.
Women play outdoors, a ghost gets a job, and a dog fetches the wrong stick.
If only the great thinkers of the past could see all the progress we've made.
Handling a snapping turtle is a delicate matter.
Here's Heather Franzen's Halloween kitten story, in case you haven't seen it already.
This is what the Addams Family house actually looked like.
Disney does know how to do a spooky party.
He's making bone soup for Halloween.
Lady M explores a ghost town.
This hotel needs to be rebuilt anew every year.
Read the tale of how a wrestler won his freedom.
It's the best sound in the world.
Nobody wants to work.
Careless science makes sexy birds.
This house is ready for Halloween.
Which species is smarter?
Follow the yellow [not brick] road.
The town of Setenil de las Bodegas lives under a rock.
Explore a magical place.
Some nice snowflake photos here.
The Manitou Springs skeleton craze has begun.
In Bulgaria, you can do your shopping in a crouch.
Here's why the two hemispheres of the Moon are so different.
See impressive skulls of extinct mammals.
These cosmic horrors really exist.
Over-stimulation destroys kids' creativity.
This is what happens when you don't get enough sleep.
Australia's Great Barrier Reef is recovering.
You can see and touch Moon rocks that weren't brought back by Apollo.
Explore the world of the ultra-small.
Marthe Gautier made a critical discovery about Down syndrome, but was robbed of the credit.
In Polynesia, as in the Americas, European diseases devastated native populations during the colonial period.
Uphold Biblical marriage.
There's a better option for Islam than making women wear hijabs.
2,200 years ago, Xun Zi had things figured out.
Putin's birthday was this week. His heavy infantry will be no match for this determined Ukrainian warrior. The Ukrainian mail service moves fast.
Some issues with WordPress here (I don't use it and can't evaluate the accuracy of this).
Here's a collection of tools for overcoming internet censorship and surveillance. Put them on a flash drive so you'll have them handy if your government cracks down.
Natural selection in action: more Americans are rejecting the flu vaccine (found via SickoRicko).
Fundies believe Halloween is pagan and Satanic (well, it is!), but their proposed "JesusWeen" response is merely funny.
Read Alison Bechdel's coming-out story.
God has his priorities.
What an asshole. And what an asshole.
Not every religious person, but.....
Social media are designed to manipulate you into getting upset.
"I don't think we give that gift very much any more."
Bruce Gerencser meets another love-filled Christian.
No, suffering does not stimulate creativity.
A dating app for Trumpanzees encounters problems.
Nobody wants to use Meta's "metaverse", not even employees.
Some interesting stuff in this new Marist survey, but the especially positive news (scroll down a bit) is that 92% of Democrats, 75% of independents, and even 69% of Republicans have high confidence that the election will be fair and accurate. Some will likely cry fraud if their side loses, but they'll be in the distinct minority.
Some people might do better by postponing college.
Learn why the Florida town of Babcock Ranch came through the hurricane almost unscathed.
Is promoting secular humanism more important than defeating religion?
Bosses pay consultants to tell them bullshit they want to hear.
Five states are holding abortion referenda in November.
The Fed will fix the economy.
Patriarchy oppresses men too.
Biden acts to correct a huge injustice. Governors, please follow suit.
Darwinfish 2 warns of stealth forced-birth candidates, and points out why making election day a holiday wouldn't help much. Vote-by-mail is the way to go.
From 1978 to 2021, CEO pay went up 1,460%, while workers' pay rose only 18%. This right here is our central problem. Increasingly the value of what workers produce does not go to those workers, but is skimmed off by a tiny dominant class.
Housing speculation is driving actual people out of the housing market.
Democrats should embrace patriotism. The "progressive" fringe is out of touch with the minorities they claim to speak for.
Religious conservatives are
Putin has a high-profile propagandist in the US.
Annie Asks You -- to vote for Democrats.
"Rapture theology" is associated with mental-health issues.
This isn't freedom.
Here in Oregon, covid cases are declining and expected to continue doing so.
"Childhood is violence."
Herschel Walker exposes the abject hypocrisy of right-wing Christians.
Alex Jones is still being an absolute slime-bucket.
Yes, the covid death rate among Republicans is substantially higher than among Democrats.
Fred Sargeant denounces "a platform for misogyny, exclusion and hate."
Green Eagle checks in with the wingnutosphere and finds it as crazy as ever.
What do churches mean when they say "you are welcome here"?
In a single attack in Portland, the tires of fifty cars were slashed. The thugs are openly at war with the citizenry here and they seem to be winning. The city now has a net outflow of population.
The Satanic Temple is suing over Idaho's forced-birth law.
See how the parasites have fattened themselves on the blood of the workers.
My alma mater has become a cesspit of anti-Semitism. Every day I'm glad that I left academia.
The current map of House districts is actually pretty favorable for the Democrats.
The fall of the USSR let the US retreat from science, and led Russia into a weird mafia medievalism.
Ukraine has captured over a thousand armored vehicles from Russia, and even bought a few.
Russia got a bunch of drones from Iran, and is wasting them on civilian targets.
Putin's behavior recalls that of an earlier despot.
Russia's sanctions-imposed economic crisis is deepening. More than a quarter-million men have fled to avoid conscription.
Iran and Ukraine are both examples of people power standing up to tyranny, reminding us that liberal democracy remains the vibrant wave of the future.
The Iranian theocracy escalates its violence against anti-hijab protests, which are becoming a threat to its power. Women remain defiant in the face of death.
High-school students are joining the protests. There are reports of strikes in Kurdish areas of Iran.
Relatives of a girl murdered by the regime's thugs have been forced to make false public statements.
The regime, as usual, blames foreigners for its people's anger.
The hijab is not part of the culture of most Middle Eastern countries. Women had more freedom just a few decades ago.
Moroccan women demand legal abortion.
The Saudi regime is now openly helping Putin against the US. Time to drop the pretense that they're allies we should protect.
More links at Angry Bear.
My own posts this week: an anticipation of Halloween, Putin's nuclear threats, and a video comparing India and China.
o o o o o
There is some debate about whether or not Western countries should allow entry to Russian men fleeing Putin's mobilization. I think we should, just as Canada gave refuge to many American men fleeing conscription into the Vietnam war, a conflict very comparable to the Ukraine war. It may be that "bottling up" angry people inside Russia would increase unrest there, which is desirable from our viewpoint -- but those men's freedom as individuals is more important.
Since I read many of both, I've noticed a curious difference between left-wing and right-wing political blogs. In the left-wing blogosphere, there's a mix of men and women bloggers -- maybe not fifty-fifty, but pretty close. Among commenters, too, both sexes are well represented. Almost all right-wing bloggers I'm aware of are men, and so are their commenters. I'm not sure what this signifies, if anything, but it's striking.
posted by Infidel753 at 12:05 AM
11 Comments:
Not only is Halloween pagan in roots but so is Christmas! So is Easter! So top marks to early Christians for marketing by tagging onto existing stuff but bottom marks for history.
Only half way through but there is a lot I enjoyed this week like the huge skulls, the dark side of the moon, snowflakes, the tiny realm, and the basement stores in Bulgaria. Looking forward to the next half.
evangelical Christians..oxymoron.
great roundup as always - wordpress.org & wordpress.com are 2 different things, which unfortunately often gets overlooked or scrambled together. I love my wordpress.com blog - the kind where there's no special know-how needed to get one's blog or website up & running.
NickM: Yep, if you took away all the pagan accretions from Christianity, you'd be left with nothing but a few scraps of generic Middle Eastern mythology about a dying-and-resurrected god, no different than dozens of cults over there 2,000 years ago.
Lady M: I liked those too, especially the oddities about the Moon. Hope you find the second (more serious) half as interesting.
Granny: There are a lot of them around, though.
Daal: Wow, talk about confusing. If they're two different things, they should have given them more easily-distinguishable names.
One issue with that meme: Workers should unionize anyway; otherwise, your boss has absolute power over you, excepting certain things that are illegal. Maybe. Even if your employer offers $30/hr tied to CPI, any number of sick days, two weeks' paid vacation, a 401k and a medical package that includes dental, vision/hearing, psychiatry, and mobility aids, all of that can be taken away on a vote that you're not there for.
I mean, even if they'd banned everyone who didn't "criticize" Israel (or the "Zionist Occupational Government" as if that term didn't begin among neo-Nazis) and not just Jews that would be authoritarianism and antisemitism; those two go together. Hell, I was telling a story about a Jewish girl on the Bozeman Trail who was captured in a raid to a friend of mine (Tokala Clifford, the actor, is a descendant of hers.) and realized halfway through that I had to explain to him that the raid was because they were American, not because they were Jewish. He was just so used to antisemitism being everywhere.
Letting in deserters is a no-brainer: Propaganda victory and reduce Putin's numbers.
There are a few women among right-wing bloggers, but as you might imagine it's tokens. Basically an issue matters more than their own rights as a woman. It can be greed (Recall, we live in a time when paying taxes is seen as left-wing.) or prejudice (This has been around for some time: Exhibit A, Emmett Till.) which moves them rightward. Or just plain gullibility, just like men. We all know the guy who posts QAnon nonsense.
Oh, I would agree that everyone should unionize. The image is presumably in response to the kind of bosses who treat workers like crap and then act surprised when they want to unionize -- and there are plenty of those.
It is curious that there aren't more right-wing women in the blogosphere. Maybe right-wing women just aren't the type to participate much>
With Fox, I assume it's like the British tabloids Murdoch cut his teeth on: Women in British tabloids are "Page Six girls" or window dressing, hired for their looks and little else.
Obviously that's not entirely true. Like, during the moral panics of the 70s and 80s, Anita Bryant was a beauty queen, but the more faux-experts (Judith Reisman claiming masturbation was endotoxic back in the 80s, and more recently Dr. Laura) are hired for their ability to lie with letters behind their name, just as men are.
True, on TV women have little choice about how they're presented or even who gets to participate. But anybody can start a blog, or (in most cases) comment on one. There must be some reason why not as many conservative women choose to do so.
I seem to remember that ten or fifteen years ago there were more conservative women bloggers. Maybe they've given up for some reason, or maybe I'm not looking in the right places.
Great round-up again. I take my time throughout the week to go through these, thus my late arrival...all the time!
Thanks! I know these are long posts -- the internet never runs out of interesting stuff.
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