mcity | Entries tagged with news

Feminist: We are under no obligation to talk about issues that disproportionately affect men.

Someone: So you don’t care about the fact that including prison rape puts the rape victim numbers for both genders in the US at roughly equal?

Feminists: Stop trying to derail and make it all about the menz!

News: Turns out Jerry Sandusky raped a bunch of boys and Penn State officials concealed it for years.

Feminists: This is horrible!

Someone: Wait, you won’t discuss prison rape, but you will discuss this? You are aware that blogs about prejudice and discrimination against men have been talking about this sort of thing and this in particular for a long time?

Feminists: Uh…

Someone: Which would mean that you somehow think that discussing men’s rights issues only becomes “feminism” when you feel like it -

Feminists: It’s relevant to us because Patriarchy. And Rape Culture.

Someone: -or it means that you’re trying to make a case about men and boys “all about the girlz”.

Feminists: PatriarchyRapeCulturePatriarchyRapeCulturePatriarchyRapeCult

http://www.lvrj.com/news/attacked-by-bees-only-way-was-up-a-mountain-151669205.html

"The bees were in my ears. They were in my nose. They were in my mouth," he said Tuesday as he recounted his ordeal from the parking lot of Lone Mountain Park, at the west end of Craig Road. "I was in a hell of a mess."

That's...not how I'd describe it.

New Scientist comment thread on a study about how Tasers are safer than batons.

What the study fails to illuminate is whether the availability of non-lethal weapons makes it more likely that cops will use force against civilians. Here in Pittsburgh, we have seen police shock a rather heavy un-athletic woman in sensible shoes during a political protest. Indeed, the whole category of non-lethals suggests a move from dealing with violent felons to a notion of the policing of populations, with the concomitant suppression of political speech and assembly.

They tased someone wearing sensible shoes? The monsters!

http://permutationofninjas.tumblr.com/post/18114790312/the-cost-of-child-support

In a nutshell, we’ve proven that paying child support is in fact a greater burden in most senses of the word than pregnancy. As such, from a moral standpoint, we can state that all arguments of rights aside, it is less moral to force a man to pay child support than it is to force a woman to carry a pregnancy to term. Let it be clear that this is not advocating forcing women to carry pregnancies to term! It’s saying it isn't moral to do either.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2118403/As-Susanna-Reid-bemoans-public-fixation-breasts-long-suffering-DD-cup-wearer-sympathises.html

After a while, I took to wearing baggy jumpers in the hope of diverting wandering eyes. In student bars, cafes and even libraries, meanwhile, I was constantly being propositioned by floppy-haired boys freshly released from boarding school.

Even though I had a boyfriend back home, the fact I had big boobs seemed to send out a message to them that I must be fair game.

Ignoring my far more attractive female friends, they would slip notes into my bag or leave them in my pigeon hole asking me out for a date.

I know I'm expecting a lot of the Daily Mail, considering it's the Daily Mail, but is this woman actually complaining that people find her more attractive than others because she has bigger boobs? I can understand the dislike of the unwanted attention, but to declare your friends "more attractive" as if that's an objective, universal assessment seems...odd.

But he scuppered the relationship when he admitted I ‘reminded him of a secretary’. By that, I assume he meant the clothes I wore were a little too revealing. But like Madeline, I didn’t see why I should dress like a nun just because I happened to be a DD cup.

Wait, wait, you "assume" that's what he meant? When I think 'secretary' or 'receptionist', my first thought isn't 'skimpy clothes'. Actually, I think of Harvey's secretary on "Suits", who dresses nicely but not in a particularly provocative fashion. And why are the only two options nun or secretary? Even assuming it's exaggerated, there's a middle ground.

At work, though, as a reporter starting out on a local newspaper, the only way to be taken seriously was to dress as conservatively as possible.

I invested in a selection of androgynous black suits and I kept the jackets buttoned up at all times.

Even that didn’t deter a room full of firefighters from giving me the once over when I arrived at the local fire station to shadow a night shift.

From the photos supplied with the article, the writer is an attractive woman. Yet she's complaining that men looked at her like she was, well, an attractive woman.

When I was sent off to learn how to Morris dance, I ended up rapping my dancing partner over the knuckles with my bells after catching him gawping down my top.

She considers physical attack an appropriate response? Would she have done the same if the gawker had been another woman? How about if a woman was caught gawking at a man?

I once even caught the local mayor taking a quick peek. I was there to cover a town council meeting, but his eyes were certainly not on my notebook.

Show a little cleavage and you are likely to be gawped at, no matter where — or who — you are.

So even if you wear low-cut tops, men should not even peek at one's boobs, ever, and it's entirely their fault if they do. I think I got it.

There are some disgusting allegations of apparent sexism from her ex-colleagues later on, though I wonder how she caught them "red-handed" lusting at her photos. It seems more likely that it would be some other color than red, if you catch my drift.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/19/urban-outfitters-tranny-greeting-card_n_1364589.html

Jill probably should've told Jack something like that before they started to fool around. If I had, I dunno, a piercing which may effect the theoretical lovemaking, or a tattoo shaped like the head of Satan emblazoned on my pubic region, I would consider it entirely responsible to inform my partner of such a fact. Hypothetically, I mean.

The funny thing is that the card just says Jack is surprised. It doesn't actually say he actually minds Jill being a transsexual. Maybe he's into that sort of thing and Jill wanted to surprise him. Happy endings all around! In more ways than one.

This photo is from a reproductive rights protest in Virginia. It's been making the rounds of Tumblr stressing out that a)this was at a peaceful protest, and b)it was in Virginia, not, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, etc.

( You may find this offensive. )

Social justice advocates and outfits like NPR use the incident to make generalizations about white people and race.
The shooter is Hispanic.
WHERPS.

Insert jokes about the Daily Mail here.

In the age of Lady Gaga's stunts and Nicki Minaj's multi-coloured hair, it's hard for young talent to stand out from the crowd.

Short of dressing like a bank manager, there's almost nowhere left to go...

Well, it worked for Tank Girl. How about shocking by not shocking?

I dunno, Kesha, wouldn't it be a nice change to go out looking like someone who could actually hold down a day job?

>flips off the show's organizers
>they have to apologize

WHAT IS EVEN GOING ON

GOLD: Don't believe me? It's all in the numbers. For a hundred years, there's been a
conspiracy of plutocrats against ordinary people.
JC DENTON: Do you have a single fact to back that up?
GOLD: Number one: In 1945 corporations paid 50 percent of federal taxes. Now they pay
about 5 percent. Number two: In 1900 90 percent of Americans were self-employed;
now it's about two percent.

This is dialogue from the end of the first "level" of the award winning game Deus Ex, and when I got to it, I was struck by the similarity of the terrorist leader's rhetoric to that of Occupy Wall Street. The NSF even claims to represent everyone, and attempt a little "wealth redistribution" by redirecting medicine toward people who can't afford it and away from the rich. Oddly prophetic for a game from 2000.

There's a talking point of Occupy that says that the rich pay less taxes than the amount of wealth they have. Like many rallying cries, it is concise, punchy, and factually wrong.

There was a thread in JREF discussing taxes. It went something like this.

A: The 99% of the US pay a disproportionately large amount of taxes. Here's a link.
B: Uh, one of those dozens of charts says that the rich actually pay more taxes than the amount of the wealth they have, while everyone else pays slightly less.
A: Of course they pay the most taxes! They have the most money!
B: It's not just "most", it's disproportionately large.
A: That's not important! It makes perfect sense that the people who have the most money have to pay the most taxes?
B: So you only care about disproportionate taxes when it's not rich people being affected?
Can you even admit you were wrong?
A: Stop trying to change the subject!

Kind of weird how people who are perfectly sane in certain parts of that forum will become completely illogical in that section. On at least one occasion, I was arguing with someone who actually knew more about the subject than I did, but was not thinking logically about the matter. Bizarre.

PROTIP: If you don't want to waste multitools disabling alarm panels, and don't want to sneak around, then just stick a mine on the wall under it, then lure the mooks to you and wait for them to reach for the alarm. Alternately, just stick it on the wall in a random corridor and let the guard see you, then run around the corner and giggle.

I don't really care.

No, wait, I do care, if only idle curiousity about whether the fangirls are going to be sad that he's unavailable to them forever, or if they're going to start writing Bomer/Tim DeKay/Willie Garmin fanfic.

YOU IMAGINED IT, YOU CAN'T UNIMAGINE IT.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/02/french-court-fines-google-france-500-000-euros-for-gratis-maps/

In France, Google stop charging 10,000 Euros and started giving away Google Maps to businesses (up to a certain amount of traffic), whereas competitors charge for theirs. They sued, and were fined 500,000 Euros in damages to the plaintiff, a competitor, for anti-competitive practices.

According to the comments, France does this sort of thing all the time. They try to limit foreign products while allowing French stuff free reign.

Here's an example of the competition, BTW. No, you have not actually been thrown back to 2001, it just looks that way. I'm betting the site's code is optimized for IE5 and Netscape Navigator.

Mind you, this is the same France that fined Google for accidentally collecting wi-fi info on its Street View vehicles. Specifically, accidentally collecting personal information. I'm not sure of the technical aspects, but the agency in question also asked for their Source Code, which is the equivalent of suing KFC over contaminants found in its food, and asking for the Secret Recipe.

There's a popular blog that has recently taken umbrage with trends in the cover of a certain magazine. Every year for a while now, this magazine has featured a "gatefold" cover. The type with one main cover, and two additional panels that fold out, with the "power cover" being the one on the left. This blog shows about half of them, and points out that most of these have only had white people on the cover, with the implication that this is racist.

Let me summarize;

Take a feature that has been going on for nearly twenty years.
Find only the covers that support your thesis.
Show several of these covers.
Mention in an aside, but do not actually show, the covers that contradict you.
Use a title that implies active racism, in a field historically known to be racist, but in a deniable fashion that nonetheless biases the casual reader.
Do not mention a single alternative explanation, such as sheer statistical happenstance.
Make broad generalizations about race in said field to close out the post, using a recent race-related controversy.
Never actually directly accuse anyone of racism.
Watch commenters trip all over themselves to talk about how you've clearly exposed racism, and swarm over anyone who points out the holes in your argument.
???
Profit!

One of the commenters even went so far as to point out that covers with POCs on the cover were "obviously tokenism". So even when they do exactly the thing the post complains they don't do enough, it doesn't count. I have a habitual distrust of any claim something is "obvious", because I find it's often used by people who are are too biased to consider any alternatives. When they say "obvious", they mean "impossible that it could be anything else".

The funny thing was, the blog didn't limit itself to the front cover, in what's basically the textbook definition of No True Scotsman. If no people of color were selected for the cover at all, it pointed it out, but if POCs were on the cover, it still doesn't count because they weren't on the front cover. And when they are on the front cover, they don't matter in the light of the obvious racism of them predominantly not being on the front cover.

This is like saying the NBA has biased hiring because most of its players are black, without considering other factors like the fact that a disproportionate of the men who try to get into the NBA are black. Actually, that was one of the most unrealistic things about "Hang Time". That, and the basketball court being only slightly larger than your average parking space.

(If you want to see the original version of this post, look at the HTML.)

MegaUpload is a website for file-sharing. Most of the files on it are pirated. The FBI recently shut it down while they investigated. Not only were most of the files pirated, staff members actively encouraged it, removing specific links to files when asked to do so by content producers, but leaving the files themselves up. It's the equivalent of closing down a store's front entrance and selling things out through the back alley. Staff even posted links to pirated files themselves; the FBI has email exchanges.

A Harvard law professor argued that taking the site down discouraged innovation, and TorrentFreak, always ready to seize on the flimsiest justification, made a post about it. Then Reddit picked it up. The idea, basically, is that it prevents people from "exchangni ideas", therefore it's bad for innovation, and they could use the same rationale to shut down any file hosting site.

I'm sorry, if someone is accused of embezzling, with what basically amounts to objective, slam-dunk proof, you don't refrain from arresting them because their workplace will have to hire a temp. If a local business is accused of money-laundering, you don't let it stay open after you start arresting people. It's chain-the-doors time. One idiot was even arguing that allowing the site to stay up actually encouraged productivity. Because that's what piracy does; encourage productivity. By decreasing the chances someone will be compensated.

MU was accused of breaking the law, and doing so in a flagrant manner. Ignoring that to make broad generalizations about what it might mean is a slippery slope argument. Saying they should've left the site up for the sake of the few legit users is also wrong, just like legit customers might be inconvenienced by the money-laundering place going down. And freezing only the pirated files, or even determining which files those are, is basically impossible without manually downloading and checking them. The millions of files.

But all you have to do is wave the "freedoms oppressed" flag in front of Reddit and they charge, regardless of the fact that this is an excellent example of a corrupt company, and that Megaupload is legally so screwed they couldn't get out of this with a defense team consisting of Johnny Cochrane, Perry Mason, Ben Matlock, and Phoenix Wright.

A guy smashes some windows in a restaurant with what's basically a long crowbar. Police show up, one with a dog, and ask him to stop. He ignores them. One pepper-sprays him, and he shrugs it off, likely from drugs. As the nearer officer tries to back away and draw his weapon, the suspect advances, and is shot dead by the other officer, holding the dog, who has had his gun drawn and pointed at the suspect the entire time.

I was having a somewhat intense discussion with someone who thinks the shooting was unjustified.

Among their ridiculous claims;

-Suspect was just "intimidating" the police.
-The dog could've stopped him.
-He had the crowbar behind his head, and could not have swung. (I pointed out, several times, that it takes a fraction of a second to swing a crowbar from that poisition, once in range.)
-The nearer cop could've dodged. (Note how the cop is actively trying to get away from the perp.)
-The officers could've stopped and disarmed the suspect in hand-to-hand. (Yes, at substantial risk to themselves.)
-UK cops never kill anyone. (Such a shooting was what kicked off the London Riots last year.)
-Using "Bobbies" to refer to cops is patronizing.

Most prominently, they keep insisting there are "other options" when it's been shown there were no other options that did not present a risk to the nearer officer. Release the dog? Suspect has time to swing. Farther cop tackles the perp? Suspect has time to swing. "Martial arts"? Unnecessary risk to the officers. Pepper spray? Tried, didn't work. Taser? Couldn't be drawn in time to be effective, even if the suspect couldn't resist it with the drugs he was probably on.

The funny thing is that they are constantly saying UK cops would've been able to resolve the situation without guns. They receiving different training and equipment and face different challenges. No matter how many times I pointed this out, they kept insisting that they could've done it, along with a few dozen other Straw Men. As evidence, they cited a case where a guy assaulted three cops and struck them with a crowbar, leading to the hospitalization of two. Yep, the UK cops are doing so much better.

The biggest fly in their ointment, of course, is that UK cops don't usually carry guns in the first place.

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=85064

For those of you who are not familiar with the character, he's the detective/psychologist star of a very successful series of airports paperbacks where he tracks down serial nutjobs, and was last played by Morgan Freeman. And one of the other people considered for the role? Idris Elba.

IDontEven.jpg

I don't even

Cop shows up at a ranch looking for cattle, with a warrant. Occupants chase him off with guns. Cop calls in backup from three other counties, on account of the place being 3,000 acres. They also used a Predator drone. Predator drone locates the family, and police use that information to capture them safely.

This has, of course, led to the knee-jerk comparisons to 1984, as well as the military. Except the Predator belonged to Customs and Borders, which is authorized to work with civilian law enforcement at their discretion, and spotting something from a flying plane falls under plain-sight laws, presumably under the same logic that would allow a cop to intervene if he was walking down the street and saw someone being assaulted through a living-room window. The comparisons to 1984 are entirely baseless; this wasn't the cops spying on people for funsies, this was the cops using a tool to try to safely apprehend people they were going after already. No one wants another Waco or Ruby Ridge.

Ironically, if you look at the comments of another article from the LA Times just a few weeks ago, some people are rather enthusiastic about getting their own little toys and using them to violate others privacy. And, of course, on both there are people who say to shoot down the drones, no matter who uses them.

Basically, the police want to use a cheaper, quieter alternative to choppers, and they might be approved for civilian use as well. There are concerns about criminal use and privacy concerns.

I wonder how long before this makes it into a CSI episode?

Basically, they said that the tomato sauce on a slice of pizza is enough to be counted as a serving of vegetables.

Note how the comments have the obligatory people who are twisting logic into a pretzel to try and make it fit into the original misconception. Specifically, saying pizza contains a serving of vegetables "means" schools can say Pizza is a vegetable.

Morderkaine wrote:
Congress is IN EFFECT saying that pizza contains 1 serving of vegetables/fruit. That is a HUGE difference from saying pizza is a vegetable. It also contains a serving of grains, possibly part of a serving of meat, dairy from the cheese, etc. Its just pointing out that there are some fruits/veggies in it. Not saying its not a fatty, unhealthy food, just that veggies/fruit is in there somewhere. Count onion, green peppers, etc that can be added and its closer to a full sized serving.

What Washpost45 just said is that saying a plate of fried chicken, corn and spinach contains 2 servings of vegetables is almost no difference from saying fried chicken is a vegetable. The meal contains 2 servings of veggies, but that doesn't mean the entire thing is.

And then there's the logical soft shoe over to "This isn't important! What's really important is that Congress isn't doing the job we put them in office to do!" No one making that argument, oddly enough, seems to bother to say what that job actually is.