Links for Friday, 2/17/2012 February 17, 2012
Today's reader submission, from a couple of folks in Northern Europe, is another variant on the Accomodator. This one, however....well, it has SPIKES.
Comment: Click through to see the full picture. I don’t have to tell you that a blog called “Scary Sextoy Friday” is NSFW, right? Right.
But perhaps most critically for us right now: mass-produced, affordable, reliable contraception has shredded the ages-old social contracts between men and women, and is forcing us all (willing or not) into wholesale re-negotiations on a raft of new ones.
And, frankly, while some men have embraced this new order— perhaps seeing in it the potential to open up some interesting new choices for them, too — a global majority is increasingly confused, enraged, and terrified by it. They never wanted to be at this table in the first place, and they’re furious to even find themselves being forced to have this conversation at all.
It was never meant to happen. It never should have happened. And they’re doing their damndest to put a stop to it all, right now, and make it go away.
It’s this rage that’s driving the Catholic bishops into a frenzied donnybrook fight against contraception — despite the very real possibility that this fight could, in the end, damage their church even more fatally than the molestation scandal did. As the keepers of a 2000-year-old enterprise — one of the oldest continuously-operating organizations on the planet, in fact — they take the very long view. And they understand, better than most of us, just how unprecedented this development is in the grand sweep of history, and the serious threat it poses to everything their church has stood for going back to antiquity. (Including, very much, the more recent doctrine of papal infallability.)
Comment: There’s a really great quote in here that I’m going to try and keep in mind whenever I run across anyone who is of the increasingly hysterical conservative mindset – “The first rule of understanding apocalyptic movements is this: If someone tells you the world is ending, believe them. Because for them, it probably is.” It’s important to remember that even when it manifestly actually isn’t, the small world that they’ve fashioned for themselves as a safety sphere very much is, and there often won’t be an easy space to engage rationally with them.
Female teachers blamed for schoolboy slackers' poor results:
Research shows that boys lower their sights if they think their work is going to be marked by a woman because they believe their results will be worse. It also shows their suspicions are correct - female teachers did, on average, award lower marks to boys than unidentified external examiners. Male teachers, by contrast, awarded them higher marks than external examiners.
Comment: To say that this study could feed into some volatile sentiments would be an understatement. And the fact that there’s no mention of the name of the study nor the folks behind it (let alone a link to it), makes me summon the great and not-so-secret side-eye.
Foreclosure abuse rampant across U.S., experts say:
A report this week showing rampant foreclosure abuse in San Francisco reflects similar levels of lender fraud and faulty documentation across the United States, say experts and officials who have done studies in other parts of the country. The audit of almost 400 foreclosures in San Francisco found that 84 percent of them appeared to be illegal, according to the study released by the California city on Wednesday.
If the War on Drugs didn’t directly precipitate the Welfare State and the destruction of the American black family, why did welfare aid to families spike in lockstep with our prison population right as that War started? Well, if you’re familiar American drug laws, it shouldn’t surprise you that some 90% of those arrested under the Rockefeller Drug Laws in the years after its passage were minorities.
Sure, correlation doesn’t prove causation – but when you stop a moment and consider that marriage requires an eligible male, it’s not that hard to figure out why the modern Welfare State emerged in tandem with our War on Drugs, as it’s a little bit difficult to marry someone behind bars:
A black male born in 1974 had a 13.4% chance of going to prison at some point in his life, while a white male had just a 2.2% chance. And it’s not like this trend got any better, by 1991 the odds a black male would spend time in prison had ballooned to 29%, while the odds a white male would end up in the clink had only increased to 4.4%
And it’s not at all difficult to see how the reduction in marriageable males affected the rate of black marriages in America. In the decade prior to the start of the War on Drugs, the first decade of the Public Welfare Amendments, the percentage of married African-American women roughly followed the national trend and declined proportionally by less than 6% – but then in the ’70s as the War on Drugs raged, that proportional decline tripled to nearly 18%.
Anonymous Promises Regularly Scheduled Friday Attacks:
They’ve decided try to balance between protest defacements like the two this week, and sifting through the data for material that can damage firms and agencies. “It’s more than just delivering a message or speaking truth to power… we are trying to disrupt their ability to operate and do business or exist at all on the internet,” the same anon said. Jerry Irvine, a member of the National Cyber Security Task Force told the New York Times last week that attacks would become more frequent, describing the amorphous collective as “unstoppable,” because of the poor state of security online.
Comment: This is fighting dumb with dumber. Dumber, because of the context in which is happening, and the people you’re aiming it at, it can never be the return punch that ACTA is. The FTC? Really? Indiscriminate targeting such as this will not only align political forces against you, but you will become a handy scapegoat for increasingly zealous cybersecurity measures. You want to defeat ACTA and prevent the death of a free and vibrant internet? THEN AIM YOUR FUCKING GUN BEFORE YOU PULL THE TRIGGER. Sooner or later, you will rile up the wrong people – people who otherwise might have seen reason, but now won’t back down because they don’t want to concede to terrorists. And really, if you’re knocking over web pages for the FTC, you’re not that far from wearing that label. You assholes, don’t ruin it with your black-bloc style bullshit.