Category Archives: Play

Universal basic income

Introspection, Reading, Work

In which I ponder the cuddle-the-baby or ignore-him-when-he-cries approaches.

I’ve been reading a lot about Universal Basic Income lately.

What is it? Well, the basic idea is that everybody gets enough income to keep them just out of poverty even if they never do anything at all.

In the U.S., it would be the equivalent of about $1,000 per month.

Everybody. No matter what. If you’re wealthy, you’d probably just shove it in your IRA or something; if you’re not, it would keep you sheltered and fed and off the streets and off welfare. It would put a lot of social services out of business. Homelessness would plummet, for instance.

Would people “abuse” it?

Well, let’s consider abuse:

Is deciding you don’t want to work abuse? I don’t want to work. Working sucks! With the exception of a couple of jobs that stimulated me and were interesting for awhile, I generally have never enjoyed work. Nobody truly likes going to the same place every day and doing the same meaningless shit over and over (especially not while being abused by the public). Most humans do not enjoy pretending to be total twats for money, just to align with the inhumane dictates of some company that doesn’t give a shit whether you live or die and which will fire you at the drop of a hat no matter how faithfully you perform/conform.

Is using that money to buy drink or drugs abuse? Well, if you’re addicted, you’re going to get those substances anyway. With basic income, you’d get them with your own money rather than other people’s. Probably a measurable reduction in theft. If you’re not addicted, you might party for awhile, sure, but that sort of life is pretty boring, so eventually you’d stop and look around for something fulfilling.

Many people object to the idea of giving everybody money because they think it would encourage laziness and slovenliness, but I think those objections reflect the objector’s personality more than anything else. Just because you’d drop out and let your place go to shit if you got free money doesn’t mean everybody else would.

And I think a lot of people would drop out, briefly, especially those in the bottom classes, and let the pizza boxes pile up. Daytime TV ratings might explode for awhile, sure. But so what? Eventually, people who are not disabled physically or mentally will get up and go do something. It’s human nature. And with basic income, that thing wouldn’t have to be degrading jobs at fast food restaurants or big box stores. That thing could be going back to CC to get qualified to work in a nice restaurant’s kitchen, or learning how to finally write that novel, or volunteering full-time to rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. With universal income, if your circs sucked, you’d be free to reject them, leave, begin again elsewhere. You could find your correct place in society, eventually.

People in good, satisfying jobs would probably stay put. But people in shitty, demeaning jobs would probably migrate out of them, forcing employers to retool those jobs to be less shitty and demeaning in order to attract workers. Right now, and for the last thirty years, it’s been an employer’s market. They’ve lowered wages and worsened scheduling, benefits, and other work parameters to the point where most jobs below a certain level are really, really awful. I know this because I’ve worked them; if you haven’t, you can shut the fuck up. “Random scheduling” doesn’t sound that bad until you’ve done it for a year. Closing at eleven followed by opening at six followed by no schedule certainty for years on end will exhaust you: physically, mentally, emotionally. It’s bullshit, because it serves no purpose. We’re not at war; we’re not fighting for our lives and our way of life, we’re just making the rich richer. This is not sacrifice-worthy, noble employment. It’s theft.

Ignore-him-when-he-cries people think that by ignoring requests for attention, we’ll raise strong, self-dependent kids.

Cuddle-the-baby people think that by answering every need, we’ll raise confident, self-assured, unafraid children.

Obviously both approaches can fail and create selfish, self-serving monsters. Both approaches are imperfect, because they choose law over what’s actually on the ground.

I say the law was never meant to presuppose every possible nuance; you have a brain for that. React appropriately in the moment. And in the moment, machines are taking jobs, and a lot of industries are dying. Considering the lay of the land, it’s not possible to bring back all those dead manufacturing jobs. Not to mention that so many of the jobs that are left are poor quality and don’t pay shit. (If you’re working full time and still on welfare, something’s very wrong.)

It’s not like we don’t already have the wealth needed; if everybody had income, no matter what, we’d have a much healthier economy.

I believe that the more I learn about it, the more I’m very much in favor of UBI.

Handmade, custom, artisanal, quilted place mats

Family, Food, Holiday, Life

In which there are a variety of reversible, seasonally appropriate motherfucking handmade placemats!!!

When your mom is psychic:

IMG_20160923_161114

You buy a table and you think, damn, some placemats sure would be great.

AND THEN YOUR MOM SENDS YOU A BOX OF THEM RIGHT OUT OF THE BLUE, AND THERE’S, LIKE, DIFFERENT ONES FOR MAJOR HOLIDAYS AND SEASONS AND STUFF, AND SHE MADE THEM HERSELF, AND NOW YOU’RE LIKE FUCK SEPTEMBER, IT NEEDS TO BE OCTOBER ALREADY SO I CAN USE THE HALLOWEEN ONES!

Place mats

They’re like little blankets for your table, really.

Domesticating and such

Admissions, Domestic Goddess, Holiday, Wishlists

In which I buy stuff I don’t really need like an asshole, but at least it’s all used so I can say I’m “upcycling”!

Bought a table today! A used table! A TABLE YOU CAN EAT AT!

It’s a brown pub-style table and chairs set, and it’s taller than strictly necessary but I think it’ll be comfortable for the man, who is tall. The chairs are not-awful considering how austere they look, and not so high I can’t easily reach a sewing machine pedal.

I’m already imagining our having our next bi-annual games night while sitting at it, and it’s still 3 blocks away! (We’re going to bring it home when the man gets home from work.) Trivial Pursuit! Yahtzee! Cards! Dice! At a pub table! Brilliant!

New pub table + 4 chairs

I have also, I might add, in the past two months, bought: dishes, water glasses, a gravy boat, and candlestick holders, mainly in anticipation of setting a semi-proper Thanksgiving table this year. It’ll only be the two of us again, of course, but I’m so tired of eating on the couch hunched over the coffee table on holidays. It’ll be so great to sit down to a proper meal together on occasion!

You don’t think of yourself as “a table person” until you go over two years without one. I haven’t owned one for a really long time, but I lived with one until moving here. You just don’t really notice the stuff a table’s good for until there’s no table. Games night. Sewing. Filling out Christmas cards. Dinner dates. Wrapping gifts. Opening boxes from Amazon. Putting down the groceries.

I was, briefly, considering buying TV trays, but then I was just, like, OMFG, NERD, GET RID OF THE RECLINER WE LITERALLY NEVER, EVER SIT ON, AND THEN THERE WILL BE ROOM FOR A SMALL TABLE! So I took pictures of it — the recliner, I mean — and put it on Craigslist and it was not only gone in a week, but we got $25 more than we asked for!

Now that I have a table, I might buy fabric and make a runner, or placemats, or a tablecloth or something! Or, OMG, I could do seasonally appropriate centerpieces. It’s already September, I need a bowl and some pine cones and mini-pumpkins, stat! (While that is a joke, it’s also not. I’m totally gonna centerpiece it up for turkey day: I don’t even care that it’s common and privileged and totally something white bitches my age obsess over. Whoo! I even have a tray that’ll work for Xmas, maybe with candles and ornaments…)

Oh, who am I kidding. It’ll be covered in random shit within two weeks, and nobody’ll ever see any decorative centerpieces, and I’ll have to clean it off in order to eat at it, but at least I don’t have to eat on the couch anymore! Whoo! I’m gonna post the best Thanksgiving pictures this year!

Vintage Corning Ware pans are amazeballs and you should get some.

Domestic Goddess, Food

In which I wax enthusiastic about a very old product!

Even with shipping, I got a frying pan, a sauce pan, and two lids for $25. Which is a really decent price, considering you could easily pay almost that for a lidded 6″ non-stick that you’d have to throw out and replace in two years.

Well, I just bought these

Behold the P-81-B, which is the 1-pint covered sauce pan on the left, and the P-83-B, the 6-1/2 inch covered skillet you see on the right! The “P” series ran from 1958 to 1972, so these pans are 44 years old at the very youngest, and they could easily be older than I am by a decade.

These things are awesome! They heat up just as fast as cheap non-stick pans, and while they’re not non-stick per se, you can fry eggs and hamburgers in them with a little bit of butter and nothing sticks!

They’re also a pure and angelic white, so they look antiseptic as fuck. They scrub clean with remarkable ease.

Making dinner

They’re small and they have lids. I find that I’m cooking in them over much lower flame than I would with bigger pans, and of course lids keep the heat in too. Today I’ve fried a couple of eggs and a hamburger over very low flame in not much time at all. So they’re unexpectedly fuel-economical. Who knew!

And while you can’t buy either of these particular pieces new anymore, Corning Ware still offers some of the casseroles in this pattern. (I totally want them, and no doubt they’re worth every penny of the retail price, but if I do buy them I’ll probably buy them used because I’m cheap. You can almost see why so many companies went for planned obsolescence rather than quality when you contemplate that Corning Ware’s 50-year-old pieces are viably competing with their brand-new products.)

I love their sizes; great for cooking for one or two. (Not to mention great for not cooking far too much food every time you step up to the stove.) I’m not really sure why pan sizes have grown and grown when family sizes are smaller; I do know that when I was learning to cook I always made far too much food because the pots and pans were so big.

Knowing that the sauce pan holds exactly enough soup for two small bowlsful makes me happy.

I’m pretty sure there are a couple of these in my g’ma’s kitchen, but I didn’t cook with them much (beyond occasionally using one to put something in the toaster oven). I always used the small non-stick to fry or scramble eggs rather than the Corning Ware frying pan; habit, I suppose. Plus they look like they should stick, after years of using Teflon-coated pans, but they don’t.

I think between these and a decent cast iron pan or two, a person could easily give up cheap, disposable non-stick pans entirely! (I can’t speak for high-dollar non-stick cookware, because I’ve never had any.)

I love these pans!

Link roundup

Nerd, Soapbox, Social, Web

In which it’s so political out there that it’s just better if I bitch here, where nobody but, like, five people and a couple of bots will ever see it.

This article just showed up in my timeline. Being a woman, I clicked on it.

https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/the-reality-that-all-women-experience-that-men-dont-know-about-kelly-jrmk/

Oh. My. Fucking. GOD. Don’t click through. It’s awful. Let me summarize it for you:

“Men have libidos and they look at us, beginning as soon as we go through puberty. We’re totally TRAUMATIZED by this and expect to be protected from ever being looked at or desired, ever. Because we’re inherently weak victims by nature.”

I am so sick of this idiot “narrative” that can’t tell the goddamned difference between evil (murderers) and horniness (young males), between actual danger (ISIL) and vague interest (a guy who looks at you), and which remains so completely convinced of its intrinsic worth and right to a voice that its adherents complaint-blog about men everywhere, constantly, all the time.

Sometimes it’s not even about “sexual harassment” (aka being human in public); they’ll blog about males simply being nice to them, because their victim-as-identity mentality is so deeply embedded in their psyches that they can’t tell the difference between a male with bad manners and a male that is trying to be helpful. Literally.

Any time a male interacts with them and doesn’t cower and grovel and spew “feminist” platitudes, it’s “harassment.” And if a man tries to help them, they’re instantly pissed off and insulted because they don’t need help from men and are perfectly capable, and being offered assistance is an insult!

Ladies: you’re not “feminists.” Feminism died before most of you were born. Actual feminists fought for equality and had legitimate academic clout. “Feminism” has degraded into a male-hating pogrom and it’s ugly, unbalanced, ignorant, privileged, immature, selfish, sexist, and wrong.

I loathe this article. It’s simple, petulant, and privileged, and sounds like it was written by an indoctrinated twelve-year-old still struggling with puberty and the measurable, demonstrable fact that boys and girls are different.

If I were more attached to my sex than my humanity, I’d be embarrassed by it, and go on apologetically about how most women aren’t nearly half as stupid, self-obsessed, and immature as the author appears to be, and I’d say that most of us are quite capable of rational thought and can tell the difference between being looked at and the legal definition of harassment.

Except judging by the massive volume of complaint-blogs about males and re-posts by women, apparently it’s not true.

This kind of thing isn’t groundbreaking, it isn’t useful, and it isn’t feminism. It’s privileged whining as a wrapper around full-on hatred of the masculine. It’s sexism.

I can’t believe how many otherwise intelligent women are applauding this article. Wives of husbands, mothers of sons! And if they’re instilling this kind loathing into their boys, well, it’s no wonder they’re all transgender. (Three of the women who reposted the link are mothers of boys who want to be girls.)

+~+~+~
This was posted, in earnest I believe, on Facebook yesterday:

http://mysteriousearth.net/2016/07/17/smithsonian-admits-to-destruction-of-thousands-of-giant-human-skeletons-in-early-1900%E2%80%B2s/

Really? Are you not even gonna use any part of that university education you paid tens of thousands of dollars for? I won’t even bother to say that both Nat Geo and Snopes say “hoax,” because it’s obvious.

Filed under chemtrails. Ye gods, people.

+~+~+~
http://www.salon.com/2016/03/03/my_gen_x_hillary_problem_i_know_why_we_dont_like_clinton/

A more mature rant, but still about the same shit: ZOMG SEXISM IS EVERYWHERE, ENTRENCHED AND RAMPANT!

Please. You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Women abandoned tech because they didn’t want to be there. I personally spent my career — what there was of it — in tech. Women don’t like tech for two reasons: they don’t like being on call all night because they have families to deal with, and nerds expect them to be competent. The ones who aren’t competent find that using feminine wiles on (most) nerds is an epic fail, because (most) nerds either don’t notice or don’t care but they definitely know you have no idea how to configure a border router or do subnetting in your head.

Being annoyed once in awhile by an idiot who happens to be male and says dumb shit does not equal rampant, entrenched sexism. The rest of your male employees and clients were capable of behaving normally, but the occasional reject proves “sexism” to you? Really?

Sexism is “prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination on the basis of sex.” It’s when someone says, “I do not believe you are capable of doing this because of your chromosomes.” Not getting a job in the engineering department because you don’t know how to subnet is not sexism.

40

‘And then I turned 40 in the office,’ and confused sexism with ageism. Any idea how many males get let go because they’re “old”? Our culture is obsessed with youth.

And let us not forget that our culture undervalues motherhood as a whole and half of “our culture” is voting women who haven’t bothered to do shit about it. If you chose housewifery over a job that undervalued home and family and valued only itself, that was capitalism, not sexism.

It’s not men who say that making money at work is so important that it must take precedence over caregiving, it’s all of us. If women wanted it fixed, they’d get it fixed. Our society in general feels, if pay rates are anything to go by, that being the CEO of a successful corporation is valuable, being a doctor is less valuable, being a teacher is even less valuable, and being a mother is worth nothing at all.

Don’t like it? FIX IT, LADIES. YOU HAVE THE VOTE.

For the first time in my adult life I didn’t want to smoke!

Admissions, Gadgets, Health, , ,

In which there’s good news.

We flew to DC last Thursday so I could see Amma.

We had a very short layover in Milwaukee, then got to Reagan, walked to the hotel shuttle stand, and waited for the bus. Got to the hotel, went out to eat on a cute little street a few blocks away, and walked back to our hotel around midnight. Only when back in our room after having been in Arlington for hours did I bother to unpack, assemble, fill, and use my ecig device, and then only briefly before going to bed.

The next day, I realized that in all that travel I never once wanted to smoke. I thought about smoking in a vague sort of way when we were waiting at the bus stand; I thought, “A few months ago, I’d be considering smoking now, even though it’s probably not allowed. I’d probably cross the street and stand over there and suck down a cig and hope the shuttle didn’t come until I was done.”

Every previous layover on every previous flight I’ve ever taken, I’ve furiously crunched times in my head and if there was enough, I rushed to smoke. Is there a smoking lounge in this airport? How far is it from my gate? Can I get there and back in time? Will I miss my flight? If not, do I have enough time to get all the way outside, smoke, and get back in through security and still make my connection?

And on arrival, the same thing: where am I meeting my ride? Where’s the smoking area? Do I have enough time to smoke? HOW DO I GET OUT OF THIS PLACE SO I CAN SMOKE?

It was really nice, not giving a shit about smoking! I didn’t even remember that I was a(n ex) smoker during the Milwaukee layover; past me would have been infuriated that it was so short and that I’d been denied the opportunity to try to get a cig in, but current me didn’t even think about it.

Same on the trip home: instead of standing outside, sucking down a few cigs while waiting for the cab back to the airport, I just sat inside the hotel lobby by the doors to the taxi stand, waiting like a normal person. Didn’t think about smoking at all during the two-hour layover, didn’t think about it when we arrived back in MSP, didn’t have to smoke in the parking garage before getting in the truck to drive back to the apartment, didn’t have to smoke when we got home. (Did have a lovely chain-vape later, before finally keeling over from the exhaustion of having been up all night, though.)

Vape

Having never travelled without having to figure out how and where and when to smoke before in my adult life, the experience was really wonderful. No cravings, no anxiety about how and where to get my fix in. No simmering rage at the constant non-smoking announcements and signage one is endlessly subjected to in airports and on airplanes.

Vaping continues to be a fantastic solution for me. I have to admit to being quite surprised at how quickly it has broken all the habits and thought patterns associated with being a smoker. When I leave the house now, I just leave and don’t automatically check my bag for a pack of cigs and a lighter. (I rarely take my mod with me when I go out, unless I’m going to the ecig store for liquid or coils, and only then because it’s fun to vape inside the store itself since it’s allowed.) I have 31 years of smoking habits to overcome, but they just seem to be going away on their own without stress or even effort. I didn’t even think about smoking while we were traveling! I was not annoyed, I did not have a nic fit! Not even a little!

I have yet to go an entire day without vaping at all, since quitting smoking 62 days ago, but while on some days I do start vaping earlier than I ever smoked (I’ve never been a morning smoker; I always did all my smoking from late afternoon on), or I indulge in a few hours of “chain vaping,” on other days I just use it for a few minutes a few times in the evenings. It continues to be much cheaper than smoking, because even though a 30ml bottle of liquid is twenty bucks, it lasts many more days than the same value of cigarettes ever did. My lung health is much, much better. I don’t clear my throat all the time, I don’t have weird snot, and my voice doesn’t sound like that of a smoker, either, which is a cool benefit.

While I suspect that Scott doesn’t like the smell (he’s too nice to say, really), it’s very mild and leaves virtually no permanent odor. I’ve tested this by vaping for a bit, then going out to the corner store and returning with a fresh nose. One gets the impression that there was maybe some weak-ass incense burnt a few days ago, but that’s about it (and as we do burn incense fairly regularly, sometimes I can’t tell if it’s that or the vapor residue). For awhile I had a little bowlful of used coils sitting around, but that did smell bad, so I got rid of them; and I now keep the bottles of liquids in a plastic bag because the combination of their various scents is gross, but in general I see no reason not to vape indoors.

My clothes, hair, skin, pockets, and purse don’t smell like cigarettes, butts, or smoke anymore. It’s great! Added benefit: I’m no longer terrified of catching a cold and ending up in an oxygen tent with a lung infection.

Like I’ve said before, it’s probably not a zero-harm activity, but compared to smoking cigarettes the benefits of vaping are enormous.

Sort of a deluxe cheese crispi sort of a thing

Food, Recipes, Reference, , , ,

In which there’s a recipe.

I’ve been eating these all week.

IMG_20160623_175326_kindlephoto-297278584

They’re really just bean tostadas, but you should make some anyway because they’re fantastic.

This is a strange but delicious guacamole. Make some. (Click on the pic for the recipe.)

Cottage Cheese Guacamole

Now put it in the fridge to chill.

Put some grated cheese — I used a Mexican three-cheese blend — on a fried corn tortilla/tostada shell.

IMG_20160623_174836

Nuke until melted. I do mine for 33 seconds.

IMG_20160623_175058

Top with, in this order: bubbling-hot refried beans (black, ideally, but I had regular refried pinto beans on hand), diced onions, salsa or hot sauce, shredded lettuce, a dollop of the cottage cheese guacamole, and diced tomatoes.

Eat your tostadas.

IMG_20160623_175305

Here’s a salsa recipe, if you want one. (Click on the pic for the recipe.)

Salsa Roja Recipe

Protesting the fossil fuel industry, are you?

Blurbs, Soapbox, Social, Web, Whining

In which there’s some perspective.

Oil is in everything. Oil is in every single thing you ever use, touch, or buy.

How does food get to the store or farmer’s market? In trucks that are running on gas. How do you carry your food home? In plastic bags. How do you store your leftovers? In plastic containers in plastic fridge interiors sitting on linoleum, laminate wood, or carpeted floors, all three of which are petroleum products.

Your prescription lenses are a petroleum product, your window blinds are a petroleum product, your brassiere is a petroleum product, and every board and nail your house was built with were made with and transported to your property on equipments burning petroleum products.

Your toothbrush is a petroleum product, the materials used to make your shoes and coats are petroleum products, and the plastic clothes hangars in your front coat closet are petroleum products. Nearly all your personal care items are in plastic containers or contain petroleum products.

2016-06-20

It’s easy to get mad about spills and pipelines and fracking, but we have to remember that “the fossil fuel industry” is us. If we’re sick of it, if we want it to change, then we have to change.

We have to demand wooden toothbrushes, woolen coats, fewer cars and more trains. We have to refuse to place every single piece of succulent produce we buy into a thin plastic bag we subsequently throw away. We have to be okay with things arriving at stores unwrapped and possibly in need of cleaning before we can utilize them. We have to bring our own containers for nearly everything, and we have to recycle the shit out of what’s left.

We have to demand less plastic in all packaging, from bed linen sets to hummus to children’s toys. We have to quit buying baggies and Tupperware and Saran wrap, and re-use the stuff we already have. We have to quit buying plastic plates and forks and Solo cups for BBQs and camping.

We have to quit buying disposable crap. We have to demand that our appliances be repairable, long-term investments, rather than engineered to fail in 18 months.

We have to buy fewer cell phones. We have to keep our computers longer. We have to walk more and drive less. We have to quit ordering take-out and eat in, on dishes, instead. We have to demand paper wrapping for our drive-thru foods.

We need to stop buying individual beverage servings; everything in those cold cases in gas stations has to stop. Buy fountain drinks only, in paper cups or a reusable container you brought with you, or STFU.

We absolutely must stop buying bottled water. There used to be drinking fountains all over the place. Bring them back.

We also have to be willing to accept things that aren’t quite as good. Wooden toothbrushes are porous and capable of harboring germs. Woolen coats aren’t waterproof and compared to modern synthetics are heavy and bulky. Paper bags fall apart in the rain. Leather shoes are cold and they leak. Real rubber degrades in sunlight. Shake shingles don’t last as long.

These massive oil spills are not just happening in a vacuum. The fossil fuel industry exists because we buy their wares, and we buy them all day long, every single day.

Americans consume petroleum products at a rate of three-and-a-half gallons of oil and more than 250 cubic feet of natural gas per day each.

Every latte lid, every drinking straw, every produce bag, every cell phone, every oscillating floor fan. Every quick little errand in the car, every elective surgery, every bottle of herbal supplements or tube of organic moisturizer.

Every plastic laundry basket, every pair of Fiskars, every casserole dish lid. Every bottle of liquid laundry or dish soap, every bottle of shampoo and conditioner, every shower shell, every vinyl floor tile, every set of speakers, every stick of deodorant. Every hand tool, every automobile, every plush toy, every microfiber throw, every Rubbermaid storage bin, every USB cable and extension cord and surge protector bar.

Even if you ride your bike to the greenhouse for a bouquet of fresh flowers, your bike was built with petroleum products and the greenhouse’s mulch and seeds were brought in on trucks.

Here is a picture of a long line of people standing on a beach protesting fossil fuels:

protest

Swimwear and flipflops? Petroleum products. Lotions, sunglasses, SPF cream? Petroleum products. Ice chests and parasols? Beach towels and plastic zippers? Nylon rope, surf boards? All petroleum products.

Everything in your medicine cabinet and under your kitchen sink: petroleum products. The kiddie pool, the lawn hose, the patio furniture: petroleum products.

It’s not that I don’t think massive spills aren’t a problem. I do. But we need to change the market if we want to change big oil; there’s no other way to reduce these risks or to reduce or stop fracking.

Oil is in everything. You use three gallons a day just sitting on your [synthetic and therefore petroleum product-containing] couch doing nothing but looking at your petroleum product-containing TV, the channels of which you change with your petroleum product-containing remote. When you get up to have some eggs, you cook them in your petroleum product-containing pan, and top them with cheese that came out of a petroleum product-containing package. When you go to wash your plate, you use a kitchen sponge made of petroleum products.

“The fossil fuel industry” is us. If we’re sick of it, if we want it to change, then we have to change.

OMFG you pussies are really beginning to piss me off now

Reading, Soapbox, Web, Whining, , ,

In which I’m ranting about “rape culture” yet again.

Rape culture doesn’t exist.

No matter how many articles you see about it, it still doesn’t exist. There was a national hysteria in the 80’s about an underground ring of satanic day care centers, where American children were being sodomized by the thousands. That didn’t exist either.

Back then the battle cry was, “We believe the children!” because only an asshole wouldn’t protect children. Now we “believe” the women, but the boogey man is equally unreal.

If you go look up the study that the 1-in-5 allegation was based on, you’ll find that even THE STUDY’S AUTHORS THEMSELVES say that it was never meant to be used this way. Not to mention that the methodology was ridiculous and biased, and basically all of the sexual contact reported was counted as rape or assault whether the respondant thought so herself or not.

Do you really think that all sexual contact is rape or assault? Really?

Seriously, gentlemen, just stop and THINK ABOUT IT for a minute. If 20% of women were getting raped, you wouldn’t be online right now. You’d be out with a baseball bat fighting men off of your mothers and sisters and daughters in the very streets. After all, it takes a long time to rape 31,400,000 women.

Rape culture was manufactured. Probably by college feminists for their own grant-generating agenda. Who knows. I don’t know, but I do know it’s a massive goddamned waste of time and attention.

guide

The snake analogy is utterly ridiculous and lacks intellectual rigor on every conceivable level. Snakes are animals, and they behave instinctively. Men are humans and have brains that are orders of magnitude more complicated than snakes’ brains. The snake analogy is straight-up sexism because if I can judge all men by their dicks, I can judge all blacks by their melanin, and all idiots by their IQs.

Men have become so soft now that they just accept brutal sexism — from one of their own! — without even a whimper. (There are few things more incorrect-seeming than the self-loathing modern male feminist.)

Feminism is now making men hate themselves for their masculinity. HOW IS THIS A BEAUTIFUL, RIGHTEOUS SOCIAL MOVEMENT?! It’s fucking not. It’s a disaster. It’s hateful, it’s ugly, it’s whiny, and it’s childish. There’s no academic rigor; it’s just a bunch of complaining about being rich and Western and how awful it is when you’re and public and men look at you. These women honestly believe that the world owes them perfect comfort and perfect safety, and that their feelings of discomfort are exactly like what Malala went through.

And the duh moment: the idea that men should police their own sex, particularly in the protection of women, has existed as long as men have existed! (See: nearly everything men have ever done, ever.)

Why are we letting idiots write articles? (Yeah, yeah, it’s HuffPo. They’ll let anybody post anything.)

As a woman, I think mens’ desire to help and protect women would be better served if it were based on facts and evidence rather than hysterical press. I also wish that they’d hold both themselves and women to a higher standard of truth.

This ‘rape culture’ hysteria distracts from real issues, like the fact that ISIL just burned a bunch of sex slaves to death in public. Let me say that again: they took a group of women and lit them on motherfucking fire and burned them until they were dead. THAT is a women’s issue. THAT is where our attention should be. THAT is what feminism should be working on, not making boys ashamed of their sex.

White chicks “feeling uncomfortable” when men look at them, or walk past them, or speak? IS FUCKING NONSENSE. White chicks are the safest, most educated, freest, and most privileged class IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD. They — we — are not victims, and letting us tell you we are is a disservice to us all.

Rape culture is a lie. Kill it with fire.

A killer app

Events, Soapbox, Web, ,

In which I talk about the news.

Was told by WaPo via popup that I’d already viewed my allotment of free stories for the month, and was invited to give them a hundred bucks per year. Instead, I switched to another device and read the story anyway, and they got no money. (I sometimes subscribe for a month or two to a paper I read frequently, out of guilt, but there are so many I visit that it’s a hassle to subscribe and remember to unsubscribe and keep them all straight.)

Same with the NYT. And the local paper from the last town I lived in. It’s only the 10th of the month, so clearly I click on a lot of news links as I scroll down my Twitter and Facebook feeds. But ultimately, there’s no paper I want more than twenty articles, maximum, per month from.

Problem is, I feel bad about it. I want to support journalism. We need newspapers more than ever before, because they do things that nobody else does: they do long, involved, expensive research; they send reporters to sit through meetings at every level of government; they centralize and curate conversations.

And most of them, unlike entities that were never papers but have only ever existed online, still feel the ghosts of journalistic ethics. They went to school for this shit, and they took ethics classes. They care about impartiality, facts, and justice. We may not agree with their various slants, but they’re all we’ve got. And they’re dying. (See: tronc.) Imagine a world with no journalistic exposées: just imagine it. You think it’s bad now?

When real papers, with real traditions and real experience and real journalistic ethics die, what will fill the void?

And not just big papers. In most small towns, once the paper fails there will be nobody to sit in on the budget meetings and report the results to the citizenry. (And, as we know, unobserved people do things they’d never do otherwise. Enter the new age of rampant fucking fraud and embezzlement at the city and county level!) Nobody to cover the town hall meetings, or the police reports, or the local obits.

This stuff is important, and without it we’re at the mercy of… God knows what. No information, bad information, information made up by politicians, corporations, and whackjobs; important information that never sees the light of day because there’s nobody whose job it is to report on it.

I want to pay for the work of journalists and journalistic institutions because I believe it’s valuable.

However, I have no interest in annual subscriptions to a dozen different news entities, because there’s no paper I want to read thoroughly enough to justify the expense. (The last time I subscribed to the NYT, it guilted me that I wasn’t reading enough of the content to make sense of the subscription. Who has time to read the whole paper each day, let alone the Magazine every week?) This is no longer the age where we all subscribe to our local paper, expecting it to cover local events and to buy important national and international news off the wire. That day is done. Nobody wants a full subscription to a non-local paper, or even a local one. We get our news from everywhere.

What I want instead — and I’ve been thinking about this really hard — is the following:

  • A widget I can sign up for once, that follows me from paper to paper and lets me pay a dollar with a single click to view a story behind a paywall. (Or two dollars. Maybe five if it’s a massive research-based exposé.)

    • AND/OR

  • A way to buy an annual subscription that is allocated across all the news sites I visit. (For $99 you can access X number of articles across all member news entities for 12 months; if you go over, you can upgrade incrementally or revert to the per-story fee.)

Is it so much to ask? A little button that pops up and says, “You’ve read your free stories. This article is $1,” and which hits my card immediately and grants me access when I click on it, and which is secure and fair and works across all devices and platforms once I login? Why has no one invented this, when papers are starving for money? Maybe a bank could do it, or a credit card company. Bitcoin. Google. I don’t care, just make it happen.

I don’t want to subscribe to WaPo; I read the big stories but I’ll never read the whole paper every day because I don’t live there. Same for the NYT and the Star-Tribune and the L.A. Times and the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin (as well as magazines: Slate and Mother Jones and Wired and The New Yorker and The Rolling Stone).

Since most U.S. papers have shut down their international bureaus, I go to international papers for international news. I’d like to pay them, too. But I want it to be convenient and I want it to be fair.

I don’t buy print newspapers or magazines, and I don’t want online subscriptions, but I do want to pay for my news.

So, make it easy for me to do so. I beg you. I love you. We need you.