wesruv likes stuff - regurgitations & reblogs

10 Photos Capturing Moments of Spontaneous Badassery by Cracked.com

This is just “#9. New in Men’s Fashion: Rocket Launchers”. There’s so much more awesomeness.

Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs - Easily the most racist cartoon I’ve ever seen

I experienced befuddlement, surprise, shock, embarrassment and a whole lot of laughter. Not because I think racist jokes are funny, but because of the shock.

It was the kind of laugh when some one falls and hurts themselves, it was to break the uncomfortable awe of what just happened, not that I enjoy pain.

Apparently these are being let out of the giant censor vault and I’m for it. It’s eye opening to see where we’ve come from, this is the world of my grandparents! I can’t even imagine living in a world that a major studio would fund and then release this.

Seeing this makes me feel that we’ve accomplished monumental change in our popular culture.

Go us.

Now get back to work, need more positive change.

High Fructose Corn Syrup (aka the sweetner in everything ever in the US) is probably candy to help cancer grow

There’s already the school of thought (don’t know how backed up it is) that your body can’t metabolize it as well as sugar (it could make you fatter than other sweetners), and now it’s cancer candy.

Weeeeeeeee….

Dear government, quit subsidizing corn. Don’t be a dick, I don’t want well fed cancer or extra love handles than what I may have otherwise had.

Image source is ironically from a NY Times article saying there isn’t much evidence that it’s so bad… heh.

Turns out Home Depot supports a lot of really cool LGBT stuffs. Who knew? Thanks morons for letting the sane people know they should support Home Depot more!

• In June 2010, The Home Depot set up a “Kids Workshop” as a vendor at the Southern Maine Pride Festival and parade.
• In 2009, The Home Depot gave over $5,000 to be a major sponsor of the Nashville Gay Pride Festival. It also sponsored parades in Atlanta, Kansas City, Portland and San Diego.
• The Home Depot offers insurance benefits that cover sex-changes operations for employees. That insurance also extends to same-sex partners of homosexual employees, proving The Home Depot considers gay couples as “married.”
• In 2008, The Home Depot sponsored the Durham Pride Weekend with a kid’s workshop and parade march. The events include “massages for couples” and “Drag Shows.”
• As early as 2005, The Home Depot placed a full-page ad in the Out & Equal homosexual workplace conference program guide.

God Hates Nerds. Christians demonstrating at San Diego Comic Con (via Gizmodo)

It’s true, I saw it on a sign. It’s strange the sign is so colorful, I expected an F word at the bottom. (fag). Maybe he re-purposed an old sign?

jonathan-cunningham:

1. Right-wing bloggers, talk radio hosts, and other conservative media outlets start promoting and distorting the story.

2. Fox News picks up the story and gives it heavy, one-sided coverage.

3. Fox News and conservative media attack the “liberal media” for ignoring the distorted story.

4. Mainstream media outlets eventually cover the story, echoing the right-wing distortions.

5. Fox News receives credit for promoting the story.

6. The story is later proven to be false or wildly misleading, long after damage is done.

This same pattern has played out several times before, with some variations. Three prominent examples from the past two years are the ACORN videos, Barack Obama’s “relationship” with William Ayers, and the “Climategate scandal.”

There’s some stuff about that crazy Black Panthers fear-mongering recently too, but I thought this cycle being documented was particularly interesting, and accurate.

How facts backfire (previous (re)blog/rant) part deux:

This is my other favorite part about ego and facts. Goes something like this (from what I’ve seen):

• Someone feels like they’re informed, but not only that, more so than another person or group of people.
• Person parrots information and feels more informed to other people, to spread their view.
• If anyone buys into it, they’ll feel validated. If anyone argues with them and they’re insecure enough they will make up facts to back up their view, and again, probably cling to their view stronger.
• Anyone disagreeing or disputing their view only makes their views stronger, less based on reality, and possibly more absurd.

weeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEeeeeeee……

But again, seems like something everyone does at some point whether you realize it or not. (I just made my rant a Catch 22, “emporer’s new clothes thing”, you’re welcome.)

This kind of stuff really gets nailed in “Flight from Death”. If you haven’t seen that documentary, I highly recommend. Don’t watch that doc in any state except completely sober and alert, trust son. It tears your brain up and spits it out, but in the best way possible.

caramelbaloney:

ryking:

“If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.

In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation…

This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false.”

— How facts backfire “Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains”

Get out of here with your science.

Cue the sad trombone. This seems to be another study on things that are totally obvious to me.

I’ve found that the relevance, clarity, or correctness of facts don’t seem to matter at all. It’s all in the presentation (something info-tainment learned a long time ago). That’s something big I learned when teaching a college course and also when I changed my world view and still interacted with those that kept up my old one.

“Facts” can challenge ego, ego loves to override reality, and make way for bad opinions!!! Best part is, no one can claim to be impervious to this behavior, best you can do is realize it’s out there and try to catch yourself whenever you fall into it.

Teachable moments are rare in America. George Bush missed the chance right after 9/11 to call for a new era of service to the nation; he asked instead that Americans do more shopping.

Tuesday night, President Obama did not call for a tax on carbon. He didn’t even ask the Senate to pass the…

The Misconception: You know why you like the things you like and feel the way you feel.

The Truth: The origin of certain emotional states is unavailable to you, and when pressed to explain them, you will just make something up.

soupsoup:

Google is phasing out the internal use of Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows operating system because of security concerns, according to several Google employees.

The directive to move to other operating systems began in earnest in January, after Google’s Chinese operations were hacked, and could effectively end the use of Windows at Google, which employs more than 10,000 workers internationally.

jonathan-cunningham:

onlylivinglesbian:

The mass marches on behalf of immigrant rights that swept the country in 2006 led many observers […] to compare the immigrant rights movement to the civil rights movement in the United States.

But one big difference from the civil right era of the 1960s is that the pro-immigrant marches have been largely devoid of the acts of nonviolent civil disobedience advocated by Martin Luther King Jr. and others.

The reason:  If immigrants without authorization to be in the United States draw too much attention to themselves – which getting arrested definitely will – they run the risk of being deported from the United States.

That’s exactly what happened Monday, on the 65th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, when a small group of young immigrants, including the 25-year-old Mateo, invited arrest when they held a sit-in at the offices of Sen. John McCain in Tucson, Arizona.

Mateo, a 2008 graduate of CSU Northridge who came to California with her parents from Mexico when she was 14, was trying to encourage McCain to endorse the Dream Act, legislation in Congress that provides permanent residence to illegal mmigrants who arrived in the U.S. before age 16, graduated from high school and have lived here for at least 5 years.

Mateo and her fellow protesters sat in openly, knowing that their arrest could lead to their deportation.

[…]

Mateo was briely detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and now faces deportation proceedings.

Case-Study: Deconstructing Popular Websites (Opinion Column) (via Smashing Magazine)

Imagine A Pie Chart Stomping On An Infographic Forever, or, How Info Graphics are Making Designers into Liars (via Smashing Magazine)

This graph circulated fairly widely for a while. The design of the food pyramid changed recently, in part because the visual characteristics of the old pyramid did not correspond well to the numerical recommendations. The new designer makes the same mistake but disdains “misleading” in favor of “mind-bogglingly dishonest.” The bottom tier of the left-hand pyramid takes up far more than 73.80% of the pyramid’s area, and the 3-D diagram enhances that distortion even further. Want a fun party game? Hide the numbers and ask your friends to guess what they are!

robot-heart-politics:

section9:

Wait, the definition of racism includes not making overt efforts to increase diversity? How many people of color or minorities would she have had to hire to not be considered racist then?

*sigh*

I’ll answer your second question first: there is no specific number that would make Kagan NOT racist. However, 1 in 32 or once in ten years are pretty glaring numbers. It doesn’t take a mathematician to recognize that these numbers are nowhere near balanced or a fair representation of our society—not even of the upper echelon of our society.

If you are a white person, you might not notice that in the last ten years, you have hired 31 white people to one single non-white person. After all, you are white. You are accustomed to most of the people around you being white, and you are less likely to know what it is to be in an institution or situation where everyone around you is of a different race (an experience most non-white people are very familiar with.) You just don’t pay much attention to the skin color of the people you are hiring.

You might say, “But doesn’t that make that not racist?” Well…not really.

Studies have shown that white people tend to experience a subconscious bias in favor of other white people and against non-white people. Even if you aren’t purposely doing so, you could be unfairly favoring white candidates in the selection process because generations of social training have boiled down to you having a blind spot when it comes to white folks. Failure to be aware of your own bias? It’s still bias, even if it’s unintentional, and having a large, unacknowledged blind spot doesn’t bode well for a Supreme Court justice.

I get irritated with the word “diversity” because it seems to imply a token-ist approach. The point of “improving diversity” should not be to make sure we have every color of the rainbow represented in our academic institutions, businesses, and government. The point should be to make us aware of the factors that keep non-white people out of these areas, which includes the bias of the [usually] white people who serve as gate-keepers.

Although those numbers are probably bad (no matter how you slice the data), I’d be curious how many colored applicants there were, and how many colored potential candidates are in that field nation-wide. (I’m going to say “colored” instead of “none-white” *** the offended and curious can see the explanation below)

Sure it’d be rough data to get, and sure she’d probably still look bad, but I’d like to know. Hearing these kinds of things I always think:

But it hasn’t been that long since Civil Rights, and it hasn’t been that many generations since slavery was abolished (less than 7?)

I think government enabled “affirmative action” is wrong, and if a private institution does it, it’s their own business, but I disagree.

That being said I also believe the bias towards people that look like you (and against those that look different), but I wouldn’t call that racism. I think it’s bigger than that, I find it’s closer to xenophobia.

Perceived difference in dress, skin color, orientation, religion or any number of other things all tie into that bias. “Flight From Death” has a lot of interesting stuff to say on that matter.

Government or institution enabled “affirmative action” creates a lot of problems for me, it is racism (by definition), even though it’s trying to remedy something, when do we stop those types of initiatives?

Instead of “affirmative action” I prefer personal responsibility and articles like this pointing out deficiencies. Protests, outcry and law suits for discrimination, also good.

*** As for saying colored (this is in case anyone is offended), I don’t like to beat around the bush. Talking about “non-whites” is kind of silly, as silly as the word “colored”, for example. Somewhere along the line there have been terms made for “everything” that isn’t “specific thing”, which is damn ridiculous.

I’ma make a word for everything that isn’t blue, I’m calling those things “nurbledoo”.

Pass it on.

I find it even more ridiculous that “colored” used to be PC no more than 40 years ago! … also kind of funny.

Using the word “colored” seems to be more honest, and to me, funny. No matter how we paint it, putting all white people in one bucket and everyone else in another is absurd, but remarkably (and unfortunately), still useful and valid (i.e. when pointing out biases in hiring practices).***

(via robot-heart-politics)