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As for the interests of white women, you have romance novels, some country music, and a broad selection of Good Housekeeping type stuff. It’s also amazing the extent to which their list shows a pastoral or rural self-mythology: bonfires, boating, horseback riding, thunderstorms. I remind you that OkCupid’s user base is almost all in large cities, where to one degree or another, if you find yourself doing much of any of these things, civilization has come to an end.
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Certain environmentalists delight in proving that every catastrophe - even natural ones - is man-made, that we are all guilty, we exploited too much, we weren’t feminine enough. All this bullshit. Why? Because it makes the situation “safer”. If it is us who are the bad guys, all we have to do is change our behaviour. But in fact Mother Nature is not good - it’s a crazy bitch.
The fear is that this bad ecology will become a new opiate of the people. And I’m against the ecologists’ anti-technology stance, the one that says, “we are alienated by manipulating nature, we should rediscover ourselves as natural beings”. I think we should alienate ourselves more from nature so we become aware of the utter contingency, the fragility of our natural being.
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Slavoj Žižek: Wake up and smell the apocalypse - opinion - 30 August 2010 - New Scientist
(via Andrew Potter)
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Can I just emphasize for the ten millionth time that it is not a conservative government that is currently waging war against Islam. It is not a tea-party protest that is bombing Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and who knows where else. It is not a conservative government that is trying a child soldier for war crimes in a secret trial. Ad infinitum. The popular sentiments shouted at “Ground Zero” are uncomfortable, but they aren’t killing Muslims; they are, however, distracting everyone from the bankrupt American military project of killing Muslims. Their superficial anger at Islam is insignificant compared to Barack Obama’s real and actual policies toward Islam, which is to bomb the living shit out of it every day.
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While nerds like to socialize, they are terrified of making social mistakes. This explains why they tend to avoid eye-contact – it is too easy to make the wrong eye contacts. Games let nerds interact socially, yet avoid mistakes via well-defined rules, and a social norm that all legal moves are “fair game.” Role-playing has less well-defined rules, but the norm there is that social mistakes are to be blamed on characters, not players.
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Overcoming Bias : Why Nerds Like Games
Last night I was thinking about proposing a weekly-or-so “game night” for friends for this fall.
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In eight months of air raids over Britain from September 1940 to spring 1941, German bombers killed 40,000 British civilians, seriously injured 50,000 others, demolished hundreds of thousands of houses and damaged millions more. Leonard Woolf, in his extraordinary memoirs, describes the haunting silence the morning after an especially heavy German bombing that seemed to have left half of London in ruins; vast piles of rubble in the streets blocking traffic everywhere; almost no one moving about; losing his way again and again as he tried to walk across town to his office, unable to find a single familiar landmark other than the dome of St. Paul’s now and then appearing in view.
It is hard in this age of endless memorialization to even express this view without sounding callous: but Londoners did not turn their entire city into a “hallowed ground” or a shrine for the dead or a monument to British victimhood. They rebuilt, they went on, they rightly saw that the truest memorial to the dead was to show the Nazis that their city would rise again as if the Nazis had never existed on the face of the earth.
—Stephen Budiansky’s Liberal Curmudgeon Blog: Victimization and vengeance
