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Anti-vaccine parents do not live in a world in which they weigh the risk of infectious diseases versus the risk of vaccination. They live in a world in which their child faces only very slight risks of contracting infectious disease, due to the decisions of all the other socially responsible parents around them who vaccinate their children. This allows them — if they are narrowly self-interested — to avoid the even slighter risk of side effects from vaccination. It is only the socially responsible decision of parents who vaccinate their children that allows anti-vaccine parents to live in that world.
—Refusing vaccination is anti-social, not irrational - The Washington Post
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center city steam, philadelphia, 2/9/2015
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Look, people will tell you that corporate America is an insatiable elder god, an implacable, amoral Mammon into whose gaping, bestial jaws flows the life and blood and spirit and dreams and democratic aspirations and so on and so forth of everyone and everything on this not-so-good and no-longer-so-green earth, but let me tell you, if what you really want is to read blogs all day and occasionally take the back stairs down to the largely vacant twenty-third floor to take long, private shits in a single, lockable handicapped restroom and to get paid, like, sixty-five grand for the trouble, then good God, there is no more perfect job.
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“Idiosyncrasy credit” is a concept in social psychology that describes an individual’s capacity to acceptably deviate from group expectations. Idiosyncrasy credits are increased (earned) each time an individual conforms to a group’s expectations, and decreased (spent) each time an individual deviates from a group’s expectations.
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I’ve listened to this song like a dozen times today and I can’t stop.
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Careful out there this morning!
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They Might Be Giants - Am I Awake?
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Yet, as the staff of Charlie Hebdo was aware, there surely is a difference, in France, between mocking the pope and mocking the Prophet Muhammad. The pope is the representative of the dominant traditional religion of the majority of French citizens. The Prophet Muhammad is the revered figure of an oppressed minority. To mock the pope is to thumb one’s nose at a genuine authority, an authority of the majority. To mock the Prophet Muhammad is to add insult to abuse. The power of the majority in a liberal democracy is not the power of monarchs, to be sure. But it is power nonetheless.