Posts Tagged ‘obscene idiocy of the week’
Weekend Mega-Links, Please Use Responsibly
* In 2015, we will open applications for Tiptree Fellowships. Fellowships will be $500 per recipient and will be awarded each year to two creators who are doing work that pushes forward the Tiptree mission. We hope to create a network of Fellows who will build connections, support one another, and find collaborators.
* It’s a small exhibit, but I really liked A Whole Other World: Sub-Culture Craft at the Racine Art Museum, as well as the Consumer Couture exhibit running at the same time.
* A new economics paper has some old-fashioned advice for people navigating the stresses of life: Find a spouse who is also your best friend. Hey, it worked for me!
* I went off on a little bit of a tear about dissertation embargoes and grad-school gaslighting the other day: part 1, part 2. Some “highlights”:
* Next week in DC! Resolved: Technology Will Take All Our Jobs. A Future Tense Debate.
* Will Your Job Be Done By A Machine? NPR has the official odds.
* What If Everybody Didn’t Have to Work to Get Paid?
* Shields said these perceptions of race were the focus of his work and he aimed to deconstruct them through imagery that reflected a striking role-reversal. Not only do the individuals in this particular lynching image reflect a distinct moment or period in history, they are positioned as opposing players in a way that delivers a different message than those previously shared. This one of a cop is amazing:
* 19 Pop Songs Fact-Checked By Professors.
* So, going by (17) and (18), we’re on the receiving end of a war fought for control of our societies by opposing forces that are increasingly more powerful than we are.
* New Grads Can’t Really Afford To Live Anywhere, Report Finds.
* Uber hard at work on effort to replace drivers with machine.
* Uber: Disability Laws Don’t Apply to Us.
* The prison-industrial complex, by the numbers. Cleveland police accept DOJ rules you can’t believe they didn’t already have to follow. Charging Inmates Perpetuates Mass Incarceration. The Price of Jails: Measuring the Taxpayer Cost of Local Incarceration. How to lock up fewer people. The Myth of the Hero Cop.
* Science Fiction: For Slackers?
* Presenting Matt Weiner’s wish-list for the final season of Mad Men.
* How to be a fan of problematic things.
* Bernie as the official opposition. And then there’s the issue of the bench.
* A new day for the culture war, or, the kids are all right.
* Can Americans update their ideas about war?
* “I often wonder if my forefathers were as filled with disgust and anger when they thought of the people they were fighting to protect as I am.” Would you like to know more?
* The Political Economy of Enrollment.
Now, the UC administration claims that the cost of instruction is greater than in-state tuition. But these claims are at best debatable and at worst simply not credible, because as Chris Newfield and Bob Samuels have shown they include research and other non-educational expenses in order to inflate the alleged instructional cost. (It’s gotten to the point that, as Samuelsobserves, the administration literally claims it costs $342,500 to educate one medical student for one year.) According to Newfield, a more reasonable estimate of the cost of instruction for undergraduates would be somewhere between 40-80 percent of the administration’s figures. Even using the higher rate, then, the administration still generates a net profit for every extra student they bring in.
* UW System faculty’s role in chancellor picks could be diminished. Also let’s make tenure not a thing. Also, no standards for teachers, just while we’re at it.
* Meanwhile, Wisconsin to burn $250M on famously losing basketball team.
* Board of Governors discontinues 46 degree programs across UNC system.
* How Poor And Minority Students Are Shortchanged By Public Universities.
* How NYU squeezes billions from its students—and where that money goes.
* What’s Left After Higher Education Is Dismantled.
* Midcareer Melancholy: life as an associate professor.
* A Top Medical School Revamps Requirements To Lure English Majors.
* Academia and legitimation crisis. This situation (and distrust/abuses from both sides) is going to get worse yet.
* Parenthood (and especially motherhood) in the academy.
* On opposing capitalism on its good days, too.
* This supposed opposition serves the interests of both sides, however violent their conflict may appear. Helped by their control of the means of communication, they appropriate the general interest, forcing each person to make a false choice between “the West or else Barbarism”. In so doing, they block the advent of the only global conviction that could save humanity from disaster. This conviction—which I have sometimes called the communist idea—declares that even in the movement of the break with tradition, we must work to create an egalitarian symbolisation that can guide, regulate, and form the stable subjective underpinning of the collectivisation of resources, the effective disappearance of inequalities, the recognition of differences—of equal subjective right—and, ultimately, the withering away of separate forms of authority in the manner of the state.
* Ecology against Mother Nature: Slavoj Žižek on Molecular Red.
* Stunning photos of the California drought.
* The Secret History of Ultimate Marvel, the Experiment That Changed Superheroes Forever.
* Why Are You Still Washing Your Clothes In Warm Water?
* Rickrolling is sexist, racist and often transphobic in context.
* Carbon Nanotubes Were An Ancient Superweapon.
* Amazon rolls out free same-day delivery for Prime members.
* Breaking: The Web is not a post-racial utopia.
* Breaking: it’s all downhill from 29.
* Horrible: DC to Begin Placing Ads on Story Pages. Even more horrible: the end of Convergence is the dumbest universal reboot yet.
* The Best and Worst Places to Grow Up: How Your Area Compares. Interesting, but really flattens a lot. It’s not geography that constrains kids’ futures, it’s class.
* The World Cup and prison labor. The World Cup and slavery. The World Cup and total universal corruption.
* They say Charter Cable is even worse than Time Warner. I don’t believe such a thing is possible.
* Five hundred new fairytales discovered in Germany.
* U.S. Preparation Lagging to Battle Potentially Devastating EMP.
* The Ethical Game: Morality in Postapocalyptic Fictions from Cormac McCarthy to Video Games.
* 10 bizarre baseball rules you won’t believe actually existed.
* So you’re related to Charlemagne? You and every other living European…
* Timeline of the American Transgender Movement.
* Judith Butler: I do know that some people believe that I see gender as a “choice” rather than as an essential and firmly fixed sense of self. My view is actually not that. No matter whether one feels one’s gendered and sexed reality to be firmly fixed or less so, every person should have the right to determine the legal and linguistic terms of their embodied lives. So whether one wants to be free to live out a “hard-wired” sense of sex or a more fluid sense of gender, is less important than the right to be free to live it out, without discrimination, harassment, injury, pathologization or criminalization – and with full institutional and community support. That is most important in my view.
* The PhD: wake up sheeple! Still more links after the image, believe it or not.
* Muppet Babies and Philosophy.
* Broken clock watch: Instapundit says fire administrators to fix higher ed.
* Became self-aware, etc: campus climate surveys said to be triggering.
* Penn State administrators announced Wednesday that a fraternity that maintained a well-curated secret Facebook page full of pictures of unconscious, naked women will lose its official recognition until 2018, pretty much ruining senior year.
* The Proof That Centrism is Dead.
* Understanding Sad Girl Theory.
* Dialectics of union activism. I’ve been really fascinated by what’s been going on at Gawker Media.
* Someone Has Done A Statistical Analysis Of Rape In Game Of Thrones.
* The arc of history is long, but that Florida community college will no longer force its students to practice transvaginal ultrasounds on each other.
* Trigger warnings, still good pedagogy, still bad administrative policy.
* A fetish is born: Porn actors must wear protective goggles during shoots.
* Ring Theory: The Hidden Artistry of the Star Wars Prequels.
* This roundtable from Amy Schumer, Lena Dunham, and others on sexism and comedy is pretty dynamite.
* The age of miracles: New Alzheimer’s treatment fully restores memory function.
* How to Bash Bureaucracy: Evan Kindley on David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules.
* The ongoing legacy of the great satanic sex abuse panic.
* Teaching pro-tips from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
* Moore’s Law Keeps Going, Defying Expectations.
* The morality of robot war. Counterpoint: Killer robots will leave humans ‘utterly defenceless’ warns professor.
* Parental leave policies don’t solve capitalism. You need to solve capitalism.
* The Nuclear Freeze campaign prevented an apocalypse, so can the climate movement.
* Honestly, you get used to the taste after a while.
* And at last it can be told! The real story behind the Bill Murray movie you’ve never seen.
Santorum Pulling Back the Mask
“President Obama wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob,” Santorum said as the crowd howled with laughter and applause. “There are good, decent men and women who work hard every day and put their skills to the test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor.”
Enjoy Your Plutocracy – 2
More on yesterday’s Walmart v. Dukes decision from Dahlia Lithwick and Scott Lemieux. Here’s Lemieux:
…if you can’t use statistical and anecdotal evidence to prove gender discrimination — and, as he apparently admitted about racial discrimination and the death penalty during the deliberations in McKleskey v. Kemp, it’s clear there’s no amount of statistical and anecdotal evidence that would convince Scalia — then there really isn’t a law against gender discrimination at all. There’s just a law against having your company being run by complete idiots. Any amount of gender (or, presumably, racial) discrimination is acceptable to the Court’s Republican appointees as long as you’re not dumb enough to actually explicitly state it as a formal policy.
Elsewhere in Supreme Court news, we have ThinkProgress reporting that Clarence Thomas decided three cases where the American Enterprise Institute filed a brief after AEI gave him a $15,000 gift.
Too Big To Be Sued?
The Supreme Court just enshrined “one death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic” as a principle of U.S. jurisprudence; it just determined that a class action lawsuit against Wal-Mart for gender discrimination can’t go forward as the class of women affected is too large. The majority’s decision actually seems to threaten the very possibility of class action lawsuit altogether:
In the majority opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the justices said when plaintiffs seek individual relief such as back pay or reinstatement, the company has “the right to raise any individual affirmative defenses it may have, and to ‘demonstrate that the individual applicant was denied an employment opportunity for lawful reasons.'”
[UPDATE: I think UPI has this wrong; the actual opinion seems to have been written by Scalia.] So, to review: (1) discrimination is now fine so long as your illegal practices are sufficiently widespread, and (2) big companies should really only have to answer to the courts on a discrete, case-by-case basis. Enjoy your plutocracy!
Health Insurance Obscenity of the Day
Health insurance obscenity of the day: a twelve-year-old boy who has already spent his lifetime maximum benefit.
Health Care Obscenity of the Day
By the numbers, Alex is in the 99th percentile for height and weight for babies his age. Insurers don’t take babies above the 95th percentile, no matter how healthy they are otherwise.
Of all the health insurance obscenities I have heard recently, this is the worst. My college roommate (a bonafide doctor!) and I were ranting about this sort of thing in Indianapolis just this weekend—whatever the merits of private insurance vs. single payer for adults, why do children have to pay for health care?
The Hispanic Hegemony
The case against so-to-may-OR.
Deferring to people’s own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits.
The line must be drawn here! SOtomayor not sotomayOR! America for Americanos! Via TPM.
Morning News
The morning news.
* The bailout has cost more than “Marshall Plan, Louisiana Purchase, moonshot, S&L bailout, Korean War, New Deal, Iraq war, Vietnam war, and NASA’s lifetime budget — *combined*!” But think of all we have to show for it!
* Related: Alternet’s ten worst corporations of 2008. How did they limit themselves to just ten? Via MeFi.
* Marginal Revolution casts some cold water on wind farms, points (where else?) to nuclear energy instead. Isn’t the problem here our poor energy infrastructure? The sort of redesigned, rebuilt grid Obama talks about would make these wind farms much more efficient than just about any other source of power, including, I’m given to understand, solar.
* Because of the downturn, colleges aren’t hiring. Ugh.
* Cory Doctorow is looking to change the world.
* Confidential to Mac users: an update for Handbrake has been released.
* And Wendy Whitaker is today’s poster child for obscenely stringent sex offender laws: because she had oral sex with a 15.9-year-old boy when she was 17, she’s a sex offender for life and is currently being forced to vacate her home because it is too close to a church that runs a daycare service. A judge, unbelievably, just upheld this order. Via MeFi.
Gerry Canavan 