Sunday, November 16, 2014

"Memories aren't recordings, they're abstractions."

"They're codes and symbols arranged to maintain one's sense of continuity with self.  
The exact details of what truly happened are irrelevant.  
The memory replaces the reality."
 - from the Tesladyne Industries Field Guide.

True Story, Bro. 


  


Fuck the professionally offended, those who want the harsh edges of the world Nerfed for their comfort.  Fuck every last one of them.  When Did the Left Turn into Rick Santorum? | Ricochet: "Seemingly everyone on Earth watched in astonishment as humanity landed a research probe on a small comet speeding 84,000 miles per hour towards the sun. Well, everyone on Earth except Ms. Rose Eveleth of Brooklyn, N.Y. The acting technology editor for The Atlantic couldn’t pay attention to the history being made right in front of her eyes. She was too busy screen-capping and zooming-in on a scientist’s shirt to see if it offended her. And, boy, did it ever...

“The dude” is Rosetta Project astrophysicist Matt Taylor, who wore an intentionally kitschy bowling shirt covered with cartoons of ’80s-era pin-up girls holding sci-fi guns. It’s basically a parody of the tacky artwork that adorned everything from Duran Duran cassette covers to Trans Am hoods. Taylor is also covered shoulder-to-ankle in garish tattoos, has the requisite ironic hipster beard and holds international press conferences in surf shorts, purple socks and skater shoes...

Several miserable harpies joined Ms. Eveleth on the public shaming, turning a staggering scientific achievement into a colloquy on restoring Victorian dress codes. For the record, the shirt was made by a woman named Elly Prizeman as a fun gift for her physicist friend. No doubt, she shall be placed in the village stockade for her grievous sin of consorting with a male and having her cartoon ladies show too much ankle. Her repentance will only be accepted when she covers them up in burkas. Mr. Taylor then made the bad situation worse. Instead of telling these progressive puritans to go pound silicon dioxide, he issued a sobbing public confession straight out of a Maoist show trial. This guy just dropped a dishwasher on an ice cube 300 million miles from home and he’s groveling to a coven of D-list bloggers? For years the left has characterized conservatives as joyless scolds forcing their morality on a resentful public. But they’ve upended this paradigm by becoming far more judgmental and censorious than so-called social conservatives like Rick Santorum ever conceived of being. The left is demanding so many recantations, the ghost of Torquemada..."
Matt Taylor's shirt and the day political correctness officially went mad - Telegraph: "Political correctness officially went mad on November 14, 2014. It happened when Dr Matt Taylor, the man who helped put a rocket on a comet, choked back tears as he apologised for wearing a risqué shirt. And thus absurdity hijacked a moment in history. While some of us were following Philae's landing on Comet 67P with wonder, others were apparently rather more interested in what the scientists were wearing. It’s almost as though they suffer from some ocular defect that makes it impossible to correctly identify wood when looking at trees. Although, to be fair, trees can be offensively phallic...

Atlantic tech writer Rose Eveleth: "No no women are toooootally welcome in our community, just ask the dude in this shirt." Astrophysicist Katie Mack: "I don't care what scientists wear. But a shirt featuring women in lingerie isn't appropriate for a broadcast if you care about women in science.” New York blogger, James DiGioia: “Technology advances while society remains decidedly retrograde.” To remind you, Mr DiGioia is writing about a shirt. Not forced marriages in rural Pakistan but a guy wearing a tacky shirt with some ladies on it firing guns. And while that shirt was brutally occupying Mr DiGioia’s television screen like Germany invading Poland, a rocket was quietly touching down on a comet and making our dream of conquering the stars a little closer to reality...

Now, this is not a rant against feminism. I can’t stand it when Right-wingers use the battiness of PC militants to claim that this proves feminism is evil or irrelevant (“feminazis” is their word of choice and I’ve always thought it sounds like a 1970s hard core exploitation flick). On the contrary, feminism is alive and well and great – we owe it thanks not just for the civil rights of women but also the making of a more compassionate and whole society. No, my beef is with those people who appear to actually get a kick out of being offended. They’re as kinky about it as those girlies on Dr Taylor’s t-shirt. They seem to wander through the world actively looking for something – anything – that could, at a real stretch, be evidence of racist, homophobic, meat-eating, chain-smoking, wife-beating fascism. Shirts, banter, saucy magazines and rudely shaped vegetables."
On the right is Jessica Valenti, and the twitter feed where she posted that adorable pic is littered with 'you go girl'isms and 'where can I get one?'s.  Because moral consistency is fucking meaningless when you have an agenda.  Jessica Valenti - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Jessica Valenti (born November 1, 1978) is an American blogger and feminist writer, founder of the Feministing blog in 2004. She is the author or co-author of four books on women's issues...  In 2011, The Guardian named Valenti as one of their "top 100 women", for what the newspaper described as her pioneering work in bringing the feminist movement online and into the 21st century."

  



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