As idioms go, I preferred “in touch with his feminine side” to “nonbinary” tbqh

In middle school there were these two bullies named Rob. I couldn’t remember which last name is which so think of them as Big Rob and Little Rob.

Big Rob was big, in every way except fat. Years later when we’d all gone through our growth spurts he was still big, at the time it was absurd.

Little Rob… never seen a guy that better fits the term “ratlike”. Not scrawny, just wiry.

Little Rob was, well, not the brains but the cunning. Big was the muscle. They made PE a real bitch. (Cuz God knows they weren’t in any of my honors classes.)

(That was the premise of one of my greatest triumphs though. Our teachers - a hilariously stereotypical drill instructor/volleyball butch pair - were running some athlete training program and just left everyone else on the other side of the gym with some balls to freestyle with.

This one kid Joey, who was scrawny, not a bully but a jerk, was going around pegging people with dodgeballs while they talked. Acting naturally, I maneuvered myself between him and a Rob - forget which one - and pretended to look somewhere else. When he released I hit the floor, the ball hit Rob, Rob hit Joey, the drill instructor came and hauled Rob off to the office. Good times.)

Anyway, when we went off to high school we were never in the same classes. Given the firm layout to class track (to, um, class track) correspondence, we were rarely in the same hall.

The last time I saw them was towards the end of senior year. Big Rob came out of nowhere, came up to me, and told me that he’d realized he had been a huge dick in middle school and he was sorry. I forgave him. Given his size I think he’d been held back a year, and knowing no one, having no social place, but being huge I can see how you’d end up that way. That’s how those guys happen.

Little Rob I last saw in the parking lot, surrounded by police cruisers. He’d dropped out years before, done a lot of drugs including meth the night before, and laid in wait for someone with a knife. Some gentle giant of a linebacker walking by saw him with the guy up against a car door, walked over, and dropped him with a single thump to the back of the neck.

Years later I wondered what happened to Little Rob. “Probably in trouble. No, probably in jail. Probably in trouble in jail.”

Looked him up on Google, he was the manager of a franchise restaurant. Only the picture was Big Rob, so I’d fucked up the names.

Looked him up and holy shit did I call it, 2 weeks earlier an article about how he was being investigated in connection with the overdose death of a fellow inmate in county.

Went back for Christmas, in a bar, told this story. Big laughs. Except one guy who calmly said that he’d known Little Rob back in elementary school and he remembered the guy always having burn marks on his arms where his stepdad had put his cigarettes out.

Which yeah. I could see that. That’s how those guys happen.

But still? Fuck those guys.

Just asked a friend of mine out after too long worth of bullshit and she turned me down but I’m pretty sure we came out of it closer friends. Which for going worse than I hoped was a lot better than I expected.

So, the classic complaint that corporate lawbreaking isn’t punished with imprisonment but mere fines.

I just realized though, there’s actual paralellism if you think of the identity of a corporation as inhering not in its employees, or board members, or owners, but in the capital itself, to which the former stand as servants.

Which is true.

And with that in mind, you realize that seizing and holding some portion of the corporation’s capital IS to punish it with imprisonment.

lovegodsmashtyrants:

realsubtle:

feminhistory:

The Queen opening Parliament today. She offered her praises for Tory austerity policies saying, “Britain should live within its means.” 

The irony of watching a woman sat on a golden throne, covered in diamonds, and wearing an ermine cloak - flanked by her equally undeservedly wealthy family members - telling the nation that austerity is the way to go. 

mother jones magazine once called this vile monarch a “badass feminist” lmao as if

This indeed happened. 

Note the smug neo-colonial edge that phrase takes on in the context of the anecdote that makes up the piece’s substance. 

The Queen’s (or King’s) Speech from the Throne is composed by the Cabinet, which is to say the heads of the ruling party in Parliament. It’s a Tory speech because it’s a Tory government, if somehow the Monster Raving Loony Party had won she’d be up there solemnly proclaiming their agenda as the true path.

The monarch proclaiming this stuff as their own is essentially a ritual submission of their formally sovereign power to parliament, to do otherwise wouldn’t be a repudiation of austerity but democracy.

(The Speech is also helpful when coalition governments are formed - each party ran on its own platform and agenda, after counting seats, negotiating terms, and distributing cabinet posts, the resultant speech serves as a sort of manifesto for the coalition as a blended entity.)

multiheaded1793:

kontextmaschine:

lovegodsmashtyrants:

realsubtle:

feminhistory:

The Queen opening Parliament today. She offered her praises for Tory austerity policies saying, “Britain should live within its means.” 

The irony of watching a woman sat on a golden throne, covered in diamonds, and wearing an ermine cloak - flanked by her equally undeservedly wealthy family members - telling the nation that austerity is the way to go. 

mother jones magazine once called this vile monarch a “badass feminist” lmao as if

This indeed happened. 

Note the smug neo-colonial edge that phrase takes on in the context of the anecdote that makes up the piece’s substance. 

The Queen’s (or King’s) Speech from the Throne is composed by the Cabinet, which is to say the heads of the ruling party in Parliament. It’s a Tory speech because it’s a Tory government, if somehow the Monster Raving Loony Party had won she’d be up there solemnly proclaiming their agenda as the true path.

The monarch proclaiming this stuff as their own is essentially a ritual submission of their formally sovereign power to parliament, to do otherwise wouldn’t be a repudiation of austerity but democracy.

Ok, but a strengthening monarchy suppressing the power of landowners and their institutions sure did use to be progressive.

(I think that Britain is kind of unique for having a party of big land-owning aristocracy in a strikingly pre-20th c. fashion. No wonder Labour finds it so easy to be brazenly neoliberal even in humiliating defeat - read their latest leadership endorsement things! - if the Tories aren’t representing a more modern bourgeoisie as much as they could.)

Well maybe unique in that the landowners are still formally recognized as nobility, but South America and SE Asia definitely have parties whose power base is those whose flamboyant wealth comes from large landholdings that can be traced back to royal grant.

You could make a case that some parties of the post-Soviet Bloc are continuous with pre-WWI nobility, too, and think about that when you hear about lustration and unwinding communist-era policies.

There is this guy who it seems whenever I’m out on the porch for the past month jogs by shirtless, and his bouncing paunch looks a little less ridiculous each time.

Had my first “old man” technology moment, finally got the Facebook messenger client on my phone, went to the “Groups” tab, saw all the sample panes for family, work, etc. and thought it was for grouping contacts, ended up starting a surprise group chat that called what I’d done to the attention of like 15 people.

drethelin:

kontextmaschine:

Had my first “old man” technology moment, finally got the Facebook messenger client on my phone, went to the “Groups” tab, saw all the sample panes for family, work, etc. and thought it was for grouping contacts, ended up starting a surprise group chat that called what I’d done to the attention of like 15 people.

My girlfriend had this happen: At the top of a chat group you can set the name for the group, but this is the name EVERYONE in the group sees rather than just one for personal labeling purposes. Could’ve been way more awkward!

Oh yeah, I’m really glad I started with “pinball” and not like “potential conquests” or something

lotusglitter:

wifihunters:

someone asked me to draw my entire angel headcanon really fast i don’t thINK THIS WORKED??

#i had a dream that ended in the words ‘We are geometric law and fluidity in one’ and it became my inspo #six wings one head long flowy robe and however many hands needed #fabric like nebulas and translucent /sphere/ halo so it’s a perf circle no matter where you look from #light it like molotov cocktail and boom angel from the book of amanda

annohideaki:

whoever made this is fucking disgusting

you: is this nightcore or happy hardcore
me: you're stepping into dangerous territory, stranger

The cultural characteristics attached to “Islam” in the West are a great example of memetic drift.

When Europe was dominated by civilly warring Christianity while the Ottomans maintained their polyglot, polyfaith empire, Islam was associated with humanism and tolerance. Which is why Freemasonry adopted Islamic imagery for their secret society of freethinkers.

As recently as the 1950s, Islamic culture was associated with gender fluidity, homosexuality, and acceptance of sexual deviance. (To this day, Islamic Morocco is known for its openness to pederastic sex tourism.)

And yet, who today…?

Of course what it really was was the shift from the Ottomans expending resources to put forth near eastern culture, specifically Anatolian, as equivalent to Islam so as to enhance their power; to the Saudis doing the same with middle eastern, specifically Arabian culture.

If there’s any first mover here it’s the maritime culture/desert culture distinction.

waytoomuchportland:

Hipsters Snap Selfies, Demand Ice Cream After 3 People Are Shot  (Vocativ.com)

This one isn’t funny. 

This one is hilarious.

(It’s about 6 blocks from my house, 3rd shooting in the area in a month or so, also 3rd since I’ve been here.)

Also, at this point the fair is for the Coachella crowd from Hillsboro and the Warped Tour crowd from Gresham, and Salt & Straw is for tourists.

methproject:

This prom season, create happy memories that you will cherish and not poor ones that you will regret. 

I… what? Is meth prom a thing?

russellharvards:

#i feel like im not supposed to see these in such high resolution

scavengedluxury:

Concrete whisk. Anderston Centre, Glasgow. May 2015.

lambdaphagy:

skwrk:

argumate:

fashionable-gamer:

<snip>

most girls hate the structure of sorority life and say that they wish they could be in a fraternity. whenever i ask a girl why they think sororities are like this, they respond with some sort of self-deprecatory thing towards their gender, like “girls are too sensitive” or “girls are too bitchy” to live like fraternity guys do. (can’t exactly recall the logic behind this). 

none of the sororities at my school have houses. the urban myth is that this is because there’s a local law that X amount of unmarried women living together constitutes a brothel and is illegal, but actually it’s just tradition. a girl told me that she thinks this is a good thing because girls would never be able to live together like guys do, because “there would be too much drama”. i felt like she was taking a remarkably dismal view of her own gender, that women are essentially too catty and mercurial to pull off the very basic task of “living with your friends”, but what do i know?

idk what my point is, but i feel like this has something to do with gender roles. 

An old roommate of mine was an ER nurse.  He told me that it was standard practice in his hospital to have leadership positions elected from the staff.  Despite the overwhelmingly female composition of the profession, the elections heavily selected for men.

He asked about this and the female nurses invariably told him, “well, if we elected a woman there’d be way too much drama.  A guy will just get things done and leave us alone.”

One wonders what fraction of the variance in earnings is explained by stuff like this.  I have a hard time imagining it getting addressed any time soon, though.  "Women hold women back on account of being, or suspecting others of being, catty bitches” doesn’t sound like a very base-energizing campaign.

There’s a women-only pinball tournament in Seattle every year. The Portland girls who go up, who I have seen dealing with boors, abusers, misogynists, voyeurs, and absurd multi-way jealousy fights between lovers, ex-lovers, and hope-to-be-lovers report that it is the cattiest, grudge-bearingist, meanest, most pointlessly cruel and unpleasant competitive field they’ve ever faced.