Mangela Lansbury

I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything did an episode addressing hostility to women in online spaces and one of the segments addressed how a law that was passed in the early days of the internet, before anyone really knew how this thing was going to turn out, enables sites to ignore abuse since they're not legally culpable for speech that occurs on their site. I really enjoyed that episode and think it provides a good context for harassment pre-GamerGate, and how things like GamerGate are given spaces to exist. https://toe.prx.org/2014/12/wishful-thinking-the-dislike-club-part-iv/

http://idlewords.com/talks/what_happens_next_will_amaze_you.htm?mod=e2this This starts as a good talk about privacy and the Internet, then turns into a talk on why San Francisco is terrible. I liked it.

An emperor is technically defined as "one who assumes the title of emperor," if you want to apply it to all people who have ever said they are emperor. Ignoring the weirdos throughout history, it's a man who rules over an empire, which is an aggregate of different states with varying degrees of individual polity. I think. I don't know. I don't know what the technical definition of a prince is, especially since the rules around bloodlines and royalty have changed over time and are pretty different depending on the place. It would be hard (probably impossible) to craft a definition of prince that captures all of the things a prince has been everywhere at all times. Monaco and Liechtenstein are currently ruled by princes, so princes can rule without being kings.

I revisited .hack earlier this year. It is both better and worse than I remembered, probably because I hadn't seen it since high school and what I value in media has changed a lot since then! I watched an episode of some subsequent .hack show afterwards tho and now I just hate all of it.

Isn't it common Union negotiation procedure to demand more or different things than they want so they can "compromise" on what they do want...?

I tried explaining bisexual but homoromantic the other day and "but you've only ever had BOYfriends" hahahahahahahahahasob I will probably just keep saying gay most of the time But hello!

Fiction is a reflection of the world. It's not a perfect representation, but if a queer woman from NYC writes a book about a queer woman from NYC, that document is useful if you want insight into how real queer women from NYC think and live. Fiction doesn't spring forth from the ether -- it's a document created by a person who is alive in the world, and if that person is insightful then their work will be too.

A lot of the conversation is wrapped up in American legal issues. The administration justifies its murder by retroactively naming anyone killed by a drone strike an enemy combatant, thereby providing a legal justification for the act. This isn't something you can do with an American citizen -- they can't really be an enemy combatant, unless you jump through a lot of legal hoops that would never, ever hold up in trial, provided anyone ever stand trial, and provided the legal justification was even provided (as far as I know, the legal justification is still deeply classified). Because the conversation is wrapped up in this legal or extralegal killing thing (extralegal because, like Clyde said, Americans are supposed to get trials -- even if they're sham military military trials, they still get trials), and American law values an American life over a non-American life, the discourse takes on that weird nationalist tone that most (every?) Western nations are prone to.

The book of the same name from the same guy (Dirty Wars by Jeremy Scahill) is also very, very good. The two obviously cover a lot of the same ground.

I keep seeing "Muslim isn't a race" arguments pop up because of the refugee stuff in Europe and since, uh, Republican presidential candidates are awful. It's immensely frustrating.

i still don't know why it exists why is it a thing i am still so confused

I spend so much time on work these days. I have to be in a lot of meetings about topics I don't understand (I did not know what neonatal hyperbilirubinemia was until I was invited to be a part of a committee about it, for instance) and provide them with meaningful support or provide meaningful patient advocacy, so I spend a good amount of time outside of work just playing catch-up with doctors who have obviously spent way more time than me on certain topics -- for things like colectomy, I'm on committees with doctor who deal almost exclusively with that specific thing. I go in early and leave late a lot of the time, just because I have a lot to do. I print out articles from medical journals and bring them home with me, and study at night. I'm becoming a workaholic and getting a self-education about a lot of medical topics. But I don't really mind. I am probably the happiest I have been in, like... 12 years? I'm appreciated at work (at one meeting that I just support, I introduced myself as "just administrative support" and the leads chided me for saying just -- that is the level of appreciation I experience at my job) and I like almost everyone I deal with. I have long term concerns about work-life balance since I see myself just throwing myself into this job once I advance in an FLSA exempt position, but short term I'm just rolling with it. I'm really into my life right now. I think I've only posted in this thread when I'm feeling down on myself or trepidatious about something, so I decided to put happy things in here once.

If you're going to talk about a Voyager actress making the news, let's at least talk about the one that matters: Jeri Ryan, who played Seven-of-Nine, is indirectly responsible for Barack Obama becoming president. While dealing blackjack in the 90s, she met Jack Ryan. The two went on to get married and have children. Jack Ryan had a life in Chicago, and Jeri Ryan had a burgeoning acting career in LA. They got a divorce, and the records were sealed by request of both parties. A while later, Jack Ryan decided to run for the US Senate and people sought to have their divorce records unsealed. It came to light that Jack Ryan was into some real kinky shit, and Jeri had asked for a divorce because she just could not deal with his particular sexual demands. Once the particulars came to light, Jack Ryan withdrew from the race, making room for his main opponent in the 2004 Chicago-area Senate election: Barack Obama.

This used to be a useful distinction. Until about the 60s or 70s, there was a strong argument to be made that Jewish people weren't white. Race is a socially constructed identity, and the mechanism that constructs that identity is racism. The same reasons that currently apply to talking about Islamophobia as a racial matter used to be true for anti-Semitism and race. Anti-Semitism isn't a solved problem, but the Holocaust forced the world to confront that racism and address it, which it did slowly (Jewish applicants to academic programs in America were still treated horrendously -- see Emory's history of anti-Semitism in their dental program http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/education/emory-confronts-legacy-of-bias-against-jews-in-dental-school.html) but surely. I recommend reading Racecraft, which builds on some theories of race that I think originated with Frantz Fanon, who wrote about race in France in the context of French Algerians. It provides a really interesting context for thinking about the construction of racial identities. EDIT: I also think it's useful to point out here that caucasian and white are not interchangeable. Even on census forms, there's Hispanic (Caucasian) and Hispanic (Non-caucasian). Also, Dzokhar Tsarnaev is caucasian -- he's from the Caucasus, and the correlation there should be obvious -- but treated as non-white.

they were dead all along!!!!! so spooky, mind blown, wowowowowow I only watched the first episode, but that strikes me as a possible ending

This is something that some people are aware of more than others. I'm ethnically Jewish, so I'm mostly considered white. I've been in situations where people considered me non-white because of that part of the circumstance of my birth. It's always very uncomfortable when that happens since, uh, I'm white.

There are also schools that have publicly elected regents. I guess students technically kind of vote on that?

I was bored tonight and had nothing better to do, so I rented this to A-B function the weird council housed and violent boy with his shirt off that I like more than I should, and I disagree with the me who existed a few days ago. Me, you were wrong in a few ways, but that's okay and you shouldn't feel bad about it. Film Critic Hulk's interpretation of that scene was not without merit. I don't agree with it, but I now see where he was coming from and understand his take on the scene. I do still think he was giving it too charitable a view, and it still sits with me the wrong way, but I now see where he's coming from when he says that your opinion of the scene says something about you. EDIT: Also, to not be completely off topic and talking to myself, go see the Lobster if you get a chance to see the Lobster. And there's a short named Keshinomi from a director that I guess is trying to break into the North American scene that is also very, very good -- see that if you can, too.

I did the same, after thinking about the artist that I used to get e-mails for. He's the entire front page of results now, and apparently has a piece at MOMA. Good for him! The strangest wrong e-mail I got from someone was something I thought was spam at first. The sender had what, to my high school aged mind, seemed like a very strange name (it was just a Polish name). The subject was something like "Catch up some time?" and the body was only the sentence "The winter is dreadful." I thought it was a weird spam misfire, but I looked at the from address and it seemed like a real screen name that an actual human being would have, so I responded with something to tell her that I didn't know who she was, so if she was looking for someone in particular she hadn't reached them. She responded with another one line e-mail -- something like "I'm so sorry to have taken up your time unnecessarily" -- and I never replied. That was something like 10 years ago and I still think about it sometimes. Something about it just makes me uncomfortable. The barest of conversations I had with this person made me feel like she was maybe going through a rough time, and it just pops into my head randomly and I think about if she's doing okay. I hope she's happy.

It's probably worth noting that GG does this too. Their rhetoric around objectification of women in video games is shifting towards "why are you, the critic, objectifyng this woman and being so sex negative."

I think it's justifiable to respond in what seems like a disproportionate way. I've put up with gay jokes and jew jokes all my life, and sometimes I've put up with them until, one day, I don't. My response seems ludicrous in the moment to some people because it seems to them like I'm responding to one thing, but I'm actually responding to a pattern that's been ongoing for a while. I think it's fine for single to respond loudly to the use of a word that makes them uncomfortable. If one person says it and you pull them aside to say that it makes you feel uncomfortable and/or unwelcome, that doesn't stop other people in the group from using the same word that there was no obvious objection to in the group. But l didn't read that article because, well, I've read enough thinkpieces about how these damn kids are so sensitive to last a lifetime, so I can't comment on the specific instance it discusses, just the generalized version of it. You're right that a lot of the problems with microaggressions are miscommunication, but I don't think the miscommunication is on the part of the people who are upset. I think it's on the people who have their questionable behavior pointed out. People just need to be more accepting of the fact that their going to fuck up and make someone feel excluded on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., because we live in a society that trains us to do that. I'm active in queer activism and have been for a while, and I still catch myself performing trans exclusionary microaggressions. I'm not transphobic, and I don't take those microaggressions being pointed out as an act of aggression or as them calling me out as transphobic. I take them for what they are -- someone reacting to something hurtful that I said, even if I didn't mean to be hurtful. They aren't attacking me, even if they're loud and hurt; they're responding to an attack that I didn't realize I was making. Basically, the breakdown isn't on the part of the person who had been injured, but in the response. We need to teach people that being called out for a racist/sexist/homophobic/etc act is different and discrete from being accused of being a racist/sexist/homophobe/etc, and how to reasonably react to it.

Intentionality doesn't play into microaggresions that much, as I understand them. I mean, they're largely unintentional things that express the message "you are different/do not belong." Like if you're at lunch with people from the office and you turn to the Asian from a creative department to help split the check instead of the accountant, or if you ask a third generation Iranian-American who's never expressed an interest in mideast politics to explain the Syrian Civil War to you. Those aren't obvious acts of aggression, but it's not hard to see how the person on the receiving end of them would have any underlying feelings of alterity reinforced by the interaction. I don't often see the term bandied about as a "hahaha, I win, sucker," kind of thing, and I don't personally know anyone who uses it that would view the kind of discussion where they talk about the idea of microaggressions as something to win or lose. I've never understood that part of the criticism of microaggression theory.

This article inspired some uncomfortable introspection. Thank you for posting it. Even though I do unabashedly advocate for popular revolution in Europe, it still made me think about why, and I don't know that those reasons are unequivocally good reasons.

No, don't, I had one, they are not good, I took that bullet for you, please make it meaningful.

There is and there isn't. As I understand from my (fairly rural) Japanese friends, PC gaming culture isn't big in Japan, but among it streaming is accepted. Outside of PC gamers, streaming isn't generally understood, outside of being a thing that "other people" might like.