The DoomYoshi Musings thread

[DoomYoshi]

Some have accused me of being an AI that passes the Turing test. These articles provide some insight into what makes you or me tick. The second is by George Dyson, son of the physicist.

https://thepointmag.com/2019/examined-life/its-all-over
https://www.edge.org/conversation/georg ... dhoods-end

[DoomYoshi]

This made me lol in the part where she insinuates that Jews invented the English alphabet.

[DoomYoshi]

I'm faced with a dilemma. Two amazing articles that everyone should read, and I don't know which one to put first:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/ ... -instinct/

For American universities, this similarity goes beyond the classroom. In their brilliant book The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt document the extreme measures that many colleges take to enforce progressive orthodoxies. “If you look at a college student handbook today,” they write, “you’ll find policies affecting many other aspects of students’ lives, including what they can post on social media, what they can say in the dormitories to one another, and what they can do off campus — including what organizations they can join.” The authors are referring to secular schools, both private and public, but they could just as easily be describing schools such as Liberty University, or Cedarville, or Wheaton College, or Bob Jones University. The rules and regulations of Christian colleges and universities cause no serious scandal, because most reasonable people accept that schools founded on religious principles will operate under specific ethical standards and guidelines. What is surprising is that the very colleges that explicitly reject any metaphysical or religious orientation — the schools that are militantly secular — are doing the same.

The same dynamic is happening in pop culture. As a kid growing up in the 1990s, I almost never heard any progressive or non-Christian make a moral case against a film or actor. Critics lauded such movies as American Beauty even as we grumpy fundies were aghast at its deviant themes and explicit sexuality. Fast-forward to 2019: The Me Too movement has chewed up Kevin Spacey, his movie, and his Best Actor Oscar and spit them all out. There’s an air (or pretense?) of spiritual enlightenment in contemporary pop culture. It’s in the sacramental language about inclusivity, in the hounding of sinners and heretics such as Kevin Hart and Henry Cavill, in the somber gender homily of a razor-company commercial.

If 2019 were all you knew of American pop culture, you’d never guess that some of the same institutions now lecturing on the need for more female leadership had financial interests in the porn industry just a few years ago. You’d never guess that “shock comedy” was a hugely lucrative business until very recently, with its bluest punchlines often coming at the expense not of sensitive liberal consciences but of Christians and conservatives. And you’d certainly be surprised to hear the marketing departments that sold their products by associating them with sex now bemoan toxic masculinity.

https://www.christianitytoday.com/women ... -vice.html

According to recent research, teens are starting their sex lives a lot later. Despite shifting cultural norms and new sexual freedoms, our youngest and most virile are apparently having less sex—at least for now. Sociologists and social commentators debate whether the trend is temporary and whether it marks a healthy or unhealthy societal shift. But it’s possible that the so-called sex recession offers evidence of a wide, disturbing trend that has nothing to do with sex—one that is particularly endemic to our cultural moment. The trend bears witness to the ways that we’re increasingly finding embodied life “tiresome.” (In Japan, that’s the word many younger Japanese people to describe intercourse: mendokusai.)

Our apparent fatigue with bodily living extends to other areas, as well. Two years ago, in response to declining cereal sales, market researchers went looking for answers to why younger people were opting out of the convenience food that had fed their parents and grandparents. According to The New York Times, researchers found the reason: Breakfast cereal—with the whole bother of bowl and spoon—involved far too much work. “Almost 40 percent of the millennials surveyed by Mintel for its 2015 report said cereal was an inconvenient breakfast choice because they had to clean up after eating it.”

I'm definitely in that 40 percent that thinks cereal is too much work.

[armati]

” they write, “you’ll find policies affecting many other aspects of students’ lives, including what they can post on social media, what they can say in the dormitories to one another, and what they can do off campus — including what organizations they can join.”

absolutely Wow...talk about indoctrination.
I didnt realize it was that bad, but I have read for a long time we no longer have education, we have indoctrination, this kinda proves to this kgb agent super 007 spy guy that we do.

Had anyone ever told myself or anyone I knew in school what we could or could not say they mighta got a shot in the mouth. not kidding. Have things ever changed.

"According to recent research, teens are starting their sex lives a lot later."

This is easy for me to believe, when I was in elementary school grades 4-7 (at the time in canada) we had girls saying they couldnt have sex any more cause they could get pregnant, so I see no way to have started any sooner, therefore, the kids gotta be starting later.

[Dukasaur]

I read a study last week saying that kids are busy having pretend sex on social media.

Not going to bother searching for it, but I think I recall it saying that up to 40% of teenage "relationships" don't involve being physically in the same location.

They're not just having less sex, but less of all types of contact that involve physical presence.

[Bernie Sanders]

I read a study last week saying that kids are busy having pretend sex on social media.

Not going to bother searching for it, but I think I recall it saying that up to 40% of teenage "relationships" don't involve being physically in the same location.

They're not just having less sex, but less of all types of contact that involve physical presence.

Fukn kids.....oooops I mean, virgin kids.

[DoomYoshi]

We need a gofundme for these people who obviously don't realize how much work cereal actually is:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/f ... ryacht-art

Pandora Mather-Lees, an Oxford-educated art historian and conservator, started giving lessons after a billionaire asked for help to restore a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting damaged not by sea spray, but by breakfast cereal. “His kids had thrown their cornflakes at it over breakfast on his yacht because they thought it was scary,” Mather-Lees said. “And the crew had made the damage worse by wiping them off the painting.”

She declined to name the owner or identify the artwork, but a Basquiat painting depicting a crazed, skull-shaped face sold at auction for a US record $110.5m (£84.5m) in 2017.

[DoomYoshi]

The Humble Bundle right now is a bunch of Paradox Interactive games. Definitely worth the price of admission.

https://www.humblebundle.com/games/paradox-bundle-2019

[KoolBak]

Do you have any suggestions where a feller could buy a quality essay?

[Symmetry]

Do you have any suggestions where a feller could buy a quality essay?

Certainly- as long as you don't want to claim it as yours.

[DoomYoshi]

The Nigerian election was cancelled, just a few hours after the historic meeting described here:
https://leadership.ng/2019/02/14/48-hrs ... ce-accord/

It really makes me appreciate Western elections, and their cool apparel:

[DoomYoshi]

What is the question?
https://www.newyorker.com/science/eleme ... everything

[DoomYoshi]

In India, white makes right:




Skin bleaching is all the rage.

[2dimes]

It was always a sign of privilege to be able to stay out of the sun and avoid a tan there.

[Symmetry]

It was always a sign of privilege to be able to stay out of the sun and avoid a tan there.

Hah- yup. Funny how some people think that looking pale is all about looking like white folk.

[2dimes]

When you say, 'white folk" do you mean Caucasians?

[HitRed]

In India, white makes right:



Skin bleaching is all the rage.

That would turn me 5000 kelvins

[Symmetry]

When you say, 'white folk" do you mean Caucasians?

Lol- you get it, but yeah isn't it interesting that other cultures that value paler skins are automatically assumed to be imitating other cultures?

[2dimes]

Ok, it is a little funny. It would be better, except.

In the US and because we are attatched here. I had hoped that racism would go away at the end of the last century. Sure there were small groups of hold out racists, but it really felt like the general public was going to be able to figure out how to get along.

Then at the turn of the century it stalled,

Now It seems to be returning to a time where way too many people are getting more and more divided by skin colours again. I don't like that.

[Symmetry]

Ok, it is a little funny. It would be better, except.

In the US and because we are attatched here. I had hoped that racism would go away at the end of the last century. Sure there were small groups of hold out racists, but it really felt like the general public was going to be able to figure out how to get along.

Then at the turn of the century it stalled,

Now It seems to be returning to a time where way too many people are getting more and more divided by skin colours again. I don't like that.

Paler skin is often considered a sign of higher class in Japan, at least. It was a way of saying that you don't have to work outside in the sun. It's a class issue for the most part.

I'm a bit wary of applying rules from one culture to another. Skin whitening in one culture isn;t necessarily the same in another.

[2dimes]

I'm going to try to switch up to light hearted humor dimes far a couple of posts here.

It is funny, more so because, here people go to tanning salons and coming back from holiday in the winter with a tan makes everyone jealous.

[DoomYoshi]

When you say, 'white folk" do you mean Caucasians?

Lol- you get it, but yeah isn't it interesting that other cultures that value paler skins are automatically assumed to be imitating other cultures?

I don't think it's so much of an assumption as an explicit statement.

“Indians are racist; it’s a deep-rooted thing here,” Das says. “There are two factors driving this absurd mania,” says Urvashi Butalia, co-founder of Kali for Women, India’s first feminist publisher. “Firstly there’s the invasions, with the idea that the Aryans are superior to the Dravidians; secondly the caste system, the upper castes supposedly being fairer skinned than their lowlier fellows. India’s rulers have often been white, from the Aryans to British colonialists. A pale skin is associated with the exercise of power.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/ ... -whitening

It's the same in Africa:

The word “yellowbone” has gained popularity in the US as well as countries like South Africa. It refers to a lighter-skinned black person, perpetuating the lengthy racist Eurocentric tradition which propagates negative images and aesthetics of black people and people of colour.

African descendants in America, the Caribbean and Brazil have internalised these fabricated and fictionalised images of themselves. In an American setting this is a psychological abnormality coined Post Trauma Slavery Disorder. In South Africa, it could be equated to what I have coined “Post-Apartheid Inferiority Disorder” (PAID). The most visible global symptoms include:

1) use of skin lightening or bleaching creams

2) preference for white or light-skinned friends and children

3) wearing of blond hair or blond wigs

4) internalised inferiority and a lack of self-love or veneration

5) lack of group unity and trust.

The motivation for using skin lighteners is linked to colonial history. Lightening one’s skin is perceived to come with increased privileges, higher social standing, better employment and increased marital prospects. This, coupled with influential marketing strategies from transnational cosmetic houses using iconic celebrities, increases the allure - primarily for women, but increasingly for men.

Skin lightening is described in many different ways across the continent. In Mali and Senegal, the terms “caco” and “xeesal” are used while in Ghana, the term “nensoebenis” describes the condition of the skin after chronic skin lightener use.

With its political overtones, South Africa has a distinctive history with skin lighteners. Various ethnic languages describe the practice. In isiXhosa it is known as “ukutsheyisa” which means “to chase beauty”. In isiZulu it is known as “ukucreamer” meaning “applying creams on the skin”.

https://theconversation.com/why-its-tim ... eams-49780

The Southeast Asian trend (most common in South Korea, Japan, Thailand and the Philippines, does have an ancient tradition based on class. Certainly some of it has to do with the most admired and powerful man on the planet being orange.

What is more important is that this isn't an isolated cultural example, but an entirely universal human thing. Getting a tan is one thing, as long as everybody knows you're white.

[Symmetry]

And you've lost me with that. Donald Tump's tan has nothing to do with skin whitening in Japan, or the entire continent of Africa.

[DoomYoshi]

https://bloody-disgusting.com/movie/354 ... ror-movie/

I do love me some Hanna Barbera, and this is one of the few series that I never knew existed.

[DoomYoshi]

Click here for a scandal that will surely shatter your world:
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/ ... ir-helgemo