"For anyone who knows the tyranny of summertime body-shaming is entirely socially constructed but doesn’t know how to do anything about it, I would recommend a try-and-see process. It’s so easy to get so caught up in the lies about how a woman’s body should look that that we’re too scared to test our personal limits. Giving yourself a chance to go out in public without shaving your legs or without worrying that your fat thighs or your upper arms are on show is the only way to prove to yourself that, in all likelihood, nothing bad will happen to you." Feminist Times
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"For those of you unfamiliar with how, until the 1990s, Ireland dealt with unmarried mothers and their children, here it is: the women were incarcerated in state-funded, church-run institutions called mother and baby homes or Magdalene asylums, where they worked to atone for their sins. Their children were taken from them.
According to Corless, death rates for children in the Tuam mother and baby home, and in similar institutions, were four to five times that of the general population. A health board report from 1944 on the Tuam home describes emaciated, potbellied children, mentally unwell mothers and appalling overcrowding. But, as Corless points out, this was no different to other homes in Ireland. They all had the same mentality: that these women and children should be punished." Guardian
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Lolz.
"Using the plural pronoun for a singular meaning is actually very common in English: the originally-plural you got extended to mean a formal, singular you and ultimately completely annihilated thou, and even we can be used as singular if you’re pretending to be the Queen or Helen Mirren.
But then, in the late 18th century, grammarians started recommending that people use he as a gender nonspecific pronoun because they was ostensibly plural, as part of the grand tradition of awkwardly shoehorning English grammar into Latin which has caused many of your present grammatical insecurities, and which I’m totally sure had nothing whatsoever to do with the patriarchy."
Also a good remark of the communicative rationale for gendered pronouns, namely disambiguating more complicated sentences.
"...You can find lots of people on the internet having writing problems when they don’t have the option of using gendered pronouns to disambiguate between people.
Is feminine/masculine the only possible split you could have here? Nope: we’ve seen that other languages have animate/inanimate or various other gender systems. But if you’re looking for ways to divide humans into two equal-sized groups with a good probability of being represented in a wide variety of contexts, gender of the natural/social kind is a fairly effective means of doing so (although it’s definitely not perfect: more on this later.) It’s at least better than, say, tall people vs short people, or children vs adults, or if you’re Douglas Hofstadter writing satire, white people vs black people." The Toast
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"The huge differences between carrying out scholarship in today’s Britain and in Stalin’s Soviet Union are obvious, not least because formal censorship and direct state repression are not routine consequences of dissent in the UK... Yet the parallels are surprisingly pervasive. They include the imperative for competition between institutions; the subordination of intellectual endeavour to extrinsic metrics; the lurching of departments and institutions from one target to another heedless of coherence; the need to couch research in terms of impact on the economy and social cohesion; the import of industrial performance management tactics; and the echoing of government slogans by funders (of which the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s invocation of the “Big Society” some years ago is only the most crass example)." Times
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"A voice of a policeman could be heard off screen make a callous statement to the miners, “I will shoot you.” When the dust settled, police stood in a line, holding their automatic weapons, taunting the miners lying on the ground and bleeding to death. None of the police officers bothered to call an ambulance, in fact, they did more than not call for it. They ordered the ambulance not to enter until after an hour of the shooting so that their path to being killers is not interfered with. In that hour police hunted other miners who ran up Small Koppie and shot them in cold blood." Africa is a Country
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“The Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision brought an end to segregation in schools, and for the first time, Black students were exposed to White teachers. This has not necessarily been positive for Black children. The history that is taught in schools is framed through a lens of White supremacy, with additives like Black History Month being thrown to mask enormous inequalities in education. Today’s students are forced to learn the oppressor’s truth by a white supremacist educational system that presents heavy-handed biases into history, language, and even the arts.” Black Girl Dangerous
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This article is just silly, though it's a standard trick of self-defined agnostics: defining any belief which falls short of total dogmatic certainty (i.e. any reasonable belief) as "agnostic". By this standard, the Pope is probably an agnostic. IO9
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"A letter signed by more than 50 researchers and specialists, including Prof Robert West of University College London, said e-cigarettes had the potential to save millions of lives." Guardian
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"For those of you unfamiliar with how, until the 1990s, Ireland dealt with unmarried mothers and their children, here it is: the women were incarcerated in state-funded, church-run institutions called mother and baby homes or Magdalene asylums, where they worked to atone for their sins. Their children were taken from them.
According to Corless, death rates for children in the Tuam mother and baby home, and in similar institutions, were four to five times that of the general population. A health board report from 1944 on the Tuam home describes emaciated, potbellied children, mentally unwell mothers and appalling overcrowding. But, as Corless points out, this was no different to other homes in Ireland. They all had the same mentality: that these women and children should be punished." Guardian
>>><<<
Lolz.
"Using the plural pronoun for a singular meaning is actually very common in English: the originally-plural you got extended to mean a formal, singular you and ultimately completely annihilated thou, and even we can be used as singular if you’re pretending to be the Queen or Helen Mirren.
But then, in the late 18th century, grammarians started recommending that people use he as a gender nonspecific pronoun because they was ostensibly plural, as part of the grand tradition of awkwardly shoehorning English grammar into Latin which has caused many of your present grammatical insecurities, and which I’m totally sure had nothing whatsoever to do with the patriarchy."
Also a good remark of the communicative rationale for gendered pronouns, namely disambiguating more complicated sentences.
"...You can find lots of people on the internet having writing problems when they don’t have the option of using gendered pronouns to disambiguate between people.
Is feminine/masculine the only possible split you could have here? Nope: we’ve seen that other languages have animate/inanimate or various other gender systems. But if you’re looking for ways to divide humans into two equal-sized groups with a good probability of being represented in a wide variety of contexts, gender of the natural/social kind is a fairly effective means of doing so (although it’s definitely not perfect: more on this later.) It’s at least better than, say, tall people vs short people, or children vs adults, or if you’re Douglas Hofstadter writing satire, white people vs black people." The Toast
>>><<<
"The huge differences between carrying out scholarship in today’s Britain and in Stalin’s Soviet Union are obvious, not least because formal censorship and direct state repression are not routine consequences of dissent in the UK... Yet the parallels are surprisingly pervasive. They include the imperative for competition between institutions; the subordination of intellectual endeavour to extrinsic metrics; the lurching of departments and institutions from one target to another heedless of coherence; the need to couch research in terms of impact on the economy and social cohesion; the import of industrial performance management tactics; and the echoing of government slogans by funders (of which the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s invocation of the “Big Society” some years ago is only the most crass example)." Times
>>><<<
"A voice of a policeman could be heard off screen make a callous statement to the miners, “I will shoot you.” When the dust settled, police stood in a line, holding their automatic weapons, taunting the miners lying on the ground and bleeding to death. None of the police officers bothered to call an ambulance, in fact, they did more than not call for it. They ordered the ambulance not to enter until after an hour of the shooting so that their path to being killers is not interfered with. In that hour police hunted other miners who ran up Small Koppie and shot them in cold blood." Africa is a Country
>>><<<
“The Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision brought an end to segregation in schools, and for the first time, Black students were exposed to White teachers. This has not necessarily been positive for Black children. The history that is taught in schools is framed through a lens of White supremacy, with additives like Black History Month being thrown to mask enormous inequalities in education. Today’s students are forced to learn the oppressor’s truth by a white supremacist educational system that presents heavy-handed biases into history, language, and even the arts.” Black Girl Dangerous
>>><<<
This article is just silly, though it's a standard trick of self-defined agnostics: defining any belief which falls short of total dogmatic certainty (i.e. any reasonable belief) as "agnostic". By this standard, the Pope is probably an agnostic. IO9
>>><<<
"A letter signed by more than 50 researchers and specialists, including Prof Robert West of University College London, said e-cigarettes had the potential to save millions of lives." Guardian
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"...women “were convinced that actual sluts existed and organized their behaviors to avoid this label”—it’s just that the system was more about policing women’s looks, fashion, and conversational styles than criticizing the notches on their bedposts. And the vagueness and ubiquity of the term “slut” on campus allowed these women to effectively police each other without denying themselves actual sex." Slate
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More anti-cycling helmet propaganda (or, at least, more rebuttals against pro-cycling helmet propaganda). Cyclehelmets.org
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"The real tribalists (and racists) who Mbeki failed to mention are white South Africans, who effectively come together to vote as a bloc for only two political parties: the white-led Democratic Alliance and the smaller white nationalist Freedom Front Plus." Africa is a Country
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A parable of Ian Hacking's idea of "looping effects" (i.e. creating new classes of people by the act of creating the classification). SMBC
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