The last thing I need is a religious state right in the middle of Europe. It would be a bad influence on all the other countries...and kind of throw a monkey-wrench in that whole EU thing.
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 10:22 AM on July 8, 2008

Little known fact about Hitler: his body was found by the Russians only half-burned due to fuel shortages, and they transported him across Germany, sporadically burying him and digging him back up, until finally they deposited him in Marburg in a secret grave. They were concerned to prevent neo-Nazi pilgrimages to the site, apparently, and in 1970 they dug him up at night, cremated him and tossed him in the river. Except for his skull, which was kept in a cigar box in some KGB archive.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 9:45 AM on July 5, 2008

Sure, there's probably a good-intentioned effort to show the world that they're not white-washing their history, but all the statue could serves to do is a) stir up a renewed anti-German sentiment and b) fetishize Hitler and Nazism, among both Germans and visiting tourists.

Apparently there's been a wax Hitler in the London Tussaud's for a while. Also, isn't it a private company? So I don't think they have any intentions to show the world anything... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 11:08 AM on July 5, 2008

ZachsMind: security guards in Germany don't look very tough. In America there seems to be a surplus of big brawny guys in need of employment, whereas here pretty much everyone's skinny and wears glasses. Also people here are pretty civil, and when they're not usually the sight of a uniform is enough to calm things down. It's easily possible that these guards have never had to actually restrain anyone. I guarantee you I would be able to cave in the nuts of Hitler, Napoleon, David Hasselhof and at... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 7:35 AM on July 6, 2008

Methinks had you been in charge in 1546, Martin Luther would have been dismissed as a vandal for nailing things to the church door.

The church door was the place where you nailed public announcements back then. And it's not clear if he nailed anything there in the first place.

More to the point: I don't think you can uphold this principle that Hitler is not entertainment. Am I not allowed to make Hitler jokes? What about... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 1:57 AM on July 7, 2008

The statement was: "Hitler is not entertainment."

And I tried to suggest why this isn't a very good statement. I have a comic book about Hitler here in the apartment that I don't wish to have banned or confiscated. And you haven't yet said how you would explain your principle to Charlie Chaplin, who was making Hitler into entertainment more than 60 years ago. And it wasn't the guy's statement anyways, the guy's statement was "no more... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 12:27 PM on July 7, 2008

From my viewpoint these fixed demographic voting blocs he's talking about were established very late and were a surprise to everyone. I'm a college-educated white and I voted for Obama, but the fact that I was apparently pre-determined to do so only became clear to me very very late in the game; for a long time I simply assumed that the black candidate was unelectable and I didn't even really bother to look into his policies. And how exactly is it pre-determined... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 2:53 AM on May 30, 2008

Wow, that banner-in-the-anus money quote could've come right out of a Tarantino film.
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 3:28 AM on May 28, 2008

Is One String Willie picking the string, or is he hitting it with something?
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 5:39 AM on May 24, 2008

Has anyone here ever tried to just leave one string on a guitar and play it the same way?
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 8:13 AM on May 24, 2008

I was also going to say "Munich".

Even here in Berlin, while there's certainly a fuck-ton of graffiti on every surface, there's little crime, especially considering the high unemployment rates. In the summer I can walk through the park at night without fear. There are lots of beggars but no-one's ever afraid of them and as far as I can tell the only ones who are literally homeless are a few illegal immigrants and a few of those too confused or insane for even... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 7:29 AM on May 18, 2008

Part of this frustration is how insistent we are as a culture that gender is only binary. It might be mostly binary, but it's not even close to entirely binary.

You see, this is what I don't understand. Doesn't these transgender cases imply that gender is binary? I say this because recently I was talking to a guy who was planning on becoming a woman and everything he said to me to involve a very conservative notion of gender as... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 12:43 AM on May 18, 2008

Any discussion of the basis for morality, introduced at this point in the thread with a rather pointless reference to Hume's Law, is going to go badly. There are many reasons to believe that we need to assume an absolute, objective morality, and other reasons to believe that this is inevitably and incoherent assumption; and the absolutist/relativist debate is entirely orthogonal to the debate about whether morality consists of real properties or subjective ones. You think the assumption of God's... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 9:42 PM on May 14, 2008

I don't think these drawings are really painted any more "realistically" than the original children's drawings. He just seems to keep the central features more or less intact but translate the primitive style into more of a Pixar style (not that it's not impressive). In fact, making the drawings "realistic" would probably be a lot more interesting, but often undefinable...how do you make a square face, with no features other than the outlines of eyes and a mouth, look... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 3:14 AM on May 14, 2008

What's irritating about this kind of art is the lack of any real humor and the pious tone they insist on. Warhol at least put his humor and frivolousness up front and made the joke fun for everyone. These works (if you can call them "works") can't stand on their own, so the artists and curators have to produce a significant amount of verbiage to back them up, and this verbiage always includes the tired cliche of "stretching the boundaries of art" or "calling art into... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 7:42 AM on May 2, 2008

Here are some ideas for "art" I just thought of. If they haven't been done already, you all are free to use them.

--Live in a buffalo carcass for a week in a museum.
--Watch TV in the museum for a week.
--Drive a car through the side of the museum into the exhibit. Sit there in the car blaring your radio for a week. Wear sunglasses.
--Cover the floor with mousetraps. Tip-toe around them very carefully for a week.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 7:58 AM on May 2, 2008

Allright jack_mo, here's a new batch:

--lie in a bed in the museum for a year getting fat. Get fatter than the world's fattest man.

--get a boob-job live in the museum.

--let children tattoo your body with whatever they want, for a week. Provide lots of different colors of ink.

--waterboard yourself in the museum.

...that's all I can think of for now, I'm supposed to be getting work done.
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 8:32 AM on May 2, 2008

I found more information in a German article here. Apparently the daughter, now 42, has white hair and looks a lot older. Also they were locked up in a "Verlies", which is a word I'd never heard before but apparently it means "dungeon". This guy must've built a serious basement to that house. Also Kampusch, the woman who was locked up for 8 years, has offered money and emotional support.

What I don't understand is how the 19-year-old made it to the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 9:59 AM on April 28, 2008

I was thinking about going to vote for closing the airport just because of how much all the posters have been annoying me. I don't quite understand the issue though; on Ronald Lauder's plan the airport would still be closed, right? He wants to turn it into something else. So it sounds like the airport won't be an airport any longer one way or another. Is Wowereit determined to tear down the building? I suppose I'm in favor of maintaining old buildings, if that's all it comes down to.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 6:48 AM on April 25, 2008

Hmm, I see now in one of the links that Wowereit says he wants to make it into a park. That sounds fine to me. I love parks. As long as they keep the fucking Ordnungsamt out of that shit so we can all grill there in the summer. Maybe it'll even become the new Görlitzer Park after Görlitzer Park gets fully colonized by all the yuppies flocking to the Medienspree.
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 6:53 AM on April 25, 2008

There are definitely three airports in Berlin. All the times I've flown to America and within Europe I've never heard of a flight leaving from Tempelhof, so that's partly why I'm confused as to why people want to save the airport so much.
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 9:13 AM on April 25, 2008

I like where he says "if we were an indigenous tribe, living the way we're living, we'd be dead a long time ago".

A statement so vacuous, it's almost meaningless.

I also like how he puts garlic on the rat.
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 4:36 AM on April 23, 2008

Does anyone else feel like Scientific American fucked up the entailment in this counter-argument?

By those standards, design-based explanations rapidly lose their rigor without independent scientific proof that validates and defines the nature of the designer. Without it, design-based explanations rapidly become unhelpful and tautological: "This looks like it was designed, so there must be a designer; we know there is a designer because this looks designed.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 3:16 PM on April 20, 2008

when news articles revealed that troops in Iraq were dying because of inadequate body armor, a senior Pentagon official wrote to his colleagues: “I think our analysts — properly armed — can push back in that arena.”

Yeah, it's a good thing those analysts are properly armed before they go into battle.
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 4:35 AM on April 20, 2008

It is very, very hard to avoid anthropomorphisms when talking about evolutionary theory. Even the word "reward", which everyone in the thread has been using, strikes me as an anthropomorphism.
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 9:02 AM on April 17, 2008

how can you not find what you want on amazon? what are you looking for that you can't find (assuming that it is a type of product that they sell)? i'm not snarking, i'm genuinely curious.

Recently I was looking for Leibniz' "Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain" in French and they seem to direct me to a third party selling it for $128. I went around the block and ordered a bilingual German-French edition from the local bookstore for 25... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 11:33 AM on April 15, 2008

I can't give them any points for making it easy to find, but Amazon France has it for €9.31.

Amazon.com or amazon.de? I see a 20 euro copy on amazon.de.

I just realized that I forget this trick every time. I figure Amazon is fucking Amazon -- it's an international service and they definitely know where I live. I've waited extra weeks and wasted hundreds of Euros over the years because I never remember this and just type the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 12:14 PM on April 15, 2008

The groundnut stew looks un-fucking-believable. That is the first one I will try. I like how everything's really vague, like "use four onions (or six!)". Upton, you have made me and my girlfriend very happy. We love eating chicken. In fact, I think even here in Germany I can find almost everything I need for these recipes, except okra.
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 4:38 AM on April 13, 2008

The author clearly doesn't get it.

eye of newt, did you read the article? The author clearly does get the point you're making and addresses it explicitly, for example here:

"If Cosby’s call-outs simply ended at that—a personal and communal creed—there’d be little to oppose. But Cosby often pits the rhetoric of personal responsibility against the legitimate claims of American citizens for their rights. He chides activists... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 8:25 AM on April 12, 2008

So are these guys are working under the assumption that everyone else on MTV reality shows are sincere? And they pranked MTV by not being sincere about it?
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 2:47 AM on April 11, 2008

That related "benchpress accident" video is horrifying. The guy seems to be holding his thumbs on the same side of the bar as his fingers. Why would you hold weight over your head that way? Hook your thumbs around the bar, for fuck's sake!
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 3:00 PM on April 10, 2008

So at this point are people benching more than they're deadlifting? The biggest deadlift I can find on youtube is 1003. But people seem to be squatting 1200-something. Is there some kind of denim underwear they're using to distribute kinetic energy across their balls at the bottom of the squat? I thought the natural order was supposed to be: bench, squat, deadlift, from weakest to strongest.
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 3:10 PM on April 10, 2008

Because the weight of the bar on the inside of your thumb and forefinger can be very, very painful sometimes.

Really? I've never had that problem. How much do you have to bench before it hurts your thumb?
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 3:14 PM on April 10, 2008

Eh, I don't think the Federalist Papers has much to do with this issue. At the time it was written Madicon and Hamilton were actually opposed to the idea of a bill of rights, i.e. to the first ten amendments. The closest the Papers come to gun ownership is the discussion of standing armies -- a lot of people were afraid that standing armies would militarize the culture and erode civil liberties, and wanted to rely on militia, although it's not clear to me quite what the difference is. Hamilton... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 10:22 AM on April 4, 2008

BrotherCaine: yeah sure, I didn't mean he was opposed to every individual right. I see how I phrased that badly. Still my impression would be that, since Hamilton and Madison were both at that point centralists and argued for allowing for a standing army rather than relying on the militia, they wouldn't necessarily have been on the NRA-side of the debate. However, once the bill of rights gets written and ratified it's a different matter; then we're stuck with those amendments whether we like it... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 10:43 AM on April 4, 2008

I was going to come here to complain about the same thing -- the author's statement that is doesn't make sense to call Arabs anti-semitic.

Words are not transparent, you cannot decide what a word means just by looking at it. The word "anti-semitism" means prejudice against Jews, and Arabs can easily be anti-semitic, just like anyone else, and many of them are. The etymology of the word is perhaps unfortunate, but that's how life is sometimes. "French... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 3:41 AM on April 1, 2008

The weatherman is definitely stoned. Not just because of the way he laughs; because of the way he says "pretty much everywhere, it's gonna be hot". And the guy on the right starts laughing sympathetically at how stoned the weatherman is. And yeah, wearing identical blazers is obviously a topic of discussion among these three. This has become clear to me upon repeated viewing.

It's after the third or fourth viewing that the funny kicks in.
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 11:31 AM on March 27, 2008

"Robots and sharks and bears" is a joke, and in my opinion a pretty good one for an off-the-cuff interview statement. I'm sure she meant something by saying that male comedy is more "boisterous", and it may or may not be negative, but to draw any conclusions about this you would have to do a more in-depth interview with her. And she didn't compare SNL favorably to the Daily Show, she just used the Daily Show as an example to illustrate what "clapter" means.
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 9:20 AM on March 25, 2008

The real shame is US customs promoting this pompous ass by taking him seriously.
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 9:07 AM on March 21, 2008

There is no argument in favor of the warden's position -- absolutely none.

If he would commit a crime on furlough, he would also commit a crime in 6 months when he gets out. If you are afraid that we will commit a crime when he's out, then you could take him up on his offer to double his sentence. Then, if he commits a crime on furlough, he would've committed the crime anyway, but now you have him in jail for a lot longer afterwards. And if he doesn't commit a crime,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 6:04 AM on March 20, 2008

valkyryn: we get your point that you think a month is too expensive. Maybe you're right about this; I would like to see real numbers about how expensive furlough is compared to how expensive it is to keep the guy in jail in the first place (which is also expensive) and about actual furlough precedents. Do you think the guy or his family would reject compromises of, say, a week, a week-end, an afternoon? Also, I don't think we need to pay for too much supervision of this guy; it's unlikely that... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 8:46 AM on March 20, 2008

Besides which, valkyryn -- this just occured to me -- the warden is also not saying "forget it, it's too expensive, a month-long furlough just doesn't happen; come back with a more reasonable request". No, what the warden's saying is "this isn't an exceptional circumstance". So you're the only one presenting your rather lucid argument about costs, an argument based on numbers you made up.
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 8:55 AM on March 20, 2008

I can see why this didn't catch on. If I'm a Christian, then who is he to rewrite the Bible, and if I'm an atheist then what do I need the Bible for? And if I just want the moral story, I can read the Bible as written and see the supernatural bits as part of the story, which they are. As long as we're already reading it as fiction, the supernatural bits don't do any harm.

Jefferson was a firm believer that God had a design for the universe, and he claimed that... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 2:35 AM on March 17, 2008

A platoon praying before battle is different, in my opinion. This guy will sell you the Lord's blessing. That's a bit different from asking for it on your own behalf.
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 4:53 AM on March 16, 2008

Look, we're all clear on the fact that it's not really a "gnome". No-one needs any clarification on that point. But if the Sun's story is at all true then a whole village is scared to leave their homes at night, with one guy even saying "One of my friends was so scared after seeing that thing that we had to take him to the hospital" (though it's not clear to me what a hospital is supposed to do with a scared person) and it's interesting to see video of whatever they're scared... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 8:36 AM on March 15, 2008

Great project.

This, however, is a bit much: "Tupac helped to combat the anti-intellectualism in rap, a force, to be sure, that pervades the entire culture".
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 9:20 AM on March 14, 2008

I'm curious as to the ethics of investigating her son's possible gayness. Presumably, if it's true that she'd disowned him, then he has his own life now and her homophobia is none of his business, just as his homosexuality is none of hers.
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 5:34 AM on March 13, 2008

This guy's argument in the first piece is basically: he'll only win if a good number of people vote for him despite his skin color -- i.e., maintaining their prejudices but exempting him.

There is simply no metric by which this is worse than people not voting for him because of his skin color -- especially not awfully, disturbingly, hyperbolically worse, "a whole new level of racism".
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 8:19 AM on March 11, 2008

On second thought, I'd like to take this guy's point more seriously. On a charitable reading, he's arguing that making exemptions for token blacks, even as president, whitewashes the real systematic racism still endemic to American life, thus actually setting us further back in our discussion of the problem.

There is of course a difference between old-style racism and systematic racism. Old-style racists don't like people of that race plain and simple. This style of... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 8:41 AM on March 11, 2008

There was an article in Der Spiegel a few years ago about German women travelling to Africa to meet young black men unspoiled by civilization. It's too bad they don't have old articles online -- the attitude of these women, the way they fetishized Africans, was quite breath-taking.
posted to MetaFilter by creasy boy at 1:39 AM on March 11, 2008