I sat at my keyboard for at least 3 mins thing about Curry and that statement.

I am a US Marine.

I fought bravely, ended my tour in 2005, and have went on to get a degree and become a notable DJ in Philadelphia since that time.

Statements like those of Curry only show how amazingly removed some people are from reality. It is totally absurd and infantile to make such retarded judgments. Disgust. You fail to understand... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Addiction at 3:08 AM on November 20, 2008

“I mean, if you can volunteer to take bullets for your country, you'd think the Army could volunteer to take a PR problem for you, instead of covering up the truth to the direct detriment of the future safety of American soldiers.”

Happens all the time. Happened to many other military forces in the past. Happened in the recent past in the U.S. Happens everywhere. Happened to me, in fact.
Doesn’t justify it. Not at all.
In this specific case, I... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Smedleyman at 2:17 PM on November 20, 2008

Alternate idea: Chris Anderson padded the whole book out with unverified conjectures and highly selectively chosen statistics that appeared to confirm his hypothesis.

Along with Gladwell, Freakonomics, and Wisdom of Crowds, I never got the feeling reading this, that any of it was ever actually true. It may resonate well with a Web2.0 types who wanted to believe its message that nerdy minority tastes were becoming the norm, but it should be no surprise Amazon was always... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by roofus at 3:11 AM on November 20, 2008

> His big idea is of course universal healthcare but that is not economically stimulating the way defense spending is. Defense spending creates engineering jobs, factory jobs, management jobs, etc.

I wonder about that. Why wouldn't it be? Universal healthcare would mean even greater demand for general practitioners, nurses, health support systems, and so on, distributed across the country in ways that don't currently exist, providing thousands of... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ardgedee at 7:56 AM on November 20, 2008

Universal healthcare would be hugely stimulating in another way too. If it were done right, we'd have an instant boom of small businesses. There are tons of people wth a great idea they could start on a shoestring, if only they weren't afraid to lose their employee health insurance.

The lack of universal coverage is a great big anchor chained to the economy in this country. Cut the chain, please.
posted to MetaFilter by rusty at 8:04 AM on November 20, 2008

I kinda prefer

When in trouble
Or in doubt
Run in circles
Scream and shout
posted to MetaFilter by dilettante at 7:17 PM on November 19, 2008

There's a guy on the list who has the same, unusual, name as someone I work with, and lives in the same area. It's not him, but that's gotta be a bugger.

A friend of mine shares the same name as the leader of the BNP. Ironically he's a card-carrying Labour member and an avowed socialist. Thankfully he can see the funny side. (Of both the name and being a socialist in the Labour party.)
posted to MetaFilter by i_cola at 8:03 AM on November 19, 2008

Right...

"I have this mental image of 1940's liberals insisting that declaring war on Germany would be stooping to their level."

I have quite a strong mental image of Godwin when people compare a membership list of 6000 out of 60,000,000 (that's 0.0001% of the population) to the threat from Nazi Germany.

"Allowing the BNP to organize is a no-brainer for privileged American... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jaduncan at 11:01 AM on November 19, 2008

"Oh, liberals. Ever more interested in the rights of fascists than in actually doing anything effectual to oppose them.

'Course, when you're white and not a radical leftist, it's pretty easy to downplay the importance of an organization whose members spend a fair amount of time beating up nonwhites and radical leftists."

Nice ad-ad hominem...based on race and political views. Just as an example, I was at the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jaduncan at 11:13 AM on November 19, 2008

There is a 10 cent refund on bottles. You have 2.5 bottles. How much money will you get back?

The correct answer is D, all available money. Because you will use the broken half-bottle to threaten the store clerk's life.
posted to MetaFilter by naju at 9:20 AM on November 19, 2008

And meanwhile, a few blocks away, $25 feeds a family of four.
posted to MetaFilter by ornate insect at 8:45 PM on November 17, 2008

If blogging had been around when I was a small child, and my mother had been a mommy blogger, I'm pretty sure I would have grown up to hate her. Mommy blogging has always struck me as incredibly exploitative, and mommy bloggers as incredibly self-centered Internet drama producers. At least, I never hear about mommy bloggers when there's not drama going on, and yet I still seem to hear about them quite regularly.

I have no particular comment on this latest piece of... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Caduceus at 3:34 PM on November 16, 2008

I'm so sorry for what I'm about to do

HOW IS BABBY WORN

All right, then. Carry on.
posted to MetaFilter by kittens for breakfast at 3:43 PM on November 16, 2008

Oh man. I had a couple days there where I was starting to become sympathetic to the breeders...

But if the snarky Motrin criticism is about some people being quick to jump on a trendy bandwagon. You know, way to prove them wrong by jumping your minor complaint to the top of the Twitter pile there, you bloggy blogger mama divas, you.
posted to MetaFilter by Skwirl at 2:34 AM on November 17, 2008

You can also say, No, you walk now like a big girl.

(This will help the girl grow up good and Midwest German. Remember, hugs are for special occasions, like Christmas!)

I'm just the nanny. I cave, it makes my life easier. I'm saving character development for my own children. Myself, my parents are Midwest Swedish and Puritan/German. I only got hugs for Christmas if Santa was in a REALLY GOOD mood.
posted to MetaFilter by grapefruitmoon at 3:16 PM on November 17, 2008

As long as you're cool with being the one to turn away the 1,000 other patients with more treatable conditions who could have been helped with that money.

Yeh, this is ethics 101 shit. In those classes everyone's all "save 10% of cancer patients for x months or 20% of Aids patients for y months ... ooh, that's hard". But Nice has to do it regularly, while fending off nonsense whipped up by the drug companies as HaloMan says.
posted to MetaFilter by bonaldi at 9:56 AM on November 17, 2008

This is the price we pay for a system where everyone has basic health cover. NHS funding is not some cornucopia. Outside the big urban centres, it is relatively easy to get a GP appointment, a dentist, a family planning clinic, or eye test etc., etc., etc.,(more or less free except for my taxes) but the cost of millions of people getting these basic services is that NICE turns down some of these life-extending drugs.
It is less easy to get the more complex treatments, help and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Wilder at 9:52 AM on November 17, 2008

Does Pollan have any qualifications for AgSec? This reminds me of when people stupidly wanted Jon Stewart to run for President just 'cause they like the guy.

It isn't really enough just to have an understanding of the problem. And it isn't even clear to me, having read Pollan, that he has a particularly good understanding of the problems at the level that would be necessary for something like this.

If we're going to fantasize, let's talk about Wendell Berry!
posted to MetaFilter by OmieWise at 12:07 PM on November 17, 2008

How about Kucinich?

Nothing like an elfish vegan to manage our agriculture policies.
posted to MetaFilter by mrzarquon at 1:00 PM on November 17, 2008

You go for production value, you get criticized for not keeping it real and for wasting money.

You go low budget, you get criticized for not putting enough production time into it.

I sometimes wonder if the politicians ignore the average person because the average person has no fucking clue what they want.
posted to MetaFilter by scabrous at 5:48 PM on November 15, 2008

aeschenkarnos, research like this gets sent out in sexy oversimplified press releases and eaten up by the media which simplify them even more. So, garbage presentation. But consider the value of the science on its own. Usually these studies have very small sample sizes or samples that are unrepresentative of a larger population (eg, all white women who were free on Tuesday mornings when the research was being done, living in a relatively well-off and educated area around a university, who... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by LobsterMitten at 5:12 PM on November 15, 2008

A man is driving down a country road when he spots a farmer standing in the middle of a huge field of grass. He pulls the car over to the side of the road and notices that the farmer is just standing there, doing nothing, looking at nothing.

The man gets out of the car, walks all the way out to the farmer and asks him,
"Ah, excuse me mister, but what are you doing?"

The farmer replies, "I'm trying to win a Nobel... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by netbros at 6:38 PM on November 15, 2008

Gladwell is a genius because he made a fortune inflating banal, observational stuff (love at first sight! money and luck matter! the devil is in the details!) into best selling books and expensive lectures. he's Dale Carnegie with an afro, but people seem to love that stuff, so more power to him. one of the few happy consequences of this global financial meltdown is that big corporations will from now on have less money to spend to have their managers enlightened -- usually in fancy settings --... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by matteo at 6:58 AM on November 16, 2008

So why has liberal talk radio been such a failure?

Liberals generally cannot reduce complex reality into simplistic terms with easy solutions that easily masquerade as folksy common sense, so they can't form the kind of one-note consensus that makes conservative talk radio so successful. They ask too many questions and consider too many points of view.
posted to MetaFilter by troybob at 7:43 PM on November 15, 2008

I'm a liberal. I've got The Beatles and pretty much every other decent rock group in history.

Conservatives have Ted Nugent and Hank Williams, Jr. I'd turn off the music and listen to talk too.
posted to MetaFilter by drjimmy11 at 8:36 PM on November 15, 2008

I mean, honestly, is this the best conservatives can do now that they're on the downtick? Liberals are too full of themselves, and don't reach out?

Do you people have any memory at all for the past eight years? Any memory whatsoever for millions of words on political Web sites identifying liberals as crazy "moonbats" who are just too wishy washy to avoid "drinking the Kool Aid" and know a fact if it bit them on the nose? And memory of eight years of... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Astro Zombie at 9:07 AM on November 16, 2008

Dear Michelle,

please ignore all this crap, just be yourself, and feel free to give the finger to any news outlet that gives you a bad review for doing so.

Yours,

the sane part of the world.
posted to MetaFilter by DreamerFi at 7:30 AM on November 16, 2008

and in total make an impression like Princess Diana did

Have you seen any 80s-era pictures of Diana lately?! Holy pie crust ruffle blouses and power suits. She may have looked better than her in-laws or a lot of other people did in the 80s (which was by far the worst fashion decade of the 20th century) but that's not saying much. She was an attractive woman with a lot of time and money to spend on clothes and personal care, but I don't know whether she... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by orange swan at 9:18 AM on November 16, 2008

I couldn't be more pleased with her fashion sense. She's spot-on perfect for the times, not too flashy except when she needs to be, ambitious and unafraid to try new looks; celebratory of her body; and her clothes never overwhelm her persona, mainly due to the strength of her character. True style in a DC, land of ladies who dress like assistant librarians at a job interview, is gonna be so fucking boss.
posted to MetaFilter by DenOfSizer at 11:40 AM on November 16, 2008

When I was 14 I lost my mother after a long fight with cancer. I remember during her last few months she would always be so cold and dress in full out winter clothes, stocking hat, coat, gloves while inside. At the same time my Dad was really into Rush Limbaugh's short lived TV show and after the show ended each night he would pontificate for a few minutes about how whatever crazy bullshit left Rush's mouth that night was pure unadulterated truth.

It so happened that... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jlowen at 1:56 PM on November 13, 2008

13 is not a child. It isn't. Pretending that this girl is a baby dismisses not only her bioethical right to make self deterministic choices about her own body, but it reduces the entire subject of allowing humans to choose to die to an trite argument.

Gods forbid that any of us ever find ourselves in the position of Ms. Jones or her family. But it isn't us, it's her and it's them. And to play armchair ethicist, with no clear argument other than "Well, I think... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dejah420 at 1:04 AM on November 14, 2008

"For all you non-fiction purists: do you really think non-fiction is exempt from the same risks of misinterpretation? I've read hundreds of long-form journalism articles and non-fiction books with definitive slants, biases and plain old lies. The only difference is that the reader is divested of any mental precautions and caveats they would take with an imagined story and can now haplessly mistake the writer's errors and leanings as an objective account.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by klangklangston at 4:40 PM on November 13, 2008

Please do some research before commenting further.

I actually hold a certificate of radiation safety that allows me to use radionuclides at the city college of new york (not that they're licenced to handle anything more potent than radioactive iodine (mostly for genetic marking and such...they don't really do a lot of energy research there...that's all up at brookhaven), and not that i've even used it...it was just a certification i got for fun)... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by sexyrobot at 12:55 PM on November 12, 2008

> how would you steal it without cutting power to 10,000 homes anyway? they would catch you immediately.

well, it would be easy to sneak away in the dark with it, what with everyone being without power and all...
posted to MetaFilter by mrzarquon at 3:57 PM on November 12, 2008

Non Prosequitur writes "hey it's the government's park and the government took the Ten Commandments monument as a private donation which they elected to have shown out of respect for the civic history of the local culture, rather than because of religious reasons."

Hey, it's the public's park. Hey, the government is supposed to not establish any religion.

And really, the Ten Commandments are... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by orthogonality at 1:03 PM on November 13, 2008

I thoroughly enjoyed watching it on FOX. Apart from Brit Hume's growing disgust as the night went on, the sweet, sweet schaudenfreude was just delicious. The only thing that made it better was watching John Bolton on BBC, barking left and right at anyone who dared say the Republicans failed. It gave me great pleasure to see that mean, spiteful, petty little man backed into a corner, faced with an approaching wall of defeat.
posted to MetaFilter by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 6:59 AM on November 13, 2008

Who's compelling them?

Bundling. Pay a lot for the whole batch, or pay even more for just the ones you actually want. Remarkably efficient at keeping craptastic journals afloat.

I also suspect administration laziness plays a role -- "eh, I don't feel like engaging in six months of meetings to determine what journals we subscribe to, since every idiot in every department will be whining about something-or-other and how the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by aramaic at 10:36 AM on November 12, 2008

CORRECTION NOTICE:

In a comment posted November 5th, 2008, Metafilter user Rhaomi, in reaction to reports that Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was not aware that Africa was a continent, wrote (among other things) that Palin was "even more of a damfool than we dared suspect". This claim was based on erroneous information and has now been retracted. Until Ms. Palin reveals shocking ignorance on matters of basic geography in a verifiable manner,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 7:19 PM on November 12, 2008

ShadowCrash, thank you.
But I have a different perspective. I can’t take credit for defending free speech (other than the very, very loose and general way any military defends a country from any given threats - I have more directly fought for free speech however).

By the same token, my argument to lupus, and others, has always been that I am not responsible for the actions other service members perform.
Indeed, the position on an individual... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Smedleyman at 3:35 PM on November 12, 2008

Whether it's the Lord's Prayer or the Nicene Creed or the Om mani padme hum or the St. Crispian's speech from Henry V or the Rifleman's Creed, a chant shared with fellow believers, and practiced until it becomes automatic, gives reassurance and calmness in the face of stress and death.

That's a valuable physiological response, but it in no way vouches for the validity of the words or the sentiment behind them. Creeds are psychological techniques, not... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by orthogonality at 9:39 AM on November 11, 2008

to celebrate war and it's trimmings as we commonly do, including the subject of this post, is very wrongheaded.

Buddy....

Nobody celebrates it. They just remember it.
posted to MetaFilter by timsteil at 9:55 AM on November 11, 2008

orthogonality : given the number of silent sufferers of "battle fatigue" and PTSD, this process is apparently not easily reversed when men return to civil society,

Exactly. I think that one of the worst things we have done in the last half century is to underestimate the importance of providing support for shell shock.


I grew up in a small town in the midwest, and like every kid, I had a paper route.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by timsteil at 10:38 AM on November 11, 2008

Burhanistan: There's not a lick of difference between the two sides, save for cultural details.

You can't seriously believe that. The marine does not decide who and when to fight, he follows orders. Those orders come to the marine from a very clear hierarchy extending to the democratically elected leader of his country. In that capacity, the marine exists to execute the will of the people of his country.

When the marine... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Pastabagel at 11:01 AM on November 11, 2008

“I've had it with knee-jerk praise of war and accusations of treachery against against those who opposed it.”

Yeah. Vets don’t know anything about that kind of experience.

“Specifically which of our freedoms did those heroes fight and die for?”

The right for a representative democracy to assert its will by force through the sacrifice of others.
I think it’s a shame they were sent. But wasn’t their idea. One... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Smedleyman at 12:54 PM on November 11, 2008

George Carlin: There's a condition in combat. Most people know about it. It's when a fighting person's nervous system has been stressed to it's absolute peak and maximum. Can't take anymore input. The nervous system has either (click) snapped or is about to snap. In the first world war, that condition was called shell shock. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables, shell shock. Almost sounds like the guns themselves. That was seventy years ago. Then a whole generation went by and the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kirkaracha at 4:35 PM on November 11, 2008

I ran into one of these in college. Dude comes in to lecture us about how he used to go out with his buddies, get drunk, and vow that by the end of of the night he would either "fight or fuck" -- that he'd either get laid or pick a fight, and that this made him a potential rapist, and having discovered this flaw in himself, he was going to explain to all of us how that same demon lurked in us.

Except that I'd never once picked a fight in a bar, or even thought... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by orthogonality at 9:10 AM on November 11, 2008

I guess where some guys get not only defensive but genuinely confused is when we start from a very reasonable and agreeable position of helping men to understand what sexual consent truly is and under which conditions it should be sought to then telling them they, in order to be conscientious people, have to monitor the "sexist" speech and attitudes of their friends and acquaintances as well.

The problem is everybody has a very different idea about what... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by tkchrist at 12:04 PM on November 11, 2008

Here's where I think some of us are living in alternative realities. I spend much of my time in predominantly male spaces, with both educated well-off men and uneducated poor men; the ages range from maybe 18 up to about 70.

Never, ever, ever do I hear rape jokes (with the exception of prison rape jokes), cracks about pressuring women into sex, or violently abusing women. It's not like these are PC spaces, either -- the gay/ethnic/and so on jokes fly freely, and there... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Forktine at 1:33 PM on November 11, 2008

On a more serious note, I just wanted to mention that part of the problem is that young women are taught that those of us who happily and enthusiastically consent to sex are "sluts", and will suffer all sorts of social punishment, be called "whores", lose respect from men, etc. In consequence, some women will become conflicted about saying, clearly and unequivocally, "yes". Changes in this attitude might help young people to communicate with each other more... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jokeefe at 4:12 PM on November 11, 2008

Like corpses? No, not at all. They look like lovers, as if you're in bed with them. Tremendously vunerable and human.
posted to MetaFilter by jokeefe at 8:47 PM on November 6, 2008