"I’ve also been written about, in ways I could find no fault with but that were nonetheless excruciating for me to read. It is simply not pleasant to be objectively observed — it’s like seeing a candid photo of yourself online, not smiling or posing, but simply looking the way you apparently always do, oblivious and mush-faced with your mouth open. It’s proof that we are visible to others, that we are seen, in all our naked silliness and stupidity." -Tim Kreider writes about finding out what people really say about you, and how it's all okay.
posted by smock smock smock on Jun 18, 2013 - 45 comments

A cover of Michael Jackson's 'Human Nature' by Vindicatrix. [more inside]
posted by ennui.bz on May 14, 2012 - 7 comments

"We're starving." - Charlie Kaufman's BAFTA Screenwriters lecture, recorded September 30, 2011. PDF transcript.
Previously 1, 2
posted by timshel on Jan 14, 2012 - 20 comments

Just as Dante found it easier to conjure the pains of Hell than to evoke the joys of Heaven, so too do bioethicists find it easier to concoct the possible perils of a biotech-nanotech-infotech future than to appreciate how enhancements will contribute to flourishing lives. One of the chief goals of this symposium is to think about the indispensable role that virtue plays in human life. The chief motivating concern seems to be the fear that biotechnologies and other human enhancement technologies will somehow undermine human virtue. As we will see, far from undermining virtue, biotech, nanotech, and infotech enhancements will tend to support virtue; that is, they will help enable people to be actually good.
posted by jason's_planet on Dec 30, 2011 - 22 comments

Chomsky-Foucault Debate in 5 seconds (SLYT)
posted by cthuljew on Oct 3, 2011 - 73 comments

This article, about rape in the Eastern Congo, (nytimes, bugmenot here) makes for hard and disturbing, yet important, reading. [more inside]
posted by sy on Oct 7, 2007 - 38 comments

Women won't sleep with random attractive strangers? Damn.
posted by Citizen Premier on Jul 5, 2007 - 129 comments

'Enemy Contact. Kill 'em, Kill 'em'. The Price of Valor. Invisible Casualties. The Psychological Effects of Combat. The Psychological Consequences of Killing: Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress. Soldiers, Self-Defense, and Killing in War - (PDF). Psychological and Psychosocial Consequences of Combat and Deployment with Special Emphasis on the Gulf War. Military Leaders’ Obligation to Justify Killing in War. And, from last year, come The Killer Elite, From Hell to Baghdad - The Killer Elite Part II, and The Battle for Bagdhad - The Killer Elite Part III--Evan Wright's Rolling Stone articles recently published as Generation Kill. They are well worth re-reading in this context.
posted by y2karl on Jul 21, 2004 - 51 comments

Becoming Evil : Boston WTKK-FM radio's Jay Severin advocates genocide of American-Muslims - this is the advocacy of domestic terrorism. And not the mere targeting of civilians but the murder of over three million men, women, and children. Why shouldn't Jay Severin be arrested and charged, under the Patriot Act, with aiding and abetting US domestic terrorist groups which advocate such violence? [Scroll down towards the bottom of the Globe story for a transcript of the quote in context.]
James Waller has studied the process by which individuals and society come to commit mass atrocities , and says of his theories: "...[the] explanation simply allows us to understand the conditions under which many of us could be transformed into killing machines. When we understand the ordinariness of extraordinary evil, we will be less surprised by evil, less likely to be unwitting contributors to evil, and perhaps better equipped to forestall evil." Hesiod Lists some of WTTK's advertisers : Purina, Hilton Resorts, 99 Restaurant and Pub, A.T. & T. Wireless. Still, Orcinus is my favorite "rise of extremist terrorist hate speech in America" news source. Germany has laws against such hate speech - which it believes to be so dangerous as to override free speech considerations - But we've got the USA PATRIOT Act, right?
posted by troutfishing on Apr 27, 2004 - 104 comments