FairAndUNbalanced.com

 
From Professor PZ Myers:

Uh-oh. Gad Saad is polluting the discourse again, this time in a vain attempt to discredit the concept of toxic masculinity. It’s embarrassingly bad. I would say that you need to first understand the concept if you hope to debunk it, and Saad does not; if you do not, then all your floundering about will simply reinforce the idea and lead you to use examples that actually demonstrate the phenomenon.

Toxic masculinity is actually not that hard to understand. It’s not a rejection of masculinity itself; it’s a problem that arises when men are socialized to conform to a cultural stereotype that doesn’t actually match their nature.

bell hooks wrote this quote in her chapter called Comrades in Struggle: “…Yet the poor or working class man who has been socialized via sexist ideology to believe that there are privileges and powers he should possess solely because he is male often finds that few if any of these benefits are automatically bestowed him in life.” One of the “powers” that men are socialized to believe that they have to embody is masculinity. Masculinity seems to be the running force of patriarchy, but this term has a very specific definition under patriarchy that is not inclusive of all forms of masculinity. This phenomenon is called toxic masculinity. Toxic masculinity “refers to the socially-constructed attitudes that describe the masculine gender role as violent, unemotional, sexually aggressive, and so forth.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? It’s the stereotype of the steely-eyed muscular man who compels women to obey his will. The True Man is sexually aggressive. And what does Gad Saad do? He opens with examples of animals that engage in aggressive competition for mates!

Female fiddler crabs and hens prefer males with extravagantly large claws and tails respectively. Ewes (female rams) will mate with the ram that wins the brutal intrasexual head-butting contest. They reward targeted aggression by granting sexual access. Needless to say, there are innumerable other examples of sexual selection that I might describe, but I suspect that you get the general gist. Are rams exhibiting toxic masculinity? Are female fiddler crabs succumbing to antiquated notions of masculinity as promulgated by the crab patriarchy?

We are not crabs or rams.

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From driftglass:

It today’s episode of “Which Trump Administration Douchbag Is The Douchiest?” Donald Trump’s pet grifting superjesus fanboy, Ben Carson, jumps into the lead by feeding his wife to the wolves.

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Pete Souza: “Excoriate is a big word. Energy isn’t—some people have it, and others just say they have it.”

Wondering why a few conservative friends fail to be impressed.

 
From Jonathan Bernstein:

It shouldn’t be a problem that incoming National Economic Adviser Larry Kudlow isn’t a trained economist possessing an advanced degree. It isn’t even necessarily disqualifying that he’s known as a famously bad pundit on financial matters. Neither shortcoming makes it impossible for him to do an excellent job leading the National Economic Council.

But another skill is absolutely central to the council’s mission, and it’s not clear that Kudlow has it.

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From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:

Dear Salesman,

You came into our home today to sell us your company’s product. We received a flyer from your company last week, touting its new, low-priced rental program of your equipment. We’ve been wanting to buy or rent your product for some time, so the new rental program was all the motivation necessary for us to call your company and schedule a sales call. What follows in this letter is a mixture of advice and critique. I hope you will learn from what I have written.

You arrived promptly for the sales call — and that’s a good thing. Tardiness — especially without notification — is a sure way to get us to reject out of hand what you are selling. If my wife and I, who are just as busy as you are, set time aside for your sales pitch, we expect you to arrive on time. And if you can’t, we expect a telephone call or text message. Last week, I offered for sale two Amazon Fire TV Sticks on a local buy-and-sell forum. The first person to say he wanted them asked if I could wait until Friday for him to pick them up. I said, sure. Friday came and went without the man picking up the Sticks. So, I offered them to the next person who wanted them. She promptly came and picked up the Sticks. The next day, the man who stood us up sent me a Facebook message, asking if he could come and pick up the Sticks. I told him no; that I had offered them to someone else. The man became upset with me, suggesting that I was a terrible person. I took a few moments to educate him on the value of timeliness and keeping your commitments. All that did was aggravate him further. The man told me that he would never do business with me again. Little did he know that I don’t give people who don’t keep appointments a second chance; even those who use the lame excuse that their grandmother was in the hospital and no one had a cell phone. He and his siblings were Millennials, so there was no chance in hell that one of them didn’t have a cell phone. So as a salesman, you get one point for being on time. Unfortunately, as this letter will detail, our interaction with you cost you quite a few other points.

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From Infidel753:

The recent victory in PA-18 and today’s primary in IL-03 illustrate well how ideological divisions within the Democratic party should be handled. They represent opposite ends of the spectrum of possible electoral situations.

In IL-03, incumbent Congressman Dan Lipinski is facing a primary challenge. Despite being a Democrat, Lipinski is not a liberal; he’s outspokenly opposed to abortion and gay rights, and has voted against the ACA and Planned Parenthood funding. (The only positive thing about him seems to be his support for science.) His primary opponent, Marie Newman, is a solid liberal. Whichever of them wins the primary is guaranteed to win the general election; IL-03 is a solidly Democratic district and the Republican candidate is an anti-Semitic crackpot who got the nomination by default because no other Republican bothered trying for it. Every real liberal or progressive should hope that Newman wins today.

In PA-18, Conor Lamb won a district which has been Republican-held for 14 years and which went for Trump in 2016 by a 20-point margin. The margin of victory was only about 600 votes. Lamb is too conservative for some Democrats’ taste, mostly due to being “personally opposed” to abortion. He is, however, pro-choice since he doesn’t support laws restricting access to abortion — laws most Republicans do support. In practical terms, what matters about a politician is what legislation he would vote for.

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From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:

Things seem to be moving quickly in TrumpWorld, which seems like a quite a statement given the usual pace. It was no sooner than AG Sessions had fired Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe over a “lack of candor” (and if there is one thing old Jeff Sessions will not stand for, it is a lack of candor…right?) than President Trump was lighting up Twitter with a self-serving and as usual, mostly untrue rant because firing McCabe wasn’t quite the job he wanted to accomplish. It was noted that Trump finally mentioned the Mueller investigation, something he had very likely not done because his lawyers would have counseled him not to.

And then it just seemed like everything was coming up Cambridge Analytica.

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Wondering why a few conservative friends fail to be impressed.

 
From The Journal of Improbable Research:

A unique 2009 research project quantified (for the first time) the changes in elevation angles of ballet dancers’ legs between 1946 and 2004. Now a new study has examined (again for the first time) leg-length in relation to selected ballet performance indicators.

“The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationships between leg length and selected dance movements representative of power, dexterity, and range motion, in a sample of female ballet dancers ranging from recreational to professional standards.”

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