Friday Ephemera

The sounds made by a man playing with his nut sack.
I see what you did there.

“It’s not that nobody wants to work with women or feminists. It’s that nobody wants to work with jerks. This is the sort of thing a jerk would do, and jerks create PR problems, as you’ve amply displayed here, they’re bores to work with, and they make life intolerable. Nobody wants to hire a human minefield.”
http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/09/10/dear-charlotte-proudman-its-not-your-gender-its-you/

Nobody wants to hire a human minefield.
Heh. Absolutely. Perhaps the “social justice” contingent should consider the extent to which the alleged prejudice and rejection it bemoans are due to the kinds of personalities common to “social justice” warriors. If your worldview and social persona are premised on being captious, humourless and insufferably whiny, and if you’re totally lacking a sense of proportion and likely to explode over a clumsy compliment, why would anyone want to employ you, or indulge you, or invite you to their party?

Meanwhile, in other news.
That’s going to be my new phone wallpaper.

Heh.

YES OKAY I picked my nose on stage. I have a nose piercing! Snot gathers behind it and gets crusty! It’s super annoying!
Does anybody want a Wispa?
I’m not hungry any more.

Nobody wants to hire a human minefield.
Guess what?
“It emerged yesterday that the award-winning human rights barrister has commented on pictures of men on Facebook herself to praise their looks. She also told female friends they looked ‘sexy’ and ‘stunning’ – the same word used by Mr Carter-Silk. On the profile of a postgraduate student at Cambridge, where Miss Proudman is on sabbatical from her chambers to study for a PhD, she wrote: ‘Hot stuff!’, while under an image of a long-haired male friend, she wrote: ‘oooo lalala!'”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3229951/Ooh-la-la-hot-stuff-s-prim-barrister-centre-sexism-storm-said-men-ogled-web.html?ito=social-twitter_dailymailUK
Is anyone surprised?

Red alert! We’ve got a live one in Edinburgh.

Who’s holding the buzzer?
No pushing. Form an orderly queue.

I actually would prefer not to get those kinds of compliments in a business setting.
Not that I would. Or do.
But I’m in IT, where the men are either married with children or have failed to launch, IYKWIMAITYD. I hate having to give men the cold shoulder and then keep on working with them, and I’m definitely not in the market for an affair with a married man or even the similitude thereof.
I have a hard enough time navigating the social complexity of an office environment without romantic potential lurking in the wings.
If you like my bright yellow shoes or the color scheme of my outfit it’s OK to say so. Just don’t be insinuating anything else, thanks.

I actually would prefer not to get those kinds of compliments in a business setting.
I agree. To me, Mr Carter-Silk’s comment seems harmless but faintly inappropriate. And yes, it’s an area that can blur into creepiness. What struck me, though, was Ms Proudman’s ludicrous hyperbole and her determination to cough up every feminist cliché and wring all possible drama from a trivial incident – while herself having left much more forward comments on the profiles of male students.

Of course his comments were ill-considered and inappropriate but not as ill-considered and inappropriate as her response to his ‘failure’ to admit to his own ‘sexism’.
Isn’t this just another example of a narcissist seizing upon an extremely slight grievance to seek attention from the entire world, even if it means destroying somebody else in the process? These people really do need to be kept at a very long arm’s length – Ms Proudman will have ensured that google searches will serve to warn potential employers for some time to come.

No refunds. Credit note only.

No refunds. Credit note only.
???! No latinum?

Mr Carter-Silk’s comment seems harmless but faintly inappropriate
He strikes me as a character who could have been invented by Harry Enfield

“I wanted to bring craftsmanship back to firewood production.”
Gentlemen and ladies, Artisnal Firewood.

“I wanted to bring craftsmanship back to firewood production.”
For a second I thought he was going to be treating logs with Stuff that makes them smell good or burn longer or brighter or in different colors.
Or that he collected logs from faraway exotic places like the Tibetan plateau.
And then I saw the bitty scissors and the jig was up.

I seem to recall back in the groovy 1970’s there were editorials and such castigating the backward thinking troglodytes who warned that women in the work force would lead to trouble. See, these Neanderthals insisted that there was no denying the sexual dynamics involved and what that would inevitably lead to. Such fools were also shouted down, as they are still shouted down today, when they spoke of the kind of emotional rogue elephants some women become once a month or during The Change and that it wouldn’t take many such creatures to bring an organization to its knees.
Alas, I must renounce myself. There’s some sort of chair I’m now required to sit in, yes?

I find Proudman’s nuke-it-from-orbit response much more troubling. This is the kind of female I’d go out of my way not to hire;
Quite rightly. This is someone who went out of her way to not accept a prompt apology, and instead turned a trivial gaffe into a crusade both online and in the national media, apparently driven by an urge to humiliate the hapless duffer by name. None of which has done much for her public image or credibility as a barrister – i.e., as someone who is expected to show enormous discretion with sensitive information. When told by other professionals that she’d done huge damage to her own reputation and employment prospects, Ms Proudman waved away such realities, saying she wouldn’t want to work for “sexist solicitors.”
And so I wonder how many other dogmatic, hair-trigger feminists find themselves not getting hired or promoted and then blame this on “misogyny” or “patriarchy,” rather than seeing it as a normal consequence of their own obnoxious disposition.
[ Added: ]
It’s rather like when Andria XX, a self-styled “social justice” warrior and “bacon-eating vegan,” was left shocked and tearful on discovering that her degrees in “social justice studies” and “gender studies,” and her endless public seething about “conservatives,” capitalism and “heteropatriarchal crap,” aren’t exactly endearing to potential employers. Having announced how many people she despises and how many things are beneath her, and having wasted time and money on joke degrees that signal only dogmatism and mediocrity, the young lady in question tweeted in disbelief, “My degrees mean NOTHING.”
Well, they do mean something, they do tell people something. Just not what was assumed.

but can we at least get to the point where we accept that they are no more “emotional” than men are
That’s tricky, because the best science we have suggests that women do indeed (& on average) think in slightly different ways from men.
Most clearly seen is the differences in reading & writing between boys and girls – supposedly linked to structural brain differences that begin to emerge very early on in the child’s life (ie: before all this putative ‘social construct’ stuff can actually happen)
Simon Baron-Cohen talks of the male brain being good at understanding systems, and the female brain being good at “empathising” – a type of thinking that would naturally require emotional intelligence and the sort of person who trusts their feelings over dry difficult-to-understand logic.
There are so many behaviours (just off the top of my head: magazine consumption, role models, sports, career choices, play from an early age) that actually largely depend on choices. Feminists who want us to believe that all these choices are made because society tells us to make them have to make a far stronger case
Look (for example) at transgender people: they know they are the wrong gender*: ‘social conditioning’ isn’t going to persuade them otherwise. This should make you realise how feeble the feminists case is…
* likewise the millions upon millions of silly love songs and Barbara Cartland novels sold don’t result in uniform heterosexuality (possibly because Elton John wrote half the songs)

Meanwhile: Attention Male Oppressor Class. Man-hating Lesbians are entitled to your sperm so you’d better get to it:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/07/the-great-lesbian-sperm-crisis.html

Like most Canadian lesbians, Paula and Nicole sought out foreign semen when they wanted to have a child.
That’s quite an opening sentence.
Perhaps there’s a heartwarming movie in it. “Desperately Seeking Semen.”

But when it does happen, the onset of emotional disturbance is gradual until it reaches Peak Anguish, when every effing nerve in my body is Stood! Right! On! Edge!
Yeah, because men never feel that way. We’re emotional chill zones, and only women ever feel emotions related to hormones.
Spare me!
While you chide me about how I am saying things about your body, you are saying things about mine. Like a lot of men, I have issues with anger rather than what are stereotypical “female” things, but they are still issues. That I deal with. I want to hit people. I don’t. That’s what being an adult is.
We know women have hormonal swings. But they are not out of control, hysterically incapable of rational thought for five days of the month.
So maybe get some more anecdotal evidence before blanket proclamations on other people’s experiences.
I’m not proclaiming about other people’s “experiences”. I’m stating that that the physical symptoms are not linked to observable behaviour.
We know women experience pre-menstrual symptoms. What is at issue is whether they control them adequately. I say they do.
And I’m not relying on anecdotal evidence. There’s plenty of studies (lead by women) that disagree with you. I’m not going to start a link war, but it’s not hard to find studies that don’t find a link between hormonal swings and behaviour.
http://healthland.time.com/2012/10/22/pms-is-a-myth-new-study/

But they are not out of control, hysterically incapable of rational thought for five days of the month
Says a man who never met my wife. Nor a few of the similar that I’ve worked with over the decades. It may, or may not, all come spilling out in the workplace, but it is always there under the surface. The extreme cases are certainly, by definition, not the norm, but what is there is there whether you want to believe it or not. You can find studies that will tell you whatever you want to believe. Meanwhile out in the real world we have actually deal with such. What I found most interesting was the hysterectomy. Odd how when they performed this operation on my wife it cleared up soooo many of my personality flaws. Hysterectomy. Interesting etymology.
And yes, men have their issues as well. But tens/hundreds of thousands of years of social evolution regarding sex roles and such take quite a bit longer to adjust to working together than the time it takes to invent the vacuum cleaner and washing machine. Men have had to work together throughout human history and have evolved means of dealing with each other’s idiosyncrasies. I am in no way saying that things can’t or aren’t changing, but to deny reality is folly. Reality is a jealous and evil bitch, and when She is on the rag, your goose is cooked.

that don’t find a link between hormonal swings and behaviour.
I haven’t read the study yet, but if that’s the pronouncement, it’s a silly statement. That’s like saying there is no relationship between drug use and behavior or alcohol drinking and behavior.
Chemistry is chemistry. For most PEOPLE, men & women, changes in chemistry will make an impact — but for most it will be in a manageable enough range we can choose not to behave badly.
One beer doesn’t explain Joe kicking the cat.
I’ve been one of the lucky females who has gone through life with no PMS, uneventful pregnancies (I actually loved being preggers) and a couple of years of menopause where the hot-flashes were unpleasant but not debilitating.
My experience does not negate all the women whose chemistry & physical reaction to that chemistry is widely different.
Two very drunk men may behave quite differently — one a friendly guy who bursts into song prior to face-planting in the couch, the other a snarling mess who punches whole in walls and pisses on the petunias before passing out in them.

I’m just thrilled we’re all talking about periods.

While you chide me about how I am saying things about your body, you are saying things about mine.
I can confidently assert that you don’t experience female hormonal surges and their consequences without saying that you experience no emotions at all.
Because the one doesn’t follow the other.
I’m stating that that the physical symptoms are not linked to observable behaviour.
I get clumsy when I’m hormonal, not just emotionally upset. I inexplicably lose my grip on things and drop them much more frequently than during other times of the month.
My mother was the same. Other women are not affected like that at all.
And with the onset of menopause (hey, you brought it up), I am seized up on by random days of rage that make me so clumsy and so enraged I can’t do anything right, which enrages me all the more and makes me even clumsier. I’ll show you the scar on my finger where I clumsily and angrily cut into my finger when I was supposed to be cutting only the iris foliage.
You do not want to be near me during those times, is all I’m saying.
The schtoopid predictions about hysterical women ruining workplace might not be valid, but that doesn’t refute the thesis that women on the whole are more emotional than men, or that PMS isn’t real.
There are many things I would never say or do when NOT hormonal, and then I’ve done and said them when I AM. Not all those things are bad (I got out of a housing contract because my PMS rage gave me the gumption to tell someone off) but many are regrettable.
That’s not to say that I’m not responsible for my behavior when it’s heavily influenced by hormones, just that I’m more likely to make intemperate comments during some times than others.
Explanation, not excuse.

I just looked it up: The walking-through walls patent application was abandoned in 2008 for failure to respond to the first Office action.

Corbie’s in? Oh dear, there goes the neighborhood.
I await SNP joining with UKIP to stomp on Labour’s pointy little heads.

. . .. nihilism where nothing’s related to meaning and mind because everything’s deconstructed . . .
Did you hear about the deconstructionist mafioso?
He’ll make you an offer you can’t understand.

I was happily raising an environmentally conscious boy until he began high school.
It would have been better she took him to temple regularly than Whole Foods.
I knew Cory had met his match when the BFF came for dinner (vegetarian, naturally), emerged from the bathroom with his hands dripping, and declined a towel. Neither paper nor cloth would be necessary, he insisted, while I watched the water from his hands trickle onto my hardwood floor. Like an untrained puppy, he appeared blind to the puddles he left in his wake as I followed behind him mopping at his heels.
Oh, I’m sorry … I would have stood in front of the little asshole and told him as he was a guest in MY HOUSE, he would either behave as one or get out — AND handed him the paper towels to clean up after himself.
Where the f*** is dad???

Oh lord, the nutcase is a “freelance journalist” in San Francisco.

“This is … a radical juxtaposition.”
https://youtu.be/PzZmcYn9A7Q