Elsewhere (199)

I looked at my phone and can’t help but wonder,
Oh my. I poked about and discovered I have the ability to embellish my messages with hundreds of these things. Every facial contortion, on any colour face, with various hats and gestures, along with some basic sign language and, for reasons that escape me, excrement, robots and a selection of giant cats.
What a time to be alive.

Either way it seems to me the control on how they are rendered belongs to the sender, not the receiver.
Indeed, which is why the simple text based ones work (if you have to use them at all), because what somebody sends from a Samsung may not be the same as what shows up on an Apple (or vice versa), or an HTC, or anything but another Samsung of the same vintage.
I got a text from a friend and had no idea what the hell the symbol was supposed to mean so I had to turn to this chart to translate. As an example, if someone sent you a Number 2 (no not that kind, the one in the chart), or a 26, or a 34 from a Samsung, but you had an Apple, you would probably infer a meaning other than what the sender intended (as indeed I did).

white, straight, Protestant, able-bodied Western male.
I think you should make your way to the Shaming Carousel. 300 rotations should do it.

Meanwhile in Sweden.

no matter how overwhelming (cough)bernie(cough)(cough)Venezuela(cough).
(a) He would say he’s aiming for Sweden (ca 1973), not Venezuela; (b) Selling Sweden is a TACTIC to launch himself into power, not a well thought-out philosophy that he’d actually stick to; (c) Venezuela isn’t a failure for Maduro and the Chavistas.

…if someone sent you a Number 2 (…), or a 26, or a 34 from a Samsung, but you had an Apple, you would probably infer a meaning other than what the sender intended
So the content of the message now depends on the device on which the message was written? How am I supposed to know whether my correspondent has an Apple, or a Samsung, or an HTC?
My text messages, both the ones I write and the ones I receive, are blessedly free of emojis. But then I use language to communicate, not to obfuscate.

So the content of the message now depends on the device on which the message was written?
Yep, written and received. I hate text messages with the fury of 1000 exploding suns to begin with and should be isolated to emergency communication where a phone call would be too disruptive, but I got a No. 34 on my HTC which is the “OMG I am passing a kidney stone” emoji, but was sent as a Samsung No. 34 “Tired Face” which resembles a tired face as much as Obama resembles the MGM lion.
The only way I knew it was the “tired face” was by asking the party of the second part what the hell it was supposed to be – if it was the kidney stone one for real I was about to summon an ambulance. Yeah, they promote clear communication.

So, what do you have to show for yourself?

Meanwhile, in academia …
Say what you will about these yackademics, but it is an achievement of sorts to be able to so consistently out-twaddle the Postmodernism Generator.

In the case of a pregnant woman, the “third party” would be the child born with fetal alcohol syndrome
We need, as a society, to calm the fuck down about fetal alcohol syndrome.
A pregnant woman having a small glass of wine late in the pregnancy is going to do no harm to the baby. My wife generally didn’t like alcohol while pregnant, but the half dozen she had scattered across not only didn’t give our kids any syndrome at all, it was never going to.
Fetal Alcohol is a risk in the early period if you consume large amounts. When people cannot tell you are pregnant. If you want to avoid fetal alcohol syndrome then you would need to refuse to serve any woman under the age of 50. Unless they are heavily pregnant, because they are the only ones you can be sure aren’t in the early stages of pregnancy.
While I don’t consider the ability to be served booze a human right, I do think people should not take alarmist stories in the media and then construct their own medical moral code based on their incomplete understanding. Otherwise we risk having a campaign for legalising marijuana often by the very same people who get all uppity about Fetal Alcohol — never wondering what heavier toxins might do to a baby.

@Chester
I don’t disagree. My wife comes from a family of German farmers where pregnant women were advised to drink two beers a day, and the kids turned out OK. My point is the nanny state winds up concocting conflicting imperatives in its attempt to regulate human behavior all to the detriment of people whose behavior is regulated.
New York allows the litigious to sue bar owners for damages “caused” by their serving of alcohol, where “proximate cause” is legally deemed to be the serving of the beverage and not the voluntary consumption of same by someone who is, by definition, a 21 year old adult. Now, however, a bar owner must worry that the same 21 year old adult, who is refused service will bring a lawsuit for damages as a result of “gender discrimination.”
Such regulations demonstrates that the worthies in charge believe they’re supervising a kindergarten instead of making sure the garbage is collected and violent crime is suppressed.

I do think people should not take alarmist stories in the media and then construct their own medical moral code based on their incomplete understanding.
Speaking of incomplete understanding and your anecdote notwithstanding, particularly given that state of knowledge regarding the topic has increased radically, the actual fact is that there is unimpeded passage of alcohol across the placenta and as the fetal liver has minimal alcohol dehydrogenase activity, fetal exposure is actually greater. Both ethanol and the metabolites, particularly acetaldehyde, which also passes across the placenta via the mother, have been demonstrated to have adverse effects on cellular differentiation and metabolism in the fetus.
That having been said, it is true that the risk is greatest in the first 8 weeks, and that the risk is generally dose dependent, the operative word being generally as it is impossible to tell in any individual what “dose” will have an effect.
As far as epidemiology goes, in the US the incidence (new cases) is estimated at 1-2/1000 live births, I have seen a UK estimate of 6-7000/year, so it is not, as you seem to suggest, a trivial concern. If you would like a comparison, the incidence of measles in the US in 2014 was 0.20/100,000.
So the bottom line from the standpoint of medical facts is that if one wants to drink while pregnant, one is assuming an unknown risk for someone else, but it is idiotic to make it illegal for a bartender to refuse to serve a drink to a pregnant woman

Thanks for the comments, which I mostly agree with. I’m not suggesting pregnant women drink — there is a risk, and the reward isn’t worth that risk.
I think the higher figures bandied about are too large, because if a mother drank and there is a developmental anomaly then FAS gets applied as a catch all these days. Since the rate of alcoholism/binge drinking is rather higher than 1/1000 there must be a lot of kids born to alchoholic mothers who don’t get it. Which does suggest the odd glass late in pregnancy is less risky than unpasteurised cheese, say. I wonder how many supermarkets refuse to sell unpasteurised cheese to pregnant women?
People need to know the risk, and then make their own decisions.
An issue is that people overstate unusual risks, and occasional risks, relative to ones they face every day. I had a spat with a friend last week at the pub because he refused to believe that the risks for second hand smoking were much lower than people believe. He was quite convinced that we get cancer quite often from other people’s cigarettes (the actual danger is mostly respiratory disease, and then mostly in children, and then often massively overstated). He then drove home after having a couple of pints. I wonder if he considered that the risk he took then was much worse than suffering a bit of second hand smoke. Probably not.

My long-suffering wife who has a Ph.D. in English believes that the whole emoji phenomenon is result of people not being able to write properly.

Based upon my experience, the whole emoji phenomenon is, like the promiscuous use of exclamation marks, almost exclusively female.
Of course, it may well be that I’m hanging out with the wrong people.

Stereotypes, you say?
I experienced a discomforting feeling of unreality when I read that the Greater Manchester Police had been forced to apologise for staging a counter-terrorist simulation exercise in which the ‘terrorists’ shrieked “Allahu Akbar”.
Why?
Why apologise?
Who else are they expecting?
Britain First? The EDL? The IRA? Some angry Mormons who just aren’t going to take it any more, perhaps?
We’ve been told for months now that it’s only a matter of time until a Mumbai / Nairobi / Paris / Bamako / Brussels (etc.) style attack is going to hit the UK, even to the extent that they are predicting the attack to come over the summer.
While clearly, we don’t live under a Communist Totalitarian government, that apology put me in mind of this quote from Theodore Dalrymple:

I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity.

Just run your eye down this global list of terrorist attacks that have happened in this year alone and it becomes obvious just how absurd that apology is.

No doubt like many here, I’ve seen lots of this stuff over the years. And maybe it’s the proverbial straw, or surprise that I can still be surprised, but this http://reason.com/blog/2016/05/10/the-university-of-oregons-thought-police made my blood run cold.
I’m struggling for comparisons. 1984? Soviet Russia? I think it’s the bloodless, matter-of-fact, bureaucratic recording, the lack of affect, as it were. Only obeying orders, and all that.
“A staff member reported that another staff member made a culturally incompetent remark while facilitating a training.”
or
“Response: A BRT Advocate spoke with the reporter, and a BRT Case Manager held an educational conversation with the president and the advisor of the group.”
An educational conversation. As in, Comrade, we need to talk about your comments, I hear they may have expressed displeasure with the Party. Perhaps you would like to reconsider them? Better yet, come with me to our facility. It can help with the psychological issues you clearly have.

Stupidity often relents in the face of information; malice doubles down.
E.g.
http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/233537/

“A staff member reported that another staff member made a culturally incompetent remark while facilitating a training.”
If the students at Oregon aren’t totally ovine, seeing as how this nonsense is evidently totally anonymous, they could have no end of fun calling in bogus reports, particularly against the administration, SJWs, and Useless Studies types, and break the system.

“An online petition is demanding that DePaul University cancel an upcoming appearance by conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, claiming his speech “hurts” and “kills” people.”
http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=7577

Yeah, just discovered it’s fake, but in a way true. Some gamer on YouTube with a million views on some of his stuff. Handle of Boogie2988. The FB comment made me suspicious but for Triggly’s sake I so wanted to believe. Everyone should find someone to be happy with, doncha think? Even if happy==miserable because, who are we to judge?